Jane Adams. Yeast, Lasers and too many Words

Yeast, Lasers and too many Words!

I’m trying to finish a book. It has to be delivered at the end of Nov and I realised about a week ago that it wasn’t about what I thought it was. Not good. Yes, my characters will be doing roughly all the things I first thought they would but the heart of the book, the real centre is something far less dramatic than the all guns blazing sort of tale I thought I was writing. What I really want the reader to focus on is a much quieter tale about one man’s now ancient mistake and the, I suppose you’d say professional coming of age of a very young police officer. Now I’ve finally spotted this, it all makes perfect sense! – just wish I’d noticed sooner; that would have saved a whole heap of rewriting.

Sometimes I get so sick of words, especially towards the end of writing a book. It feels like there’s a daily supply or a daily tolerance level over and above which I just don’t want to know. I don’t even want to read! So, displacement and replacement activities move in to fill the vacuum – apart from watching rubbish on the television; always an attractive option at the end of a long day of word wrangling. We’re all keen bread makers in our house. Well, my son and I are keen bread makers, my husband is a keen eater of said product. Last month we decided we’d have a go at making wild yeast bread.

First catch your yeast……

Our culture comes from our apples – Yeasts are everywhere. We’ve fed it and hugged it and called it Clive – no, really, we have. Clive is thriving and we’ve now got a reliable sour dough culture that takes about five hours to rise but makes great bread.

We’ve also been playing with lasers. Having read somewhere – wonderful thing, web browsing – that if you passed a laser beam through a drop of water and project said laser onto a screen you can see the little critters living there, we just had to try. The results and pretty amazing and one of our pictures is below – if I’ve uploaded it right. And yes, I know it would be easier using a microscope, but hey, this is much more fun.