Well...that was interesting

I set up to do my dinnertime post and discover Blogger down for database maintenance. Phew. What a bummer! Especially as I wanted to talk more food. :D You see...in addition to the strawberries, I have a jones in the worst way for this stuff called Nutella. I'm dangerous around Nutella. Nutella is endangered around me. And my local Kroger very recently began carrying it, so now I don't even have to drive thirty minutes to the international grocery over on the west side of town.

But I'm now the proud owner of at least three gallons of strawberries, and about two quarts of freezer jam, which is setting up nicely in my kitchen. I'm taking the extra strawberry mash and mixing it up with ginger ale and maybe a bit of lime sherbet for punch (and adding in the vodka when my kids are not around).

Now picking berries (or really any U-pick vegetable or fruit) always makes me realize how backbreaking good old fashioned farming or hunter/gathering can be. So I got my exercise today, and that got my juices flowing for the novella I'm working on. I thought I might leave a little preview of it here:

Man plans and the Gods laugh, Lin thought, straightening the bodice of her ill-fitting dress. What the hell is a girl like me doing in a place like this? The lights and colors of the rotunda of the hotel were lit with thousands of twinkle lights, in a weak reflection of the billions of stars that dotted the vast sky that was technically underground.

She missed her sky with an ache like a sore tooth. No sky was actually visible in all of Cinco City--only holograms and illusion, the same way that "down" and "up" were illusions of artificial gravity in the massive, rotating ring city.

Dubbed "Cinco City" by its denizens, LEO-5--Low-Earth Orbit settlement number five--was one of eight urban sprawls in fixed orbit around the Earth, and home to millions of people who, by virtue of debt or circumstance, had lost their coveted eligibility to live on Earth proper.

Millions of people and one target, that is. She spied him in the crowd from half a room away, a sense in the back of her head twanging taut like a bowstring and homing in on him. Tall, auburn haired, and lean, he moved through the crowd with a purpose. He was why a girl like her was currently trying not to exhale too much and lose her bodice in a place like this.