Cheesecake and alchemy

It's a gorgeous sunny day, and almost looks like fall here. My fingers are freezing from the window being open, which I love even more. It's the perfect kind of being cold, although I have to type slowly or I get thdfj a;skdfjpieya.

I passed on the "The Harvester" to both John and one of my favorite beta readers yesterday. To my massive delight and relief, they both say it works. I do need to de-knightoftheholygrail it, though - any comparisons to Monty Python would be dreadful, and perhaps clean up some of the awkward spots, and then off to the rest of the writing group and OWW it goes. It's not the story I expected to finish, but I'm so thrilled I've got a workable draft.

And now I wonder - maybe I can even finish the novel around it - which I already have 40-ish thousand words of. Some of the key elements would change a little, but it could really work...perhaps it was the end that has kept me fumbling at it, and now with this new end, found in the short, the novel is accessible again.

I'm going to over to John's mom's tonight to hang out with her & my sisters-in law. Girls night, with a movie and dinner and pumpkin cheesecake.



This is from the Martha Stewart recipe, which doesn't let you open the oven. It was extraordinarily hard for me, but I tried not to think about it, and it turned out pretty good, aside from the fact that I used the six inch springform pan instead of the nine. The extra cheesecake batter naturally turned into pumpkin chocolate chip cheesecake brownies. I think I've made brownies once in my life before, and have certainty never even thought about pumpkin chocolate chip cream cheese brownies before, but damn, were they good.


I just picked a random cheesecake brownie recipe, poured the cheesecake over that, threw in some chocolate chips, and swirled it with a toothpick. For the last few months, anything I've slightly experimented on has sucked, big time. And sure, I should have taken them out of the oven when the buzzer went off, but the cheesecake looked so runny I couldn't bring myself to - I will next time, since the outside of the brownie was a little chewy. But these weren't anything like the time I tried these cookies that literally melted into a sheet of sugary chocolate - I nearly cried. It was awful. And some of my soups have gone astray, the breads, etc. I don't know why I think I can throw shit together and it will work, because it suddenly stopped there, for awhile. Yet these brownies mean its possible. That's probably not a good thing.

The cat is whining at me. Now I must do my morning pages, because I've been procrastinating by answering emails and posting pictures and brainstorming about alchemy. And then I'm going to think about a loaf of bread for John.

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Oh, the cat's not whining at me, he's whining at the dog. But the dog doesn't want to play. I swear, sometimes, that dog is so slow.



The picture is a little distorted from where I sit at my desk. Kitty is only about 1/3 the size of Buddy.