Today was a good workout day for my back and lats and then we spent the afternoon carving many pumpkins which made the little boy quite happy so all was practically perfect in every way. (My pumpkin took forever but at least it is done and looks like a bat - something I wasn't too sure about halfway through the process!)

I took my hurricane story and have folded it into the YA book I'm plotting out right now. I kept returning to the short story and especially the way it began, trying to figure out how I could steal that part of the story for the book and put in a decent replacement that didn't weaken the story. It took a couple of days to figure out that the same girl was in both, and she was thinking about her father the same way. So there you go. Now Hurricane Diane will live and breathe in a very different place. The irony that all this happened in my head while Wilma was bearing down on Florida is not lost to me. Hurricanes are everywhere around me it seems, both figuratively and literally.

I am juggling a couple of books these days, still learning my Canadian history in The White and the Gold, reviewing a new YA book, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp and I just received a new title for Booklist. I am deep in Samuel de Champlain's adventures in Quebec in the 1600s and just found out that the man's marriage was a bust, but no surprise. She went from Paris to the Canadian woods and wasn't ready for the change I'm sure. I'm learning about the Jesuits right now, and as they were the Order my father was educated by, I'm fascinated by what they were founded under and sought to accomplish. Very hardy guys, that's for sure. (And quite serious about God, but no surprise there.) Alfred Kropp is a King Arthur saga of all things, set in the modern day and has "ultimate boy adventure book" written all over it. It's a lot of fun and a breeze to read, so writing the review will be a good time. I was reading Caitlin Kiernan's Five of Cups before the Booklist book arrived - interesting because Cups is partly about the Holy Grail legend with a vampire twist. It's a strange to find yourself knee deep in old myths retold in such different and unexpected ways. (Especially when you are writing about some myths as well.) It's good to have the history book to ground me at times like this. With all my other reading spinning around like crazy, some good Canadian history is a nice respite.

Of course you do wish they had all figured out the scurvy thing before everyone kept dying each winter, but that's history - it just keeps repeating itself.

It's amazing how much we have in common with those guys in the woods 400 years ago, after all.