To answer the three most frequently asked questions I’ve gotten from people since we got engaged last weekend:

1.) Chris and I haven’t set a date yet, but are planning for sometime in the fall.

2.) No, we are NOT having a Little-House themed wedding. I will not wear a poke bonnet, walk down the aisle to fiddle music, and ride off on a covered wagon. It’s sort of cool that Laura Ingalls Wilder wore black for her wedding, but I seriously doubt I could pull off that look without looking like Louise Fletcher in Flowers in the Attic.  (And no, we are not having a V.C. Andrews-themed wedding either, though if another couple ever decides to go that route, PLEASE SEND PICTURES.)

3.) Also, Chris did not propose on a buggy ride while driving his team of Morgan horses. How did Almanzo manage to slip the ring onto Laura’s finger with one hand while he held the reins with the other? He had some slick moves, that Manly. Chris made me get out of the car. (And then walk with him to the pop-the-question spot.) I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We just barely got the tree up this season, I haven’t baked any cookies or made any gingerbread creations (sorry), and I totally missed seeing the Santa Train, but this is turning out to be one of the best holidays ever.

Speaking of Christmas and wearing bonnets: as much as I loved the Little House books as a kid, I never had my own sunbonnet or any other kind of prairie girl getup. You’d think this would’ve bothered me, but somehow it didn’t, and now I remember why. It’s because for two Christmas seasons, right around the peak of my Little House adoration, I got to dress up all 19th-century for a community theater adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”

It was a musical production at the Village Players theater in Oak Park and it was called, I kid you not, Ebenezer! I was in the children’s chorus. The first year I performed (1980 I think?) I got to wear a long red velvet dress, a bonnet, and a shawl. The second year my costume had a fur muff.  I knew from reading On the Banks of Plum Creek that muffs were the It Accessory of the 1870s, and I about lost my mind when the wardrobe lady gave me one to wear.

Here I am in my red dress, delivering my one line, which I can still remember: “I got new skates! They’re made out of real steel!”

Maybe I wasn’t convincing enough, because in the following year’s production my line was simply, “Oh, there’s Tim.” But whatever, I had the MUFF that year.  If you look in the picture below, I think the girl in the white cape in the front row had it.

Why the heck weren’t we wearing gloves if it was supposed to be December in London? We look way too happy and warm to be Dickensian urchins. Also the kid in black on the left is supposed to be Tiny Tim. That’s right: the tallest kid in the group. But never mind, it was Christmas. God bless us, everyone!  And God help us this next year.  Merry Christmas!

SIX THINGS ABOUT HOLIDAY MUSIC THAT I VERY STRONGLY BELIEVE:

1. While people are free to record their own renditions of any traditional holiday song in the public domain, if they want to change the lyrics for commercial purposes, they should have to pay a massive, exorbitant royalty to do so. If some jackass wants to foist upon the world a line like Deck the halls with Walgreen’s Savings!, it’s only fair that he pay through his very shiny nose for the privilege. Proceeds from the royalties would go to various charities. Obvious exception to the rule: “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,” because that is a classic.

2. The few dozen holiday pop songs that are now part of the contemporary canon should NOT be covered by other pop artists for a certain number of years following their original release date. Like maybe even fifty years. No, really, I feel this rule has become necessary due to the many recent terrible versions of Wham’s “Last Christmas” swirling around the airwaves, like a crap blizzard that grows thicker every year.

Look, I don’t even like “Last Christmas” that much, but I just think Taylor Swift and Hillary Duff and Coldplay and all the other posers need to back the hell off and let George and Andrew have their hammy synthesizer pop-ballad glory every holiday season until around Christmas 2035, when middle-aged Miley Cyrus can record it as a duet with the cryogenically preserved head of Bret Michaels. Until then, she and everyone else ought to try writing their own original songs instead of cashing in on someone else’s successful bid for holiday music immortality. Because one of the things that I love about modern Christmas music is that it’s such a crazy collage of decades, with Bing Crosby and The Ronettes and the Carpenters and Jose Feliciano and The Waitresses all captured in little retro snowglobes of their eras. Remaking those songs to sound more up-t0-date and/or fit some acceptably hipster aesthetic seems control-freakish and sad, like those color-coordinated Christmas trees that you see in magazines. IT IS NOT RIGHT.

3. I enjoy “The Little Drummer Boy” enough that for most of the song I am able to suspend whatever general skepticism I may have about the existence of percussion instruments and drum majors in the Biblical era. I’m totally with the Little Drummer Boy all the way up to the line “the ox and lamb kept time,” and then the bubble totally bursts. The ox and lamb kept time? Are you kidding, song? Am I really expected to suddenly just imagine livestock jiving along in some crazy bullshit Max Fleischer cartoon scene right then and there? Seriously, it ruins everything until the next time I hear the song.

4. “Let it Snow” is still pretty demented, but I love when Ella Fitzgerald sings it.

5. “The Christmas Song” still makes me feel dead inside, but I tolerate it in order to be part of society.

6.  The Paul McCartney Christmas song is way more fun than the John Lennon Christmas song.  This is partly Chris’s doing, because he pointed out that “(Simply Having) A Wonderful Christmastime” sounds for all the world like Paul’s in his living room on Christmas morning trying out wacky chords on the new synthesizer that he just unwrapped. Barrp-barrp-barrp-barrp BOINGG! Barrp-barrp-barrp-barrp BOINGGGG! “Brilliant keyboard, Linda!”  Not to knock John and Yoko and the whole “war is over if you want it” thing, but sometimes what you want is to just sit around in your pajamas for awhile.

Am I the only one who thinks this much about Christmas music?

There are a few things on my Little House Bucket List that I didn’t get to write about in the book. One of those was making a green pumpkin pie like the one Ma Ingalls makes in The Long Winter. In Chapter 3, an early October frost kills the garden, and Ma, perhaps thinking of ways to make the most of their tiny harvest, improvises a mock apple pie from an unripe pumpkin and surprises Pa with it that night.

I wrote about that chapter this past January on the Beyond Little House blog because the green pumpkin pie has always fascinated me. Back when I first read the books I thought green pumpkins had a sort of vague magic to them, or that Ma knew some wacky science-fair kind of trick that could turn pumpkin bits into apples just by pouring vinegar on them. Who wouldn’t want to try to make a pie that changes the laws of nature? Since The Little House Cookbook by Barbara Walker has a recipe for the pie, I was sure that I’d be able to make one for the book.

Except I couldn’t score an unripe pumpkin last fall. Barbara Walker warned me that it would be tricky to find one if I didn’t grow my own pumpkins, and by the time I started asking vendors at the farmers’ market, I was too late—it was October and all the pumpkins had turned orange. Stupid nature!

So this year I started earlier. I took weekly morning walks in September over to the Lincoln Square farmer’s market and found a produce stand guy who said he’d bring me a green pumpkin. Wait about two weeks, he said, but I went back the next week just to remind him.  Finally, the week after that, in mid-September, he hauled out a green pumpkin and sold it to me for a price that would surely dismay Ma.

It was so big I had to take it home on the el, at about 7:30 am, on a train filled with morning commuters. (Nobody cared.) It was a glorious sight.

It was only Tuesday, and I wasn’t planning on making the pie until the weekend. I began to worry that it would continue to ripen, so that night I cut it open and sliced it into small, thin, apple-like bits.

It didn’t have that slightly rank, squashy smell that pumpkins tend to have at Halloween carving time, which was a good sign. There was way more pumpkin than I needed, so I stored a big container full of the cut bits, enough to make two pies, and reluctantly threw the rest of it out.

As my luck would have it, that weekend, I had to attend an all-day conference on Saturday, a party the same night, and then a column to write on Sunday. It was a heck of a time to have to make the pie, but of course you have to gather ye green pumpkins while ye may, as the saying goes.

For the pie crusts, I made the Little House Cookbook recipe from scratch bought some pre-made crusts, the kind you only have to unroll and tuck into the pan. I know, Ma would disapprove of all this store-boughten fanciness. But it’s been years since I made pie crust. I had only a couple hours on Saturday evening to make the pies, and I worried that the whole thing would be a disaster if I tried to make everything from scratch. And based on the accounts of other people who’d made green pumpkin pie, I was expecting mixed results.  Life is too short to make crust for uncertain pies, I thought, as I unrolled the dough. Maybe I’ll stitch that on a sampler someday when I’m not so lazy.

I filled the crusts with the pumpkin bits, brown sugar and spices, and poured a little Newton’s Folly hard cider over it all. Barbara Walker claims hard cider is more like 19th-century vinegar than other kinds of vinegar. (It was one of the few ingredients that I already had on hand.)

The pies smelled amazing while they baked and turned out much better than I expected. The filling didn’t have the squashy taste that others had reported from their experiences. The pumpkin pieces cooked down nicely and were tender and sort of translucent.

And yet, it didn’t taste like apple pie, not really—just some kind of cinnamony-spicy concoction.  It was also a very wet pie, really a puddle with a crust. It was definitely edible, though, if on the bland side. But if you were Pa Ingalls and likely hadn’t had an apple since about 1874, you’d probably really dig it.

I brought one of the pies to the party that night—a gathering at a bar for a friend’s birthday. There were a lot of people there and I tried to warn everyone about the pie’s experimental nature.  One friend said, “As an apple pie, it’s disappointing, but for what it is, it’s pretty good.”

I decided that if it had tasted exactly like apple pie it would have been pretty creepy. I was also relieved that there wasn’t a massive blizzard the very next day, the way there was in the book.

In the end, I concluded, everything was as it ought to be. Apples were still apples, pumpkins stayed pumpkins, there were no October blizzards, and I’m still too lazy to make my own pie crust.

For more photos of the pie-making (and other Little House stuff to come), I’ve set up a Flickr site for the book.

Also, The Wilder Life is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Indiebound and elsewhere. (Also, it’ll be an audio book! Don’t think I mentioned that before, but more on that soon!)

Last weekend I paid a genius to redirect Poundy.com to WendyMcClure.net and merge the RSS feeds, and it appears to have worked beautifully. However, if you read the site through something like Google Reader, you may have noticed a few older entries showing up as new posts. Just in case you were wondering how on earth I could be going to LauraPalooza AGAIN.

More soon.

I am back from my grand tour of midwestern hotels: one night in St. Paul for a bookseller trade show (MBA!), two nights in Grand Forks for a children’s book conference, then the following weekend a night in Dearborn for another bookseller trade show (GLIBA!).  It is a very small-time kind of jet-setting: short little flights where the flight attendant puts a beverage in your hand and then two seconds later takes it away because the plane’s landing. I both love and hate that.

All for books—for these two jobs in my life that involve bookselling. Because even if your job is to write books, or edit books, or buy other people’s books to edit (I do that, too), at some point or another you have to Sell Books by talking about them to complete strangers and somehow you have to do it without coming off like some kind of feverish Mary Kay lady with a big pink case full of crazy.  Though when it comes to this new book I already sound insane just from talking about my butter churns,* which lets me off the sanity hook and thus gives me sort of an advantage.

(*Yes, churns with an s, as in PLURAL churns, because I recently bought another one with the vague idea that when the book comes out next spring I would have a little mini travel churn and put on some kind of jolly one-woman pioneer dairy show. Except I misjudged the size of the new one from the auction listing, and it turns out it’s pretty huge. I mean, not massive, but too big to hide and too ugly to pass as shabby chic. Crap! I need to stay the hell off eBay if I don’t want the apartment to turn into Cracker Barrel.)

Anyway, the trips were good, and I’m told I didn’t sound too kooky, and other authors talked about their books, and they sounded perfectly normal, which gives me hope that even with my churn-hoard I might come off okay.  I met the guy with the amazing-sounding inter-generational fire memoir and the girl with the werewolf YA novel that’s getting a lot of buzz (or growls?) and the Not That Kind of Girl girl (whose book I am DYING to read) and also this woman who I realized I’ve been following on Twitter for months, and you’re clicking on all these links, right?

Now it’s good to be home. And finally the weather is Octoberlike and not that creepy slow-bake psuedo-summer business. It took only a few short weeks from the end of reasonable sandal weather (early September) for my pedicure to completely devolve and my feet to shift to winter mode and become sad gnarled Shetland-pony-hoof appendages, so when the weather makes everyone break out the flip-flops again this late in the season, I highly resent it. Now everything is cool and crisp and soon I will be swaddled in a safe cocoon of knits from which I’ll occasionally stick out a bare hand just to grab a mug of hot cider, and all will be well.

You know, as long as I am talking about seasons: now that the book is finished, I have some time to blog again (and eventually the poundy.com blog and feed will be redirected to wendymcclure.net, so I’ll be blogging in one place). But The Wilder Life doesn’t come out for another five months. While it’s a big part of my life, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to talk about it in the new year, so until then, this blog doesn’t have to be—and perhaps shouldn’t be—All Little House Shenanigans, All The Time. (Though before the fall is over I really ought to post about the green pumpkin pie I baked a few weeks ago, just like Ma in The Long Winter).  But in the meantime, I’m curious to know what you’d like to read about on this site. Should I write about the writing life, exploring my weird little interests, the sadness of hotel rooms, what?

But I should add that I haven’t really been compelled to write about fat and body image these days. Maybe it’s just the years passing, but the things that used to get me worked up just don’t anymore, and I’m afraid that with work and writing I haven’t been keeping up with the new stuff, which means I don’t know that TV one show with the fat people, or that other show with the other fat people, or that thing that Beth Ditto did that was cool. This is not to say that I’m “done” with the subject, but if there are peaks and valleys, I’m definitely in a valley. It’s like with Chris and metal. He doesn’t feel the need to keep up with the latest  Iron Maiden or Electric Wizard or Bone Awl like he used to, though he’ll still promise to check out a new album if someone else tells him it totally rules hell.

Look, I even a made a tacky web poll where you can vote! I’m just curious.

Finally, a reminder: next Friday night—Jen Lancaster! Claire Zulkey! Stacey Ballis! Me! At the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, being Witty Women Writers wittingly weading our work! Come say hello.

The wind blows like crazy against my office window whenever the seasons are in transition or the temperature changes quickly. Wind Of Change, why must you be so literal as you rattle the stupid windows?

But I guess there is a corresponding truth, because stuff is starting to happen, especially with the book. For the past twenty months The Wilder Life’s life has progressed at the glacial pace of my writing, so it’s a little stunning to have things going so quickly now over the past few weeks: copyedits, design, page proofs, the metadata going out into the universe and getting sucked up into the pneumatic tubes of all the retail websites. And even though I spend every day at work bringing books into existence, this whole process still feels mystifying from the other end. Like I’ve found myself looking at the line on the Amazon page that says “Shipping Weight: 1 pounds” and wonder how anyone could know that at this point. Even when I know perfectly well how it’s possible, because I know there are production managers and purchase orders and specs and templates and cartons and I have to sit in meetings about this stuff every day, but never mind, it’s still sort of magic when it’s your book.

So now there it is—the book writing part was so huge and lonely, it’s hard to get used to the way things are now, with the book stuff just bubbling along on its own in one corner of my life.  Between now and the pub date in April things will be intermittently frenzied: for two weekends in October I’ll be flying out to bookseller trade shows where I’ll meet a whole lot of indie bookstore folks at these speed-date-type dinner events. I still can’t believe that I get to think about other things.

Such as: remember how Chris and I decided that in exchange for his accompanying me to LauraPalooza I would go with him to see all the movies in the Cremaster Cycle? I mean I knew I would do it, but I guess I was counting on being able to make a funny-cute joke about the whole thing for a while before the films showed up at an art house somewhere. But ha, only six weeks after our return from Mankato, there they were at the Music Box! It turns out it’s really hard to casually describe the Cremaster films to people. You tell them that it’s an eight-hour conceptual epic made by Björk’s husband, and it’s about Masons and Mormons and Houdini and the Chrysler Building and bees, and that it has Norman Mailer and opera and the drummer from Slayer and a lot of things made from Vaseline in it, but when you get started trying to explain nobody really wants to meet you halfway. But for three nights straight we went to the theater, and it was fun (in its way). It was also by far the least Laura-Ingalls-Wilder thing I’ve ever done.

But you probably want to see another picture of me with a Little House on the Prairie TV show cast member, don’t you? Well, here you go:

That is none other than Alison Arngrim, aka NELLIE OLESON!!!, who did her one-woman show, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, at Davenport’s last weekend. And if it wasn’t obvious from this review I wrote, I thought her book was great even by non-celebrity-memoir standards.  Her show was full of anecdotes about playing Nellie but also about growing up in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. The audience was invited to write questions on index cards for her to answer at the end, and SOMEONE, I’m not saying who, asked her if the guy who played Doc Baker was as sexy in real life as he was on the small screen. (Answer: yes, but apparently a lot more people are still hot for Albert after all these years.) Anyway, If she comes to LauraPalooza 2012 they’ll really need to leave room in the schedule for her to discuss things like Dance Fever and Eartha Kitt. Also, she was very cool in person, and I hope that after all those camera flashes she didn’t wind up like Mary Ingalls.

While I do not have awesome stories about Deney Terrio, I will nonetheless be reading funny stuff here in Chicago next week, at Funny Ha-Ha at the Hideout on the 28th, and next month, at Witty Women Writers at the Book Cellar on October 29th. I’ll probably be trying out some stuff from the book, but hey, if you have any requests, let me know. (As long as you come to the show, too.)

Happy first day of fall! When will it be corduroy weather? Come on!

(cross-posted at wendymcclure.net, just to be redundant.)