I spent a fair amount of time this last week picking grapes at the farm of chidren's book author and Rotten Ralph illustrator Nicole Rubel (http://www.nicolerubel.com/). And then we hauled all those buckets of grapes to my house where we spent another full day cooking all those grapes down to juice in a medieval-looking contraption that hissed and steamed and made my already flat hair go even flatter.

But the results are delicious. I may not know what kind of grapes they are and we didn't worry about the blends of each particular batch. Instead Nicole and I trusted that if we had good ingredients going in, then the end product had a good chance of turning out okay as well.

But near the end of the day, my mom showed up. "What is that thing?" she asked, pointing to the monster on the stovetop. Nicole and I shrugged.

"It's the grape cooker thingy," I answered.

"You've been doing this all day?" Mom then points to the rivulets of condensation rolling down the kitchen windowpane.

Nicole and I nod.

"Why don't you just get a juicer?"

"Because," I sputter like the grape cooker thingy, "we do it this way."

But after she left, Nicole and I wondered if all these years we had been taking the long way around unnecessarily, that we'd been wasting time, that we hadn't taken advantage of an obvious shortcut. But after asking around, I was relieved that we had been absolutely right to spend those many, many hours boiling grapes. It DOES taste better that way. Whew. I may not be a teenager anymore but I still haven't outgrown the need for my mom to be WRONG about something.

And now that my cupboards are full of jars of juice and I'm back to writing I'm seeing how wrangling with the grape cooker thingy is a lot like working on a book. You need to start off with the best ingredients you can. Is your idea sound? Are your characters interesting? If the answer is yes to both then you're not guaranteed a successful outcome, but it doesn't hurt.

Once you have your ingredients then it's cooking, I mean writing time. And that is a long, long time. My computer may not steam up the windows of my studio but it does steam up my brain and I wouldn't be surprised if that makes my hair go flat too. But bit by bit, I have more of the work behind me and the completed first draft chapters are as satisfying to look at as when a new line of jars of juice fills even more of the counter space.

The grape cooker thingy has been put away until next year. But the writing? That's something that never goes out of season.

Cheers!