You can find the entire recipe for Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats here. Start by buttering an 8x8 inch pan or you can do like I did and line the entire pan with aluminum foil and spray with Pam for super easy cleanup. Set the pan aside.
In a large pot melt a stick of butter on medium-low heat stirring frequently making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan. The butter will become foamy and then start to get golden brown. Watch the butter carefully and stir constantly because it goes from golden to burned quickly! When the butter looks nice and golden brown remove from the heat and quickly stir in the 10 oz. of marshmallows until they become all melted and smooth. Add in 6 cups of Rice Krispies Cereal and 1/4 tsp. of sea salt or you can use coarse kosher salt like I did. Mix well to coat and spoon the mixture into the prepared pan.
Forgot to update yesterday. But I guess now that I'm caught up, the drama of the daily struggle has lessened and the only jucy thing remaining is what story elements I will choose to divulge. (Am I sounding like a writer yet? ^__^) Also, being caught up makes it a cinch to hit my NaNo quota. After breaking myself in at 3,000+ words a day, the regular 1670 goes by quick. My current word count is 17,138 (and it's the end of chapter 4) - I'm actually above quota!
I
absolutely hated everything I wrote yesterday, so the hard part was to NOT
go back and redo it all - because that would kill my word count. I was on the verge of needing to type with my monitor off. Yesterday saw some boring real world type stuff - parts of town,
introducing the classroom setting. Bleh. (probably why I hated it - I'm bad at that stuff. Hence the fantasy writing.)
Better stuff today: some foreshadowing (some of it for the story
this is prequel to, though it may come out at the very end of this book as part of a subplot) including a crazy mysterious man shouting "RUE" amidst his mumbling;
Two houses, two conservatories, and secret stuff going on in both. My
Main Character is quite perplexed.
Whew!
I caught up (13,407 words)! [hoorah! hoorah! - the crowd of one in my apartment goes wild!] And I just barely made it. Okay, I sort of cheated, but not
really. I'd written a couple hundred words in Michigan on the first day, but decided
I didn't like it as the beginning of my story. I put it aside, and started again when I got home and could concentrate better. Today I got to exactly the spot where that bit could go in,
so TaDa! So, "cheating" in that I copied and pasted, and only made a few quick changes to make it fit (now that there were more people in the scene than the way I'd first written it). But definitely NOT cheating because I did write it for this story and in the month of NaNo. I just did it so quick it felt like cheating (it was about 7 minutes to midnight when I realised I was precisely AT the setup for the scene), but I'd always intended to see if the snippet could go back in. I mean, if anything, I've actually been shortchanging myself on my word count all this time, 'cause no one ever said you had to write the thing in order.
In the story today: My MC caught the local shop owner gossiping about her and decided to listen in. And she also heard there's a new boy in town who apparently thinks my MC is pretty. Then he walked in and caught her eavesdropping!
I am 1/5th the way through! More than 20%! I passed today's NaNo catch-up goal (10,000 words) with over an hour to spare, and surpassed it (10,578) with half an hour to spare. I'll catch up tomorrow for sure! I'm only stopping now because my MC is going to bed, too, so it seemed like a good spot.
In the story today: Apparently my MC has a revered ancestor named Quinlin Hart and her mother was having a bit of a salamander problem - the magic kind that are made of fire. It lost its tail, but it'll grow back....
...Don't know when my main plot will kick in. Not that I know what that is yet. Maybe tomorrow it will reveal itself. She's gonna catch some unsettling gossip about herself. And there's someone new in town. Now if only I knew what that gossip was...
So I made a Fat Elvis costume for my friend's kid. It looked kind of awesome. I am expecting a shipment of candy - my tithe, if you will.
Didn't
quite hit my double quota before midnight like I needed to catch up for
nanowrimo, but I should get there before I go to bed tonight. Currently at 6,120. Need to get to 6,668 before I go to sleep. (Though I really should be at 10,002 if I were caught up.)
In the story today: a gnome named Hollaby, a gnomide (that's a female gnome), an injured rabbit who got some healing and is now being chased by a kunal trow flying about on a bulrush. But the rabbit's in good hands in my main character's saddlebag....
I wrote
over 3300 words for NaNo today, but I'm still 5,000 behind due to my
late start! But if I can write double the daily quota for the next
three days I should catch up.
In the story so far: a shapeshifting woman, a very dark cavern, and a garden built by gnomes out of rock, moss, and non-native plants....
making pathetic progress so far on my word count. But I'm gonna stay up all night to catch up a bit. ...If I can keep myself from taking too many breaks.... Which doesn't seem likely.
Word count is at 1586.
p.s. Feel free to hound me when I'm behind. I'm not sure I can rely on those 'invisible guilt monkeys' to keep me on task. They're titchy little buggers.
I spent the first few days of November at my mom's in Michigan, where there was only dial up internet, no cell phone signal, and adorable nephews to distract me. So I'm getting a late start on my writing. The daily quota (if you write every day) is 1,667 words. I'm about 7,000 behind.
Here I go!
I haven't been writing nearly enough over the past year or two, as my sparse blog can attest. I mean, I've been thinking about my writing a lot for months now, but mostly in terms of research for my big ole epic young adult fantasy series. But nothing that I've really been writing down.
So a couple months ago I decided that it was time I finally attempt NaNoWriMo. I've known about this crazy thing for years. Even bought the book way back when. But never really gave it a good shot. Too busy, to dried up of ideas, too much of a first draft perfectionist.
But this year is the year. With all the research I'd been doing I hit upon the perfect idea of what to write about. Okay, I still have no plot, just like my epic has no real plot. But while that is a hindrance for the epic, it is not a problem for NaNo (in fact the NaNo book was purchased for just that reason, what with its title of 'No Plot, No Problem'.
I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to come up with the back story for one of my minor, yet key, characters. I know where the story it has to end up, and I know a few things that need to be included. But other than that, not only is the storyline fair game, it is totally unnecessary to my larger ideas. So I don't need to worry about getting locked into something or messing things up. If I just come up with one tiny bit of a useful event or one clever description of something, it will have been worth it.
It may even help me to knock out some of that perfectionism I get when I write. I'm the type of writer that seems to have trouble concentrating during the revision process, so I tend to try to get it perfect the first time 'round. I often won't move on in my first draft until each sentence is perfect. How liberating to say: "It doesn't matter how crappy this is!" In fact, the crappier the better! Since the single goal of NaNo is word count and word count alone, I can write crappy lengthy wordy sentences - on purpose!
So last night, as I was posting a little update to my facebook status, it occurred to me that it might be nice to use NaNo as an excuse to make friends with my lonely vox once again. I'm going to try to put my NaNo updates here every day, though they may only be copied straight off my facebook... But since you probably can't see my facebook, I figured you wouldn't mind.
So, wish me luck!
(p.s. I'm going to go ahead and be a dork with my first couple updates and put them in seperate posts, since they were seperate days. And I'm going to lie about the dates, too since they were really posted to facebook earlier...because I can. I can and I feel like it. ...*thpppttt*)
