5am is not exactly the best time to plop your thoughts down for any sort of meaningful impression. And of course most of my more meaningful ponderings happens while, well, farming.
11am would be great, heck even 2pm (usually by 1pm my early wake-up time has caught up to me and I pass out for 10 minutes while Earen goes down for his own nap). But 5am in the only time NO ONE requires my assistance with anything (until 7:41am when I have to make Erik breakfast before work).
So while I was out yesterday, scraping down my deer hide, and trying NOT to think about what I was doing at that exact moment, I realized how similar everything is.
As a new farmer trying to survive, you have little experience. You read all you can, but ultimately, you just have to jump in and give it a go. You are pretty much destined to fail. Yep, that’s the way it is. You know you will fail, but you try to focus on what you are doing AT THAT EXACT MOMENT and pray that maybe you will be wrong. And sometimes you are wrong. But usually not! Some things can ONLY be gained and taught through failure.
While we haven’t failed too miserably at farming (my failures are typically an inability to attach certain farm implements, or do something in a timely manner), deer hide tanning is another story.
When I was a kid, there were two things I dreamed of doing. One, becoming an author, and two, making clothing out of deer skins. I have no idea why, lol.
When we first started hunting 5 years ago, I saved every deer skin. They were like gold. Unfortunately, much like farming, I had no idea what I was doing, and just took the advice of random articles on the internet. I cut the hide off the deer carcass rather than pulling it, and threw it into a bag and into the freezer. There they accumulated, and then scattered from freezer to freezer while we moved.
By fall of 2016, I had 9 hides in the freezer, taking up too much space. I realized I’d better get going on tanning them if I was ever going to do it, so I pulled them all out, set them in the sun to thaw, and began the CORRECT process of wet-salting them for storage in an air-tight container.
Like farming, I knew I would most likely fail at tanning. Who knew what kind of shape the hides would be in? If bacteria start thriving on a hide the hair will slip (fall out). Then all you have left is a buckskin!
Some things can only be gleaned with experience, so I set to work on my first batch this winter (the total number of hides grew to 12). While I did get a book on making buckskins, info on tanning hides with fur-on is limited, and because of this my first set were a failure. One hide kept the fur on perfectly, while the second had a spot of slippage. While my liquid solutions were probably spot-on, my timing wasn’t, and while hide tanning is simple in the steps to be taken, it’s exceptionally complex within each step!
The first hide I decided to soften by hand after running it through all the soakings and then smearing brains all over it. I worked it for 14 hours straight, until finally at midnight, with it still lightly damp and no where near soft, I collapsed into an exhausted heap on the floor, to worn out to even cry.
The next hide of that batch I decided to put into a frame and use a stick to soften it. But I could still see that this one wasn’t going to soften properly either, so I saved myself the agony of working it.
After combing back through tidbits of random articles and trying to correlate the buckskin book instructions to work for my fur-on tanning, I figured-out what I thought the problem was.
-On a side note, no my two hides are not ruined. They can always be re-tanned!-
So I dug through my bin of wet, salted hides and found a stunning pelt that I knew I wanted to tan next. It didn’t look like a deer, but more of a fox. The fur was 2-3 inches long and touched with a soft rosy glow. Wet-salted, it weighed 40-50 lbs! I quickly checked the fur in a few spots, and it seemed to be holding well, so into a new pickle bath it went!
Sadly, the fur had not been holding everywhere, and soon chunks began falling out while I stirred it. Eventually I knew it was doomed. The thought of losing such a beautiful hide made me physically ill, but there was nothing I could do except turn it into buckskin.
So as I woefully sat on my deck scraping hair and grain off the once beautiful hide, trying NOT to think about anything other than scraping, I realized that’s how writing is starting out.
You have something with fantastic potential and you know you want to accomplish something with it. You read all sorts of articles online about getting published. But ultimately, you just have to dive-in and hope for the best. You know you will most likely fail, but you pray you won’t.
But when you do fail, you buckle down and re-evaluate your methods. You don’t think about failing, you try to focus on re-drafting that manuscript, or seeking out new agents, but it always sits at the back of your mind . . . it tries to creep into your thoughts and you begin to get depressed until you kick it back into the recesses of your brain and push harder toward your goal.
Because really, failure is when you stop trying. Giving up is failing. Everything else is simply a mistake to learn from.
At least with farming, it’s pretty easy-going (usually). Sending-out queries to agents, then sitting and waiting for a response, is nerve-wracking. There’s a nice little site called Query Tracker that allows you to see where your e-mail sits in a line with others waiting for an agent response. Apparently one of my e-mails is up next in line. It was one of eight for my memoir. So either today or tomorrow I’ll get a nice little e-mail thanking me for my submission, but they are considering other work . . .
I’ll most likely go back through and re-draft it again (not excited since it takes several months to do a re-draft!).
But the painful one is my children’s book. I absolutely have no idea how to change it to make it better at this point. That’s the one that hurts the most (also the one I want to see published the most). That’s the one that keeps me up at night. It’s lurking on the website in an area I’d forgotten about . . .
If you’ve got a good eye you can find it, lol, until I hide that section away for agents only. I don’t have it listed directly on the site since it’s not published yet, and well, you paying to read it is my paycheck!