Additional Story Notes/Deleted Scenes: Spring Comes to Snow Hill · 3:02am Mar 5th, 2018
Now that we got all the vocabulary and tech out of the way in the last blog post, here's some more behind-the-scenes stuff for Spring Comes to Snow Hill.
The story had a really odd inspiration: Majin Syeekoh wrote a story titled The Sauce Must Flow, and not too long after I read it (possibly the very same day), I got to thinking about maple syrup making.
I looked up a few articles on the interwebs, and checked out a couple of books from the local library, just to get a sense of the history and the lore of it. I was a little bit disappointed to find out that since it was a new world craft, there wasn't a lot of 'traditional' vocabulary when it came to naming the tools. Really, the only unique name is spile.
Just the same, in the northern parts of America and in Canada, it's a springtime tradition, and while I might have been mildly disappointed to not have a whole bunch of cool names for things, the process is still quite interesting, and made a good foundation for a story.
I wrote a little bit of it, but last spring I didn't have a lot of free time: I was finishing up Silver Glow's Journal, and I realized that by the time I would actually get around to publishing it, sugar season would be over. Not that that would have stopped me, but with all the other projects I had going on, this was one of the least urgent.
When I went to Everfree Northwest, one of the panels was an 'authors helping authors,' and people were supposed to read a little bit of a story they had in progress, and then everybody else would offer suggestions for improvement, and more importantly, what they really liked about it. Since I didn't have anything else that was in progress at the time (at least, not to the point that I had a significant amount of finished text), I read some of this story instead.
And then it got put back aside.
Y'all may remember that it's one of the stories that you got a teaser for in my January blog. It was time to get back to it. Honestly, it was a little bit easier in the wintertime, anyways. I didn't have to try and remember what a winter night felt like; I only had to open my front door.
When EFNW announced the topic for the 2018 Scribblefest, it couldn't have been more perfect. This story pretty much fit the bill, and it even had actual trees in it. 
So it was time to put my nose back to the grindstone and get it done.
One of the things about the contest is that there was an upper word limit. This ultimately turned into a problem. At one point during the editing, I replied to a suggestion with: “I don't think I can afford to--I'm hard up on the word counter, and changing them all here would add about 50 words.”
I'd also decided to do chapters as individual character focuses, with the first and last chapter being the whole family. It would have been easier if I'd planned that right from the beginning, of course, but such is writing sometimes. Something doesn't become apparent until midway in the process, and then you make the changes as needed.
So there were sections that had to go, either for word count or because they didn't fit into the final structure of the story. In fact, that wound up being about 1200 words.
The downside is that I lost one of my favorite sections, a bit of dialogue between Winter Berry and Maple Leaf.
I did, however, have the foresight to copy it (and several other sections that got deleted) to another document.
This is the morning that Sugar Bush makes samp cakes. In the original draft, they were oatcakes.*
Maple Leaf woke up first. He was halfway out of the bedroom door before he considered waking up his sister.
But there were oatcakes. He could smell them. Maybe I could just have one, and then wake her up.
Maple Leaf was already halfway to the kitchen before he changed his mind, and went back to their bedroom.
“Ugh.” Winter Berry twisted around in bed. “I forgot how much it hurts to pull the sledge.” She stretched out all four legs and arched her back before rolling onto her belly. “I can't wait until you're old enough.”
“Me, neither.” Maple Leaf shifted on his hooves. “Come on! Mom made oatcakes!”
“You can get started without me,” Winter Berry decided. “I don't mind.”
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*I spent a fair bit of time researching breakfast food that would be easy to make, portable, and historically accurate before settling on samp cakes.
Another section that didn't completely make the cut was the sugar on snow section. In the first draft, that was Maple's reward for working in the saphouse; he got it and nopony else did. It also covered how you traditionally determined if you'd reduced the sap enough to make good syrup.
“You see how the drops are sheeting?”
Maple Leaf studied the ladle carefully, trying to see what his father saw as he slowly dribbled the syrup off. “I . . . think?”
“That means it’s ready. But there’s one more test.” Red stuck the dipper in one more time, stirring it through the hot syrup before he pulled it back out. He held it carefully, unwilling to lose a drop of the precious liquid.
Maple jumped off the barrel and followed him outside—he knew what was coming next.
The sun never really got a chance to disturb the snow on the north side of the saphouse, so that was where they went. Red dribbled the sap onto the snow, where it almost instantly turned into a taffy.
Red saw his son looking at it eagerly. “Go on,” he said. “Try it.”
Maple pushed into the snow, relishing the coolness against his belly. It was still just a bit warm, and he ate all of it before he realized that he ought to have left some for his father.
Sugar on snow was the best part of making syrup.
In fact, the entire section with Maple Leaf was longer in the earlier draft. Part of it also got dropped because I'd made a mistake in the scene. To the best of my knowledge, you don't have to stir the sap while it's reducing (I'm not 100% sure of that, but I never saw anybody doing it in any of the videos I watched).
I was also going to put in a detail about him burning himself on the evaporator, which would be an easy thing to do, especially since in that scene he was standing on a barrel while he worked.
Maple Leaf didn't get any time to relax; Red Maple gave him a long paddle that looked very much like an oar.
“Got to keep stirring it, else it can stick to the bottom and burn, and that'd ruin the whole batch.
<missing transition>
“I got a barrel for you to stand on.”
Maple Leaf nodded and climbed up on it. It was filled with dirt for stability.
He had been hoping that getting close to the boiler would warm him up—aside from the burning in his forelegs, the rest of his body was numb with cold.
Unfortunately, the sap was still nearly as cold as it had been when he pumped it, and the boiler was efficient, only directing heat out at his haunches, which only served as a reminder about how cold the rest of him was.
“You've got to stir it in an irregular pattern, else it can eddy and burn,” Red Maple advised. “Leastwise 'till you get a sense of how the sap flows. Be careful of the tank, too—it'll get hot.”
“I wish it was hot now.” Maple Leaf picked up the paddle and dipped it in the sap, and began stirring.
The heat rose slowly, so slowly Maple Leaf hardly noticed when he stopped shivering. Then it was pleasant for a bit, and then it started getting unbearably hot.
“Do you have it figured out?”
Maple Leaf nodded.
“I'm going to go and bring back the sledge and dump the pots,” Red Maple told him. “Keep stirring, and add some logs when the fire needs them.”
He focused back on the sap, on moving the paddle through it and the swirls and eddies of the liquid.
Now he was hot; the pan billowed out vast clouds of steam that gathered around the rafters and joists before venting out the louvers under the eaves.
He got off the barrel to add more wood, and when he got back on, he slipped and accidentally caught his pastern on the edge of the boiler.
Maple yelped and yanked it back, but not quick enough. It didn't matter; there was sap to stir.
He was completely engrossed in his work when Red Maple came back in.
His father said nothing, but just kept up a watch as the sap reduced to syrup.
(If you noticed the <missing transition> . . . this section was cut fairly early in the process.)
Source
This is legit what my desk looks like midway through the writing process
Alright, for all of you who came here to see the deleted scenes and get a little bit more of the backstory, you can skip to the end. In this next section, I'm going to address writers and aspiring writers.
I don't generally pre-read, and when I do, it's almost always for someone that I know reasonably well (as well as you can know someone on the internet, anyways). There are numerous reasons for that, which I won't bother getting into here, because it's not particularly relevant.
What is relevant is that once upon a time, I volunteered to pre-read a story for someone who's spoke English as a second language, and by the time I got through with his first chapter, the comment/correction thread was easily five or six pages longer than the story itself. I told him not to get discouraged, that there were a lot of fixes but they were generally small things.
I also tend to write fairly clean copy (so to speak). English is my first (and only) language, and I've got a decent amount of practice banging away at the keyboard.
Nevertheless, at one point there were 275 comments/corrections on the document, and I was having trouble keeping some of them straight. I actually wound up making a second document and printing that out so I could do an editing pass without being distracted.
I color-code my text, to make it easier for my pre-readers to see what's been added, and to also keep track of things I need to note later.
I screenshotted one part of the document to give you an idea what it looked like while it was in progress. Black text is what was originally there, red is new text, strikethroughs are editing suggestions, yellow highlight is for a comment, and orange highlight is for something that I'm not happy with but don't have a good idea how to fix just yet. Blue was for things that could be deleted at a later point if needed for word count (there doesn't happen to be any of that on this page, so I'm not sure why I needed to say that).
What's most significant is how little of the story is in black text, at least on this particular page. And of course the published version is still different than this particular revision.
The main thing to take away from this is that for a good story (which I hope y'all think this is), there are going to be compromises, and there might be a lot of editing work after the first draft to polish the thing into its final form. It's easy to get discouraged and frustrated during the process, but that's just the nature of the beast.
Hey, my only exposure to maple tree sap is from the Troy Rising series by John Ringo. Excellent work here, without terawatt lazers and fusion missiles.
What's this strange "editing" you speak of?
Sugaring off is a tradition here in Quebec. I remember going to cabanes à sucre (sugar shacks) when I was a kid and eating syrup on snow. Stay away from imitation syrup, it's real maple syrup or nothing.
I almost never have prereaders. They can be great, but I find they can also discourage you, even if they are your good friends. I'm of the opinion that I should never doubt myself. 'course, that's just me.
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I'm sure if the one tree in Kansas is a maple, you could tap it and get maple syrup out of it.
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I've never had sugar on snow, although it sounds really good. There's a bunch of small-time producers around here, and I've been to a farm that was harvesting sap many, many years ago (besides the aforementioned bed and breakfast, which we visited in the summer).
Especially stay away from the sugar free maple syrup. That'll tear you up.
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In my opinion, the advantages outweigh the potential discouragement. They've caught continuity errors before publishing, correct all sorts of misspellings and such that I somehow managed to miss, and made all sorts of things I should add in or take out. For example, in this story where I was really hurting on word count, one of my prereaders asked why a particular passage was in there, and it was only after I explained it that he realized why . . . and since he hadn't caught the reasoning for it, that suggested to me that most readers wouldn't, and I could safely drop it.
Funny thing, I am re-reading Silver Glow these day (and keeping the chapter and the date the same) and earlier this week she was wondering how maple syrup was made. and then this got out.
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The timing is mostly coincidental, although it's possible that I wrote that about the same time that I was planning this story (or had already begun it).
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Coincidence, the waffle maker was working that day. But the syrup was not good.
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You'd think for how much tuition at K-College was, they'd have had a waffle maker that worked all the time.