Picnics with Birds, Blackberry Cocktails, and an Amsterdam Meet-Up

In other words: September.

Hello to Fall, and That Back-to-School Feeling

I have an especially back-to-school feeling right now, because I went on a very fun and friend-filled vacation in Amsterdam last month, and returned to face the final stretch of the book I’ve been working on for a year. It’s crazy to think that a year ago, I was nervously shopping this book around to publishers (well, my agent was), wondering if anyone would be interested, wondering if this was in fact what I’d be doing next with my life…and then Random House said yes, and immediately I was filled with that feeling I always get at the start of a new book project, which is that I realize that I have no idea how to write a book and it seems impossible that I’ll ever get it done. How does anyone ever produce a three hundred page THING, anyway?

One page at a time, that’s how.

So here I am, a year later, and the end is in sight. I just have to roll up my sleeves and get it done. Nobody is allowed to get sick, there can be no fires or floods or disasters of any kind, because I am ALMOST THERE!

Also, I have that back-to-school feeling because I’ve been at school a lot lately—elementary school. The Chapman Elementary Swifts are back, and I live just down the street, so there’s been a lot of evening picnics with friends as we watch the swifts go to bed. The other night a hawk perched right on the edge of the chimney, that asshole, preventing them from going to bed until finally the hawk got what he wanted, which was a fresh plump swift for his dinner. He flew off, triumphant, while the crowd booed. I mean, it’s nature, but come on man, we’re there to cheer for the swifts.

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Summer’s Wrapping Up, Make a Blackberry Cocktail Now

A blackberry smash is a pretty straightforward drink, one that barely requires a recipe. It’s more of a template. And you can skip the booze and make yourself a nice non-alcoholic version if you like. Here’s how it works:

In a cocktail shaker, muddle a handful of fresh, ripe blackberries with a dollop of honey simple syrup (equal parts honey and boiling hot water, so the honey melts and doesn’t become a glob in the bottom of your drink), and add a couple ounces of whiskey or vodka. Probably this would be good with rum, too. Or tequila. Maybe gin.

Throw in a handful of mint leaves (or rosemary? Thyme? Basil? Pineapple sage?), and squeeze in a wedge of lime or lemon or orange.

You see how flexible this drink is? Muddle it all together (meaning crush it, and make sure to release lots of blackberry juice, you need to be aggressive here), then shake well with ice, then strain it into a glass filled with ice. Crushed ice is better.

Top it off with club soda or maybe some ginger beer. Garnish with berries, herbs, citrus, or all of the above.

Oh, and if, in addition to drinking cocktails, you’d like to draw some groovy cocktails the easy way, with no actual freehand drawing required, I teach a fun class about drawing cocktails using Andy Warhol’s ink transfer method. These are very gifty little works of art, so if you’re the kind of person who both reads to the last line of a cocktail recipe and likes to make little handmade gifts well ahead of the holiday season, this might be for you! Doesn’t have to be cocktails, either! You could do cats or flowers or adorable little houses. Give it a try.

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There are Peanuts Stamps, and You Can Pre-Order Them

Are pre-ordering stamps a thing now? Anyway, the post office is about to release these delightful stamps to celebrate Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, and I think you should order yourself a set and send someone a nice letter. Even better, there’s a Peanuts fold-and-mail stationery set, and each item in the set is unique, and this looks exactly like the kind of thing I had when I was twelve years old, and probably you need a set of these, too.

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Here’s a Flip-Through of my Latest Sketchbook

This is the sketchbook I took with me to Amsterdam. It was a very busy two weeks, filled with museums and boat tours and bicycle rides, so I didn’t sit still and sketch long enough to completely fill the book. I used the remaining blank pages to draw at home from photographs, and in some cases there are many versions of the same sketch--that's just because I was home, working with different art supplies, and wanting to experiment. It’s all an experiment, that’s what a sketchbook is for.

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Could Sheriff Nell be Constance Kopp?

My eagle-eyed husband spotted something about a lady sheriff character from the silent film era called Sheriff Nell. There were six of these short films, running from 1917 to 1920. They were vaudeville-style comedies, with a comedic love interest played by Jack Turpin, who was, notably, quite a bit shorter than Polly Moran as Nell. (Constance was six feet tall.) Here’s a video of him playing a goofy sheriff, which I suppose could come from one of the Nell movies. Reviews from the era seemed to conclude that while the films were funny, they did “tend to prove that a woman was not cut out for the sheriff business.”

Was Sheriff Nell inspired by Constance Kopp? All I know for sure is that the newspaper coverage about Constance started in 1915, and there were very few mentions of any other lady sheriffs in the newspapers right around then.

I’ll probably never know, and I don’t expect I’ll ever be able to see the films, either. But Constance must have known about this. The movies were advertised in local New Jersey newspapers, and they played in her local theaters back then.

I would love to go back and work this into the books. (Actually I would not love to re-write any of my books, but I do wish I’d known about it before I started.) It’s one of those real-life details that’s so outlandish that I didn’t think of it. That’s always been the issue with the Kopp novels: as much as I tried to rely on true events and embellish in an entertaining but true-to-life way, I know that if the Kopps could read my books, they’d look at me with pity and tell me all about how their lives were vastly more interesting than whatever I invented.

And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I wrote seven novels about a real-life lady sheriff and her two sisters and you can read more about them here.

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A Newsletter Recommendation—and a Meet-Up!

One of the wonders of this modern age we live in is that you can travel halfway around the world and meet up with someone who lives just up the road from you. I was very happy to open Instagram and see that Nishant Jain was in Amsterdam at the same time I was, and was meeting up with fellow urban sketchers while he traveled. We met for coffee and sketched what we saw over each other’s shoulders. Here’s what we both drew from basically the same spot—he focused on people, I drew buildings.

Anyway, Nishant also publishes a newsletter here on Substack, and his Sneaky Art Podcast offers up wonderful in-depth interviews with all of the most interesting and exciting artists in the urban sketching/sketchbook world right now. Check it out.

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What Are You Reading?

I was so surprised to see a new Elizabeth Strout novel available at the library—how did I miss this one?—but then I read this New York Times article about her and learned that she’s cranking out one excellent novel a year right now. (I love how she says, matter-of-factly, ““I’m getting older, and I’ve taught myself how to get these sentences down.” Yes, it really does boil down to that.)

Many of these novels are about the same set of characters, and while you don’t have to read them in order, I think I’m going to go back and start over at the beginning and read them all straight through. If you like Anne Tyler and Meg Wolitzer, Elizabeth Strout is for you.

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