November's starting late at this blog. Various ideas for entries have been floating around and getting in each other's way. I think it’s because half the people whose blogs and zines I read are writing a novel this month. You're all making me tired!

Mary and I are up to 75,000 words with about five chapters left on the book we started well before Tuesday, so with that head start maybe -- maybe -- we'll beat everyone to the finish.

One thing I've noticed is how anything related to what we're writing leaps out from the headlines. For example: Ancient tradition revived to turn honey into money

"Beekeeping has been there for 5,000 years," says Malcolm Sanford, professor emeritus at the University of Florida who went to Iraq this year to study the country's beekeeping industry.

It's "where it kind of started," Sanford says.

Iraq's honey industry fell on hard times during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

One of Baghdad's largest beekeeping centers, just south of Baghdad in Rashidiya, was closed and converted to a military base in 1992 by Saddam's Republican Guards. By 2002, government support for the industry had nearly vanished, and exports were virtually zero.

Now, Iraqi beekeepers are trying to revive their decrepit industry. With money from the U.S. Agency for International Development, carpenters are being trained to build efficient apiaries.

That story I noticed because one of the minor characters in Six For Gold is an itinerant Egyptian beekeeper. They used transport cylindrical clay hives along the Nile, following the seasons as flowers opened, allowing the bees to "graze."

Then there was the discovery of the grave of Copernicus.

Polish archeologists believe they have located the grave of 16th-century astronomer and solar-system proponent Nicolaus Copernicus in a Polish church, one of the scientists announced Thursday.

Copernicus, who died in 1543 at 70 after challenging the ancient belief that the sun revolved around the earth, was buried at the Roman Catholic cathedral in the city of Frombork, 180 miles north of the capital, Warsaw.

This caught my eye because a Victorian flat earth society figures in a small way in our current book. The one we might yet finish!