Uh oh, a new neighbor

A new neighbor moved in. I saw him trespassing through my backyard the other day. He may be trouble - for my garden.

My new neighbor is a groundhog. Here are his digs:

This cozy little hole is located next to my yard , dug into the low, privacy hill that acts as a buffer between the park next door and my house.

Great.

Frosty freezies

Boy am I glad I covered my tender little plants last night. We did indeed have a freeze. In my community garden plot we covered 24 little plants with large, plastic party cups. When I went to remove them this morning, I surveyed the few other plots which had already been planted by other gardeners. It's sad to report that those plants were badly frost damaged and I don't think they'll make it.

My tomatoes and peppers and basil are all fine. Those little plastic cups did the trick. I'll have to cover them again this evening - there may be another frost.

I guess I have an advantage in living so close to the community gardens. They're literally a three minute walk away, so I don't have to hop in the car and drive anywhere. It's easy to pop over there to water, or cover things against a frost.

Everything's coming up roses!

My son and my husband and I planted three rose bushes out front. It's been cloudy and rainy, but when the sun came out for a few brief minutes, I sent my son out to take a few photos:


We put them up by the mailbox, behind the lilies. We had to raise the bed a bit for the roses, so I hauled a bunch of stones from the back (left behind by the ice-age glaciers and piled up by the farmer that used to farm these environs) to ring the area and hold in the extra soil.

My son and daughter gave me these two beautiful hanging baskets for Mother's Day. They look so pretty along with my young azaleas:

There is supposed to be a hard freeze tonight, so in honor of Mother's Day, everyone will have to help me cover tender plants in my gardens this evening. Hooray for Mother's Day!

Planting the killer vegetable garden

And what I mean by that, is that planting my vegetables has nearly killed me. I'll feel better soon, though. I popped an Aleve 30 minutes ago.

Phew! Three garden plots planted. My medicinal herb garden went in first, over the weekend. My community gardens plot went in yesterday, with the help of my son. And the plot at the way back of my yard went in today.

Here is my medicinal herb garden. It's in a half-wheel shape with different plants in each of the nine 'spokes' (and something in the half-hub). I have string marking the spokes right now, but the bricks are there for when the plants have grown and the string is gone.:

Each spoke is labeled:

Here's the plot way back in the wild parts of the yard, half in sun, half in shade at this time of day. You can't really make them out, but there are three elderberry bushes way back there, too. My daughter gave them to me for my last birthday:

I don't have a picture of my community garden plot. I'll get one and post it later.

Here are the things I have in the two vegetable gardens. Basically, tomatoes, greens, carrots, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers:

The medicinal garden has elecampane, St. John's wort, calendula, holy basil, sage, astragalus, chamomile, evening primrose, and flax (which is just an experiment). And I have a few things in other places, like lavender, and yarrow, and lemon balm, and hyssop, and garlic (for cooking), and I've probably forgotten something or other.

I still have a few things to do, but most of the initial work is done.

Who's making dinner tonight? I'm pooped.

To self-publish, or not to self-publish... Maybe through Kindle?

I'm not riding in the self-publishing bandwagon, but recently on the Galley Cat website, there have been a couple of posts about successful self-published authors. These authors were both self-published using amazon's digital text platform self-publishing tool for kindle. Their stories are interesting and worth a look, you can find J.A. Konrath's story here. And you can find Karen McQuestion's story here.

J.A. Konrath has something like 20 books available through the kindle store and sells something like 800 per day. Crazy, huh?

And Karen McQuestion sells tens of thousands of books per year and is the first kindle self-published author to land a movie deal.

Now, all of that success involved more than just uploading their books to the kindle store and sitting back. Konrath already had a book or two in print and so already had a following, and McQuestion made sure to keep her name, and her books, out there in forums and other venues.

After reading their stories, I decided to try my hand at the kindle self-publishing. Not with my major works, with which I am still going the traditional route and sending queries to agents and keeping my fingers crossed.

But I have two other works that I thought would make good experiments for the kindle platform. One is a short Christmas story. I actually recently turned down a real publishing contract for this story. I don't have an agent (yet) and the publisher was very small and very niche, and the contract was very bad (for me). They wouldn't negotiate, so I didn't sign. But this gave me confidence that this work was good enough to be published, so it has become my first self-published work on kindle. My Twelfth Christmas became available yesterday and I've already sold four! (One to each of my sisters, one to me, and one to my niece *grin*.)

But the experiment will continue. I have another work which was completed fairly recently. It turned out to be novella length and novellas are a hard sell through the traditional route, unless you are already a popular author. So once I've finished with revisions, The Witch of Starmont will be going up for sale on kindle, too.

I'm not that great at self-promotion, but I'll try. Because if you don't tell people about your stuff, no one will ever know it's there. And you want people to know it's there.

One key to high volume sales is low price. My Twelfth Christmas is priced at $0.99, and The Witch of Sarmont will be priced at $1.99. Right now, the royalty structure is such that I get to keep 30% of that.

They also give you an author page on amazon. Mine is still being created, but when it's up, I'll post about it with a link.

Let the experiment commence!

Flowery pictures and a small victory

This is a picture of one of my small victories in the garden (and they are all small, believe me):

It's the bloom of an azalea that was mostly dead at one point. It used to be in my front yard, but it didn't survive its first winter in the spot that I had put it. I guess I should say that it barely survived. I dug the mostly dead thing up and plopped it among the weeds in the wild plot in the back. This is the third year it's been back there, and the second that it has mustered the courage to bloom. The first year it concentrated on just surviving.

Below is a violet among the rocks:

Here are blossoms on one of my four blueberry plants:

Ooh, I can't wait until these become blueberries!:

This is a very small peony bud. It'll get bigger, trust me. And it will seem to take forever, swelling oh-so-slowly until one distant day it will blossom into a frilled and fragrant beauty:

A lone tulip among the silver dollar plants. Don't ask me how it got there, I haven't the foggiest notion:

And my dogwood. It gives me pleasure all year long, even when it's covered in ice and snow instead of blossoms, I admire its shape:

How are things in your neck of the woods?

Accidentally popular - or - 15 minutes of blog fame

A blog for an online publication used a picture from a post on my blog and referenced it back here. The picture is of the scads of violets I had in bloom last year. Now I have scads of people visiting from The Atlantic.

Don't know why I bother...

I've been digging dandelions out of my yard by hand. Just the front yard. The back yard is hopeless.

I'm sore all over now.

I'd take pictures, but I'm not sure I can get my hands to work the camera at this point.

A few days ago when I was doing some work in the back yard, I noticed large shadows passing over me. I looked up, and what did I see? Vultures circling overhead. Okay, maybe I'm a little out of shape, but I'm not that bad.

What doesn't kill you will make you stronger. And just in case, the vultures are there to clean things up.

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

Volcanoes and Fringe

This is a NASA satellite image of the volcanic ash plume from the volcano in Iceland:

Hope you weren't planning to fly into or out of Europe or the UK right about now.

And, Gaah! Did anyone watch Fringe last night? That old guy (Peter's father) is such a good actor. Even though I suspected what was in the envelope in the end, it blew me away. He didn't have any memory of talking with the time-jumping man, and there was the sign he was looking for. A while tulip. He looks at the tulip, and then up the stairs after his son.

At the end of the show, I felt like I had just read an extremely satisfying short story. Well done, whoever crafted that script.

My husband and I were talking about the time travel in the show, and he was asking why everyone seemed to jump back in time with the time-jumper man. I told him that everyone didn't, the show was just showing how things changed when the man jumped back. The conversation became a little surreal and I was reminded of a quote that headlined a chapter in a modern physics text (an introduction to quantum theory and mechanics) for a class I was taking once. It said:

"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously." - David L. Goodstein (States of Matter, Mineola, New York: Dover Press, 1985)

If you didn't watch Fringe, then I aplogize for all of the above. If you want to watch this episode, go to hulu.com/fringe and then select the episode titled, White Tulip." Or just click here.

Let the Gardening commence

Over the weekend my husband and I tilled up the two garden plots in our back yard. One plot is for herbs and the other is mostly for veggies, but will also have some herbs. This morning I planted some lettuce, spinach, and five-color Swiss chard. They don't mind a bit of cold weather and can be sown early.

I don't have any pictures of either of those plots yet, but I did snap a picture of the community gardens, which are a three minute walk away. I will have a 10' x 20' plot in these gardens this year:


The ugly orange fencing is meant to keep the deer out. There are plenty of other critters around too, voles and rabbits, to name a couple. This is the third year of the community gardens. I walk past them everyday with the dog and over the past two seasons, it looks like the critters have left things alone. I hope this year isn't the year they suddenly discover the fresh veggie stand not five yards from some of their burrows.


My plot is somewhere right in the foreground in the picture below. You can see the old barn from the farm that used to be here in the background. They haven't put up the stakes marking each plot yet, and planting season is still a few weeks off. We have to wait until about mid-May until the last freeze has passed:

Once it's safe to plant, I'll use this plot for veggies.

On the way back to the house from our walk, my daughter and I spotted a little snake. It looks big in the picture, only because it's a zoomed-in shot. The little guy (or gal) was only about the size of a pencil in both circumference and length:

Maybe it'll grow big eating voles and keep them out of my garden.

Gone to the birds

Robins really do have beautiful songs. I don't know why they're not praised more highly. I can hear one singing through my open window right now.

And I can see why Woody Woodpecker was given that laugh. A woodpecker often stops in the trees in my backyard for a laugh. Sometimes my daughter and I laugh back and we get a conversation going.

And red-winged blackbirds? What's not to love there? A lot of them nest in the cattail area in the park next door and often drop by our birdfeeder for a snack. It makes me feel special when they do, I mean, how many people out there attract red-winged blackbirds to their feeders? You have to live in just the right spot.

How to Train Your Dragon

The early commercials I saw advertising this movie left me not wanting to see it. But when I read a good review in the paper last Friday, and then my daughter came home from seeing it with her boyfriend and gushed about it, I decided to give it a try.

Wow! I would recommend it to anyone. I've only seen it in 3D, but I've heard that you won't be disappointed if you don't see it in 3D. The animation is wonderful, and the flying sequences actually take your breath away - not just because it's a whopper of a ride, but because it's actually downright beautiful. No kidding. And I liked the story too, mostly because Hiccup - the boy hero - is so wonderful, his story, his predicament, his expressions, the whole thing.

And we have a little gray cat that has big, green eyes just like the dragon : )

I know this is a kid's movie, but this was one of the best movies I've seen, visually and story-wise, in a long time. Probably since Julie and Julia.

I'm terrible at summing things up, so what I will say is that the animation was absolutely stunning, and the story was terrific, and it actually touched me.

The 3D ticket is pricey, so try to catch a matinee and save a few bucks. Even if you pay full price, though, you won't be disappointed.

Plotting...

Not a novel, or even an evil plan to take over the world. Plotting, as in a garden plot. I now have a 10 x 20 plot in the community gardens!

I have to get busy plotting what to put on my plot. Although planting season is still pretty far off around these parts.

At my daughter's request...

Here are a couple of pictures that my daughter took and wanted me to put on my blog.

First, here is our dog, Strider with a bow on his head. My daughter put it there and he was oblivious until I finally took it off before we ventured out for our walk:

And this is how I had to prepare for a walk only last month:

With temperatures in the single digits from the wind chill, and snow nearly up to the knees, I dressed in layers: long johns, jeans, fleece pants over the jeans, sweater, two sweatjackets with both hoods up, extra-long scarf wrapped twice around the head, two layers of mittens, and sunglasses only becuase it was a rare sunny day and I didn't want to go snow blind, and gaiters over the boots to keep the snow out.

We've had much better walking weather lately - I've been out many times already with no jacket of any kind at all! What a change a month can make.

Signs of spring!

The Bees are out:

And the crocus are blooming:

In purple:

And white:

And yellow:

New Banner Photo

The new banner photo was actually taken last year in April. I know, I'm looking ahead, but I'm excited about spring.

The photo is of a garden in the Amish country.

Yay!

I have my computer back! It was a minor trouble that brought it down, but it took a few days to set it right.

I will have to work on a new banner picture. The snow is gone now - hurray! Spring is really here. We may get a little bit of snow next week, but I've seen the crocuses, so spring is here.

It's been very mucky with the snow melting slowly over the past two weeks, and rain today. Mucky, mucky, mucky.

We had been planning (although not very hard) to tap into our maples and try our hand at maple syrup this year. This is the time of year to do it, but, alas, we sat on our hands too long and didn't order the equipment. So no maple syrup this year : (

Maybe we won't procrastinate next year.

Is Spring here already?? And, no, I didn't sign the contract.

The weather has been gorgeous here lately, sunny, warming temperatures. Our blanket of snow is looking rather tattered now. A couple more days like this and it'll probably be gone. Wow. It's unusual, we're usually looking at cold and snow through March and sometimes into April. I wonder if it'll stay this way, or if we'll have one last winter hurrah before all is said and done.

In publishing news, I didn't sign the contract, so I remain unpublished. There were a couple of big things in the contract that really made me uncomfortable.

1. They wanted me to assign all of my rights to them in perpetuity. It's recommended to license your rights, not assign them. Assigning rights is generally unrevertible - the rights now belong to the publisher and don't revert back to you. Rights are revertible in a licensing agreement, they revert back to you when the term of the agreement ends. And there are many kinds of rights, not just for printing. They wanted the rights for, "any and all media and forms of expression now known or hereafter devised."
2. They wanted the rights of first and last refusal for, "the Author's next published work in this series or subject matter and the Author's next published work." This means that any similar story and my next published work would be theirs unless they didn't want it. And even if they didn't want it, if I found someone else who did, I would have to take it back to them for a second look to see if they wanted it now that someone else was interested in it.

This is a very small, niche publisher with limited reach. This contract would lock me into them without hope of escape.

Why would anyone sign with them? They are a Mormon publisher, and if you are writing specifically for a Mormon audience, this contract wouldn't be all that bad. Your work would be published and would be distributed to Mormon bookstores (there are Mormon bookstores, just like there are Christian bookstores), and you would have a guaranteed publisher for any future works, as long as they wanted to publish them.

I, however, am not writing specifically for a Mormon audience. How and why did I even come to submit something to them? My brother-in-law is Mormon. He is something of a Mormon apologist - a defender of the faith (you know, like C.S. Lewis). Over the past few years he has published a couple of books on the subject that have been very well received in the Mormon community. This is his publisher, and when they sent out an email to their authors looking for a short Christmas story, he forwarded it to me, knowing that I had one.

It would have been a nice way to break into the publishing world, except for that darned contract. The funny thing is, I actually do have an idea for a book that would target a Mormon audience. The title would be, In Search of the Stray Elder and other Adventures in Jelly Making. You see, an Elder is what a male Mormon missionary is called. The elder in my title refers to elderberry bushes - so the title is a play on words. It would be a recounting of the adventures I've had in finding and collecting fruit for jelly making over the years. So they could have had two books out of me if they had been willing to negotiate.

Oh well. On to bigger and better things, I say : )

More computer problems, and still unpublished

My computer is down temporarily. Son's computer suddenly quit. Daughter's computer occupied. I am currently typing this entry on my daughter's boyfriend's laptop.

Not a good time to be without technology while trying to negotiate a book contract through email.

Found out, however, when I finally accessed my email through the laptop, that the small publishing company won't negotiate the terms of their contract at all. I'm not thrilled with the contract as it stands, so I am considering not signing. Which is disappointing, but I don't want to sign away more than I'm comfortable with (way more than I'm comfortable with).

So as of now, I am still unpublished, and likely to remain so for the time being. But hopefully my computer will be up again soon and I'll get back to the story I'm working on now - which I literally left mid-sentence when lots of things started happening all at once just over a week ago.

I'm itching to get back to that sentence : )

Yikes! I might become a published author!

I was offered a book contract the yesterday by a small publisher for a short Christmas story that I wrote. Yea!

I don't have an agent, so poring over the contract is up to me. I don't want to sign away my firstborn, so I'm trying to make sense of everything. I've caught a few things that need changing, so hopefully this publisher is willing to negotiate.

I have 30 days to sign the thing. Hopefully everything works out in the end. It'd be nice to have something published!