Editorial Calendars and Garden Musing

While I'm waiting for my first edits to come back from my publisher as per the timeline set forth in the editorial calendar, I started querying agents for a second novel. I would still like to be represented by an agent at some point in my career and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to send a batch out. The Blood Red Pencil has an informative post up about acquiring an agent and there are many other sources for "dos" and don'ts", Nathan Bransford and Janet Reid being two of my favorites. 

I also need to start the process of creating an author website. Word Press has good templates and website building is a good accompaniment to the querying process. I already purchased my domain name YvonneOsborne.com so nobody can snatch it up. The plan is to put up pictures of my garden, my cat, my cluttered desk, dad's old Corona, the first strawberry of the season, etc. and start a sign up for my mailing list.

On a different track (warning...and some might find this inhumane and offensive) there was a family of baby groundhogs invading the garden, nibbling on the onion tops and the strawberry plants and eating baby cabbages when the wind blew the row cover askew. This is financial ruin to an organic gardener. You can imagine the time, sweat, and expense that goes into a one-acre garden. To cut to the chase, my sister and daughter, who were weeding the garlic, discovered the intruders hovering where the tall grass grows, but they were too squeamish to knock them over the heads with their shovels. Sister ran off to get her dog, the varmint killer, but Sarge arrived too late for they had all escaped back into the creek bed. All but one. 

An hour later my husband was on the tractor, tilling the perimeter when he spotted a furry creature on the top of the deer fence half hidden by the wild raspberry canes. He called me over to "come see!" There it was with his sharp little teeth hissing away. Hubby said, "I should have had my pellet gun with me." I was like, well knock him down. Do something! He rummaged in the built-in tool box behind the seat of the tractor and came up with a can of WD40. He sprayed the bejesus out of him. I couldn't look, but he said it dropped like a wasp under a stream of wasp spray. The underbrush was too thick to find him, so he didn't know if it killed him or just taught him a lesson.

The next morning I found a dead groundhog outside my greenhouse door. What was this? The mama dragging him by the scruff of his neck to lay him at the feet of the perpetrator?

Anyway, that's it for now. Out and about, over the bend. 

The Good Neighbor

A wooden fence encloses her Sacramento yard
and every time she considers it
the vein in her forehead throbs
in thinking of the other side.

The neighbor’s trumpet vines climb the slats
poke through the cracks and cascade over the top,
wild, free, and untended.

His garden was once on a magazine cover,

the cornerstone of neighborhood tours.

A quiet neighbor who kept himself to himself

but passed her tips and cuttings from over the fence.

 

It was spring when he left the gate unlocked.

Her irises were in bloom, rain in the air,

the day she arrived home to yellow tape  

wrapped the length of their adjoining fence.

 

Policemen with dogs stomped the herbs

and the baby’s breath and traumatized the cat

lying in the sun on their dash across her yard

to follow the killer's path lest the trail

grow cold and dissipate like the promise of rain.

 

She walks her paths through autumn color,

checks her locks and eyes the roofline.

She tore out the grass in front and converted

it to a rose garden—a white border of shrub roses

and statuesque teas of yellow, carmine, and pink.

Waist high, they point their thrones skyward.

The prompt today from Claudia at the Poet's Pub is to write a poem about gardens and/or gardening. How could one resist? It's summer and it's all I do, even when I'd rather be writing. Thank you for reading about the good neighbor who is a no-more man and the woman who prevails.

 

Hang The Garlic Over The Drive

Summer is busy but should one not always steal a moment to write? We dug our garlic and hung it in the granary.  Dad said to hang it over the drive, but I didn't know what he meant. Then he told me that Grandpa used to park his car in here-there are two big sliding doors on each side of the structure-a perfect place to park your car. But it hasn't been used as a garage in my lifetime. 

So I hung my garlic "over the drive" from the top railing on the third floor, climbing the steep staircase on your right. The old steamer trunk that sits behind the railing against the back wall is empty. I wonder what happened to the contents. Did I imagine them from my childhood?

The corn that borders my garden towers overhead 

and the winter squash and potatoes flourish.

A story about the granary: When we were children, an unruly cousin took our beloved red wagon to the top of those stairs and pushed it over the edge to the concrete below. The impact made a horrible noise and our wagon was smashed beyond repair. I don't think we ever got another. I don't know what compelled him to do that, but every time I climb those stairs, I remember it.

That's it for now. Off to plant more beets and lettuce. I just wanted to wake up my blog and say hello to all. How has your summer been?

The Cocoon

I've been gone so long I can scarce find my way back. I've missed coming around and reading your blogs and participating in Friday Flash Fiction and Magpie Sunday Tales. In case my blog should disappear from lack of interest, I click on it ocassionally to look at the water. But all too quickly, I'm called away to my lettuces and radishes, radicchio and kale, picking asparagus and tending finicky peppers that need this and that and tomatoes that must soon be staked. And then there are the weeds.

I fall into bed at night, earlier and earlier, like the most boring person on earth. In the wee hours of morning I look at my manuscript, portions stacked here and there (cause I'm a hands-on-paper kind of writer), and wonder how long I can persevere in my search for the perfect agent who will love its strengths more than they dislike its problems.

Spring and summer are always like this, no time to write, guilt-ridden at nightfall, but too tired to do anything about it. Achy legs find surcease between the sheets and achy heart burrows into the soft cocoon of blankets and dreams of water, an orderly garden, and a writing life.

But wait....have you ever had Canada geese fly overhead so low you could hear the whoosh whoosh of their wings? I was standing on my front porch admiring the idyllic scene of cattle on grass, when I heard the familiar honking of a resident pair. They flew in just over the power lines with their necks outstretched. I was surprised at the intensity of sound, much like the flapping of a dozen sheets on a clothesline. Geese fly slow and methodical, and the air displaced by their wing span left a tremor in the air. I watched as they disappeared over the tree line, wondering at their destination, wondering what they see from up there.

The Summer Solstice Post That Wasn't

Summer Solstice came and went

like June bugs and fireflies

and the candle that was lit

and left on the porch.
Like the string of ash from an incense stick
that dangles in the morning light,
spent. 

In the still of the shade

a hummingbird flits

in search of the feeder that isn’t there.

The fuchsia is hung amongst long-throated flowers
but it searches for sugar water
with red number nine.
The longest-day sun slipped out of sight
like a moth in the wind and the days we were young.

Today we transplant strawberries and watch for rain. The skies are overcast and the temperatures cool. Weed the beets. Weed, weed, weed. The weeds don’t need rain and they are not bothered by pests. They’re like unnecessary adverbs and overused adjectives, like the scene that should be deleted; the finished product cleaner for the whack. Then there’s the quack grass. It’s like a run-on sentence. It runs on and on, from one end of the garden to the other, like a person with words  but no deeds.

In a weird way, I admire my weeds. I’ve learned to accept that there will always be weeds in a huge organic garden, unlike the small weed-free garden I had when I was young. I see that garden in my mind’s eye, the path to the perfect, slender cucumber warmed by the sun. I peeled it over the sink with firm long strokes. I enjoyed the day.

Mind Your Agent Research

I love blogging. I LOVE writing. I miss by bloggy buddies. I have not been a good blog buddy of late. We have a huge (one acre)  garden and it is a main source of income in the summer. Actually, I love winter too because it's writing time but there isn't much money coming in, so we have to really double down in the summer. What's my point? I just want you all to know that I peek in on you when I can and if I don't comment, don't assume I wasn't there.

I feel guilty even taking the time to write this itty bitty post because I should be weeding the chard, squash (I saw my first baby zucchini yesterday!) the lettuce and beets. Then it's building-a-trellis-time for the tomatoes. And mind the soaker hoses. We've been a  month without rain, so we must mind the soaker hoses.

For those of you in the agent research phase of your work, there is a great post by Jemi Fraser over at The Write Angle.

Have a great week!

p.s. I'm planning a special post for Summer Solstice. Hopefully it'll happen, unlike the Summer Solstice party I've always wanted to throw.

Grab Hold Of Your Writing Life

To close out May (can you believe it?),  I thought I'd share a great post by Pete Morin on how to write fiction that others will want to read. It doesn't hurt that he ends with a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of my favorite "Beat" poets.


To close out May, I thought you'd like to see a picture of our cattle when they were first put out on pasture this spring, where they're supposed to be. It's a little blurry but can still say a thousand words, no?

And one of our plump hens:

My daughter's Corgi rounding one of them up:

And the solar panels at the farm:

To close out May, I'd like to boast that we've planted 140 tomato plants in two days, all by hand, but I don't have a picture of that. Now that the bulk of the planting is done, I hope June affords me time to research my A list for agents, but how do I show you a picture of that? Maybe this Scribbler Award that Tricia O'Brien, one of my oldest blogging buddies, gave me a long time ago will do.

See you all in June!

Where's Your Nest?

I awoke this morning to the honking of geese overhead. They flew right over our house to land on the pond. I know it's pretty nice around here but the pesky birds should be up in Canada by now, mating and nesting up there. I have a robin's nest in a shrub beside my deck. Three eggs of the purest blue are nestled inside. 

I hope our human activity doesn't disturb the mother. Why do they nest so low to the ground and close to houses? Do they like us as much as we like them?

A Sunday aside: Did you know you can buy Facebook "likes"? Doesn't that diminish the value? At a time when it's supposed to be the bomb? I can pay people to "like" me who don't even know me. Before you know it there will be a way to buy followers.  Remember, I'm just a poor writer who plants veggies on the side and can't afford to pay much. OK, enough already. Off to plant brussel sprouts and cabbage and chard before the heat sets in.

Digging In The Dirt and Telling The Truth

I haven’t talked gardening in a while. Now that it’s taking up the majority of my time, I might as well write about it too! Digging in the dirt is therapeutic and sometimes characters and ideas surface along with the roots of the quack grass.  So I can dig and hum and make up stories all at the same time. Humming and singing to oneself run in my family. You should hear us when we all get together.

My asparagus came up too early because of the sustained warmth in March. Then the April frosts set in and the spears were killed. My new asparagus patch was nothing but drooped heads bowed to earth, depressing as a line of penitents. I waited, thinking there might be enough life left in them to fern out, as asparagus will, making a beautiful frond forest. But there wasn’t, so yesterday I took a sharp knife and crawled up and down the rows on my hands and knees and cut off the brown spears and pulled weeds at the same time and threw the mix into the wheelbarrow to be carted away.  (I confess I once wrote a short story called The Wheelbarrow about dead things being carted away.) You don’t want to leave any debris in the patch that will attract the dreaded asparagus beetle. I do have new spears coming up so all is not lost and now that the dead stuff is cleaned out, that end of the garden looks healthier. I also planted parsnips for the first time yesterday. I like to try a least one new vegetable every year.   

If it doesn’t rain today, I’ll plant kale and broccoli next to the parsnips and then we’ll set out the cabbage plants I started in the greenhouse on March 16^th.  I did notice my fingers are a little stiff this morning. Funny…I can sit at my laptop all day writing lies and creating havoc and my hands never bother me. But one full day of pulling weeds makes them ache. Maybe my hands are telling me something!