What I’m Working On:
I continue my wild quest to self-publishing my first fiction book. The marketing around fiction books is so very different from math textbooks. Writing that, I realize that it probably evokes a universal ‘no, duh!’ from you as you read this. But here, in the middle of the tornado that is the culmination of 4 years of hard work I feel like Dorothy. I could come out in Kansas, or Oz. It’s anyone’s guess at this point. Still, I resist the little voice in my head telling me it would be so much easier to delete all the files and walk away, hoping no one noticed I even attempted this book. I have come this far. The book, the story really, called out to be written. It haunted me for years, and positively poured out once I got started. I feel as if the characters are all my friends now, except the evils ones. Their well-deserved fate was, well, well-deserved and you have to read the story to know what happens.
As I was writing, I realized that not many thrillers are set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Plenty take place in San Francisco, but further down the bay, in cities that are perfect settings for exciting, tense stories from which the best and the worst of humanity bubble to the surface, there is not much available literature. Given my familiarity with the area (born and raised in Palo Alto), it was a natural setting for me to explore.
Books by my Bedside:
I have discovered some wonderful books this month. I think the most exciting is Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine, the first in a YA steampunk fantasy series about a boy who loves books in a world that has controlled and banned ownership of physical copies. Written over a decade ago, it feels to me prescient of where we are headed now.
The No-Waste Kitchen Garden by K Elzer-D is a fascinating and actionable guide to using up all the little bowls that your family uses to hold nuts and snacks and condiments and filling them with all the things they dislike eating like beet greens, celery, and turnip greens. Sadly for them, the project that came out of reading this fantastic book is still going strong.
Here is a list of the other delights I discovered this month:
• The book of the Frog by Sally Coulthard
• The River has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohilleben
• Onibi by C Brun
• Lagom by N Brantmark
Life in the Bungalow:
Spring is in full force here, in fact summer somehow peeks through about once a week to warn us. To remind us to enjoy the mid-70s weather while we can.
We ended up getting rain at just the right time, finally, to induce a bumper crop of pomagranets, apricots, artichokes, bedstraw, and thistles to spring forth as the days warmed.
I spent weeks and weeks patiently nursing seedlings of all kinds, from vegetables to herbs and even a few flowers. Every morning, all through the winter, I pulled cardboard egg cartons, filled with said seedlings and a bit of potting soil, out of the laundry basket I sacrificed for the project, laid them out on the kitchen/dining table, watered them gently with a misting bottle, and opened the kitchen curtains to expose them to enough light to happily grow. Each evening I repeated the process in reverse so the freshly watered seedling babies could be tucked cosily, stacked in the laundry basket, one egg carton upon the other and put into a dark spot in the living room. This went on for months with great succeess. Until I made the fatal mistake of planting them outside. I continued to water my seedling babies three times a day, but sadly everything withered away except for two pumpkin plants and 5 squashes. So it goes. There is definitely something I do not yet know about growing vegetables, but there is always next year to try again.
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