Wednesday, April 17, 2024
So pretty!
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
The scent of childhood
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Welcome to the farm!
Though I will get the rest of those completed aluminum beds out of the living room, because we're tripping on them and the cats seem to think I'm building an amusement park for them.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Anyone have a bridge for sale?
I really thought it would go faster, though. It's the fourth book in a series. I know the main character - he's been in my head and in my books since A Wider World. There are also appearances by Bess and Tom from Songbird; Robin and Margaery from A Wider World and Lady, in Waiting, and a few other returning characters. I know all of them, and sections of this book have been drafted since before I started working on the Ava & Claire series.
Okay, so the later middle Elizabethan reign - 1568 - 1571 - was some new ground for me to explore, but I didn't think it would take this long for me to get my thoughts together. I'm about 20%, maybe less, from the end and I just keep walking around it and looking at it and trying to figure out where I'm going. I know the end, but it's like I'm across the river from it and no bridges are magically appearing.
Anybody got a bridge they'd like to sell me?
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Tis the season
Garden season, that is.
In the front yard, the daffodils are exploding in a riot of yellow - so many that I can actually *smell* them. The hyacinths are up, but the grape hyacinths, usually the earliest arrival, are poking along by comparison. The peach tree looks like pink popcorn.
The side garden is still pretty dormant. There are a few daffa, and the iris greens are perking up, but the side is mostly fruit and the fig and blueberries haven't leafed yet.
Im the back is...a mess. Five springs ago, I put in eight 4x4 raised beds, the kind made of recycled wood/plastic. They were cheap, which I needed at the time, but they've lived up to their pricing, bulging outward and coming loose from their corners, spilling soil everywhere.
Add to that pretty picture the fact that we need all new mulch between the beds, and that I spent Saturday helping a friend build new metal-framed beds for *her* garden, and I have a new project. New metal frames are due to arrive tomorrow, and that gives me plenty of time to put them together and figure out how to place them so we can actually use the back yard a bit more. (I have a hammock on a frame that I'd love to use, but there's no room for it).
The fun part will be getting the existing soil from the old beds to the new ones, considering they're not going to be in exactly the same place. And I need to top up the soil once that's done, and get more mukch. Hoping the local tree service is still giving away free wood chip because them I can afford the higher quality soil/mushroom compost blend.The fun part will be when there's a mountain of it in our driveway that will need to be shifted so we can continue to use said driveway.
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Enemies to Lovers
Then the impossible happened. She moved up, threw herself down again, and put an arm over him. Rufus opened one eye and quickly closed it again - if he didn't acknowledge it, maybe it wasn't real?
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Rage against the machines
The collage shows some of the results it gave me before I got more specific. Most of those, while pretty, are completely unusable, but the final - or at least the place where I decided to stop - is more than good enough. It's a 10,000 word short story; I would never hire a cover designer to put a cover on a short story. I'm not going to pay $100 plus (and sometimes considerably plus) for something that I'm giving away for free. Being in indie author also means managing your finances responsibly and knowing where and when you can spend money on things.