When I'm not writing, I'm playing in my flower garden

I'm so glad we're not in this stage anymore. 

 When we built our house into a hillside three summers ago, the hill was nothing more than a pile of dirt and a couple trees. But I had a vision.

At our previous home, I'd created flower gardens all over: around the vegetable garden, the house, the shed, the garage, the mailbox, around various trees, and a couple big beds out by the roadside. As you may imagine, this meant there were flowers all over the yard. While this was very pretty, it was also a lot of work. So when it came to designing my new flower garden from scratch, I decided to keep my ambitious flower tendencies a bit more in check to correspond with my time and mid-life energy levels.

Who thought gardening on a hillside would be less ambitious? Ha!

Which brings us to summer number two. In which I planted and mulched around a whole lot of things. Many of these plants were brought over from my previous flowerbeds and survived a hard winter in pots and some of them even in plastic bags (because I ran out of pots). Others had been brought over years before and had resided in a holding garden. The rest were clearance finds. I allow myself a handful of full priced plants a year and even that pains me. I love the clearance table at my home and garden store or most any nursery I pass by.  I love them so much so, that I've rather run out of room for new plants already. Ooops!

Notice that rock pile coming down the middle of the hill? *We'll get to that in another post.

Everything grows like mad here!

Now were up to our third summer, well second living here, but you get the idea. As you can see, everything has filled in nicely. Some so nicely, that I've had to split plants and expand the garden another five feet toward the roadside because I hate tossing perfectly good plants in the mulch pile.

Iris is my favorite flower, followed closely by daylilies. I have a lot of other things in here too, but those two far outnumber the rest.

You can see how well the creeping sedum groundcover likes it here too. A year ago I had a few springs from my sister in law. I tucked them between the rocks. Next thing I know, I can't see the rocks anymore. And I've pulled out handfuls of the stuff and spread it elsewhere. The rocks are completely covered again!

In other rock pile project news, I decided to take care of my hillside ramp that started at the six nice rock steps we could afford (those suckers are pricey!) at the top of the hill and break it up into steps of my own with other rocks that I'd purchased this spring. So now I have a slightly less dangerous and more traversable slope. Wet mulch on a steep incline was slippery!

It's funny to see these pictures from a couple months ago. That sedum has mostly covered these new steps too. I'm not complaining. Everything that covers means less mulch I have to buy next year.

You may notice the wall of large rocks to the left of the last photo. I put a bunch of different varieties of sedum between those last year. It filled in beautifully.

We get a lot of dragonflies and butterflies in the garden, as well as bees from the neighbor's hives. That's all fine and dandy until that creeping sedum flowers. While it's lovely to see the hill covered in tiny yellow flowers, it makes spotting the yellow bees difficult, yet necessary when the sedum covers the path areas. Yes, wearings shoes also a wise choice.

This particular dragonfly was in no hurry to leave its warm rock and let me pretty much put my cell phone on top of it to take a close up. I wish butterflies were as patient.

Please, may I eat another sky raisin?
They're sooooo tasty.

Who loves the flower garden even more than me? My little dog. Bitsy spends hours weaving through the iris and lilies chasing sky raisins (flies). This is a rare picture of her sitting still in the sun. I wouldn't think flies would be all that tasty, but she must. If nothing else, it's good exercise and the world could do with a few less flies. Not that I want her licking me anytime soon after eating one. Euw.

The lovely black-eyed susans are transplants from a corn field next door that was left to its down devices last year and soon filled with wildflowers. When I moved a few plants here, I thought they would never make it. They shriveled up and looked dead. Yet, this year they came up all over the place and I just might regret planting them a little. I pulled out quite a few of them already before they took over.

*That new rock project? I'm creating two ponds and a long waterfall between them. Watch for photos once I get that project done.

Until then, I'll leave you with this last photo of flower hill.

My low cost garden: How I take a break from writing

While I love my flower garden, I like to grow vegetables too. However, I haven't been able to do that for the past couple years. I've missed the daily excuse to get outside and get more dirt under my oh-so-lady-like nails.

The flower section of my old garden, complete with a pear tree, but minus a partridge.

For years at our previous house, we had a large garden, fenced in, with strawberries and raspberries, grapevines and plenty of room for anything I had the urge to grow. Over the years the kids helped plant seeds. We chased untold numbers of rabbits out of the fencing. Squirrels and raccoons leaped down from trees to rip up my corn and decorate the branches above with the stalks after they were done with their stolen feasts. We composted for years, slowly turning the sandy dirt into a nice dark and fertile soil.

And then came building a house. No time to garden, no sir. We barely had time to eat or sleep, for goodness sake. Ignored, our beautiful garden was quickly overtaken by weeds and eagerly expanding raspberries. Then we moved. I'm sure you know how much fun that is and how long it takes to settle in. Egads!

To supplement our fresh veggie intake during all this, I joined a local farm CSA program. If you have one nearby and don't have the time, space or inclination to have a garden of your own, I highly recommend it. We learned to like all sorts of things that I wouldn't have otherwise considered trying from the grocery store or planting myself.

Now, finally, in our third summer in the new house, I had time to make a garden. It's not that we don't have space. There's plenty of that, but where to put it? The majority of our land is low, meaning it gets wet fast and floods in heavy rain. It's also mostly shaded. The back of the house is much higher and in full sun, but filled with dune grass and beach sand, because nothing says contrast like our yard.

So much dune grass...

The full sun won. I rototilled the dune grass. Three passes to get it good and chopped up.Then I covered it with landscaping fabric and lined the edges with rocks. You'd be surprised how fast dune grass grows. I ran out of time for the weekend at that point. So it sat that there for a few days until free time and weather allowed me to get back out there. You'd think that all of my efforts would deter the grass a little, wouldn't you? Ha! It was already starting to sprout up through the fabric!

So I pulled all the fabric back and lined the area with layers of newspaper. With the fabric back in place overtop and the addition of four inches of cedar mulch. I thought I was in good shape.

What's in the pot? Raspberries. I learned my lesson with those. Contain them!

Time to build boxes. We had a lot of random lumber left over from building the house and deck. I didn't want to spend anything if I didn't have to, so while my boxes aren't pretty, other that one box of screws (because I ran out of my leftovers), they didn't cost a thing.

We're also working on a landscaping project in the front of the house and happened to have a delivery of dirt come in for that. I took what I needed to fill my boxes with good dark composted soil and lined those with newspaper too for and extra deterrent.

The one thing I did splurge on was a pre-packaged drip irrigation system from Lowes. I did put this garden out in the full sun right up next to the house for goodness sake. The least I could do was to give it a fighting chance. So a $60 drip irrigation system went in. It was super easy to do and maybe took an hour so two.

If you're wondering what the deal is with the random corner blocks, I left most of them how I found them so that I could add fencing or drape row covers over the plants if rabbits or deer became a problem. So far, thankfully, they haven't.

Next, I ran to the tractor supply store down the street and grabbed up a bunch of seeds while they were on sale and picked up a few tomato plants while I was at it. Though the last frost was still looming, I just wanted this project done so I planted half a packet of everything. Good to have that other half to fall back on if something fails.

You can tell how often the kids use that trampoline. The dogs like the shade it provides though.

Now, two months later, the flowers are starting to bloom ( some, because they're edible and marigolds to keep the rabbits away), and everything is looking lovely. We enjoyed our first zucchini with dinner last night and have been enjoying fresh spinach and lettuce for a couple weeks.

It takes me five minutes every other day to keep it all weed free. And dune grass free, because yeah, all my efforts did was slow that down a little. That's persistent stuff! But it gives me an excuse to get some sunshine. Those randomly long posts at the corners make good handholds when bending over, woo exercise!

Now I'm going to go clean the dirt from my fingernails yet again and think about what project I'm going to work on next.

On Being Thankful

If I were looking to jinx myself, I would do a post I've been contemplating for a while about being thankful. But I wouldn't do that, because I know how the universe works.

I wouldn't want to dwell on the fact that I'm vastly enjoying life in my new house with plenty of room for everyone. Or that my writing room has in fact remained a writing space, free of clutter, or other encroaching household items seeking storage space.

If I were foolish, I would curse myself by talking about how comfortable and inviting my writing chair is, or my new warm, furry lap blanket, or the horde of chocolate I have stashed away for NaNo writing sessions. I surely wouldn't want to mention that I suddenly have more story ideas than I will have time for this November.

Speaking of work going well enough to support two people, or at least well enough to pay the bills, would surely prod the powers that be to bring about some costly misfortune that would sideline my intention to be credit card debit free (creative financing for unexpected projects when we built our house two years ago) by spring of next year. 

I wouldn't want to invite an onslaught of poor reviews by saying that Sahmara has been well received or talk about the nice comments on the cover art from people at the author fair I attended last week.

No, doing any of these things would be just asking for trouble, and I certainly don't need that. So, instead, I'll just leave the whole topic of being generally healthy and happy with where I am in life out of this post and get back to planning my NaNo project, because, thankful or not, I can't seem to focus on that no matter how hard I try.

Off To A Productive Start

It's a new year...where to begin?

I've been writing! Every day even! It's a wonderful feeling. I love my new chair that helps block out all the aching distractions so I can get lost in words. The third unnamed book in my as of yet unnamed series is sitting at 32K fairly as of today. I went back and took notes and added several new opening chapters until I got the story starting at what feels like the right place. I've got a fairly clean draft now going forward, and I'm loving the story so far.

My daughter is giving me crap about not working on Interface, but I will get back to it, just not right now. I need to stick with one world at a time this deep into the draft.

I have a social life again! I've forgotten what that feels like, to just pop over to the brewery down the road after work, to meet friends for lunch, to have friends over for dinner. All those casual encounters that got shoved aside with an overwhelming workload, building, and settling in. I've even started volunteering at school again. Only for one thing, okay, two, but they are on my own terms and only one is more of a long term after school thing.

With time to write in the morning before work and after work before dinner, I'm more flexible about taking time to watch frivolous TV during and being a couple time. We recently finished watching Orphan Black (clones!) and can't wait for the new season to start. We're currently watching Making A Murderer (with everyone else on my Facebook feed), and while it's interesting, the slow shots of the scenery and soft voices put me to sleep every damn episode. It's like Forensic Files. I love that show, but it also has the voices that lull me to sleep. Maybe murder just makes me tired?

I've been reading too, because that's apparently a thing this year. When resolutions flooded my Facebook feed, reading more seemed to be high on the list. It seems like a good goal, so I figured I'd tag along. Last week I finished Brewed Awakenings I, an anthology featuring some of my local writing friends. My favorite by far was Amy Jo Johnson's, She's My Favorite, which is about...clones. I think I might have a clone fan thing going on. But really, it was a haunting story and I couldn't put it down.

Not only reading and writing and watching, I even managed to squeeze in two critiques! One for a friend and one for a stranger. Getting back into that mindset helped with the cleaning up of the draft I'm working on as well.

We spent Christmas Break trying to squeeze in watching all six episodes of Star Wars because the kids hadn't seen all of them, and we'd never watched them all in order. Then we topped it off with a trip to the newly renovated local theatre featuring all recliner seating (which was so freaking awesome- no heads in front of you, all the foot room you could ask for and comfortable!) and saw the new one in 3-D, because why not? It was probably the best behaved theatre audience I've ever been a part of, and the movie was enjoyable, though I had several snarky comments to save for when we got in the car and that last scene? It just went on too long to the point where I wanted to laugh, but overall, a massive improvement over the prequel casting and acting and script.

Our house is also home to a new cockatiel. My daughter's previous one died, which is a story fraught with things I'd do differently and gritting my teeth. We'll skip that because it makes me angry, and I'm relaxing this year. Let's instead focus on the new one, who is a couple months old and great fun. Pepper makes all kinds of noises and loves hanging out with my daughter. She's also happy to ride around on our shoulders and pick at anything in reach. Today we built a ladder for her so if she happens to land on the floor (her wings are clipped), she can get back up to her cage and out of the reach of the dogs, who think she looks really tasty.

And I'll close out this rambling update with this week's Author's Answer, where we talk about our favorite characters we've created.

It's November. You know what that means

I send you greetings from the land of NaNoWriMo. Not only am I way overwhelmed with building the house (we're installing doors and trim now, in case you're keeping track of progress), I'm again MLing for National Novel Writing Month.

Am I also writing? Sort of. The odds that I'll make it to 50K this year in the midst of all the stress I've already got going on and the time involved with organizing events and overseeing my region, are fairly slim. Instead I'm aiming for a much more attainable 10K. If I get more than that, yay me. As of this moment, I'm sitting at 1600 words.

With that already under my belt, it sounds like 10K should be no problem, except that the majority of the work on the house from this point onward is in our court. Doors, trim, cabinets, plumbing, electrical, flooring, etc. And I can't move in until that's all done. Did I mention I need to move in as soon as possible? Yeah, I kinda have my work cut out for me.

So what am I writing? Damaged takes place in the same world as Devolution (a short I wrote years ago that is currently looking for a good home).

Gabriel and Nina are thrilled to learn they are having twins until a checkup reveals that one of them is at high risk for developing violent behavior. They are given a termination notice. Not knowing which of the twins is defective, the couple is not willing to sacrifice the other. Signing a life-long contract to be responsible for all damages done by their questionable offspring, they embark on a journey to prove the prognosticators wrong.

Estate of Waiting Update

I'll have a story to announce next week, but for now, I figured I'd do a little update on the house project. I wanted to share a nice photo of the house, but we're at a point where nothing exciting is happening on the outside and, well, the inside is a friggen mess.

For the last few weeks, this is the first thing I see when I pull in the driveway. What are those? Septic tanks. No the faces aren't really there. Well, the eyes are, but that's what I imagine on them every darn time. I'm tempted to run over there with some spray paint and make it official. But I haven't yet. 

Why are they still there? We'll, that's a good question. The guy who is supposed to install them hasn't gotten around to it yet. After another email, I've been informed that he will be there this week for sure. But he hasn't been there yet. One more week and my imaginary faces on the feces tanks are becoming real.

The rest of the project is coming along slowly. Yes, we're still in the Estate of Waiting theme. Drywall is going in this week and next. The paint is purchased and waiting in the basement. The trim needs to be ordered and I need to pick out tile and flooring next.

Construction debris is building up everywhere and the concrete guy would love the garage to be cleaned out so he can get that poured. However, the garage is full of the doors that can't go in until the drywall is done and siding*. A dumpster is arriving tomorrow to help alleviate some of the mess that's making me twitchy. And yes, that's a temporary furnace in the middle of the family room. Charming isn't it?

*Our siding guy quit a quarter of the way though the project. He was a friend who did handyman stuff and was going to build our deck next spring. Turns out he got a day job and suddenly didn't need the handyman job anymore so he was done. Just like that: done. Neato.

So now my house is stranded like this. Without the ladders. He took those. Which means now we get to hunt down a new siding guy. Or hunt down the old one. Maybe both.

Juggling, Folding, and Hauling

I'm happy to say that one of the short stories in my juggling routine has found a home. A Little Thing Like Death will be in an upcoming issue of Isotropic Fiction. In the midst of all the non-writerly stuff taking over my waking hours, it feels good to know that productive things are still happening on that front.

This is what my weekends look like.

I did manage to find a couple hours to pound out some book page crafts after a long day of branch and log hauling last weekend.

Did you know that you can turn a tattered paperback into an ornament?

Outdated financial and internet books can become artwork for your walls.

Getting up two hours early on the weekend and ten minutes here and there throughout the day allowed me to draft seven NaNo preparation emails for my region. They will be appearing here as well in the upcoming weeks if you're interested in joining the November novel writing frenzy. I guess that also proves that I can find time to write as long if I don't sleep much. However, I'm not sure how many days I can do that in a row. This is the first November that I'm seriously doubting my ability to reach 50K in a month AND get everything done that I need to do every day. Time will tell.

The Waiting

Insert house here. If only it were that easy.

Sounds like a gripping suspense novel, doesn't it? Sadly, it's my life right now. Waiting to receive any good news on submissions. Waiting for what was more likely going to be rejections on submissions. Waiting to get elevations on our house plans from the architect. Waiting to get quotes to see if this house is even feasible with our budget
...after we finally get the elevations.

I got sick of waiting over the weekend and spent most of it over at the property, clearing out stumps and dead shrubs. This involved a lot of walking back and forth from the wood pile to where I was working, using the claw end of a hammer as a pick axe and lots of swinging of the machete. Now I'm waiting for my muscles to stop aching and the itch to stop from the poison ivy I encountered.

While I'm doing all this waiting, I decided last night, at around 9pm, to do some book page folding. It's a new crafty thing for me. There are boxes of books in my garage that the resale shop didn't want. They're just waiting for me to having another garage sale before eventually becoming a charitable donation.

Now I'm waiting for this work day to be over so I can get back to some folding fun.

Slowly catching up with the world

In my quest for a me focused year, I've managed to find time to watch a few tv shows I've been meaning to watch, scarily, for a decade in one case. Since December Netflix has indulged my desire to watch:

Capricia, which I never got to watch on tv because I was mourning the end of BSG. Why do they force these related series on us faithful viewers so soon after the end of our favorite show? Give us a little time to want it again, people. I didn't need more of this (am not joining the angry throng still upset about it only lasting one season), but I did enjoy seeing how the cylons began and getting hints, that I'm more than happy to fill in myself thank you very much, as to how these events played into the series that we knew and loved.

I finally manged to wrap up my spotty year of attempting to get to the entire series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I also totally snubbed at the time of it's original airing, though for no particular reason other than it just wasn't my thing at the time. Not that it was my thing now either, but carrying a show over that many seasons and keeping the main characters still interesting and evolving is certainly something to appreciate.

Firefly is also on my watch list. Never watched that at the time either, despite the rabid fans telling me that I should. So far the most amusing thing is seeing actors that have been in so many other shows since now in this role. Haven't become a rabid fan as of yet.

I also tried to give Lost Girl a chance because it sounded interesting, but after a couple episodes I don't have much good to say so I'll leave it at that.

Thanks to the doctor informing me that I have bronchitis, I haven't been overly active, I've spent a good deal of my evenings wiped out and in bed coughing long before actual bedtime. Since my laptop has some loose wiring in the monitor that makes it go blank every time I cough when it's on my lap, I've started watching Eureka - yet another show I meant to watch but didn't make time for. So far, this is my favorite of my tv show quest.

And with this updated, I'm off to edit some short stories, juggle a submission, and get some work done before my my medicine puts me into a nice cough-free sleep.

Prepping for NaNoWriMo

One of my four dragon eggs.

Unlike most NaNo participants, preparing for November has far less to do with outlines or creating characters than it does with filling the Kitten Jar with challenges, gathering RSVPs, sorting prizes and figuring out just when the hell I'm going to actually find time to write.

October is filled with "Things I put myself through" also known as Donning the Superwoman Cape. Things like:

Preparing of 312 Christmas craft kids for my daughters elementary school (because that certainly wasn't getting done in November). I am only doing half the school this year, so hey, that less thing is still working.

Filling goody bags, sorting prizes for all our big regional events and weekly write-ins, and finally getting around to filling out and dropping off the one donation form I pledged myself to.

Then there is the matter of spending some time with crafty-daughter who declared we needed to make dragon eggs. I'd forgotten how much of a pain in the cheeks it is to blow out eggs. So yes, we made dragon eggs and then the eggs needed nests, which meant a trip to the craft store because I was out of black rocks (and we needed black rocks, I guess). Hopefully this fills my mom and daughter craft quota for the upcoming month.

Running my kids to and fro with all their fall school activities. Taxi anyone?

Getting a couple of my stories that had dropped out of submisions back in into the juggling mix, the house decorated for Halloween and cleaned enough to tide me over for the month ahead with only a little general maintance.

And, of course, working, but thats a perpetual challenge these days.

I suppose I should read over the couple pages of the short that I'm intending on turning into this year's NaNoNovel, huh? Thankfully I still have a few days to squeeze that in.

All set to take over the world

...Now that my army of tiny NaNoBots is complete! Mwahahahaha

I really have to stop checking in on what the other NaNoWriMo MLs are up to, because it just leads to inspiration and that leads to projects that I really don't have time for. But they're fun!

They don't need to sleep. They just do. And do. And do. And some of them even smile about it.

So how does one go about raising an army of their own?

First, visit your local robot part outlet. Mine happened to be called Hobby Lobby.

You'll need two sizes of wooden blocks. I used 1 inch and 3/4 inch. There are smaller sizes, if you want really little bots, just keep in mind that you'll need to find hand and feet parts that are equally sized.

I picked dowel hole plugs for the head knobs, 1/8 dowels for the arms and legs, wooden balls for the hands and some little rounded dowel part for the feet.

I cut the dowels at 3/4 inch using a wire cutter. They snap off really easy. You will need to sand the cut edges to get a good base for the other parts to attach to.

Using hot glue (because I really didn't have time to sit around while stuff dried), I attached the head knobs on the smaller block and then glued the smaller block to the larger one.

Things got rather assembly line after that. Attach the arms to the hands and the legs to the feet.

Because I was doing thirteen of these (the max I could do with the pieces I had purchased), I assembled all the arms and legs before moving on.

The easiest way to assemble the feet is to set them both side by side and put a drop of glue on top of them. Set the block body on top of the feet and adjust as necessary until the bot stands up.

If the legs are mostly in the middle section of the block, it has a pretty good chance of standing on the first try. Making sure the legs are generally the same size would be a good idea too, if you're going for a uniform look. My army is a little haphazard. I'm okay with that.

Once my robots were assembled--all thirteen took about an hour from opening the supplies to figuring out the first one to gluing on the last leg.

Removing all the glue blobs and stringy bits would be a good idea at this point.

Then it's time to find some paint!

I could have opted for regular old acrylic paint, but I had this hammered silver spray paint in my closet and it begged to be used.


As you might notice in the pictures, some of my robots have different feet. I ran out of the nifty little bowl pieces. Boo! But, I had some craft sticks sitting around so I snapped off the rounded ends and darn it, they made cute feet too.


Behold my army of NaNoBots!

Dragon myself through the week

From this side it looks angry.

It's been a crazy busy week. You'd think being down one kid (he's working at Boy Scout camp for two weeks) would make for a little extra time, but no. Work has continued to devour what would usually be my writing time. Which also is my critiquing time, so sadly, I've also fallen woefully behind there too. On the slightly brighter side, I have been able to devote some subconscious effort to percolating submission pieces for A Broken Race, which is nearly ready to head out into Queryland.

While I've been so busy, I have managed to carve out a little craft time with my daughter. She's been in a 'let's make dragons out of clay' mode lately. Who am I to argue? So I sat down with her and a ball of air dry clay and we made dragons.

At this angle its more friendly.

Admittedly, I made this dragon over a month ago (work has been at crazy level for quite awhile). I then moved it to the corner of my kitchen counter where stuff that sits around collects. I figured that if it sat there, I'd remember to make time to also sit with my daughter and paint it. Great intention.

It sat there for a week and got hit with some random something that I set on the counter. One wing, a foot and several back spines fell off. I swore. Profusely. Then I got my glue gun out and fixed it.

I moved my repaired and still unpainted dragon to my desk in an 'out of the way' place so it would be safe until I got around to painting it. While it was in this safe place, it seems that I managed to smash it with a tape gun in a flurry of shipping packages for work. All that stuff that broke before, fell off again. Only this time, the wing shattered. Again, I swore profusely. I didn't fix it.

The poor dragon and its broken bits sat in a pile of clay dust for several weeks. You might say it was daring me to fix it and I was ignoring it because I was still pissed that I'd broken it again before I had made time to paint the darn thing.

Finally, after a late dinner, I hauled out my box of paints and my glue gun. The dragon got fixed. Again. It also got a base coat. Then it sat on the table for two days until I stepped away from another twelve hour day and a late dinner to begin the brain numbing process of painting scales. Four days later, its finally done.

The dragon has now been placed in an actual safe place. And if fate has it's way with the dragon again, at least I have these photos.

Camp, edits and balls

Trala runs screaming through the paper-lined paths. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

"What the heck are you talking about?" Delilah asks, peering upward. "Holy crap. She's right. Run!"

Nekar stands his ground beside Ms. Wildstar. They both watch as a wad of cloth plummets to the floor. Nekar gives it a minute to settle before examining it closer.

"Why the mass of terrycloth?" asks Blue.

Ms. Wildstar shakes her head. "It's a towel."

Nekar extracts a crumbled post-it note from within the wad and straightens it. "She Who Taps the Keys has officially thrown in the the towel on Camp NaNo." 

Delilah creeps out from the paper wads. "She finished?"

Blue holds up his translator. "Perhaps you should get one of these." He sighs. "It's a phrase meaning-"

"What's on the post-it note?" asks Ms. Wildstar.

"Story titles." A steady whump, whump, whump sounds overhead.

Trala takes another hysterical lap. "The sky! It's falling!"

Blue snakes out a tentacle and trips her. He whistles to himself as he backs away. 

"Is she submitting again?"

"Five stories at once. Hence the juggling. If you hear any hint of swearing. Do run. Worse than the sky, balls will fall on your head."

Ms. Wildstar nods. "That explains the editing snow of random words that fell thickly over the weekend." 

Nekar reaches over to pluck a shred of paper from her hair. "Hey, you got a nod on you."

"Oh god, get it off!" She shudders. "They were everywhere! I thought I'd burned them all."

"We should make sure there aren't any more laying around. The damn things breed like dust bunnies." Nekar leads Ms. Wildstar into the pathways.

Still working on that New Year's Resolution

Back in those last few minutes of 2011, I pledged that this year I would embrace the word Less. I am pleased to announce another milestone in my efforts toward that end. This weekend I wrapped up my four year stint as a Girl Scout leader.
While there were some proud moments during those years, I can't say that this is something I'm going to miss terribly. It was something I let myself get roped into for my shy daughter's sake, and because I thought I could bring something to the program that our troop was missing - namely a craft lady and organization.

We've decorated and tool aprons,assembled hygiene kits, and this year, made blankets for a local women's support organization. We've made cards for service people and place mats for the elderly. We earned bunches of badges, sold car loads of cookies and went on some fun end of the year reward trips together. We hung out at a big mall and made Girl Scout build-a-bears. We went to a big water park where some of the girls had their first big night away from home in a pretty awesome hotel. We went camping, which many of our girls had never done. This year we went to a smaller water park and also went horseback riding, which, again, many of our girls had never done. We went roller skating and bowling discovered local art museums, pet stores, parks and countless other field trip locations.

These girls all went into this as girls who went to school together, but came out as friends. There were even some unlikely exchanges of phone numbers and promises of hanging out over the summer happening on the way home yesterday. I hope they follow through and look fondly on all the pictures they took together in the coming years.
Both of us current leaders are passing the torch to a new pair of brave souls. I wish the new leaders luck and patience.

Why wouldn't I miss what seems so sound rather like a warm-fuzzy-fest from this post?

No more pressure to attend the monthly leader meetings and no more planning meetings cramming into the frantic end of summer. Two less after school troop meetings a month - which also means no more last minute phone calls of:
- Did you get snack or do I have to?
- OMG! Do we have paperwork from everyone for this field trip today?
- I'm so far behind at work, I'm going to be late. Oh crap, you're going to be late too? Ahhh!

No more:
- Wading through piles of emails from the local leadership
- Feeling guilty that I couldn't squeeze more of the fun local opportunities for the girls into my schedule
- Filling out troop paperwork
- Having to run to the store to get last minute craft supplies for projects I didn't have time to set up because of work.
- Having to call thirteen parents to remind them of what their daughters need to bring to our next event.
- Composing last minute notes to send home to try to avoid those thirteen phone calls before an event.
- Waiting for twenty minutes at the end of every meeting for the same two parents who never remember to pick up their kids even though our meeting gets done at the same time every time.
- Dealing with other leader drama from the other troop at our school.

Yes it was fun, but it was a lot of work too. And so, with fond memories intact, I will undo a knot from my superwoman cape, allowing a little more neck room, and walk a few feet closer to the sunset.

Back to the Positive Side

The last thing I expected to see when I
looked out my second story window was a
groundhog staring back at me.
True Story.

It's been a busy week around here. The Family has been talked to about their dog. It seems the frolicking Great Dane wandering my yard was the perfect excuse to haul myself over there to speak to them. All is as good as it will get for now. Maggie is no longer left out for the entire day. So hooray on that front.

Someone got into my car Monday night and stole all of the cash out of my purse and all of the coins out of my daughter's purse (that I hadn't even realized she'd left in my car) thanks to us forgetting to shut the garage door overnight. *waves goodbye to hard-earned money and gestures to the thieving little punks that took it*

The charger for my laptop decided this would be a great week to die--thus completing the trifecta of suck. Good thing I have several other computers around here to fall back on in such emergencies. The new charger arrived yesterday so I'm back in business...and on the couch.

On a better note, I've got my summer family vacation all planned out. We're road-tripping to Yellowstone. Buffaloes and bears beware!

Camp NaNo has mostly been an utter failure on the actual writing front, but hey, I have been motivated to get last month's shorts into the jaws of critiquers, stories polished and suitable markets sought out for submissions.

Next week promises to be slightly better for writing as I won't have child transportation duties smack in the middle of my prime writing time. Wish me luck!

On your mark, get set, June!

Camp NaNo has arrived. I spent my first day working. Not even working on my computer where I could sneak in a lunch break of writing, but out doing vinyl installations. When I finally got back home after enough errands to make me dizzy, I still had to work until 10pm to catch up (sort of) from being out of the shop all day. So what do I do when I finally get time to write? Yeah, I create a regional camp logo because my work brain wouldn't shut off.

So what am I writing this month? Well, I fully admit I never intended to embark on a new novel. Instead, I plan on reaching my 50k by writing whatever project I'm working on that day. I know I can write a novel in a month. What I need to do is clean up some projects and finish them. So yes, I'm pretty much bending this challenge to my needs. I need to make time to write. That's the challenge.

First up is rewriting a couple opening chapters of Trust - the motivation hammer and the percolator aligned in a way that made the angels sing. Or maybe that was just my ears ringing... Either way, I've found a way to fix some issues I've been told where there and I knew were there, but I couldn't see around my baby to do what had to be done.

After Trust, the plan is to open the dusty file of Swan Queen and see if I can't find out where the hell that story was going. It needs the last third written and the rest needs revising. The poor novel is several years old and I don't know about you, but my writing style significantly changes over the years.

That should be enough to keep me busy for the month but if I hit a rough patch, the percolator is working on a short story set pre-A Broken Race, and I have a couple other short story starts from May and a failed YA short from two years ago that's been knocking at my creative doors with the invitation to get dark. I might have to RSVP to that.

Fools, Writing and Eggs

Being April first I feel like I should have come up with some fantastical fib to attempt to fool everyone with, but I decided to spent my creative energies elsewhere. Instead I've spent yesterday and today catching up on edits for the previous three chapters of A Broken Race. Yeah, probably time better spent, but a fib would have been fun too.

Only five more chapters to run through the critique mill before A Broken Race gets fully spit back into my hands. So far so good with only a few minor noted hiccups. I know, I've just cursed myself, but I am truly happy with the feedback so far - especially from those who have caught some staging slip ups on my part.

In other creative news, it seems my Easter egg project post has been selected as a finalist in the Easter Craft Challenge hosted by Happy Hour Projects and Here Comes the Sun. I feel I've already won by having this project done weeks ahead of time (rather than next Saturday when I would have realized I didn't even have the Easter decor out yet.) So thank you to the lovely hosts of this challenge for getting me thinking about Easter much earlier (on time) this year. If you'd like to stop by and check out all the finalists and cast your votes, here's the link.

Eggs, Spring and yet another creative distraction

Mother Nature decided to make spring come to Michigan during spring for once. It's kind of crazy, because in all my years this has never happened. We might not have snow, but it's still cold and usually raining.

With the first day of Spring coming in just three days, we're (vastly) enjoying temperatures in the upper seventies. I've even cleaned out a few of the more protected flower beds close to the house (because this IS Michigan and for all we know, we might have two feet of snow by next weekend). Crocuses and daffodils are flowering. Have I mentioned how crazy this is? We're several weeks ahead of schedule here.

And so am I.

Easter usually hits me as an 'oh crap, that's next weekend?!?!' event. Which means our Easter decorations usually sit out for a whole two weeks (maybe). This is a little sad, because we have a long running tradition of painting wooden Easter eggs every year and I'd prefer to enjoy them a little longer after our effort in creating them. This year, we're on top of things!

When my son was born fourteen years ago, I had this grand idea of painting an egg for him every year so he'd have a little memento to take with him when he eventually moves out. Yeah, I was kinda planning way ahead, but this comes from a similar thing my mother did for my sister and I when we were little. We picked out a new Christmas ornament each year, and when we moved out, we had a pile to start decorating our own tree with. Well, I do that too, but the overachiever in me had to one up my mother and pull in a second holiday.

But now I have two kids and a lot less time. You can probably figure out which years were more of a last minute rush than others from this photo. We've done glitter, and little designs. That second one in the bottom row was finger painted by one year old fingers. And some years, I've actually had time to sit down with my tiny paint brushes and have some fun.

My son is rather past the excitement of painting eggs. In fact, he'd probably much rather calculate the number of eggs he'd have by the time he moved out by pi and multiply by the circumference of Jupiter and then applying that to some ungodly number theory game he learned in math.

Thankfully, my daughter is my mini-me and loves painting so she paints her own eggs now, which frees me up to take over the task of creating one for Mathboy. He also loves Nerf guns, which is why, this year, I decided to use that particular phase to decorate his egg.

Ok, so it's not particularly Easterish. I gave up on that years ago and went for documenting what ever they are into at the time.

My daughter has hermit crabs. So yep, we have a hermit crab egg.

A dragon egg? Sure, why not.

Swords? Definitely.

My daughter was a little easier. Some flowers, glitter and more glitter! That worked for several years before she started painting her own.

A couple years ago it occurred to me that I should make a few eggs for myself or I'll be left with none when these kids finally do move out. Tie dye was fun in egg form for something different.

So how does one make one of these things? 

It's pretty easy. First, get thee to a craft store and buy a bag of wooden eggs. You might notice that mine are different sizes. Some years I had left overs. The medium size come four in a bag. So do the small ones. The large ones are sold individually. Some years I had to go with whatever size was still on the peg a week before Easter. Hence, we have an assortment. 

If you're fortunate, you might find a brand of wooden eggs that are round on the bottom. Most are not. This is ok really because it makes it much easier to stand on the table to paint and dry. Look for ones with the smallest level of flatness on the bottom. You won't notice that once they're all painted and piled in a basket.

 Then you'll need some acrylic craft paint. Just a little goes a long way. Gather some brushes, water and some inspiration and you're ready to go.

 Paint a base coat. You can either paint a solid color or water the paint down a little and do a wash. I'm rather fond of the wash so the wood grain shows through a little. For this year, I did a wash of mix of pearl white and pearl blue. If you opt for the wash, it dries very quickly and you can get right to painting.

If you're going to add glitter, you'll need wet paint to for the glitter to adhere to. Be aware that painting over glitter isn't the easiest thing so only put glitter in the areas you don't plan on doing anything else with. You could also add the glitter to smaller spots at any point by shaking it onto any wet paint area - making little dots or squiggles of paint works wonderfully. 

 And then paint your design. Yep, it's pretty simple. I'm a fan of long, thin bristled brushes, mostly because it better hides the shaking my hands do these days. I usually do something more in the random design arena on the opposite side of actual painting so it can look Easterish if it ends up with right way in the basket.

And then there's the other side. 

At this point, I write their names and the year on the bottom and bring it outside for an overall shot of Krylon clear coat. The clear coat also seals in any glitter.

Once it's dry, it goes in the basket--where it will come out several times as the kids go through the pile and organize them by year (as my daughter did in that long picture), and chat about which ones they painted, and hide them, and find them (or I find them a month later). The best part about them is that they don't chip, they don't rot, you don't have to find a way to eat a dozen hard boiled eggs and they make a great conversation piece year after year. 

And now I can check that little project off my mommy list for year. Hooray!

Some Cyborg Weasel Fun

Immersed in editing mode as I am while A Broken Race works its way through its first round of critiquing, I've been staying busy with other little creative projects to get my 'make something new' fix. Sewing has been fun, but since spend most of my workday in front of a computer, sometimes its easier to sneak in some creative moments there.

So last night, I retired my two year old cyborg weasel cling and borged this little guy. Now he's armed and ready to stalk me during all those times I'm wandering around on the internet rather than writing.

I'd attempt to take some better close up pics of all the little details but the darn glossy finish made it very difficult to get even this pic to turn out half decent. Who came up with the idea of a glossy finish on a laptop anyway? Windex and paper towel manufacturers had to be in on it.

Thanks to Ian, I just had the realization that I have the file for this. Duh. How about I just crop some bits of it for close ups? *smacks forehead*

The temptation of a shiny new plot

I'm sure you've been there, set on a plot, in the middle of one, bored with one...and then along hops a plot bunny. It sits there, staring at you, enticing you with its promise of something better, something fresh, sparkling and new. Ooooh shiny!

It captures you with its hypnotic stare. Never easing. Never resting. Taunting you while you slog through your current project. Sowing seeds of doubt over which thing you should be working on.

"Just take a few days to get to know me", it says. Try this out. You might like it. You might like it a lot better than that thing you're working on.

But you know what? If you give in to the plot bunny... more will come! They breed like...well, bunnies! Lock them away until you need a new idea, but don't give in to their hypnotic stares. Oh, and keep them separated!

Yes, another NaNo raffle prize is born. Bunnies, monkeys, birds... what could be next?