Green and Growing

Posted on by wren

kitchenwindowsill

This is the kitchen windowsill at present: from L to R, it’s parsley, Thai basil, lavender and sage together in the white pot, my daughter’s sproutling sunflowers in a kit she got for Easter in the green tray, a pair of anonymous succulents (Tatiana could name them, I’m sure), an olive tree, Genovese basil, and rosemary. I’m not doing much with the garden out back this year — which currently consists of strawberries (or “rabbit food,” per the local rabbit community), a dwarf apple tree, and a few perennial herbs, all choked by morning glory — but I’ve planted tomatoes (plum and cherry) in containers with more basil. We’ll manage happily through most of the summer with our CSA veg, but we can never have too many tomatoes or too much basil. I’d grow sweet corn here too, for the same reason, if only we had the space and sun for it. Alas.

CSA629

This is this week’s CSA haul. June is still basically springtime as far as Massachusetts’ growing season is concerned, so still lots of early greenstuff: lettuce, kale, escarole, cabbage, hakurei turnips, green onions, peas. The zucchini are a nice nod to summer’s entrance, and the kohlrabi — well. I never have any idea what to do with kohlrabi. The internet always suggests I just serve it raw as sticks or slaw or in salads, but that is because the internet has not met my family. There may be four-year-olds out there who will eat kohlrabi slaw or sticks of raw kohlrabi, but my own child is side-eyeing those kids pretty hard from behind her box of Cheez-its.

Writing: Did morning pages. Took a walk through the cemetery and had some useful thoughts from inside Sirin’s head; came home and remembered to jot them down. Reworked Vulo’s first novel-scene (I know, I know …) to introduce a crucial plot element sooner and to establish his condition better. Read K’s story for Sunday crit group. Reconsidered the opening of Ratri and Shrike’s story per a kind Shimmer rejection.

Cryptic index card note-to-self from last night: Whales vs. angels

Daily things: Made blueberry jam and two loaves of bread.

forfrances

I promise not to bombard you with as much in future, but it’s a solid start, no?

 

 

Accounting for Myself

Posted on by wren

I want to try an experiment.

I wanted to blog more this year — it was a resolution, you may recall. I also want to write more, to garden more, to do projects with my kid more — basically, to do more of everything except playing video games. I want to play fewer video games.

I’m constantly resolving to do more things, and equally constantly failing to keep up those resolutions (to wit: more blogging). I tried bullet journaling. It was great, it made me feel crafty and productive, and I stopped doing it after a couple of months when keeping the journal itself became the kind of chore I needed to set time aside in the journal for.

But three things happened recently. The first was that I read C.’s post about using her bullet journal as a log rather than a planner, and I thought, Holy profanity, what a great idea. Look how tidy that is! My tidy-sense is tingling. Then, second, I was reading my darling Mary’s journal and thinking how much I admire her … accountability, I guess? The fact that she’s able to itemize the things she gets done daily, point to progress as she makes it. And the third thing was that I was commiserating with some other writer pals about the fact that a lot of the writing work I do — real, necessary work, the planning and plotting and research and so on — happens so much in my head or in the background (pages and pages of amorphous notes, index cards jotted unintelligibly in the middle of the night and strewn around my desk, long brainstorming walks and sudden breakthroughs) that it doesn’t feel like work or concrete progress. It’s not a thing I can point to like, for instance, I wrote 1,500 words today. Sometimes it’s just, I took a walk and thought about it and realized why [redacted] is resistant to [redacted], and how that conversation with [redacted] should go.

But that is work, it’s work without which the writing doesn’t happen, because so much writing — for me, anyway? — is head-work, not word count. And I wish there were a way to quantify that better so that I didn’t spend so much time moping about not getting any writing done when in fact I had two plot breakthroughs and learned how fermented horse milk liquor is made. (Look, it’s relevant.)

So anyway all of these things fermented (like horse milk liquor) in my brain and I realized that what I want (à la C.) is not a plan but a record. Both to credit myself when I deserve credit and to keep track of what’s actually getting done and what isn’t.

I have ADD, and I don’t know if that’s why — as C. speculates for her own part — I am Not Good at things like keeping planners and making elaborate schedules for myself. (I seem to make to-do lists mostly for the purpose of losing my to-do lists.) But I do know that the prospect of having to account for my time and actions after-the-fact is pretty motivating for me in general, with the added benefit that it doesn’t require any kind of advance planning or preparation: I have to do the thing, first, and then I get to say I did the thing.

So anyway, that’s the new plan (she said, a touch ironically). I’m going to try to use this blog as a regular — a few times a week, if not daily — check-in, just to report what I’ve been up to, Mary-fashion. It may be news on writing and word count; it may be rambly notes on the research rabbit holes I’ve fallen down or the plot-potholes I’ve filled in. It may be some terse bullet-points. It may just be pictures of gardening or baking projects. But in any event, there will be more regular noises of some kind over here, and hopefully they will form a catalogue of my various species of productivity.

Blank Page

Posted on by wren

Good morning, 2017.

I saw people posting year-end roundups and so on which seemed very Responsible and Organized of them, and since I am neither of those things I guess this isn’t that sort of post.

What did I do in 2016? I sold two more stories — “On the Occasion of the Treaty of the Thousand Rivers, A Visit to the Gallery,” and the still-forthcoming “The Storyteller’s Sleight.” I was accepted to and attended Viable Paradise 20, and emerged from it feeling stuffed with knowledge and a little gladder and surer of my craft, and — more importantly — collected a tribe I adore. I made a bunch of nebulous progress on the novel, but it was progress, and it was progress both quantitative and qualitative. I went to Readercon, my only con for the year.

Today I am setting out into 2017 with the novel soon-ready for beta, I hope, and two short stories I intend to have out on submission by month’s end, and two novellas I aim to finish and polish. I mean to reach the end of 2017 with the novel at least out on query and a second outlined and in progress, two to three more stories sold, and both novellas on submission. I also mean to read a book a week (less ambitious than some, but since my daughter was born I’ve averaged probably 3 – 4 books a year) and to practice some self-care. Self-care is important, and mine is terrible. I’m going to try to blog more, too, and of course you’ll still be seeing Tuesday tarot writing prompts from me.

I’ll be attending Fourth Street Fantasy, Readercon, Worldcon 75, and Sirens this year, so if you’ll be at any of the above, please let me know! We can get together and I’ll buy you the beer or non-beer item of your choice.

I have non-writing-related goals too — gardening, parenting, anti-fascism, fiber arts, fitness, staving off apocalypse — and you’ll probably hear about those in time, if I’m going to be blogging more.  I will spare you a breathless list of resolutions right now; I’m not sure 2017 starts so optimistically for many of us. There is hope for things ahead, naturally and defiantly, but there’s also so much work to be done.

I have faith, friends, that we can do it.

The new year stretches out ahead, for better or worse. Off we go.