Oh, for the life of a dog

Brio smiling in his sleep.

Sorry it's a bit blurry -- had to snap this with the camera on my laptop.

I'm on YouTube! Gardening in Small Spaces, with The Provident Prepper

 Please check out my recent chat with The Provident Prepper on their YouTube channel. Such nice people! Such a lot of info to try to cram into twenty minutes! Such problems with my camera freezing! But it was lots of fun and I think it turned out well in the end, thanks to their patience and their terrific editor.

Grow Food ANYWHERE: Small-Space Gardening Secrets Revealed!

Mother's Day Blossoms

My husband took me for a drive on Mother's Day to Kariya Park in Mississauga. Lots of people out enjoying the colour. We live on such a beautiful planet!

Hardening Off the Seedlings -- The Hope Continues!

 

Manuscript Submissions and Hope Eternal

My latest manuscript got declined by my current publisher. It appears they no longer publish the kind of stuff I write (and I still have three years left on my contract with them). Anyway, there were about five minutes of angst, and then I sent the manuscript off again to a literary agent. I think the key to not becoming discouraged is to keep something out there all the time, so that when you get a rejection, you can reassure yourself that you're still waiting to hear back on the other thing. It steers you toward hope instead of despair. All is not lost! There may yet be good news!

Although...there's also the little voice niggling in the back of my mind that says, "I've done this successfully 12 times before. How come suddenly no one wants what I'm writing? You'd think I'd have the hang of this by now." It's easy for self doubt to creep in. For anyone out there who's reading this who wants to get a book published, stand firm and have faith in your own ability. You'll find the right home for your stuff eventually. Though I remember one instructor saying that writing a book and then looking for a publisher for it is like cutting a key and then searching for the lock it fits. It's much easier to select the publisher first and then write according to what they want. But then, when the manuscript is rejected, it may mean having to revise a lot in order to submit it to the next publisher. And then the soaring hope and crashing disappointment cycle begins again.

In which case the only possible response to the situation is to go eat cheesecake. 

50,000 Words In

I'm 50,000 words into the next manuscript, this one a mystery/romance. I'd written a rough draft decades ago and shoved it away in a binder on my closet shelf (I have probably twenty of such binders), so I've dug it out and am rewriting it. This one features a woman who runs an antique shop and is hired to inventory a mansion for insurance purposes but gets caught up in a case of fraud and theft.

People have asked me how much of myself is reflected in my books. I think all of them contain a bit of me---you can't really avoid that---to varying degrees. Promise of Spring had a protagonist who could fulfill my personal dream of farming and rehabilitating over-farmed land. Garden Plot arose from a real estate ad I wanted to pursue, and the main character had the irritating habit of always having a song in her head (yes, that's me. It's constant. It's never quiet in here). Beyond the White River arose from a time when I was homesick for the smell of sagebrush and reflects my love of place. The main character in Desperate Measures probably reflects my personality the most of all my writing. And it goes on...

This new manuscript lets me explore what it would be like to know about and deal in antiques, something that interests me but that I've never really pursued. That and running a bookstore were early career aspirations at one point. Then again, there were also periods where I wanted to be a veterinarian, an English teacher, a forest ranger, Grizzly Adams, a speech-language pathologist, a musician, a baker, a public speaker, a statistician, a farmer's market vendor, a textile artist, a university theology professor...

When you can't decide what to be, the only logical solution is to become a writer, and then your characters can do all of those things and follow all of those paths that interest you. So this round, an antiques expert it is!

To Be or Not To Be

My husband and I have developed the habit of walking 6 kms most mornings, shuffling around the mall with a herd of other seniors because the weather's too nasty to walk outdoors. I don't know if it's having any effect on our cardio fitness, but it does give us an hour and a half each day to just yack. And yack we do, on every topic under the sun.

This week, I expressed to him the weird "limbo" I've felt I'm in since losing my job. I haven't found another one, and to be honest, I don't really want another one, but I feel a bit lost and routine-less without one. My former job was never the defining thing about me and I didn't enjoy most of it, but after 40+ years of doing it, it feels strange to suddenly stop. I've always wanted to retire, but being forcibly "retired" without having a say in the matter or control over the timing is discombobulating. 

Now I'm in this gray area---am I retired? Is that it and I'm done with that part of my life? Do I keep looking for something? Do we just figure out the finances and settle for something part-time to top up the coffers as needed? I think because it happened without being my choice, I feel like I can't choose now to say I'm officially retired. It's like standing at the starting line of a race, waiting for the gun to go off, but the gun never comes, and you realize everyone else is already running and you've taken a couple of steps over the line but aren't committed yet... Do I need someone's permission to say I'm retired now? Do I need my own?

Anyway, after quite a lot of this sort of irritating talk, my husband turns to me there in the mall, holds his hands out toward me, and shouts loudly, "Shazam! You're retired!"

It made me laugh and a few people stare, but you know what? It helped! 

I keep listening to Alan Frew's Canada's Song, especially the line that says "Free to be a dreamer, free to be who you are, free to believe in your star, free to go far..." Who I am is a writer and a gardener, and I want to support myself doing those things. I'll find a way to do that, and I'll stop searching for another admin job, because that's not who I am. And somehow now I feel like I've got permission to go after those things, the life I want. Even though, really, that permission resided within me the whole time.

Have a listen:

Free to Be Strong and Free