The hot season arrives for real today. Over the past few weeks, July weather has been fairly subdued. No more. The highs will top 100 today and tomorrow, and look to do so again next week. Thankfully, whoever controls the weather will slide the heat dome back over to Arizona over the weekend. 

So I went out to the garden this morning to make sure my photosynthesizing friends are staying hydrated. As is typical with gardening, while out there, I noticed a number of minor tasks that needed doing. I weeded the asparagus bed, made sure the strawberries had mulch over their roots, and dug two more potato plants.

.

All the asparagus, except one, a first year plantings. Keeping grasses from overgrowing young plants in their first year, and lots of water, ensures they'll survive, and make it to year two. In year two, you can start harvesting until the first of June, then you should let them grow until the first hard freeze kills the above-ground portion of the plant. After year three, one can harvest as much as one likes. Once established, the plants will give you 15-20 years of funny smelling pee. 

Great success!

As for the strawberries, last summer was a disaster. I mulched them way too late, and the two months of 100 plus weather and practically no rain fried their roots. There were not survivors. But like the Spartans at Thermopylae, they did not die in vain!

To tackle the hot summer weather this year, I've made sure to provide them with a thick layer of grass clippings atop their root beds. The downside of using grass clippings as mulch is twofold: if you mulch too deeply, the water will bind the grass clippings together and form a solid mat that can smother plants. But if you don't mulch deep enough, the heat can still reach the soil and roots. So, I companion planted runner beans above the strawberries, and heat loving watermelons as ground cover. 

This is a little bit of an experiment. I don't think they will completely shade out the strawberries, and I do think they will provide a much-needed buffer against the hot sun of late July and August. If the strawberries were still putting on fruit, I'd be more reluctant to shade them, as it would cut down on sugar formation, but at this point they haven't flowered in weeks. Once cool mornings return in October, I might cut back the shade plants and try to get a fall harvest out of them before covering them up for winter.

This fall's seed taters up top,
eatin' taters down below.

Digging the potatoes didn't yield quite what I'd hoped. The one in the planter didn't yield much, and neither the in ground one planted over by the asparagus. Companion planting potatoes with asparagus is a bit of a no-no, as their root systems can get tangled, and digging the potatoes can harm the asparagus, but I already dug the trench and didn't have enough crowns, so in went the seed potato. It was fine for everyone involved. 

Anyway, that's all for now. Off to write more fiction. Take care!

    Last week was the Summer Solstice. I'd like to say I observed the holiday with some Celtic incantations and a hefty does of sun-worship. Alas, that was not the case. For those reading who don't keep up on Oklahoma-based meteorological events, an extremely powerful line of thunderstorms hit the Tulsa area early Father's Day morning. These storms cooked 100 mph straight-line winds, along with all the lighting and heavy rain one could ask for. The city even activated the tornado sirens for it. In tire Okie fashion, I stepped out onto the front porch to assess the storms myself  I was skeptical, until I wasn't. I watched power flashes across the Arkansas River from my home, the got hit in the face with a lashing rain that reminded me of Superstorm Sandy. By the time the power went out, I changed my mind about how 'legit' this line of storms were. 

All that is a round-about way of saying I didn't celebrate the solstice much this year as the power was out, and I had to spend the day making sure the generator fueled to run the fridge, and doing all the household tasks without electronic appliances and by the light of a pair of solar lanterns. It wasn't exactly the Wild West, but it served as a nice approximation. When PSO kept pushing back our date for restoring power, enough laundry accumulated that I considered investing in a tub and washboard. 

Thankfully, the nighttime temps dropped back into the low 70s and the days weren't super hot, so the house didn't get too miserable. We have electricity back now, and just in time. Now that summer is here, so is the weather that makes one's lungs revolt with every breath you take outside.

It's been a few months since the last post. Everything grew well in the garden, until this week. The hundred plus degree weather has every plant, including even the okra and watermelon, wilting and wanting water. 

Pole beans, marigolds, strawberries, basil. All looking sad.

Watermelon and cantaloupe.

Pole beans, carrots, strawberries, cucumber in the raised bed. All very thirsty.
Only the tomatoes appear at all happy about this weather.

Every morning, I break out the watering can and pour some stored rainwater around the roots to get the plants through the day, but they still look like they're suffering. 

The first potato plants died above ground last week, so I dug them up. The results were mixed, as you can see from the pictures below: 

Three potatoes from a knee-high planter. Sounds like the name of a bluegrass song.
Wait, do I hear banjos in the distance?

That little guy on the right? Yep, that's the rotten one. 

Five taters. Much like 3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible.
I had high hopes for this one...
 

This harvest reinforced a lesson that anyone aspiring to grow potatoes would do well to learn: loose soil is the ONLY soil to grow them in. You don't really get a sense of this from the pictures alone, but as I dug down below the levels of the tires, the still went from mostly loose and full of compost, to thick and damp to outright wet. One of the potatoes from the very bottom of the tire with the multitude of little potatoes, was in the process of rotting. 

So, how did I make this beginners mistake? Before I planted the eyes back in March, I certainly dug deep below the tires and broke up the soil. I even added some compost to it. The problem, I think, was not adding enough compost. I saved most of it for the layer around where I planted the eyes, as well as layering some on top. Which is a good practice. But I didn't have enough to filll the two-foot-deep holes with enough compost to allow the tubers to root deep and develop spuds further down. So now that I'm digging the taters up, I'm getting a lackluster crop.

The temps should return to the low 90s this weekend. I'm already mulling over my later summer crops, which will probably include peas and carrots, which should go in the raised bed around Labor Day. I promise to post again before then.

For now, I hope you all enjoyed the solstice and have a fun summer on the way!

Before the Last Frost

According to the National Weather Service, the average latest hard freeze (below 28 F), occurs March 17th. In 2020, our last hard freeze was April 18th. Last year was March 12th. Just because the final hard freeze hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean I can't find plenty of garden-related things to do. 

For instance, I chitted seed potatoes last week. All that means is I cut them up to separate clusters of sprouting eyes. In the interest of science, I created a control group and a variable group, just to confirm what I suspect will happen if you don't do it right.

Picture taken March 1st.

The six fingerling potatoes in the end of the egg carton were cut the same day. Three placed cut-side down, the others, cut side up. I then left the carton in a sunny(-ish) window to dry and continue growing.

And then Bobby, science happens.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the taters I left cut-side up look like they're molding. I may have to throw them out, or at least plant them somewhere outside the garden. What I found most interesting though, is the black edge of the large (I believe Russet) potatoes on the left. That one I cut in half and turned over, but it was too big to fit down in the egg carton. So, that end with the ugly looking discoloration was left sticking up at an angle. And it looks to be going bad too. It may go in the ground outside the main garden as well. 

These taters ended up curing on junk mail. They look just fine on the underside. 

I planned to plant the potatoes in the raised beds. After a little double checking, I found a number of sources of mostly solid repute, which advised against planting potatoes and strawberries in the same space. The consensus seems to be that potatoes are prone both to insect pests, and fungal diseases. On a related note, planting kale, cabbage and broccoli around strawberries can lead to the same fungal diseases. 

So, instead of putting them in the raised beds, I will try another experiment this year: growing potatoes in above-ground containers! I've read about this technique, but haven't tried it before. We'll see how it goes. 

I'm sure the 'how it's going' photo will be a lot more rewarding than this....

Another experiment I'm trying this year: fertilizing the garden with composted plant (and probably worm) matter from the plastic pool under my parent's bubbling rock. I worked this stuff into the west raised bed, the blackberry enclosure, the potatoes buckets, and the base of my fruit trees. The only place I haven't used it is the east raised bed. We'll see if the difference produces any noticeable results. 

 It doesn't smell near as gross as it looks. 

Planted from left to right: brussels sprouts, green onions, lettuce, spinach.

I'm looking forward to the possibilities the spring brings, and I hope your spring is full of (positive) possibilities too!

Advertising on Amazon

 As promised, I will blog not just about general writing and publishing topics, but I want to get into the nuts and bolts of what I'm doing.

Right off the bat, I ran into an issue I did not expect. When attempting to launch an ad campaign for my first anthology, the moderators at Amazon suspended the campaign, stating the following:

"Your ad contains content prohibited from advertising. This may include images and videos of weapons (including realistic and non-realistic firearms, swords, bows and arrows, etc.) that are shown in a violent, threatening manner, displayed in a gruesome way, pointed at a character, or directed out toward the customer. Please review section 6.4 Weapons under Book Advertising Guidelines and Acceptance Policies and update your ad."

See if you can spot the problem...

The moderators do a job, so I certainly don't blame them for suspending the ad campaign. I suppose a knife with blood on it qualifies as 'gruesome'.

Now, with the knife airbrushed out, the ad campaign went live. 

If you bought the paperback before this week, congrats! You own a rare early version depicting a gruesome knife!

Setting aside the specifics of a bloody knife, I suppose I should provide a bit more context. To come up in generalized searches on Amazon, one must buy ads which push your book up the results of any given query. For instance, if you search a general term like 'Black Mesa' you'll get a load of results. One of which is a vampire romance series involving werewolves. Fun.

So, if I run an ad campaign which outbids other advertisers, the algorithm pushes my book up the general search results, where it will, I hope, catch the eye of potential readers.

Amusingly, a friend messaged me, saying that even when he looked up the book by title and my name, the vampire romance series came up before my book. I chuckled. 

On a more serious-ish note, this is an aspect of self-publishing I wasn't entirely prepared for. I knew that running ads helps sell books. Shocker. But more to the point, I didn't realize HOW MUCH the Amazon algorithm favors advertised products in generalized searches. Again, I'm not shocked, just wearily disappointed at the ways Amazon makes money, not just off sales of the book, but on advertisements for the book. There's a reason Jeff Bezos is the richest (?) man on earth. God help me if anyone at Amazon bothers to read the book and notices the subtext of 'Summoners of Smith'.

One way to Cure Writer's Block

At a recent(-ish) event, I met another local writer who said she has trouble editing while she writes, and as a result feels she cannot get anything completed.

Hoping my response sounded witty, I quoted Mark Twain's saying: 

"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the right words."

To be clear, I didn't try to pass it off as an original observation.

Anyway, I've never had much trouble with the first part. Crossing out the right words always seems to drag on. Delaying deadlines and publication becomes routine when you tell yourself, "Just one more round of revisions..." 

So, to keep myself on track editing the next set of novellas, I'm posting this calendar I put together in January. 

If you don't want to zoom in or try to read my handwriting, I'll throw out a few highlights:

1 - Anthology Two should be done and ready for publishing this July. 

2 - Anthology Two will include Part Two (of Three) of Black Mesa, and three novellas. 

4 - Anthology Three should hit the Amazon in time for Halloween, and will include the conclusion of Black Mesa, as well as at least two more novellas, maybe a third. We'll see how the brainstorming goes.

That's all I have to say about that. 

For now...

Way-too-early Spring Gardening

"Why are you gardening in late February?" asked the chickens.

I shook my head and continued breaking up the hen bit and grasses that sprang up in the east raised bed over the winter.

   

"You gonna just compost that hen bit?" one of them clucked. 

They were less than thrilled when I did, indeed, just compost that bit.

At least, I think that's what they were carrying on about. Then again, maybe not. I may be giving their cognitive abilities too much credit. They're chickens. They will try to murder their elders given half a chance.

Wanted for elder abuse by multiple jurisdictions.

I'm nursing our oldest hen, who survived a hawk attack, two polar vortexes, and multiple rounds of molting, back from getting beat up by the roosters.

The strawberries I planted last fall came through winter just fine under a layer of mulch and pine shavings. I'm currently debating wether I should pinch off any flowers they put out this spring to encourage green growth. If I do, they should spread all across the raised beds and put out more fruit next spring. If I don't, they won't spread as fast, and the fruit this spring (probably) won't be as numerous. As with everything, it will be a trade off.

Those green patches are strawberry plants. I promise. 

On the right side of the bed, I sowed two rows of carrots. On the left, I planted four clusters of broccoli seeds. I've never had great luck with broccoli, but I'll thin it more aggressively this spring than in hears past and see what happens. 

Along the weld wire running the length of the bed,  I directly sowed a handful of peas. I also started a bunch of peas in toilet paper tubs in a pair of planters. I plan to transplant them into this bed, and the west bed, when they get about four inches tall. But that should happen in a few weeks. Say, mid-March. 

Speaking of transplanting things in mid-March, I've got quite a few blackberry canes that rooted outside e their enclosure. This is prime time for transplanting dormant plants. If you're interested, let me know, and we can dig them up and you can take 'em home.

Trust me, the roots are down there. Under the leaves and dirt and stuff. 

'Murica! It's time to Vote!

 I've written two blurbs for my rough-drafted novel The Tornado Catcher. I will pursue traditional publishing with this one, rather than going the indie route. BUT, to get an agent interested, one needs to pique said agent's interest in taking on one's project with a catchy 30-second pitch. At least, that's what everything I've learned over the past year from writers who have landed agents tells me. 

To make voting at least a little amusing, I'm going to attach a picture to each blurb, so if you just want to read and comment 'tornado' or 'noodlers' to cast a vote, you can do that.

Without further ado, here's two different pieces for the same story:

A - 

Upon rejection for tenure, associate professor Freddo Mancha suffers a minor mental breakdown and puts in writing to the tenure committee that he can use 5G cell phone towers to pull the energy out of rotating thunderstorms. Instead of saving his seat in academia, his claims draw the interest of business and government, each with their own agenda for Mancha’s program. But storm season is a semester away, and his program isn’t going to install itself in every cell tower in the state of Oklahoma. With the help of  local deputy Stanislav Stangle, who’s intrigued with possible riches to be pulled out of thin air, Mancha must keep his program secure, while dealing with the Provost of a university that has no use for him other than the grant money his project brings in.

B - 

University of Oklahoma associate professor Freddo Mancha takes his tenure rejection as well as catfish pulled out of a riverbank by hand. While the committee doesn’t see much merit to his proposal to pull electricity out of thunderstorms, but private interests that shovel money at the Provost of the university do. Instead of firing Mancha, the Provost, the NSA and the private interests look the other way, in hopes of getting ahold of his program before it can go line. Assisted by down-on-his-luck deputy Stanislav Stangle, Mancha travels the state installing the program in every 5G tower from Ardmore to Zena. When Chad Callahan, the NSA agent tasked with tracking Mancha, decides the professor’s project has become a threat to the 400,000 people of Oklahoma’s second largest city, it sets up an electric confrontation in the shadow of a monster storm.

Let me know in the comments which pitch gets you more interested in the antics of Freddo Mancha.

Fun Times with Formatting

Last week, I uploaded my manuscript for an anthology of supernatural horror novellas, titled Blank Mesa: An Anthology of Supernatural Suspense. So far, the reception has been positive, and the eBook version of the anthology drops Sunday, January 29th. It is available for pre-order now.

Which brings me to the first challenge I encountered. Amazon's website will allow you to set up an eBook for pre-order, and, helpfully, allows you to upload changes to the eBook up to 4 days before the eBook goes live. Despite my searching through the depths of the FAQ section, I could not find a 'pre-order' setting for a paperback. So, I opted to go live with the paperback and related in last Tuesday. I ordered a proof copy. When it arrived, I found the same set of printing errors that my friend Mike found, upon receipt of his two copies. (Thanks for buying more than one!)

See if you can spot them:

This is the error I should have caught on final review.

This sentence involving kitchen knives did not show up at all in the original document, so I can only assume it was some funky formatting error going from Pages, to ePub to the KDP file.

This one too, did not show up in the original Pages doc. 

Then there's this one. A title page should always (with only rare exceptions) show up on the right hand page. It did in Pages, but by the time it got to the KDP file, it did not. 

On a positive note; free preview!

You may also notice a lack of page numbers. I got around this formatting error with the second version by uploading a PDF instead of a KDP file.

The point of all this, is that I want people to know that, if you were so kind as to order the book the first week, it will contain these errors. As of Monday, paperback copies that go out should not. Please do let me know if they do. 

If you want a second version of the book, with the errors fixed, I believe you can return it to Amazon at no cost. I will look into that and confirm, sometime over the next week. 

Or you can have a unique copy that shows you heard of my books first!

Either way, I hope you all enjoyed them, and I am working on three more stand-alone novellas and part two of Black Mesa. I plan to release anthology two in early July.

Cheers!

The Adventure Begins...

I once read that; "an adventure is something dangerous that happens to someone else a long way away." Amusingly, when I googled the quote, I couldn't even find where I originally read it. I don't know if the quote is a rephrasing, or original to the author who wrote it, though I'd imagine someone, somewhere else, wrote something smilier. At some point. Monkeys with typewriters and all that...

My point in taking up blogging again is much more about self-promotion rather than self-endangerment. Yesterday, I received the email from the hive-mind known as Amazon saying that the paperback edition of my first (of many, one hopes) book, Black Mesa, is now live and available for purchase. Right here:

https://a.co/d/3B8lYFM

Black Mesa is actually a collection of three stand-alone novellas that fall solidly in the horror genre. Don't worry, the killing and bloodletting serves a purpose. Each novella explores a theme, as all stories should, I suppose, though my novellas themes center on the themes of disaster capitalism and the atomization and alienation of individuals in contemporary America. 

Does that all sound remarkably dreary, or if you feel you could just step outside and check out the real-world effects of disaster capitalism for yourself?

Well. You're not wrong. 

Care to guess the median price of a house in this country?

The answer might horrify you more than anything I can write...

But if you'd rather explore those themes and ideas, through the lens of the supernatural, all while riding on the shoulders of characters forced to make ethical and moral decisions you might find familiar, hop on into the book.

For instance, whatever could be happening in a story involving swords, gavels, and books of forbidden lore?

Because the internet is an amusing place sometimes, and the controls on the KDP website have some quirks to them, the e-book version is available only for pre-order until the release date I set of January 29th. The website led me to believe the paperback would go live at the same time as the e-book. Not to belabor the point, but here's a link to the e-book:

https://a.co/d/cObzHq7

My father created the cover art for the book, as well as the image on the back cover of the paperback. A pair of illustrations didn't make the paperback version, so I will post both of them here:

As you can tell, the drawings are mock floorpans for the house in Distressed Property, the first of the novellas.

Currently, I'm working on four more novellas, one is the second part of the title novella Black Mesa, while the other three offer more stand alone mayhem and mysticism. 

Stay tuned, cause there's alway more...