Monthly Archives: March 2022

One Project Ends, Another Begins

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Today, after much reading and re-reading of online documentation and filling out a series of forms, I finally self-published my cozy mystery, Alibis and Aspidistras, on Amazon Kindle (under the pen name Samantha Cornwell.) It started as my 2019 National Novel Writing Month project, and I spent a lot of 2020 revising it while keeping in touch with my writing friends on Slack, since actually meeting in a cafe was temporarily (!) impossible.

Thumbnail of book Alibis and Aspidistras.
Click for a sample.

Then I spent the fall of 2020 and most of 2021 querying agents, as well as starting three other writing projects that I did not finish. Not yet. But now that I’m done with Alibis, it’s time to move to the next project: one of the three unfinished ones, currently titled Felonies and Fittonia.

I’ve signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I’ve got thirty days to write 50,000 words. I’ve got a notebook and a Scrivener file and a general account of what happens in the story, plus something like 15,00 words of a false start from last year. I’ve also got an idea–to make each chapter a kind of writing practice session. One chapter could emphasize description. One could emphasize dialogue. In another, I could work on showing emotions better.

Clearly the result wouldn’t be a particularly smooth draft. It would need a lot of reworking. But it would add an element of variety to the month, and maybe be a way of improving my writing. I think it’s worth giving it a try.

And remember, for NaNoWriMo, it’s quantity, not quality. Quality comes later.

Till next post.

In Praise of Apricots

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I am in love with apricots: tree, flower, and fruit.

Long ago, in a house in Tunis, we had an apricot tree. My family was only passing through, residents in the house for two years, but I remember the garden. It had a fig tree with a bough thick enough and horizontal enough to sit on. It had loquat bushes, mysterious and fuzzy. It had a walled garden where plants that looked like water lilies of the air suddenly appeared and bloomed with bright red and yellow flowers. (I’d never seen a nasturtium before.) And it had an apricot tree.

Delicate, scented white blossoms, followed by a shower of petals like something out of a romance or a fantasy novel. Heart-shaped leaves. And finally, small orange fruit. More velvety than fuzzy, and not tasting like tiny peaches but with their own distinct flavor.

Alas, I didn’t settle in a Mediterranean climate. There are no local apricot orchards. Despite the cautions listed on the Extension website, I did try to grow my own. I planted two trees. They grew, they bloomed, they fruited. I even got to eat some rather speck-marked fruit before the squirrels discovered them, and before the year that both trees died, probably from shot hole disease.

Not wanted to kill another apricot tree, I planted a fig in its place. And wow, has that fig grown!

But when you love something, it’s really hard to give up on it.  Every so often, I buy apricots in the store, hoping that this batch will be ripe enough. I am usually disappointed.

The last time I did so, I saved some of the pits–just because. I chilled them in damp coffee filters for a month or so, in case they needed cold treatment, and planted them. Now I have three seedlings growing in my window. I know fruit varieties are usually grafted, so I can’t expect to get the variety I planted, but I am eager to find out if they will eventually produce those lovely delicate blossoms.

Apricot blossoms after an ice storm

 

Here’s the puzzle. If I love apricots, should I keep trying to grow them even though they are poorly suited to this climate? Or should I accept my situation and stick to the many plants that will flourish here?

And another puzzle: why is it so hard to give up one’s fantasy garden? Be it fields of English bluebells in the Midwest, or posies of sweet peas in the scorching South, or fresh ripe apricots in an area of many false springs, is it partly because they are just out of reach?

Till next post.