Not Fun Anymore by Helen Henderson

 

Windmaster Golem
Click the cover for purchase information

A rule often taught to fiction writers is adversity. Depending on the storyline and character, the author's job is to throw roadblocks into their creation's plans and make their life "interesting." While you can be told it is a blessing, "May you live in interesting times" can be a curse. This post covers a few examples of how "interesting" life can be from the mildly annoying to decisions that can change the direction of the someone's life.

The post, Green Plant versus Brown Thumb, discusses my history with gardening and my current attempt to grow tomatoes and onions. None of the onion plants prospered. Since none of my family had any better luck, I didn't feel too bad.

The tomato plants are the reason for the title of today's post. Why? Overnight they went from thriving, fruit-laden plants to defoliated sticks. And the tomatoes that were just about to blush went from food to garbage. The zen aspect of gardening and the pleasure of watching the plants grow vanished. It was not fun anymore. The plants had survived heat indexes of 105 to 110°F to succumb to four-inch long, green, ill-tempered hookworms that teleported in from nowhere. 

Image by Margaret Martin from Pixabay

How does this relate to writing? Not every situation has to be life-threatening. Even simple, everyday situations such as a bill arriving after a due date or being late to an appointment can be the setting for tension and "interesting" times.

When Kiansel hears the summons to the council fire in Windmaster Golem, her problem isn't that she will be late for the ceremony. Unlike the nervousness of the younger mages who know their destiny, Kiansel is unsure whether or not she will attend at all. For in doing so she might succumb to the lure of magic

Image by Comfreak from Pixabay

In Fire and Amulet (coming spring 2022), the environment makes life interesting for dragon slayer Deneas. Ahead of her is an impassible hedge row of poisonous, thorn bushes. Retreat means risking going beneath stone-laden ledges ready to collapse. Her only logical path is to walk the stones of a washout and freestyle climb a cliff face to get past places where the path eroded away.

 

To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL

~Until next month, stay safe and read. Helen

Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination.  Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads or Twitter

Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack. 

Green Plant versus Brown Thumb by Helen Henderson

Windmaster Golem
Click the cover for purchase information

During lockdowns for COVID-19, many people turned to hobbies, do-it-yourself projects, or exercise for mental and physical well being. One thing that fit all the  criteria is gardening.

Now let me say first off, I did not voluntarily decide to be one of those who turned to a garden for therapy or exercise. I have what has been called a brown thumb. Over the years, my brown thumb has killed plants, bushes, and other green living things including cacti, ivy, grass, forever plants, and azalea bushes. Some of which are under normal circumstances almost indestructible.

What makes my ability as a terminator more remarkable is that I grew up on a farm in the "Garden State." And, yes, that is the official nickname for my home state. 

Besides the cash crops of eggs, sheep, wheat, corn and such, we had a lilac bush so big you could ride a pony through the middle of bush. In fact our Shetland pony and a sheep used to play hide and seek and tag using the bush as shelter and hidey hole. The weeping willow tree that was as tall as our two-story farmhouse provided hours of play on the tire swing or shade for reading and cloud watching.

As  might be expected we also had a garden. It provided fresh vegetables for the dinner table and extras for canning and friends.  One of the many chores and tasks needed to keep a farm running was pulling weeds and hoeing the garden. As you can see I  am not a total stranger to gardening and plants. It is just that when it was my garden, my house plants, my landscaping, they died.

After my move south, for several seasons I tried container gardening. As to why containers were selected?  I couldn't decide where on the property to put the garden. Another consideration? Farm equipment and sibling labor were not available and I was not going to turn a plot over by fork and spade by myself.  Of course I didn't have any luck with the several tubs of tomato and pepper plants I attempted to grow.

This spring a local DIY (do-it-yourself) store gave away a different project each week and several family members decided to participate. The lobby pine given out died within three weeks. The milkweed seeds didn't get planted. That will happen when I build the butterfly house part of the project. 

First tomatoes harvested, 2021

Pepper and tomato plants were the next weeks project. For being the first in line the stock boy coordinating the distribution handed me a bush-type tomato plant. It was shortly afterwards paired with a vine type a family member donated to the project. The vine tomato is just now producing, Its fruit are the size of golf balls, a far cry from the large ones that were already harvested.

It has been very interesting experiment. The plant are on my covered back stoop. Besides watering (or keeping them from getting drowned in the summer storms), they were shifted against the house when they needed protection from high winds. Of course I did have to rely on someone who had successfully gardened in the locale as the climate and conditions are drastically different than what I was familiar with. (And so are the bugs, including a very aggressive green species.) So much time (think decades) had passed since those early childhood gardens, that research on the care and feeding of the two very different plants.

Authors are always told to write what you know. Which must be why none of my characters insisted they be master gardeners. So far the only one who has any real experience is Deneas whose tale is told in my current work in progress, Fire and Amulet (scheduled for release next year.) If any other of my characters are gardeners, they will probably be hydroponic engineers who are in trouble because of a brown thumb.

Here is what happened to her garden. To set the scene, it is the evening before she leaves on a journey from which she will probably never return.

An idea formed on how to thwart Karst from getting anything he hadn’t earned. Instead of sleep, she spent the cool candlemarks under the moon pulling the root vegetables that were ready for harvesting. The red fruit that hung heavy on the vine filled another large basket. Next she took the growing pots her mother had made or bartered for and by the time the moon was full overhead had half the garden in pots ready to be gifted to others in her village.

This experiment has given me a greater understanding of why some assisted living facilities have a raised garden for their residents. The daily routine of watering, snipping errant sucker vines, and monitoring for bugs and ripeness can be therapeutic.

As to whether I will try gardening again ? That remains to be seen. I prefer more interactive beings. Depending on their loquaciousness, you can actually hold conversations with a dog or cat. Our 18-year-old cat could quite clearly say "Now" and "Out." And when she's in a good mood, the husky I visit, can talk your ear off. Especially if you answer her.

 

 To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL

 ~Until next month, stay safe and read. Helen

Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination.

Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads, or Twitter.

Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack.

Green thumb? by J. S. Marlo

J. S. Marlo's BWL Books

Many years ago, my daughter asked me to take care of her cactus while she was away for three months. Her only advice was "try to remember to water it a few times before I get back". Well, by the time she returned, it was dead. I truly believe it takes special talent to kill a cactus.


That being said, I love flowers, specially lilacs and lavender. I tried growing lavender...it followed the cactus into the compost bin, but I have five lilac trees around the house that grow four different varieties of flowers from deep purple to pale pink. I started with six trees but one befriended the cactus. Lilacs are low maintenance and hardy, the first quality suits me and the second the  northern area where I live.

Every year I plant some annual flowers and tomatoes. This year, finding flowers or soil was a challenge. With the quarantine and social distancing, it seems everyone decided to start gardening. I still got a few plants but I lost half my tomato plants two weeks ago after they froze to death. My fault...I should have put a blanket over them instead of ignoring the risk of frost warning.


Though not all perennials survive  minus 40 degrees winter or our short growing season, I managed after many failed attempts to find a rose bush that comes back to life every spring. It has pretty red roses and right now it's budding.

I tried planting tulip bulbs, but no matter how many I bury in the fall, only one tulip grows every spring. This year my lone tulip is yellow with a black center.

My biggest successes are probably my poppies. I started with an envelope of red and yellow poppies that someone gave me decades ago. For years, I had red poppies and some yellow ones, then gradually some red poppies became more orange until one day, when amid the yellow, orange, and red grew a single snow white poppy. Since then  I get some white or very light beige/pink poppies every year.

I'll admit I'm fascinated by the genetic changes that occur in my poppies over the years. My thumb may be a little green after all.

Stay safe. Many hugs!
JS

 

J. S. Marlo's Website

THE FATAL CARROT (Almost)

The best laid plans gang aft awry, or whatever the exact quote is. I had a plan for this October, because I’ve had borderline too many commitments to handle, among them, a plot this year in our town's community garden. I was lucky to get a space in this gold-plated community effort, for once my town decides to do something,  it is all-the-way luxury class. We have an electronic gate, a sturdy fence, and the township supplies aged compost and sturdy raised boxes. We’ve had a chilly autumn, so this senior waited for the stillest and warmest day to finish up. I’d watched Weather World faithfully--predictions from the Wise Men at the Penn State Department of Meteorology. An upcoming Monday and Tuesday would be the last hurrah of Indian Summer, warm and still. Perfect, I thought, as this was the drop dead-week for clearing up.

In the meantime, I was eating vegetables, both my own and those of generous garden plot neighbors. On the day of near-doom, I’d enjoyed a delicious lunch of green peppers stuffed with beans, of Brussels sprouts and bright orange winter squash. I'd finished the meal with a fresh apple—a crisp, yet sugary Empire--fresh from the tree.  The coup de grace to this high fiber orgy was an mid-afternoon snack consisting of a big, crunchy, raw-from-the-garden carrot.

(Oh, and there is a backstory. Significant portions of my gut are gone after a long illness followed by two Trekkian "cut and sew like garments" surgeries.) 

By 5 p.m., I knew I was in trouble. By midnight, the pains were child-birth-big. It was time to head to the ER for the ritual of vein piercing and hydration. Afterward, I was a sad-sack hunk of flesh, still breathing only because of attentive nursing and good old Ringer’s Lactase solution.   Needless to say, I was in hospital during those two perfectly warm days during which I’d planned to make my final harvest, haul dirt, and "put the ground to bed."

Still standing were two four-foot foot plus stalks of Brussels sprout and a bed of kale and one of beets. Only the beets, after my release from the hospital, were still on the menu—at least for the next few months, they said. After that, caution was advised regarding how much fiber I attempt to put through my system.  My kind neighbor was happy to receive the sprouts. The dino leaves of Lacinto kale went into the freezer for some distant dish of Colcannon.

It was sobering to realize that ingesting a raw carrot could, in my case, become a flirtation with death. I'd confused a desire "to live normally,” with what was, in cold reality, possible. Simply "eating what I wanted" had wandered into the Kingdom of Denial. The episode was one of those humbling -- but inevitable -- reality checks that are part of aging.

~Day of the Dead Altar, Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian~

 Juliet Waldron

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