Great Pumpkins! (an IWSG post)

Last IWSG, I was talking about how late it was that we planted our garden this year. And it was. Very late. You can go read about that here.

As late it was planted, though, it is doing very well, now. Sure, we didn't get things like tomatoes as early as everyone else, but we're getting them faster than we can eat them, now. In fact, it's time to start making and freezing sauce.

The above picture is the first three pumpkins to come off the vines. There are three more I'm going to get soon (in fact, by the time this posts, I will probably already have gotten them). AND the vines have suddenly put out all kinds of new growth, so there may be more pumpkins next month! Or early November. And here, that's a totally doable thing, because they're not going to freeze.

The picture above, still showing the pumpkins, also shows "the monster." Or, shall I say, "the attack of the killer tomato vine." [My kids totally accused me of making it up when I told them about the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!] Let me just make it perfectly clear: We did not plant this particular tomato vine. It grew there all on its own.

You can't really see the placement of the vine in the picture, but it's right next to the front door of our house. Back behind the "the monster" is the gate to the backyard. My daughter hates this tomato plant, because it keeps growing over the sidewalk leading to the front door (no matter how often I cut it back), and it has grown up and through the lattice by the front door, so it attacks people is they go in and out of our house.

Now, I just want to be clear, here. We are in the middle of the worst drought on record in California. I did not water this plant for the entire month of July and most of August. I was hoping that by not watering it, it would, you know, scale itself back. Not grow so crazily. But it did grow crazily even without the water and, today, when I was picking tomatoes, I got as many off of it as I did off of all of other vines, the vines we actually planted and took care of, combined. In fact, I didn't finish picking from it, because I ran out of storage space, so I got an equivalent amount and left A LOT behind. It is The Monster.

When the vine first started growing, my wife wanted me to pull it up. "It's in a bad place; it will never survive; we don't even know what kind of tomato that is." But I didn't see any reason to just pull it up. My idea was to just let it grow and see what happened. Of course, since then, my daughter has been the big advocate for killing it, but my wife doesn't want to do that anymore. Mostly, I think, she is just amazed at it. I know I am. What a huge success from such an unexpected source.

Which is the point. We don't ever really know what's going to take off and be successful and what's, despite our best efforts, just going to sit there going nowhere. Or just piddle along. Or whatever. It's like when you work really hard on something, something you think is great, and show it to someone and he just shrugs at it and says, basically, "So." But, then, you have this other thing that you just threw together and don't think is anything special and someone comes along and really loves it. Really loves it. As in, "This is great!"

So you nurture your ideas and let them grow, even the ones you don't think will go anywhere, because you may just end up with something huge. As I mentioned recently, that is how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out.

And you may end up with some pumpkins, too. Things that take a lot of work, that look doubtful for a while, but yield a nice prize at the end. By the way, between the beginning of this post and now, I did go out and pull those other three pumpkins. They're in a nice pile on my table, at the moment, and we have big plans for them. It's all a matter of keeping your options open and not closing off ideas just because you don't think they will amount to anything. I mean, "the monster" grew out of rocks, basically in a completely inhospitable environment, with people trampling on it and no water. And, well, my daughter's scared of it because it wants to eat her. That's what she says, anyway.

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This post has been brought you in part by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

How Doesn't Your Garden Grow? (an IWSG post)

We were late planting our garden this year. There were issues with softball, softball that I've been mentioning on and off since March and which started in February, softball which still has two weeks to go.

That's a picture of my daughter hitting a double.
Basically, since March, we've had no weekends, so the garden didn't get planted when it should have. We had the last weekend of May and the first weekend of June, the interim between the spring season and the travel ball season, and that first weekend in June is when we finally got everything planted, a full two months late.

Some of you are probably wondering what would be the point, at that point?
It's a good question.
I mean, here we are in August, and our garden still really hasn't started producing. I didn't pull the first tomatoes from it until July 23.

Yeah, that was the first of our harvest, all five of them. There was one very early and overly ambitious pepper, back in June, right after I planted it, but there haven't been anymore since then, but they're working on it. This year, I'm also trying watermelons and pumpkins for the first time in my experimental garden area. I think I missed the watermelon window. That or the birds keeping eating my baby melons, because they keep disappearing. The pumpkin has become a monster.
Here it is a week after I planted it (that's it in the lower right):

And not long after that:

And now:

And you might think that looks great, and it does... except that everyone else already has orange pumpkins. And we haven't had our tomatoes, which are a big thing for us during the summer. Tomatoes everywhere. All of which brings me back to the question: Why bother with the garden at all when we started it so late?

Fortunately, the area of California where we live has a long growing season. I think I was still pulling tomatoes off the vines in October, last year, so, even though we planted late, we should still actually get a pretty decent harvest. Eventually. Not that that makes it easier to look at everyone else's gardens with all of their abundance of produce. I mean, I actually accepted tomatoes from someone else last week, something I've never done before because we've always been overflowing with tomatoes at this time of year.

All of this is how I sometimes feel about my writing career. That I planted it too late. My sales are like those few little tomatoes in the picture. I'm just hoping I prove to have a long growing season like the area where I live!

How Does Your Garden Grow? (an Indie Life post)

I haven't spent a lot of time talking about our little mini-garden; at least, not here on the blog, I haven't. It's not really much of a garden, since it's just a planter box, but we did get a ton of tomatoes out of it last year. This year, we expanded the tomatoes into the backyard, too. But I'm not here to talk about tomatoes. Not today, anyway.

One of the things we planted last year was nasturtiums. I think it was because we had some fantasy that we

would use them in salads or something, but, mostly, we never did. I'd throw some flower petals in occasionally but not enough to really count. We skipped planting the nasturtiums this year, but that was because we didn't have to plant them. The above picture is our little nasturtium plot for this year, and, if you can see it up there in the top right corner, they didn't grow in the planter box. No, we had our own little patch of nasturtiums spring up all on their own this year, outside of the box. That's kind of cool, because they are pretty.

As you will notice, the nasturtiums are yellow and orange, which is what we planted last year, yellow and orange nasturtiums. As a big patch of flowers, they are very pretty, but... BUT none of the individual flowers stand out. It's just a bunch of yellow and orange flowers all mixed together. One flower is as good as the next. So let's say I was making a salad and I was going to throw in some flower petals for color, there wouldn't be a lot of thought involved in which nasturtiums to pick. I'd look for the ones that were more freshly bloomed and pick a few.

And that's kind of how choosing books are for a lot of people: What's newly published? What's "freshest"? But, really, it's all the same stuff, so it doesn't really matter. To a large extent, for example, fantasy written today is pretty much the same as fantasy written 30, 40, 50 years ago.

Look back up there at that picture of the flowers. Just orange and yellow nasturtiums. And that's all it was for a while. But, then, inexplicably, we had this:

That, just to be clear, is a red nasturtium. We didn't plant any red nasturtiums. It grew up all on its own. And that's kind of like when something new comes along in the book world. It really stands out against everything else that is just orange and yellow.

Harry Potter is a good example of this. Not that Harry Potter is really all that new, because it still uses many of the familiar fantasy themes: orphaned boy, who finds out he has previously unknown powers, who is the subject of a prophecy. Etc. It's a fairly standard fantasy setup, except for the setting. That's the thing that makes it different. The thing that makes it standout. The thing that makes it red. It's no longer just some apprentice wizard boy with his wizard master; it's a whole school of witches and wizards and it's set today. People stopped to look. "Ooh, look... that one's red."

Which, incidentally, is the same thing that happened with Fifty Shades of Grey. I mean, nothing has changed in romance in, like, ever, but Fifty Shades came along, and it wasn't just the same old yellow or orange flower and, whereas before, no particular book got lots of attention because of that; suddenly, Fifty Shades was the only red flower, and everyone wanted it.

Now, of course, we have lots of red flowers,

which has changed the look of the nasturtium patch somewhat (but only somewhat, as they tend to hide under the leaves more than the orange and yellow flowers), and, now, of course, we have lots of books like Harry Potter, which is not a bad thing. Adding variety is a good thing, and, although a lot of "copycats" can seem antithetical to variety, it does, actually, add variety to the overall landscape of the book world, just as it's done with our flower patch.

Then, we have these that have popped up in the planter box along with the tomatoes:

I'll call these mixing genres, which also produces some pretty flowers (and interesting books). In fact, I actually these are prettier than the red ones, though harder to see from a distance. I mean, I'm not a zombie fan, but even I have Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sitting on my teetering stack of books to read.

Often, publishers don't want to take a risk on anything but that's not yellow or orange. They look out at he flower patch and see that everything is yellow and orange and just decide that that's all people will like. But people like variety, and it doesn't always have to be good (see 50 Shades) for people to be attracted to it. The difference is all that matters. Which is not to say that you should give up on quality for being different; I'm just saying don't stick to the same old orange and yellow flowers. Or, even, red, when a lot of that comes along. Don't be... safe.

That's what I've tried to do in my own writing. I like fantasy, but I don't want my stuff to just be the same old fantasy. And, evidently, I like it to be scary, because a lot of people call what I write horror, especially Shadow Spinner, but, you know, I'm okay with that, because I don't want anyone to read this and think, "Well, this was okay, but I already read this book." [Which is what I think of anytime anyone starts talking about how great Martin is, because I already read that story except it was called The Sword of Truth and, before that, it was called The Wheel of Time, and, before that, it was called...] So, you know, write what you like, but put your own twist on it. Make it yours.

Be the red flower.

This post has been brought to you in part by Indie Life.