I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring*

Much of the garden depresses me, much of the time (we have rampant bermudagrass, which just wants to eat everything else; and the drought makes it really hard to keep crops healthy, or even alive; and I don't know what I'm doing, but I do know I'm not doing enough - like any depressing thing, I spend more time avoiding it than dealing with it; which in this case just means not going out there much, which is a shame whichever way you measure it), but every now and then something touches my heart.

Yesterday, I found that the parsley has taken over its own propagation, and there are little self-seeded parsley plants in the herb bed. I love that.

And the teeny-tiny kieffer lime has teeny-tiny buds on it, yay.

And there is some chance of a little rain tomorrow. *crosses fingers*

And there is a garden I walk past almost every day, on my way home from the library; and it doesn't have too many plants, but it does have almost everything else you can put in a garden by way of ornamentation. It has fountains and sundials and soft toys and a standard bench with lifesize statues of two elderly people enjoying the sunshine and and and. And many, many colourful banners, which are swapped out with the seasons. We have been through this garden's wishing us a merry Christmas and a happy new year; we have been through Valentine's Day; this being America, what's up next is St Patrick's Day, and all the banners have turned green. And one of them proudly declares HAPPY ST PAT'S DAY! - only due to kerning difficulties and a poor choice of typeface, what I read was HAPPY STOATS DAY!

Which I think we need to keep in the calendar. Except that in the interests of diversity it should not of course exclude ferrets, and ice-weasels are a must; so may I take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy MusteliDay?


*I do. Don't you? 'Course you do!

Displacement activity

So I have all these jobs that I really need to do, editing jobs and writing too, with urgent or imminent deadlines - so I am spending at least some of this afternoon out in the clubhouse, emptying books out of boxes and then putting them back in different boxes.

Thing is, it occurred to me that I'm spending a significant amount of time helping other writers get their books ready for Book View Cafe publication, and actually no time at all working towards the same splendid goal with my own backlist books. This is demonstrably sup-optimal, and needs fixing.

But step one is to dig out destructible copies of my early books, for which I have no viable electronic versions; and the other thing is that I am a disorganised creature with thirty-eight years of publishing history behind me, whose stuff has recently crossed oceans. And there's a lot of published stuff - one of the things about the writing life is that one tends to accumulate unpredictable numbers of every story, every book, every translation - and it was barely sorted when I packed it, and much of it is still in boxes in the clubhouse.

So I went to look through 'em to see if I could find a copy of Paradise to be scanned and OCR'd; and was barely into the first box before I decided this was a silly way to do things. And now I am going through all the boxes, sorting and organising and recording. And finding that I have dozens and dozens of copies of some books, and vanishingly few copies of others; but I knew that already, and by the end of the day maybe I really will know whether "vanishingly" is the mot juste...

(And if anyone local wants a free book or two, you only need to ask. Seriously. I do not need fifty copies of a twenty-year-old paperback.)

[EtA: I have been through all the boxes that admit to holding books that I wrote. Unless there has been some serious mislabelling among the rest, then in among the plethorae - mostly, inevitably, vols 2 or 3 of a series; I am universally scant on vols 1 - are some curious lacunae. I appear to have no copies at all of the Daniel Fox books, except for Hidden Cities (vol 3, yup); and if I have any copies of Pandaemonium they ain't there. And I have no spares of The Samaritan (which some consider my first book), or Shelter (which some consider my best). Hmm. I foresee raids on Abebooks* as a priority...]


*I have always envisioned Abe as a lumberjack, living in a check shirt and a big beard and a log cabin in the woods. Insulated with books, which he sorts & packs for the mail at the end of a long day's lumberjacking. With an axe. Seriously, this is the way I see him.