Message From Teresa
It’s that time of the month again: just a day past the new moon as I write. Spring is coming on with enthusiasm, as shown by the latest picture of our backyard:
Every tree and bush in our yard is busily leafing out. The daffodils are gone, the vinca majora is thinking about blooming, the hostas are appearing, the pachysandra (which has sulked for years) has finally decided to spread. A lot of my gardening is multipurpose: ornamental, provides for wildlife, and is Darwinian.
As I get older, more and more of my gardening falls into the Darwinian category. If something is willing to grow with enthusiasm without work from me, I’m all in favor. Coral Bells? No more. Painted Ferns? A lost cause. Astilbe? Terrible waste of money. Hostas? Yep, they grow for me so I’m slowly acquiring more. They aren’t natives to North America, but they’re lovely and they love to grow. I really like the big, showy, colored leaves, making hostas have much of the interest of flowers but over a longer growing season. The flowers are nice too, but it’s the leaves that are most interesting. I don’t pay much attention to rarity (I buy my hostas at the supermarket) but I do pay attention to size.
Size matters, you know, and why grow miniature hostas that you can’t see when sipping your drink on the patio? I want big hostas, the kind I can see from halfway across the yard. I want fancy-colored leaves: blue, yellow, gold, white-edged green. Plain green hostas are nice, but I’ve got a yard full of greenery. I want some variety.
No, as you may have guessed, I don’t do subtle in my gardening. What’s the point of filling a garden with flowers if they don’t knock your eyes out? Anybody can have a rectangle of grass edged with yews, unchanging throughout the year other than when it snows. I want to fully experience the change of seasons.
Luckily for me, not only do my hostas thrive, they tend to be ignored by our extensive wildlife population. I don’t see rabbit nibbles or groundhog gnawing. We don’t have deer in our yard; they’re rare in town. We’ve got a fence lined with tall yews forming a deer-proof border. Deer can leap an eight-foot fence so a typical four-foot fence won’t do you any good if you need to keep out those giant, hooved rats that vacuum up your ornamentals and food crops like you’ve opened an all-you-can-eat salad buffet.
I don’t see slug damage either and I attribute this to two reasons: Don’t look closely (#1) and the extensive array of critters in the yard (#2). I’ve got plenty of little and big animals, including birds, who eat slugs.
None of this, naturally, has anything to do with the writing business. Or does it?
For me, gardening, like sewing, gives me a place to go and think. When I’m weeding (and I do weed despite what my garden looks like), my mind is empty. I’m focused on removing *&%&# Virginia Creeper or Porcelain Berry vines, giving my subconscious time to work. Yes, Virginia Creeper is native and Porcelain Berry is not, but neither one is content to grow in their designated allotment of soil. They’re thugs who take over and thus have to be removed.
Similarly, when I’m sewing cloth bookmarks — tiny exercises in abstract design — I’m only concerned about color and texture. My brain is involved in a different way and has time to rest and think about what’s going to happen next.
These last few months have been difficult (see our newsletter back issues for details). Fortunately, the situation with my parents is back on a more even keel. They now have wonderful handrails that look like they’ve always been part of the house. The trip to Ocean City was restful and enlightening. Bill and I spent a lot of walking around and not much time working, but when I did write, it felt more fluid. This must have been because I wasn’t trying to force the words to come. I don’t write that way. It’s almost like I take dictation, starting at the beginning of a story, writing down everything that happens, and when I reach the end, I stop. Some days, the dictation comes like a firehose, other days like a leaky garden hose.
Ocean City was a reminder that both of us need downtime to process and think. Books begin in the mind, when it’s noodling around. Thus, more gardening and sewing for me. Gardening has the added benefit of being outside in the sunshine and fresh air. Hanging laundry is good too.
While we were at Ocean City, we stopped at Bethany Beach Books. A wonderful store and well worth visiting the next time you’re in Bethany Beach, Delaware.
So what do we have coming up, now that we’re rearranging our life/work balance?
Bill hopes to have The Cases of Blue Ploermell finished by the end of May. He’s got essays to edit, then he’ll hand me the manuscript and I’ll attack it, Old Red in hand. So, June?
Signed and Personalized Books For Sale
Bill here: Just popping in to let you know that we have made arrangements with two local bookstores to make signed copies available of all our books. They’re at the usual price, plus shipping (which in the U.S. should be about $3-4 dollars for media mail; the nice clerk will tell you). And you can have them personalized any way you like! You’ll be dealing with reputable stores (Cupboard Maker Books and Mechanicsburg Mystery Book Shop), so your credit card will be safe in their hands, and they’ll make a bit of cash as well, so everybody wins!
Man in the Brown Suit
After Blue Ploermell, Bill will finally tackle Agatha Christie’s second thriller: The Man in the Brown Suit, originally published in 1924. Our heroine, Anne Beddingfeld, watches a man get murdered in the Tube, seizes the call to adventure, and we’re off. Mystery men, stolen diamonds, secret agents, a hidden criminal mastermind, cruise ships to South Africa, kidnapping, riots, and terror in African jungles. And that’s just for starters! I won’t forecast a date for Brown Suit because every time I do, I’m off by a year or more.
Bill here: Sheesh, let some books slip a year and they’ll never let you forget it.
What Teresa didn’t mention is that I’m under deadline pressure to get Brown Suit finished (and Blue Ploermell) because we want to get to work on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and get that out by Jan. 1! That’s the first day this major milestone in Agatha Christie’s career enters the public domain in the U.S., and I don’t want to miss it!
Odessa Moon News
As for me, I’m the current author of the month at the Hershey Public Library, but this time as Odessa Moon. Here’s the link. You can see my glorious cover for The Vanished Pearls of Orlov in the background of my video. It’s finished, even though I still have plenty of work left.
I’m nearing the finish line for Escape to HighTower. After that, the next book will be The War Dogs of Barsoom (Ulla and Shondra’s story). However. The Agatha Christie film project is taking far more of my time than I expected, and of course there’s my parents in their deathtrap house in another state. I’m having trouble keeping up, so I’ve decided to take a break. I won’t dive right into War Dogs. Instead, I’ll catch up on editing Vanished Pearls and then Escape so we might actually publish them this year! Unbelievable, no? Then I’ll start writing War Dogs. Once I’m ahead by a few chapters, I’ll start posting them at Archive of Our Own and Wattpad.
Once again, I’m reminded that there is no such thing as a work/life balance. We have to pick and choose and do the best we can. Sometimes things just don’t get done or they’re delayed. War Dogs may end up a richer story with the delay. I’ll have more time to think about Ulla’s flighty mother, slavers, John RedHawk’s fate, how Ulla will extricate herself from her mess, and the Asp.
I’ll also use the time to design the bookplates for Vanished Pearls and Escape. For those of you who haven’t seen the finished books, I create a custom bookplate for each title. I use cut-paper (like Matisse), giving me a strong, graphic design. It’s more work but books need bookplates so every Peschel Press trade paperback comes with one.
So that’s where we’re at. Join us again in June to see how we succeeded (or not).
As always, thanks for joining us here at Peschel Press and reading our books. What would writers be without readers? We need you and we’re grateful to each and every one of you for your support.
In the meantime, we’re going to kick back and watch an Agatha Christie movie!
