by Charlene Teglia | May 17, 2010 | Uncategorized
The garden’s been mulched and tilled and planting has begun. Since I’m in garden layout mode, and so many people are doing gardens this year, I thought I’d do 5 Gardening Things for today’s blog post.
1. Remember to transition indoor or greenhouse starter plants before planting them out. Set outdoors in a sheltered spot while they adjust to outdoor conditions. Keep an eye on moisture as they will dry out faster then they do indoors. If there’s a frost, move them back inside or cover them for the night. A week is best but depending on your climate, 3-4 transition days is probably enough.
2. Check your plants’ space requirements before planting to make sure you allow enough room for the mature plant and to make tending/harvesting easy.
3. Make your rows wide enough to easily walk through and tend/harvest plants.
4. Spread straw between plants and in the rows to help the ground retain moisture and keep weeds down. Bonus: the straw mulches in and makes nice compost for next year’s garden.
5. Plant marigolds around your tomatoes and onions around your lettuce and carrots to discourage pests.
by Charlene Teglia | May 16, 2010 | Uncategorized
My PC laptop officially reached the “I’m just not going to work anymore” stage. So I put all the crap I’d saved to the desktop in dropbox, and it was nearly that easy to switch. The husband found a tool to synch my browser settings, and it took about a minute to tell the mail program where to find my mail. It was really fast and painless.
And now I’m getting used to the cord being on the opposite side and a slightly different keyboard (although I like the springyness of it) and remembering to hit the apple key to do keyboard shortcuts. Mainly I’m noticing that life is easier on a Mac. I actually started using the Macbook last week for Drupal work, which gave me some transition time, but I was really hoping to finish books in progress on the other laptop. I didn’t want to change tools in process, but now that change has been forced on me, I’m glad. Sometimes it’s good to change.
Yes, I’m doing some Drupal work. I’ve been thinking long and hard about where publishing is and where I am as a writer and what my goals are, and I decided that one of the best things I could do for myself was to find a way to earn money that wouldn’t require 50 hours a week and all my brain power, leaving nothing for writing. But would, at part time, offset the vagaries of publishing and allow me to write what I wanted to and not worry about whether or not it sold, and not feel pressured financially to take a deal, any deal, whether it was good for me or not. I decided that over a year ago (Drupal has a steepish learning curve) and now I’m doing the work. Very part time. But it’s had the wonderful unexpected effect of recharging my creativity. I’m getting scenes downloading from my brain, I’m getting new story ideas and plots and feeling very excited about a new project I can’t wait to work on.
And what about Kindle, you may ask? Am I not thinking this is the answer? I think it’s a path to explore, certainly, and now that I’ve read on an iPad, I think it’s a game-changer. So yes, I will have 2 projects coming straight to Kindle/iPad, hopefully this summer. I’ve been around ebooks for too long to think this is a magic wand, but I do think it’s a viable option to the writer willing and able to do a lot for themselves. And it will allow me to release ebooks in a very visible way while retaining the rights to them.
This is very much an experiment, and I see it as part of an overall approach to publishing that includes traditional routes. But for some projects it makes a lot of sense. My shiny exciting idea could only be done on an iPad, really.
There’s a lot of change going on, in the world, in publishing. And like hanging onto the laptop that was blue-screening, really, sometimes it’s better to just embrace the changes. They offer some pretty nice options.
by Charlene Teglia | May 13, 2010 | Uncategorized
Woke up to thunder this morning and all sorts of weather alerts. On the west coast, the storms happen in the fall. Here, it’s spring. It’s hard to get too worked up about the flood watch when rainfall measured in inches per hour used to be normal. Still, I am wondering if I made a mistake planting out the potatoes. I hope they don’t drown.
Internet may or may not be affected by the weather, so there will be lots of working going on for internet-sensitive things and then offline work for those things not requiring connection.
Things in progress:
Art form for Kiss of the Demon. Since no matter how I fill these out I end up gnashing my teeth, I’m taking a cue from PBW and sending in a dummy cover. I’d like to carry over the look from the first book, same-but-different.
Series cheat sheet for Shadow Guardians. Because I couldn’t remember what color Abaran’s eyes were when I went to fill out the above-mentioned cover art form. Putting together all those little details in one handy reference saves me so much time on subsequent books. (When will I learn to do that while I’m writing the first book?)
Outlined project mentioned yesterday, which I would ideally like to release in between Red Queen and Kiss of the Demon but we’ll see how that goes.
And of course, the actual writing of actual books plus revision of said books. And hoping the basement stays dry and the potatoes (or, if you are a fan of How to Train Your Dragon, The-Vegetables-That-Must-Not-be-Named) don’t drown.
by Charlene Teglia | May 12, 2010 | Uncategorized
1.
PBW is back!
2.The Mammoth Book of Special Ops Romance was officially “out” in stores yesterday. I know it’s been for sale online for a while, but now it’s official. You can find this real world object in brick and mortar stores.
3. I have a cool idea I would really like to implement but it will involve time and talent, half of which (or more) will not be mine, so it remains to be seen if this cool thing will become a reality. Watch this space for news.
4. If it ever stops raining I can plant the garden. It’s ready to go and the Almanac says there won’t be another frost. I believe the Almanac. It describes how to suck the madness out of your blood with the right kind of rock, how could it be wrong on frost?
5. The school year is nearly over. Must write faster. Or stop sleeping.
by Charlene Teglia | May 7, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’ve been reading Fan to Pro, and I’m going to post my thoughts even though I’m not finished. This isn’t a book you just read through, it’s a book you work through. The book offers a series of exercises designed to give you new insights into your abilities, experience and values, and many ways to brainstorm potential careers. I really think it’s worth the cover price just for the exercise on page 53. If that doesn’t give you a whole new set of options and opportunities, you didn’t do the exercise.
This is important stuff for anybody to think through, because confidence comes from having options and just seeing how many exist calms the fearful lizard brain and puts you in the right mindset, literally, to try new things.
And let’s face it, all of us are going to have to reinvent and recombine and recreate ourselves and our professional lives as we go forward, because we live in such an age of change. The jobs we’re all doing ten years from now might not exist today. Look back on where your career started; chances are, your industry has changed drastically since then. It’s good to have tools like this book to help us find the opportunities change brings and figure out how and why we’re uniquely qualified to succeed in new directions.
Fan to Pro is a great guide to mining your overlooked or undervalued past to revitalize your present and future. You can get it in print or ebook, but either way don’t forget to keep your own paper and pen handy so you can get the most out of it.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention this, but this is terrific stuff for the writer who isn’t sure where their material is or who needs to take a new publishing tack. Bob Mayer blogged recently about how he used similar methods to figure out what he should be writing about. Makes me realize how much of my own material I’ve been ignoring.
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