At any rate, it’s been a swift six months, devouring 2010 like lightning. I’ve written some songs, some short stories, and I’m seeing progress on both fronts. I sent out a few queries for my first YA novel, Cheshire Cat Moons, in March, got a good response and am currently revising it before sending it back out. I stopped reading slush for SH because I couldn’t keep up, but boy did I learn a lot.

This past week we’ve finally set up our library in the room formerly known as The Blue Room. Six tall bookshelves and a rough count of 1,000 books unpacked later, I’m revelling in having all our books easily accessible again. And a touch of extra shelf space to fill up with new stuff – we’ve been on a book buying moratorium for the last few years. Ban: lifted!

So that’s what I have been doing – writing, gardening, working the web, and unpacking books. Currently I’m editing a short story about inherited ghosts, and another about walking houses. In spare moments, I’ve been devouring the archives of the Paris Review and trying to get my own writing to a point where I enjoy re-reading it.

Oh yes, and I’ve been informally logging the books I’ve read this year to see if I make it to 100. As a kid, this would have been cake, I read about three times that amount yearly, but this year I’ve been chewing up short stories like they’re going out of style, and I haven’t counted those toward my book reading goal. At any rate, the last book I finished was The Hunger Games (enjoyable, predictable but with lush descriptions of food – I’m a sucker for that) and I am currently reading The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman and really loving it.

The dorktastic backwards pictures are just bonus.

“Did Missouri Agricultural Conference Forget About Small Farmers?”

“Spice Melange:Dill” made me hungry

“Grow an Urban Garden” re-uses my photo of my mojito stash -

and two of my photos are currently illustrating two different eHow articles: “How to Plant a Chokecherry Tree”

and “How to Describe the Growth Process of a Plant Seed”

and Dian Reed’s 2009 wrap-up “Best of Tea” uses a photo of the first display tea I ever tried (I’ve since enjoyed many more):

also, Camille of the Svelte Gourmand finally tried kale (well, back in August)

“We are all going to die, yet we spend most of our life avoiding this fact, as if to mention death will bring it upon us sooner. Then when death strikes, we are devastated, in part because we are unprepared. And yet, some of life’s most valuable lessons are best learned in the face of death. This is the story of two extraordinary women facing their mortality head on as they battle lung cancer.”

And Aileen Roberts contacted me not to use a photo, but to use a caption from one of my photos in the same family series for her project about cancer, “Ties That Bind“:

“The day after the haircutting party was chemo, and after chemo we went wig shopping. Naturally, I bought a styrofoam head of my very own. I wanted 2, but I didn’t have enough room in my bag. This is Clio. Mom found me listening to Mozart and drinking red wine from a jam jar while I was painting her face. Mom just turned around and left the room. “

That’s one powerful windowsill!

The pics below are going to be used in a book on urban gardening by Spanish publishers
Ormobook.

The Guardian Gardening Blog has used a couple of my indoor gardening photos:

Em & Lo’s Love and Sex advice column hilariously (and quite appropriately) used one of the photos I took during my elopement trip to San Francisco:

And I don’t know who this is, but they liked one of my harvest photos enough to re-use it: