. . . if you’re a writer! Authonomy, sponsored and paid for by HarperCollins’ branch in England, allows both new and published book writers to post their books, partial or whole, and allows other writers to vote and comment on them. The top five books each month go to the editors and are fairly likely to be published; furthermore, other book companies and agents snap up books from this site. So you get a combination of help from other writers and an improved chance of getting an agent and/or a publisher you can work with in the future. This is far more fair and reasonable than the old slush pile, in which a wonderful manuscript can lie buried indefinitely. If you know how many times books like GONE WITH THE WIND and HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE were rejected, you can see why the opinions of other writers to push a book toward the top of the stack is likely to be helpful to writers and publishers alike, to say nothing of the reading public. I just read part of a book written by a woman with severe mental problems about her childhood and her mother, whose problems were even worse. The book is a knockout and will probably find a home, but in the bad old days when HarperCollins used a slush pile, it probably would never have been read by anybody with the mental acumen to notice how good it is.
Now, I am sittingat the garden window, as I always am when I’m using my desktop computer, and I have just moved my Aerogarden cascading petunias in from the “barn.” I was enjoying them through the window from my office to the “barn,” but my stepdaughter bought me three lovely new flower pots to put my scented gardenias in. I had put them in two-inch pots and they have been throwing a tantrum (and their leaves) all over the place, so I need to move them from the kitchen window, where they keep getting chilled, into the barn, but I didn’t have a place there to put them. So I had been wanting to move the petunias indoors, but I can’t put them in my bedroom because they warn not to put them where oxygen therapy is being administered, and that’s where my oxygen concentrator is. But all that gets into my office is the end of a 50-foot hose with my nose on the end in the office, so I decided to bring them in there. I wanted to put them in the living room, but my husband emphatically did not.
So first I put them on a two-drawer filing cabinet just below the window to the barn, but that interfered with my office shadow boxes, so I moved them to the top of a four-drawer filing cabinet in what was, when this was a bedroom, the clothes closet. They look very nice there, and the Aerogarden setup illuminates my scanner/fax/copier, which had been very hard to see, and also my shredder.
Ah yes, my shredder. My husband has just been given, for review, a lovely new top-of-the-line shredder. He began the review process by writing a very funny parody of “The Night Before Christmas” about how the shredder makes confetti out of all kinds of obnoxious pieces of paper, and then the confetti becomes mulch and then compost in my garden. And then he gave me his old (as in about two months) shredder, so now I have my own shredder and that is going to be very useful for mulch and compost, to say nothing of the condition of the top of my desk.
Now I want to tell you about a very nice new book by Steve Bates called SEEDS OF SPRING. I have already done a review of it on Amazon and you can go and read it, but I’ll just add a few more things here. Mr. Bates kindly gave me a signed copy to review, and the cover is beautiful. The book itself is philosophy–gardening as a metaphor for life, seeds of plants as a metaphor for seeds that make our souls grow bigger. The practical problems he encountered are in many cases unfortunately familiar to me, although I don’t have to worry about horses, and the philosophy in most places is similar or identical to mine. So I appreciated the book, and recommend it to anybody who has weeds in their life. Steve Bates won’t put Roundup on them, but maybe he can give you some ideas on how to pull them out of your psyche.
Until next time . . . . Bye!
