Gardens in my Dreams

It's January, and time for planning my garden.

What does this have to do with writing? A writer writes what they know and what they love, and I love plants. Particularly plants I can eat, because I like food as well. And if they also smell good, that's a bonus because I like things that smell good. As you might expect, my best friend is named Basil, and he grows in my garden every year.

One of my favorite characters in my books was a garden. Or a Garden, perhaps, because it had begun as a food forest, a planting of perennial edibles modeled after the layers of a forest. The picture below will be worth 1000 words:

from: Permaculture, a Beginner’s Guide, by Graham Burnett

The Garden in question incorporated fifty of these units in a three-dimensional pattern: one canopy tree, surrounded by three dwarf trees, and clumps of the other units as needed. It had been commissioned by a eco-collective (a coop based on ecological principles and striving toward self-sufficiency). Little did the collective know that they had called on an acolyte of the earth-soul Gaia to design the project and direct the work crews. Overnight, the garden grew a foot, and in a few short weeks offered up its first crops. The residents felt unsettled for a long time, because it's one thing to call something a "force of nature", and another to meet it face-to-face.

There are other stories about the Garden, but I will not tell them here.

My Work-in-Progress has a collective with greenhouse domes in an ecologically efficient desert habitat. Below each greenhouse is an underground living unit with tunnels to the central unit, where the Great Room/kitchen and workrooms reside. The dome above the main unit holds a grafted tree bearing two different colored apples that came from the central trees of the original Garden. These two gardens, the original food forest and the desert domes, are connected by more than the scion from the mother Trees, but that truth is scattered across several books.

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I received another rejection today.

My novels don't grab agents within a synopsis and three chapter (or less) form, and I have no idea why. I've edited, and I've polished, and I've improved my query letter and etc., but I don't know if I can write what they want. My ideas are speculative, utopic, ecological, egalitarian, and not very dominant culture. The ideas themselves may not sell -- pacifism instead of war? Ecologically sane utopias that struggle with prejudice and discord?

I seem to get better at dealing with rejections. I'm quite calmly considering whether my goal of getting published is worth the time investment. Writing itself is rewarding and enjoyable, but as a hobby it takes about 14 hours per week.  The gardening, at least, yields food; the writing has not yielded readers or income. I know hobbies don't yield income in most instances, but I don't get the return in writing alone -- I want to share ideas. I want to be read.

Writing is another garden I've been tending -- and at moments like this, all I can think of is that my back aches and I'm weary, and as is true in all kinds of gardening, I will not know if the effort is worth it until it sets fruit.