Growth Mindset in Our Endeavors

 Today I'm just waiting for straggling exams to come in. This means it's time for some creativity.

My first reader (aka my husband) says the second half of my latest book goes too fast. He's right, of course. So the task du jour is to work on adding a little more substance into the second half. This is not, I repeat not, an easy thing to do without disrupting flow. So my work is cut out for me.

This is a reminder of what I learned a long time ago in writing books, but it may be a good piece of advice in general: Never fall in love with your results so much that you can't hear constructive criticism.

I believe so many things are a process -- writing, teaching, any skilled labor or hobby. We can take them just for fun, but those with a growth mindset will always push themselves to improve.

It took a lot for me to get there, in part because I think writers' immediate response to writing a book is "This is my brainchild! My masterpiece!" Our second response is "This is horrible! I can't bear to edit it!" Somewhere in-between that is the desire to write the best book possible. That's where the growth is. 

Growing as a Writer

Gaia's Hands, the novel I've gone back to revise, was my first novel, and it's been a problem child since its conception. I have amended it, added to it, subtracted from it, tried it as a novella, and still it's been not quite enough.

It's always seemed like a small novel, one in which not much happened, even though a lot happened. A novel in which a relationship developed and then, after a few chapters, Jeanne's getting persecuted by her department, and then ... 

Almost like there were two halves of the book -- first half relationship and second half disaster.

Why didn't I figure this out sooner? 

I've been growing as a writer. Those rejections from agents and publishers have helped me to seek out improvement. My dev editor, Chelsea Harper, has helped me to see where I can improve. The rewrites have helped me to see what I can become.

I don't know that I would have gone through this process of improvement if I'd gone straight to self-publishing. I'm glad I have to work hard for my dream.
 

My Sanctum

As I have mentioned before, one of the things that saves me from severe winter blahs (aka Seasonal Affective Disorder) is my planning for the spring garden. 

I should explain that my garden has rules: everything I plant in it should be, at least in part, edible*. This means that I landscape with edible flowers, herbs, and plants that have been gathered and eaten in American or other cultures. Most of these can't be found in nurseries or are rather expensive if bought as plants, so I grow them from seed myself in my grow room.**

 Here is a view of my grow room, which is a small basement room that used to be the coal room back when my 100-year-old house was a youngster: 

Not very impressive, is it?

The wires are for all the fluorescent fixtures and the heat pads -- and the ancient iPad repurposed for record keeping that you see at your left.  The wall that you can't see is lined with reflective material that was meant to insulate a garage door. Peel and stick -- excellent for increasing the light in this room.

The flats you see are for two sets of items I'm growing -- the edible nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) and a handful of herbs (celery, lovage, yarrow, calamint, perilla, hyssop, alpine basil herb).

Closeup of my first herb flat

I have more to plant -- I'm waiting on seeds for my moon garden and more herbs and for some flowers (and for lots of things that will get planted directly in the garden. By the time I'm done, I will have six to eight flats of seedlings to nurture.

Not all of them will survive. Past seedlings have succumbed to damping off disease (which I fight heroically with cinnamon water spray) and watering malfunctions. Some seeds never come up. On the other hand, sometimes they grow faster than I expected, which is why I'm setting the top shelf (that you don't see) for taller seedlings to reside. I will save the best of the plants that come up for planting come spring.***

Spring comes to me sooner than to most because of my grow room, with its ugly cement floor and worn shelves. Today I sat with my seedlings, thinning them out so that they could grow strong, and feeling, if not happy, a bit less out-of-sorts.








* This year's exception is the moon garden, which is comprised of white, night-scented flowers, most of which are toxic to deadly if eaten.

** When I say "grow room", people think I've got one of these high-tech setups advertised on eBay where people grow -- well, plants that are illegal to possess or use in this state. Mine is not nearly so exciting.


*** This doesn't count the direct-seeded vegetables. I have to admit that I'm not as good with these because it gets too hot to weed and there are so many weeds. I'm working on using more mulching and earlier morning weeding.

Back in the Swing -- oops!

Yesterday, I could finally look at Whose Hearts are Mountains and shape the parts I'd abandoned while answering the developmental edits on Prodigies (which I  need to ship out to other agents at some point).

I think it's a better story than I thought previously.

Honestly, I'm trying to figure out what to do with all the Archetype universe stuff since the first book, Mythos, is such a royal mess. (Or maybe it's not -- I have an idea ...)


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Just got done rearranging a lot of things. I'm doing serious surgery on Mythos (cutting it drastically back; merging it with Apocalypse) and my developmental editor Chelsea Harper is now editing my first book, which may be the original Lost Cause. That means putting off the end of Whose Hearts are Mountains. Whee.

I have to keep reminding myself that writing is a growing experience.

Besides writing and moulage in my life, there's gardening.

I dream of the first emerging sprouts speaking to me.

The stretch of the first seedling breaking through the soil with the tiniest pop assures me that change is possible. And each seedling, each plant, has purpose. The lowliest weed has purpose --  dandelion makes a wine whose pale nectar will break your heart. The scrubby lamb's quarters tastes better than spinach, and purslane is rich in Vitamin A and Omega-3 fatty acids. What is toxic to man may treat your illnesses -- the toxic foxglove can be processed into digitalis, a heart medicine that you might have heard of. Even the otherwise useless Cannabis sativa* is a bioaccumulator, pulling heavy metals from the ground and sequestering it in its leaves.

My basement is full of seedlings to go into my summer garden. They live in the former coal room, now a room of grow lights and reflective insulation material on the far wall, with a window that the law enforcement officials can look at and make sure I'm growing tomatoes. This may not be enough.**

Right now, the tomato/eggplant/pepper plants are partying on the top shelf with the cardoon which I thought I wouldn't get to grow. The perilla seedlings are numerous and vigorous. Hablitzia, yarrow, pinks, and savory are popping up a little more leisurely, and I still can't get sea kale to grow from seed. The basil -- I'm a basil fanatic, but I still may have to give some away. That's not all the seed flats -- I am nearly out of room on my plant shelves, and there's a dwarf lemon tree I hope gives me lemons for lemonade someday.

At night, when I go to bed, I imagine I hear the plants sighing in their sleep. When I feel down, I contemplate sneaking down to the basement and joining them in the dark. But I am human, and cannot sleep in a garden bed, so I wish them a silent goodnight.

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I've gardened since I was about five years old, when my second cousin Dale Hollenbeck gave me a plant of his that was dying to see if I could nurse it back to health. I did, and I did the next one he gave me. I had a lot of failures, largely because of my lack of understanding about soils -- it turned out that Illinois' hardpan soil wasn't a great planting medium for cacti -- or much else. It was at that point that I wanted to learn anything I could about plants.

My neighbor Johnny Belletini, who was somewhat of an adopted grandparent (I adopted him), taught me one day that weeds weren't nameless and had uses people didn't know about anymore. I was fifteen; he taught my his recipes for dandelion greens and dandelion wine that day, and I made my parents leave the lawn unmowed until I picked all the flowers to make dandelion wine***.  We did everything wrong, but the result (don't ask me how I know) was a sacrament, sunshine in a glass.

When I was seventeen, my second cousin Francis Koenig**** worked in a state park for a while and had an encyclopedic knowledge of those previously nameless weeds. At the time, I had begun my lifelong interest in edible plants. He would visit me at my parents' house, and my family would sit mystified as he and I talked about plants -- their genus and species names, appearance, habitat, and uses.

Nowadays, I have an odd quest, and that is to landscape my entire yard with edibles. I have raised beds for annual vegetables and for perennials, I will add edible weeds (tastes like spinach) like quinoa and orach and giant lamb's quarters, and I will add herbs to the rubble-and-dirt hill by the stairs to the backyard.

Many of the edible plants I've never eaten before. The moringa thicket in a pot in the basement apparently has excellent nutrition for a green tree, and the scarlet runner beans are a favorite in Britain. But I'm fascinated by vegetables and fruit that can't be found in a grocery store, just as I am interested in people and places you couldn't find near a shopping mall.

Later this spring, I'll give you a virtual tour of my garden (if I can get my SketchUp software running on a four-year-old Mac with no graphics capability to speak of. If you want pictures, let me know.

Thanks for keeping me company.


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* I do recognize that C. sativa is not useless; I was just having a little fun. The plant has proven useful for wasting syndrome PTSD, chronic pain, muscle pain, glaucoma, and mental health issues. (Grinspoon, 2018). In addition, it is used as a sacrament in the Rastafari religion.

** There is also a window where any curious law enforcement officer can look into to assure themselves that there is no Cannabis grow operation here. I still feel a certain sense of unease about having a grow room in my basement. I'm not kidding. Not Marijuana

*** I made my first batch of wine at age 15. I did my research first -- although there was a law against drinking until age 21, there was no law against making wine at any age unless you made over 200 gallons a year and/or sold it.

**** Francis Koenig died of drowning in 2009. I point this out where I otherwise would have because 1) he was family and 2) he lived lonely because of his neurodiversity. I believe he was on the autism spectrum, as he worked at a sheltered workshop until he retired. I want you all to see that the neurodiverse have lives and feelings and deserve to be members of society to the extent they feel they can. Thank you, Francis, for telling me that hawkweed had edible roots -- I look for it often, and I think of you.


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Grinspoon, P. (2018). Medical marijuana. Available: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/medical-marijuana-2018011513085. [March 13. 2018].