Life Imitates Book

Pardon my scarcity this past week. Normally I’m scarce because I’ve been struck down by some random universal “Whack that woman!” quark type thing, but this time I’ve been doing some good old constructive manual labour, so I’m allowed to be too tired to do much. I want to grow some heirloom tomatoes now, because I want to use photos of the plants in the cover art for one of my upcoming books – and I want my own original pics for this, so they need to get growing in a hurry. I’m an indie scribbler – these things are normal – we do these things. I’ve managed to get seeds for four gorgeous different varieties, and got three new chilli varieties while I was at it to get my collection going again. One’s called a Mozambican Bastardo, so I’m guessing – yummy! The problem is that Bella finds any sort of plant/tree/container/neighbour’s shoe/pants hugely offensive, and sets about methodically destroying every single thing in her reach. She’s also Incredible Leopard Crawling Houdini Dog. Nothing is safe from the innocent looking mug she sports to conceal her ninja destructive jaws of steel. I wonder about her superpowers sometimes to be honest – do dogs do deals with the devil? Anyway.

Now I’m fencing off a bit of the yard so she won’t be able to mess up my book cover tomatoes – and holding thumbs that she doesn’t eat the actual fence. She had to go to be spayed this week, so I was looking forward to a couple of days peace to set things up while she recovered. Not so much though. After being hand fed bits of choice meat for a very long while by me (who thought she was going to clock out, the way she looked after the operation), and a single night’s snooze, she’s right back to climbing trees, fences, and abusing my cactuses. Still – spring has sprung here, and with the heirlooms being a big part of my story, I do want to get them up and growing soon. They’ll be my book marketing tomatoes even if they don’t take up lots of the actual cover space at the end of the day – plus I’ll get to eat them, so I’ll probably be a bit scarce for another day or two as well till I get everything properly Bella-proofed, and all the seeds in.

It’s a bit odd that this particular book inserted such a terrible need to plant tomatoes in me. None of my other scribbles have given me any sort of desperate urges to bring parts of them to actual life. Maybe it really is another thinly disguised universal quark whack job to steer me from my course, or possibly I could set up an “Oy Buy My Book!” stand at a local farmer’s market, where you’d get a bag of tomatoes instead of a bookmark if you do buy one. Hah – now that’s marketing for you!