Plants are putting forth leaves in abundance right now.




And of course there are flowers…


Here is a splendid review for She Who Comes Forth by the redoubtable Sally Cronin.
Today I am reviewing She who comes forth by Audrey Driscoll…an intriguing action adventure set in the land of the Pharoahs.
About the book
Recently turned 21, France Leighton travels to Luxor, Egypt, taking with her two legacies—an antique cello and an emerald ring. Instead of the archaeological adventure she expects, she gets a lecherous dig director, hidden agendas, a risky balloon ride, and an enigmatic nuclear physicist. In the mysteries of the ancient tombs, France realizes she and her gifts may imperil the world—or save it.
More Details:
October 1962. The developing nuclear missile crisis in Cuba is of no concern to Francesca “France” Leighton. Recently turned 21, France travels from her home in Providence to a job at an archaeological dig in Luxor, Egypt. She takes with her two legacies—an emerald ring from the grandfather she never knew, and an antique cello from his friend, a man…
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Here is an inspiring post from writer, photographer, and observer of nature, Michael Graeme. His blog is always worth a visit!
Leave comments on the original post, please.
“The arts put man at the centre of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage – and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still – I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.”
Kurt Vonnegut -1970
Unless you’re already some sort of celebrity, it’s a well established fact the arts are no way to make a living. But what they do for the ordinary Joe and Joanna, is make living meaningful, or even just bearable. It brings each of us back to the centre of our universe. It may be there is nothing to life and death, nor anything beyond it, and all our stories to the contrary are wishful thinking. But…
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I was thrilled to wake up to this review of She Who Returns, from Jaye Marie.
Every decision has consequences, and logic gets you every time.
France Leighton is studying Egyptology at Miskatonic University, hoping to return to Egypt via a field school offered by that institution. But France has a talent for rash decisions, and things are complicated by the arrival of her twin half-brothers from England. Edward and Peter are contrasts—one a rational scientist, the other a dabbler in the occult—but they are equally capable of persuading France to help them with dubious schemes.
France does return to Egypt, if not quite the way she intended. She encounters old friends and new enemies, and challenges rooted in her previous adventures and her family’s complicated history. Accusations of antiquities theft drive France and her companions into hiding in the Theban Hills west of Luxor. An attack from the unknown turns an adventure into a desperate predicament. On the brink of yet another failure, France must…
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Every spring is different. Now that I’ve gardened this same patch of ground for nearly 30 years, I think I’ve experienced the full range of variations. Except that with a changing climate, there may be shocks and surprises along the way.
This has been a slow, cool spring, quite different from 2021 (the year of the Heat Dome). Last spring was dry, with April temperatures in the 20s (degrees C; that’s 70s F). This year we’ve had more rain than normal (and that after an extremely wet fall and winter), and below normal temperatures. On April 12, wet snow fell for several hours. Strong winds from all four directions (on different days) battered plants and scattered twigs.
But late April and most of May are the best months in this garden. Spring bulbs are in bloom and there’s lots of fresh foliage. Things are green and juicy. The cool weather means tulips, narcissi, and other flowers have remained in good condition for weeks.
A few months ago I was unhappy about my hellebores, which seemed to be suffering the effects of excessive autumn wetness followed by severe cold at the end of December. I am happy to report that they shook off the doldrums (assuming hellebores can get doldrums). Most bloomed as usual, and are now approaching the stage where I remove the flower stems to prevent seeding.
Inevitably, there are a few disappointments. The pasqueflower (Pulsatilla vulgaris) that used to bloom together with white candytuft and flowering currant seems to have vanished from the scene. It appeared to be in decline last spring, so I thoughtfully dug it up and reset it in improved soil. Either it didn’t appreciate that treatment, or the June heat wave did it in. For whatever reason, there is no sign of it this spring, which is both sad and annoying.
On the other hand, the gentians (Gentiana acaulis), which sulked last spring, are doing really well. Half a dozen flowers opened this week, with twice as many buds still forming. (I sometimes berate myself for counting buds and blooms, but do it anyway.)
This is really the best time to be a gardener here. Cleanup and mulching are done. The miserable business of pruning is finished and the tyranny of the hose and watering can hasn’t yet arrived (although soaker hoses are in place and ready). The hardest job is mowing the grass, which looks deceptively good right now. The gardener strolls around, admiring and self-congratulating. Even common, weedy plants look good.
Whether because of the excessive heat last June or some other reason, huge numbers of laburnum seedlings have appeared. I must have pulled up hundreds of them by now, and I see more every time I visit certain parts of the garden. Some of Nature’s excesses demand intervention by the gardener. Others are to be invited and celebrated.
One plant that’s doing better than usual is the Bleeding Heart (now called Lamprocapnos spectabilis by botanists, although I still think of it as Dicentra spectabilis). Mine has always bloomed on disappointingly short stems, but this year it looks more or less as it should. When I see its dangling little heart-shaped flowers, I always think of garden writer Henry Mitchell’s description of them: “Like Valentines hung out to dry.”
When I’m feeling grumpy about the look of the garden after hot, dry weeks in August, I should look at this post and tell myself it will be like this again.
Last chance to pre-order my latest novel, She Who Returns. It launches on May 1st!
This is the third chat in which we answer questions from January (which seems a long time ago).
Watch or listen to it HERE.
And feel free to ask more questions in the comments!
I’m over at Sally Cronin’s bounteous blog today, with an excerpt from She Who Returns, which will launch on May 1st.
In this series you are invited to share an extract of 500 words from your most recent book published within the last 12 months. Details at the end of the post.
The aim of the series
Today an extract from the adventure SHE who returnsby Audrey Driscoll, on pre-order until May 1st. The book is the sequel to SHE who comes forth and both books are on offer during the pre-order period.
About the book
Every decision has consequences, and logic gets you every time.
France Leighton is studying Egyptology at Miskatonic University, hoping to return to Egypt via a field school offered by that institution. But France has a talent for rash decisions, and things are complicated by the arrival of her…
View original post 1,534 more words
Since 2014, I have published six books in print editions as well as ebook. My latest novel, She Who Returns, will be the seventh. Unless I decide it’s not worth the effort.
All right, I’m dramatizing. But really, you’d think that by now I would be familiar with the steps and the process would be routine.
I’ll bet you’re expecting a rant about formatting the Word document. Well, no. Or at least not yet. This is about getting through Amazon’s quality checks. After my experiences with correcting errors in a previously published book, I didn’t expect it to be easy.
In fact, even before I started, I was a nervous wreck, anticipating hurdles and hoops and cryptic warnings that would drive me to appeal to the the Help people, like a bewildered newbie instead of a seasoned self-publisher.
I was right.
Take the ISBN, for example. When setting up my previous six books (on CreateSpace and its successor Amazon KDP Print), I entered the 13-digit ISBN without the hyphens inserted by the issuing agency (Library and Archives Canada, in my case). This time, I was admonished via a popup that I had failed to enter an ISBN, even though all 13 of its digits were right there in the appropriate slot. With no other explanation, I appealed to the Help folks by email. Within 24 hours, as promised, I received a reply suggesting I should enter the ISBN as issued by the official body, including the hyphens. Great, except it would have saved everyone time and aggravation if that requirement had been right there on the book setup page, instead of useless accusations of failing to enter the information. And another thing–you are now encouraged to supply the imprint associated with your ISBN. As a self-publisher, the imprint is your name, unless you have a “publisher” name (“Desperado Press,” for example) registered with your ISBN source (such as Bowker, LAC, the National Library of New Zealand, etc.).
The next big challenges were the interior (text) file and the cover. I uploaded the PDF of the text file successfully, it seemed, but I was unable to invoke the Print Previewer, which would notify me of errors, such as incursions into the gutter no-go zone, or… who knew what else? But I couldn’t open the Print Previewer until I had uploaded the cover image. That’s another annoyance–it should be possible to use the Previewer as soon as the text file is uploaded. If there’s a margin problem, fixing it could result in a larger page count, which could affect the spine width. If an author has hired a cover designer, it would be awkward to have to ask for changes (and possibly pay extra for them).
At least my cover image (designed and created by me on Canva) uploaded successfully. I invoked the Print Previewer and was notified that fonts were not properly embedded in my Word document (never mind that I had precisely followed Amazon’s instructions on how to do that). Amazon had apparently embedded them for me, but warned that some features of my book might not look right when printed. Twenty-one instances were flagged with an “i” in a circle. Supposedly the “i” means “information,” but all I saw when I clicked on it was a tiny black square.
The Help person who answered my question about that simply trotted out the party line about embedding fonts as per instructions, which I had already done. Yes, I would have to fix the problems with the fonts in my document. If following the Amazon instructions didn’t do the trick, there was a hint that I should consult Microsoft about how to work with Word.
In a pig’s eye, as some would say.
Instead, I sat down and did some thinking. If unembedded fonts were causing the problem, surely every page would be flagged? Why only those 20 pages? They were actually all the right-hand (odd numbered) pages in the first three sections of numbered pages. And as always, the problem was in the header of those three sections. (Word’s headers and footers are the very devil!)
To shorten a long, tedious tale, it turned out that even though the book’s title in the header was in Copperplate Gothic Light font, as I intended, Word’s default Arial font was also living in the headers of those pages, even though there was no text in Arial. Repeated attempts to change it led nowhere, except to the brink of sanity. I finally found the solution by moving the cursor along the header space while watching the font dropdown (in the Home tab). At a certain point, the font in the dropdown changed from Arial to Copperplate. So I highlighted the empty space where Arial was manifesting and changed that to Copperplate. The change finally stuck. I rejoiced.
When I uploaded the PDF I created after these changes, the Print Previewer still grumbled about fonts not properly embedded, but there were no more problem spots flagged.
I have approved the book’s content file and ordered a proof copy. If that looks okay, this saga will end happily.
In the meantime, here are my tips for other self-publishers who want to produce a print edition:
Remember, She Who Returns is on pre-order until May 1st, attractively priced, along with She Who Comes Forth, the first book in the set.
I’m not much of a consumer, but in the past couple of months, I’ve acquired three items I consider to be tools for specific purposes: a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), a Silky Gomtaro 240 mm root saw, and a Kindle e-reader.
As someone who edits her own writing, I finally decided I need a definitive authority on matters of grammar, punctuation, and usage. Working through beta readers’ comments on my WIP, or trawling through the manuscript before moving on to the publishing stage, I kept encountering questions I couldn’t answer. Should “the” in the name of a pub or bar that begins with that word (as in “The Blue Poppy Pub”) be capitalized when it occurs in the middle of a sentence? What is the correct order of punctuation marks when a word is quoted in dialogue just before a question mark? Example: “What do you mean by ‘a problem’?” I asked.
Trying to find answers on the internet yielded a lot of irrelevant stuff (depending on how I worded the search) as well as contradictory answers. It wasn’t usually obvious how authoritative any specific answer was, either. So I shelled out the nearly $100 (in Canadian dollars, and including shipping) for a copy of CMOS.
And those two example questions? According to CMOS 8.45 “An initial the as part of a name is lowercased in running text, except in the rare case of an initial The in the name of a city.” So it’s “I’ll see you at the Blue Poppy.” And the matter of punctuation after a quoted word within a spoken sentence? It’s explained thus in CMOS 13.30: “Exclamation points, like question marks, are placed just within the set of quotation marks ending the element to which such terminal punctuation belongs.” To be honest, that sentence is pretty murky, but the examples had ‘?” rather than ?'”
I’ve complained before about shrubs that spread by underground suckers. Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) is one of the worst. The little saw intended for cutting sheetrock (gyprock) I’ve been using to cut suckers isn’t up to the job. So I tracked down a saw made for cutting roots. Strangely, Amazon was unable to supply it, but I was able to order one from a farm and garden supplies store in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I still use tools I bought there when I lived in that city more than 30 years ago. I suspect they happened to have one hanging around in old stock, whereas the ‘Zon was affected by “supply chain issues.” I intend to tackle the Oregon grape later this spring, using the new saw judiciously. (It wasn’t cheap, also almost $100 with shipping).
I’ve resisted for years buying one of these. Until now, I’ve read Kindle ebooks on my tablet, with the Kindle Reader app. But the tablet is fairly heavy and needs frequent recharging. It’s fine for scanning blog posts first thing in the morning, but for reading books, I much prefer my ancient Sony e-reader. It’s light and runs forever on a single charge. But of course it can’t be used for Kindle books. When I realized I was avoiding Kindle books written by fellow indies because my reading instrument was awkward, I caved in and bought a Kindle reader. An hour after it arrived I had activated wi-fi, linked it to my Amazon account, and was reading a book I bought months ago. (But I’m still a bit disturbed by the extent to which Amazon intrudes into my online life. Plus it doesn’t feel as though I own Kindle books the way I own the epubs I buy from the Smashwords store and read on the old Sony reader.)
The right tools for the job do make a difference.
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