Category Archives: Gardens

Autumn – so soon?

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The last few days have been strange and sad, as we try to accept the death of a dear friend. It is difficult to settle to tasks, but I find hard labour is as good a way to consume time as anything else. So I have been clearing the path, closely supervised by a young robin (who refuses to stay in shot). Though you can just about spot him/her taking time out for a bath (in the second photo).

IMG_0516DSCN6298 - Version 2The yellow (Japanese) quinces are all over the path and with my nose to the ground, they smell delicious. This scent, along with that of the lemon balm (a welcome weed in our garden) is very comforting.

In the nearby playing field, it looks as though autumn base already arrived. IMG_0514 While this Rhododendron Yakushimanum is convinced it is spring.DSCN6299 And the roses (Octavia Hill, Papa Meilland and Wollerton Old Hall) are making the most of the end of summer.DSCN6306 DSCN6308 DSCN6305 Meanwhile this fairy-like fuchsia (magellanica molinae)  has taken over the path.DSCN6304 - Version 3And two of the three martin’s nests are on their third brood – I don’t remember seeing quite such big piles of droppings in past years – with the house painters due in a week’s time. I expect nature will sort things out without any help from us.

(Apologies to photographers (you know who you are) for the rough and ready snaps)

More is sometimes less in printers terms

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I have learned something today. The manuscript I am close to sending to the printers has come to a total of 218 pages. I have decided to go for litho printing (minimum 300 copies) rather than Print On Demand, because this reduces the cost per copy. This in turn increases the chances of at least breaking even after subtracting postage and/or discounts.

So far so good. I get an estimate from the printers quoting for 216 pages. When I point out that I have 218 I am told it is either 216 or 224. It has to be evenly divisible by 8. I spend the day killing a few more darlings and re-setting the text. I am on the last few pages when I get a further estimate from the printers for both 216 and 224 pages.  The estimate for 224 pages is shown as a good £100 less than the 216. I thank them, say I want to go ahead with 216, but they have got their figures the wrong way round, and I finish resetting the text to 216 pages.

I get a further email explaining that:

 It would work out cheaper to produce the 224pp as this would consist of 7 x 32pp sections, whereas 216pp would have 6 x 32pp sections, 1 x 16pp section and 1 x 8pp section. The extra plates and folding in production would therefore make this more expensive.

Got it? I can’t face re-setting the text yet again, but I have added pages front and back with some lovely spaces to create an MS 224 pages long. I am a wiser self-publisher than I was this morning.

A sunny interloper in the vegetable plot.DSCN6281

A lovely cosmos Chocolate given to me in memory of a friend.

cosmos Chocolate

cosmos Chocolate

 

 

 

One tomato, two tomato, three tomato… and some maples

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My husband was a little underwhelmed by his first sight of lunch today.
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We love tomatoes and I thought with the new greenhouse we would have a splendid crop of homegrown ones. Sadly, all the ones I started in the greenhouse have not fared well after being transferred to the vegetable plot. The blazing heat, our sandy soil and my erratic watering and feeding (though I tried) have not been to their liking, so every kind of rot has set in and this is all that is left.

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And they’re not as healthy as they look. The one plant I kept in the greenhouse is looking much happier, so next year I will fill the greenhouse with them.

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However my little nursery bed of seedling maples has come through the summer in brave force and I think there are some interesting plants here.

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I was a little alarmed to see that the parent of most of these, Matsukaze, is already showing some Autumn colour. I don’t understand where the summer went or how the year is slipping past so swiftly.

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At least the birds and the hedgehogs are flourishing. Outside my writing room window very new half-coloured robins, bluetits, great tits and coal tits and, I think, a willow warbler (who resists the efforts of the paparazzi ) all flit about constantly (very good for concentration) while the ground is patrolled by pigeons, dunnocks and blackbirds (one with a grey head). We hear the hedgehogs at night and they polish off a plate of mealworms etc every night. I am torn between my desk and the outside, but the seasons won’t wait, so I must try and get out more.

 

 

Beans, beans, beans and proof-reading

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Little garden interlude. The runner beans, having started to mature, are unstoppable. Luckily I have hungry neighbours.DSCN6237 DSCN6233There are as many courgettes as we care to eat and the first french beans are cropping too. I have at last transplanted the leeks and we had torrential rain yesterday, so I am not looking out of my window worrying about thirsty plants. Mind you, we are promised the tail end of Bertha, the hurricane travelling across the Atlantic, tomorrow. As the beans are mostly held together by elderly bamboos, some string and their own tendrils, they may be on the ground by Monday.

So, after a morning putting in proof-reading corrections, I will, I will, get into the garden for some re-enforcing work.

My last proof reader did not really enjoy Border Line. Although this is, naturally, depressing, it is also more helpful than vague praise. I have learnt some useful stuff from what she said (and did not say) and it is not too late to make some, hopefully crucial, changes. Knowing WHAT to change is a great boon. Thank you JL.

Web surgery – Kristen Harrison

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It’s been a while since I put up a post, because I have been hard at work trying to update my embarrassingly old-fashioned website at hilarycustancegreen.com. Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 17.24.04

Today, through the Society of Authors, I signed up for a tutorial on my website and social media presence. I spent a generous and productive hour with Kristen Harrison of The Curved House.

My fear that I would be told to get onto various media outlets and advertise my books according to some hidden ‘rules for authors’ was unfounded. The session was unexpected for three particular reasons: 1) Kirsten had already checked out both my blog and my website and her first questions were designed to understand my work and interests. From there she swiftly showed me how to rearrange and redistribute the information on the web about me and my books. 2) She listened to, and understood, my concerns about cover design, about which she was extremely knowledgable (more about covers at a later date). 3) She aligned her advice with my understanding of the Internet and technology and with my needs outlined in a pre-session questionnaire.

How rare is that? All I have to do now is to put all this into practice…

I did manage to weed the vegetable plot and we have eaten the first runner beans.

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But there are 74 posts to read in my emails and I am going Lindy hopping tonight.

Threadgold Press – lessons learnt

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[This is a moan, so feel free to jump to pictures at the end]

One of the privileges of being your own publisher is being able to choose your own book cover. Over the last month I have really concentrated on this (actually since April, if I’m honest). Ignoring the Really Good Advice to pay for professional work, I have become intimate with the foibles of InDesign; my numerous attempts to create a cover now run to over 50 files.

I am exhausted and depressed, I have used up all my credit with my nearest and dearest, the garden is untended, the vegetable plot a riot of weeds and my in-tray is overflowing. Each night I have new ideas and each morning I start again expecting the perfect cover to appear under my hands. But it hasn’t, and I am now finally ready to compromise. My daughter, Amy, has produced something better than any of the ones I attempted and while I still feel, churlishly, that it is not what I had in mind, it is simple and beautiful and I need to stop NOW.

So here are a few more rejected designs (and they are not the weirdest):

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That’s enough amateur graphics. Here are some lilies (smelling heavenly) and hydrangeas to finish with. Tomorrow, I will pick beans and weed the veg bed.

DSCN6205 DSCN6202 DSCN6201 DSCN6199I’ve been Lindy Hopping this evening, so I feel more human.

 

Reading, Writing and (A)rithmetic

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After a stressful day (actually week) on the book-publishing front, I am baffled. This is clearly an absurd enterprise, since at the same time I am reading – and enjoying:

Middlemarch (George Eliot); Surviving the Sword, Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East 1942-45 (Brian MacArthur); One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I have started Americana (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and Morning has Broken, (Carol Balawyder); The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe). I have dipped into The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt) and I am looking forward to And Then Like My Dreams – a memoir (Margaret-Rose Stringer); A Serious Business (Roderick Hart)… and then there is Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel) and The Luminaries (Eleanor Catton) staring at me from the bottom of a pile of books on the other side of the room.

Oh and I will be picking up The Rosie Project (Graeme Simsion) from the library and polishing it off for a meeting on the 6th of August… correction I am going to the opera that night – but I will still read it.

With writing like this, the world does not need books by Hilary Custance Green. Any which way you calculate this, it doesn’t add up. I should stick to cultivating my garden, reducing my ‘to read’ pile and my stress levels.

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However.

I’ve invested too much time (years), energy (and some money) in writing, editing, revising, researching, submitting and rewriting this book, never mind all the pfaff of getting a tax identity in the States, and learning how to create ebooks (nearly there with the older novel), to give up now. Also I am too bloody-minded. Also I owe all the kind friends who have supported me. So I shall add another few straws to the giant hayrick of books swamping the world – even though it fails to add up or make any sense at all.

Some rejected book covers to laugh at. I’ve learned a lot about InDesign

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PS. I have now finished the Surviving the Sword, sobering and good for realigning one’s priorities.

Hedgehog excitement

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We used to meet hedgehogs regularly in the garden at night, but of late years there has been very little evidence of them. For the last three months we have been leaving hedgehog food (Cranberry Crunch from the RSPB). The food gets eaten and there have been hedgehog droppings around, but no sightings, then tonight there was a great deal of scuffling and snuffling about 20 minutes ago and…
DSCN6143 DSCN6144They legged it very swiftly as soon as I approached with a camera, so I’m afraid you will need the eye of faith to spot them. But those two brown lumps like fluffy microphones tucked into the lefthand base of the pot are healthy young hedgehogs and they were frolicking in our knot garden and we are thrilled to pieces.

 

greenhouse shame

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This was going to be a boring post about TAX and ebooks, but I’ll save that until I have made a call to the US tax authorities.

In April I was putting up photos of my wonderful new greenhouse. Soon after this I started planting seeds like fury. I decided to try and use up all my old seeds (some very ancient indeed). After an anxious week or so a few little seedlings made an appearance in a couple of trays, but I didn’t really know when to take the lids of the propagators and one lot damped off. The others died on the very hot day we went into town forgetting to open the greenhouse ventilators. Absolutely nothing appeared in the other trays.

I tried again with fresher seed but had similar results. So my total greenhouse haul this year so far is four weeds, DSCN5900

the sweet pepper a friend gave me, DSCN5901

and behind that one of the two tomatoes I managed to grow, DSCN5899the other is in the vegetable patch. I did manage to grow a pot full of purple sprouting broccoli and that is in the veg bed along with some direct sown leeks, carrots etc, but still, it’s embarrassing.

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The good thing about gardens is that there is always another season and something else to admire. I rather like this last glimpse of the sun. DSCN6034 - Version 2The lilies are trying to make up for other failures,

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and the giant host is flowering madly.

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Thrilling post about tax coming in the next few days.

Musical joie de vivre in Peasmarsh and bonus

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We have just had one of those rare experiences – a mini holiday that exceeds all expectations. From the moment we arrived for a two day visit to old friends (plus two days in London afterwards), life, which was OK, became sublime.

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The weather helped as we sat out long into the evening, after a great meal, just talking. The following day we relaxed yet further. I had forgotten deck chairs even existed. We were able to catch up on tasks, ask advice for vexed questions (such as book covers), and forget briefly the list of things undone that are never absent at home.  DSCN5906

Later we visited the astonishing gardens of Great Dixter. The ultimate challenge to the tidy or colour-match-obsessed gardener.

DSCN5955In the evening we arrived at the Church of St Peter & St Paul, Peasmarsh for the last concert in the Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival http://www.peasmarshfestival.co.uk. We picnicked in the churchyard on delicious foods made by our friends, then went into the church for a Brahms violin Concerto, some exquisitely played Debussy and, after an interval, a Schumann quintet.

The church is tiny, the dais for the musicians, already accommodating the Steinway Grand, is tiny and we had front row seats (click on the link above to see rolling photos of the church and dais). The cello was less than two feet in front of me. I have never, never, experienced such a powerful, energetic musical rendition. Each performer was at their peak in this final piece of their final festival concert. Their joie de vivre was quite extraordinary.

The players were international: Anthony Marwood (violin), Richard Lester (cello), Magnus Johnston (violin), Benedetto Lupo (piano), CarlaMaria Rodrigues (viola); the venue a tiny parish church in a small village in East Sussex; the effect an astonishing musical experience and a privilege.

Then back with our friends to their wonderful garden.DSCN5913 DSCN5914 DSCN5925