Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Garden Departments in June

My wife and I like to garden. We have flowerbeds around our house and a vegetable garden in the back corner of our yard. I love flowering plants and plants with interesting foliage.

We live in Western Pennsylvania. Here, unlike our native California, May is unpredictable. It is not consistently "good" gardening weather. May is a month with days of snow flurries and days that hit 80 degrees.

Yet, May is when the national chains expand their garden centers into the parking lots. Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowes place young trees, shrubs, and lots of annuals outside their fenced-in and covered garden areas.

It promptly freezes two or three nights in a row. The injured survivors are placed on clearance racks. I've purchased a few of those weakened survivors, with mixed results. Still, clearance is clearance, and plants aren't cheap.

The local Master Gardeners suggest planting after Mother's Day, which is usually the last freeze. This year, Mother's Day was over 80 and humid. It was horrible. And now, just a few weeks later, it was in the 50s and cold enough that people are in jackets again.

Local garden shops at the national chains should know the region.

Instead, the local garden shops are downsizing this first week of June. Just as we finally enter the predictable planting season, the plants start to vanish.

This is Western Pennsylvania, not the Southwest.

You see the colorful annuals, the early perennials, and you want to plant them. But, knowing they will die or at least go into shock, you wait for the first week of June. You drive the Jeep to the garden center, all ready to trade green paper for green leaves. The plants are gone. Not moved. Not on clearance. Gone. So you drive to the next garden center. And the next.

The best places to buy plants, we've discovered, are the local businesses. They get it. Maybe they have a deal with the distributor or something, but as the chains shrink their garden areas, the local nurseries and landscaping suppliers expand.

At least the chains' ignorance of local climates is great for local business.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Unemployed = Full-Time Writer

The only way to be a full-time writer is to be unemployed.

Writing means spending hours skimming online postings of contests and other submission opportunities. Screenwriters and playwrights have to network, too, which means attending events and meetings with directors, production companies, actors, and other writers. You have to pursue pitching your works almost with the same energy you invest in writing.

Treat writing like a business, if you want to earn a living at it.

Last September, I declared my intention to become a published, real paid professional playwright. I was going to clean up the existing plays and submit things to various producers and publishers.

And then reality happened.

Nope. Nothing publishing.

I did have a new show produced, after swearing I wouldn't write a new script, and it was a good experience… but I'm still not published. Still an amateur, I suppose.

Writers and other artists have to be the most secure insecure people on Earth. We don't stop trying to pursue our crafts, confident we have something worthy of being shared. We also never stop doubting the very convictions that compel us to create.

My passion, as the post from last September indicates, had waned after mixed reviews and no publications. By the time I started to want to write again, I was teaching an overload schedule with no time to read through submission opportunities. Now, I have time to pursue writing again. For better or worse, I'm not planning to teach full-time in the coming school year.

Without other work to distract me (or to pay me), I should be pretty motivated to make this writing thing work. At least, that's the plan for now.