Catherine Fitzsimmons's Blog: Jinxed, page 7

Halloween countdown: three days to go

Tonight’s dinner: Witchy moon stuffed acorn squash



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Dessert: Potions and spells cupcakes



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2020 edition jack-o’-lanterns: “What do you want to do tonight, Brain?” “The same thing we do every night, Pinky.”



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Today’s craft: Melty beads



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Today’s socks



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Halloween countdown: Four days to go

Today’s dinner: Jack-o’-lantern quesadillas



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Dessert: Broken glass cupcakes



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Today’s socks



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Halloween countdown: Day five

Since the pandemic has put the kibosh on trick-or-treating and parties this year, I wanted to do what I can to make Halloween special. I may be going a little overboard.

Today’s dinner: Spaghetti and eyeballs



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Dessert: Skeleton cupcakes



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2020 edition jack-o’-lanterns: This is all your fault



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Today’s craft: Paper decorations



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Today’s socks



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September 6th: Algonquin Park

Photos from a weekend in Algonquin Park in Ontario and a hike on the Centennial Ridges trail.

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Confessions of a former botanophobe: the aftermath

I know the growing season isn’t entirely over yet, but here in southern Ontario, the nights are getting cool and we’re preparing for the onset of winter. So I thought I would give an update on how my gardening efforts, the first time I seriously attempted growing anything, progressed from the beginning of the season.

The stars of my garden were the seeds I harvested from grocery store vegetables—tomatoes and bell peppers. The latter had a slower start, but has borne a lot of very healthy-looking fruit in the past month. The jalapeño seeds took even longer to grow much, but finally yielded its first pepper in the past couple weeks, and since we brought it inside, it has bloomed another couple flowers.

[image error]Tomatoes are starting to look a little ratty.[image error]The first jalapeño. More on the way![image error]I guess bell peppers don’t need a lot of space.

Mostly, the vegetables haven’t been ready to harvest yet. However, I did eat my first tomato yesterday, which was very tasty.

[image error]Two fruits decided to ripen before the rest.[image error]Not super big, but a healthy size.[image error]Delicious.

I had an exaggerated sense of how temperature-tolerant the plants were, which may have stunted the ripening process for many of the tomatoes. With a frost warning tonight, I decided to go ahead and harvest the rest and let them ripen indoors (hopefully, or else I’ll see how fried green tomatoes actually taste).

[image error]Perhaps not a particularly bountiful harvest, but not bad for my first try.

I’m quite interested to try a home grown bell pepper, though the only colour they have exhibited so far aside from green is some purple striping when it got a bit chilly for them overnight earlier this week. They have been living inside since and the peppers have gone back to green, and continued growing, if slowly.

The lettuce was a big surprise. After a couple of false starts trying to start the seeds indoors, I gave up and planted the rest of the seeds in their final home, and they proliferated so much that I was able to harvest a few salads’ worth, until the squirrels dug them up so much that they stopped growing back.

[image error]“I’ll just throw the rest of the seeds in here.” Two weeks later: “Oh.”

Having never grown or known much about growing anything that did not produce food as some sort of separate fruit, however, I was blown away by the idea that I could just rip the leaves off and they would just keep growing.

Alas, after their initial burst, my pumpkins didn’t do so well, and I finally gave up on them a week or two ago. I don’t know what it was I did wrong. I thought, after seeing a family member’s progress on a similar squash that had required a lot more water than I had been giving my pumpkins, that they were just thirsty, but either that wasn’t the solution or it was already too late by then.

Now that we’re at the end of the growing season, we’re looking ahead to next year. After reading that in warm enough conditions, bell peppers plants will continue growing and producing for a few years, we’ve decided to keep tending to them now that they’re inside. Same with the jalapeños. Both have now attained a semi-permanent home in a south-facing room upstairs with a full-spectrum light on a timer set nearby.

I enjoyed raising my garden enough this year that I’ve decided I want to create a proper one next year, though I need to start preparing a plot for that now to be ready for it. More tomatoes are a given, and I want to try pumpkins again. I will definitely be planting more lettuce next year. Other options I’m considering include green onions, celery, green beans, and zucchini.

In all, I’d call this experiment a success.

Welcome to Jinxed

Hello, visitor. I’m Catherine, an author, artist, publisher, reader, photographer, mom, and cat herder with way too many hobbies. This is my personal blog and website where you can find more information about my work as well as posts about writing, books, or whatever else I feel like talking about. Keep reading for my latest posts or check the archive or category listing for specific dates/topics.

September update: Success?

Well, the good news is that I achieved my writing goal of adding 20,000 words to book three of my Sisters of Chaos trilogy in August, for the first time in six months.

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However, I’m not entirely convinced this was a good thing. For one thing, after fighting to the last day of the month to get that word count in, I had only a few hours to enjoy my success before the clock simply reset and I had only to look forward to doing it all over again. It wasn’t a particularly inspiring victory.

Aside from that, I ended up with a fair bit of writing I’m not entirely pleased with. I know the point was to just get the words out and worry about cleaning it up later, but it’s discouraging to achieve that word count with content I’m immediately dissatisfied with as soon as it’s on the page.

As a result of these issues, I haven’t written a word in the story since. Part of it is simply that I don’t feel ready to write the climax of the story yet, which is pretty much where I am now without going back and adding/editing other scenes. But I think I need to go about my word count goals differently.

Obviously I need to just sit down and continue writing. I’ve a ways to go yet to reach my initial goal of having a first draft of the manuscript complete before the end of the year, and this seventeen-day slump is one of my longer ones of this year. Yet perhaps I won’t worry so much about forcing more words out for the sake of a word count goal if I feel something’s not working.

August update

Had I stuck to the writing goal I set in March of this year, I would have a complete 120,000-word draft of book three of the Sisters of Chaos trilogy by now. That has not happened. I also admittedly didn’t do a great job of trying to recover from that in July.

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Instead, I ended the month with only 71,506 words. However, I’m well on track for my initial goal of having the draft done by the end of the year, especially since I’m starting August off on the right foot for a change (knock on wood).

I’m also feeling better about the story now. About halfway through July, I spent some time doing plot development and nailed down some things to make the book more interesting. It will involve a fair bit of rewriting, but the story is looking much better for it. I should have done more writing after that point last month, but what’s done is done. Or not done, as it were. I surpassed my progress in July by this Sunday and have managed to keep that second graph above the blue line overall, so I’m both hopeful and motivated to continue writing.

Here goes.

July update and NEW BOOK!

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Okay, so only about 1/10th of the content of this book is actually my writing, but I’m still very proud of this new book. It’s an anthology of stories from authors I’ve been privileged to publish over the years, and every story in it is fantastic. It even includes one from me about Liam from the Sisters of Chaos trilogy, and a story from J. R. Dwornik about Lyle from the same series. So please check it out!

Now, on to my terribly delayed monthly update for June.

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So, clearly I still fell well short of my monthly goal of 20,000 words, but I did far better than in May, and at least achieved half of my goal. The problem, obviously, is that I simply didn’t write for many days. I rarely allow myself to fall short of my daily word count goal when I actually sit down to write, I just too often don’t end up trying. To be perfectly honest, usually it’s simply because I don’t feel like it/don’t want to write.

Most of that comes from the fact that I’m feeling dissatisfied with the story. I know it can, and will, get better, but I suppose it’s been so long since I really did any heavy writing that I’m getting discouraged a lot easier when what I write doesn’t immediately come out worthy. Mainly I continue to write new scenes that end up as large blocks of exposition. I will improve on them, I just need to get past my own perfectionism and blank page syndrome to simply advance the story.

I should have a 120,000-word manuscript written by the end of this month, but at present I’m only clocking in a hair under 70k. But hey, 70,000 words is a pretty decent book on its own, and it’s still 70,000 words more than I had at the beginning of the year. I need to focus on that more than how much I still have left to do, and just write.

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Beyond writing, I haven’t done much of note recently. Stress/overall emotional state has largely reduced my extracurricular activities to reading and another play-through of Trials of Mana. I have only a few books left in my TBR pile, though I’ve had occasional diversions with books from daughter’s collection or library acquisitions, and have added a couple as well. I’m looking forward to having an excuse to dive into the many ebooks I’ve collected over the years.

Of course, being halfway through the month, my course has already been pretty much set, and so far my writing hasn’t progressed much better in July than it went in June.

But there’s still time to improve that.

Confessions of a former botanophobe

Growing up, there were always plants in the house. Hostas, ficus, Norfolk Island pine, aloe vera, maybe some herbs on the kitchen window sill. Green things, rather than flowers or fruits or vegetables. That seemed to be common among the houses I visited as well. Maybe it’s a Texas thing. It’s certainly too hot to tend an outdoor garden for half the year.

I was never involved in the care of those plants. As a kid—teenager—I wasn’t really interested in taking care of plants. It’s never been a bug for me, and after moving out, I learned that I have a brown thumb. I’ve killed cacti. I’ve killed plants that are notoriously hard to kill.

Granted, a large reason I’ve done poorly with plants is neglect. I forget, or rather decline, to water plants and then throw them out when they’re nothing but dried husks. But I tried, I really tried, to properly care for a seedling my daughter brought home from school, which was supposed to be a very easy to care for plant, and I still killed it.

So a year or two (three?) ago, I officially gave up on trying to grow anything. I’ve never really missed having plants around anyway. [image error]When my daughter later brought home a gladiolus bulb, I told her it was her job to care for it. I bought a spade for her to plant it in the back yard and took pictures of her doing it. That was about the extent of my involvement.

Truth be told, I don’t think it received much in the way of care from my daughter either after that point, but it bloomed beautiful red flowers in summer and grew taller than her, before a squirrel stole the bulb in the fall and it subsequently never came back. But it grew. A plant, within the borders of my home, did exactly what it was supposed to do and thrived.[image error]

I always love seeing flowers in the spring. The warmer air and sight of green things and beautiful colours never fails to cheer me. Many years, I walk around the neighbourhood and think about beautifying my own home. Add some colour, maybe a hanging plant or two. But, I’m still just not interested in gardening. Certainly not enough to be worth the fight to keep the cats from getting to it.

For some reason, however, a few months ago as lockdown began to stretch on, the thought of growing vegetables stuck in my head. I still don’t know why. But I figured that lots of people grow gardens successfully, it can’t really be that hard.

I started small. I knew my own history with plants, and my historical lack of interest in caring for them. So at first, after looking up regrowing vegetables from scraps, I decided to try regrowing an onion. And what do you know, it did. I don’t have a whole onion yet, but it’s regrown quite a bit of greens and a little bit of the vegetable itself. Same with celery and lettuce (I later killed the lettuce, but mainly allowed that because I got better stock).

So, continuing the trend of minimum investment, I collected seeds from a bell pepper and from a tomato and, after buying some soil and peat pots, planted those. Lo and behold, they sprouted as well! In fact, these ones ended up sprouting too well and became bushes. After buying some larger pots, I replanted a number of them and, despite being dug up by squirrels a couple of times, they’re growing quite well now.

I ended up buying some seeds in addition to those I collected. I chose a poor location to browse for seeds, as there was very little selection left. At the same time, I didn’t have any idea what I was actually looking for, so I suppose it’s just as well I was only given a few choices. I ended up buying lettuce, oregano, and pie pumpkin seeds, as well as a couple flowers I’m less invested in.

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I am the pumpkin queen.

The pumpkins amazed me. I started the seeds in peat pellets and they literally sprouted overnight. After replanting them in their final home, they were growing at least half an inch per day (until being dug up by squirrels… an ongoing problem). I’ve even had the second seeds from each pellet sprout, weeks after one had already dominated its pellet. They’re growing far better than I would have expected, and far quicker than anything else.

Everything’s in pots, and I’d been bringing them inside at night to keep them safe, though they’ve remained outdoors over the past week. I was concerned for them when we got heavy rain this week, yet all of the plants (aside from the flowers, which I planted in an old salad tub but forgot to add drainage) seemed to love the extra water, so I’m watering them a bit more each day now.

All told, everything’s looking really good so far. I cooked off my first oregano seeds and didn’t harden off the lettuce properly, so I’ve started new seeds for both of those, which are going to stay in their greenhouse a little longer. (Since the pumpkins sprouted so fast, the lettuce and oregano got replanted too early.) I’ve done a lot of reading about how to care for these plants and I’m enjoying watching them grow, and taking care of them this time.

As I tend to do with new projects, I had ambitious thoughts of a complete garden rushing through my head with these successes, but fortunately, I managed to keep my impulses in check. If I succeed and enjoy growing these plants this year, then maybe we will set up a proper garden in the back yard next year. I’ve never had the opportunity to step out my back door and pick food for the dinner table, so I’m excited about the prospect of getting some vegetables out of this.