ITS GETTING HOT OUT HERE...

To all my current and future #DCSPeeps (DECIDE, COMMIT, SUCCEED), welcome to my new series in my continuing effort to inspire, amuse, and entertain you! Each Monday I will select a new word to analyze how it might apply to our writing lives and also give you a peek into my childhood growing up in the swamps of southern Louisiana, so kick back, put your feet up, and check out my story about TODAY'S WORD:

 

PLANTING

 

With the rising temperatures announcing the arrival of Spring, my thoughts turn to vegetable gardens. One image I will always have from my childhood is my mother planting her vegetable garden no matter where we lived. Small yard, large yard, she always found the space to supplement her meager grocery allowance for our family of six with food fresh from the garden.

Every spring I would look through the Burpee seed catalog as my mother made plans for her latest endeavor. Green beans to potatoes to carrots and radishes, everything had a place in my mother's garden. But the one vegetable I remember the best are her tomatoes.

No starter plants would do except for the free ones she could get from the local sewage processing plant. I imagine most people stayed away from that place due to the overwhelming smell alone. 

But not my mother.

Every year, we would make our way to the fields surrounding the processing building, and my mother would dig up the young tomato plants that had managed to make it through the sanitation process to start their new lives among the rich fertilizer to be found nearby. Maybe not the sweetest smelling beginning, but those plants provided some of the juiciest, most flavorful tomatoes around come harvest time. I guess she could have bought them from Burpee, but the hard work put into the initial harvesting made the ending worthwhile.

It's the same with our writing.

We can try planting just any old generic idea and hope it grows into something appealing. Or we can go in search of that stronger plot...even among the smelly muck of our own self-doubt ...and transplant it into a field rich with  imagination and skillful writing to produce a flavorful story worthy of our readers sinking their teeth into. 

 

 

Let the harvesting begin!

 

 

Children's book author, Donna L Martin, has been writing since she was eight years old. She is a 4th Degree Black Belt in TaeKwonDo by day and a 'ninja' writer of children’s picture books, middle grade chapter books and young adult novels by night. Donna is a BOOK NOOK REVIEWS host providing the latest book reviews on all genres of children’s books. She is also a book reviewer for Harper Collins, and a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. Donna is a lover of dark chocolate, good stories, and an adoptive mom to 20-pound guard kitty in Knoxville, Tennesse

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PLANTING SEEDS OF SELF-DOUBT

 

To all my current and future #DCSPeeps (DECIDE, COMMIT, SUCCEED), welcome to my new series in my continuing effort to inspire, amuse, and entertain you! Each Monday I will select a new word to analyze how it might apply to our writing lives and also give you a peek into my childhood growing up in the swamps of southern Louisiana, so kick back, put your feet up, and check out my story about TODAY'S WORD:

SELF-DOUBT

There's a hint of spring in the air and it reminds me of all the times my mother waited for spring to arrive. Seed catalog in hand, she would walk the perimeter of the latest house we were renting and plot all the ways she would turn one little yard into a massive veggie producing garden.


Every available inch would be cultivated and every vegetable imaginable would be planted. My mother never once seem to have SELF-DOUBT concerning her ability to provide for her children through the efforts of her own making. I often wished I could glide my way through my own life the way my mother managed to sail so confidently through hers.

I have dreamed of being an author most of my life. When I was 6 years old I started writing poetry. By age 11, I was winning local writing contests, and by the time I graduated high school I was working on my second volume of poems as well as writing essays and editorials for my high school paper as its editor. I was well on my way to fulfilling my dream of seeing my name on the cover of my own book one day.

Then SELF-DOUBT entered my life. In my early 20’s I allowed someone else to erode my belief that I was any good at this writing thing. And when those tentacles of SELF-DOUBT started to wrap itself around my spirit, it affected all aspects of my life. My relationships. My weight. My writing.

I put away my pen and stopped writing for over 25 years. I never realized how crippled I had become by SELF-DOUBT until one morning seven years ago when a shocking miracle happened and the passion for writing finally returned to me. Seven years later I continue to write…having managed to get published a few times and even seen my name on the cover of my first children’s book…and I’ve learned the secret to stopping SELF-DOUBT in its tracks!

As long as you keep moving…keep reaching for the stars…and never give up on YOU, then those ugly tentacles of SELF-DOUBT no longer have the power to destroy your spirit!

Now go out and conquer your own SELF-DOUBT, DCSPeeps, while having an awesome day because you deserve it!

 

Children's book author, Donna L Martin, has been writing since she was eight years old. She is a 4th Degree Black Belt in TaeKwonDo by day and a 'ninja' writer of children’s picture books, middle grade chapter books and young adult novels by night. Donna is a BOOK NOOK REVIEWS host providing the latest book reviews on all genres of children’s books. She is also a book reviewer for Harper Collins, and a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. Donna is a lover of dark chocolate, good stories, and an adoptive mom to 20-pound guard kitty in Knoxville, Tennessee.

 

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TALES FROM THE BAYOU: A Canning Craze

I always have two memories when I think about summer. One is the fact that I am highly allergic to the sun and all the lovely high humidity coming from living in eastern Tennessee. But the other memory is all the summers growing up in Louisiana where my mother was the undisputed canning queen of the south. If there was a way Mother could stuff a fruit or vegetable into a canning jar she would find it!

At every house we moved into over the years Mother always made sure there was room for a garden. The last house before I moved out on my own boasted a flower garden  by the driveway where Mother grew her beloved tulips. But if you looked closely enough you could see the mint, green onion, or dill plants she hid among the flowers. On the other side of the house was a row of potato hills and a large fig tree where Mother would spend hours over the summer harvesting the fruit and freezing the peeled figs sprinkled with sugar so we could have frozen treats throughout the winter.

But it was the back yard where mother communed with Mother Earth the best. I was raised in a home with one small income and six mouths to feed. Back in those days there wasn't the expanded Food Stamp program like you find in the states today so Mother would depend on what was left over from Daddy's paychecks after the bills were paid, a monthly "food pantry" type distribution in the next town thirty miles away, whatever she could barter away from an old man who visited our town once a week with extra produce and any vegetables she could managed to grow at each house we lived in.

Mother's backyard garden had everything from lettuce and tomatoes to beans and cucumbers. Rows of corn stood tall next to cabbage and cauliflower. One year I even remember her growing a row of tall sunflowers along the back fence. I was fascinated by those flowers and watched all summer long as they grew taller than my father with their heads almost touching the ground, so heavy with seeds I was surprised their stalks didn't snap in half from the weight.

I knew the routine. Weed pulling in the morning, harvesting anything that was ready in the afternoon, and canning on the weekends. By the end of summer every spare inch of space in the dining room would be stacked with jars of summer goodness.

My mother was creative when it came to storing those jars. One summer she found someone in the neighborhood getting rid of two old televisions. This was back in the day when the inside of the TVs held one large picture tube and a few other wires. Other people would have simply thrown those broken TVs in the trash and not given it another thought.

Not my mother.

I remember wondering what in the world were we going to do with them, but soon Mother had thrown out the picture tubes, built shelves inside the wooden frames and put curtains on the front of each before stacking them on top of each other in one corner of the dining room. Viola! Instant food pantry! We never had to worry about not having enough to eat during the summer.

This is the time of year when I can walk through my local grocery story and see canning supplies on the shelves just waiting for the summertime harvest. It always makes me smile and remember my mother and how hard she tried to keep her family fed during hard times. What a pioneer spirit she had...

Sit A While In My Garden...

 

 

 

 

(Wikipedia Commons)

 

My mother loved all types of gardens.  She loved being outdoors.  I can remember flower gardens every place we lived when I was growing up.  I remember the happiness my mother found working in the dirt to bring some beauty into our lives.  It wasn't until I became an adult that I realized the time and effort she put into such a simple thing as a flower garden.

 

While working in my yard yesterday I realized that writing is very much like tending a garden. What I thought would be an easy chore as I have a very small yard, turned out in fact to be quite tedious and took more than four hours to just do the basics.

 



 

(Wikipedia Commons)

 

 

If I were to cut my yard in a simple pattern with the object being only to get job done with as little effort made as possible, it would the same as it I threw a few cactus into the ground and called it a garden.  Yeah, the rudimentary elements are there and some would indeed call it a garden, but there wouldn't be much color or beauty to the finished project.  It's the same with beginning a new story.  I can throw some Who, What, When, Why, and How into it, but does it really become a great story with just the basics?

 

 

(Wikipedia Commons)

 

Now, how about if I take out my weed eater and trim the edges of my yard?  Start to shape things and make sure everything in my yard has a specific purpose for being there?  Maybe add a little splash of color here and there to help bring excitement to my landscaping?  Then it would be more like a Japanese garden where the balance between functionality and beauty draws attention to my handiwork.  But still it might be lacking something.  A missing piece which invites the world to come by and take a look.  If I add tension and a strong plot to my stories, it might capture the attention of my readers for a few pages or maybe even a few chapters.  But if the magical element or spirit of the story doesn't hook them, they will leave without caring about the ending.

 

 

(Wikipedia Commons)

 

How about if I trimmed the hedges, planted flowers, set up cozy chairs amongst the beauty and welcomed the world with open arms?  Wouldn't that be a garden worth visiting?

 

My writing should be like a garden...well thought out, well tended, every aspect of it planned out for optimum exposure.  It should have a subtle sense of purpose and have a strong voice to entice readers to come for a visit. Only then will the beauty of it be seen by others.  Only then can I comfortably sit a while in my garden...and plan the next one...