Prepping the Vegetable Garden. (Credit: photo by Keith Carreiro, June 2016, Swansea, Massachusetts.)
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Raking . . . (Credit: photo by Carolyn Carreiro, May 2016.)
Raking, weeding, sweeping, cleaning, pruning, cutting and trimming grass. Don’t even think about re–staining the exterior sides of the house, garage and shed. Reseeding and fertilizing the lawn. Shopping at the local nurseries for vegetable plants and flowers. Then, of course, they need to be planted, along with the plants and seeds ordered from Burpee Seeds.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
? Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Henry and Vavu. (Credit: photo by Laura Carreiro, May 2016, Norwalk, Connecticut.)
I also had to go see my new grandson and attend my other grandson’s birthday party in southwestern Connecticut. The new baby, Henry, is about a month old and the other, Jackson, turned two. They represent our twelfth and thirteenth grandchildren. It was two years ago that I made the same pilgrimage to see Jackson. That was during the week when I started writing the Pilgrim. The pressure was on to duplicate the literary effort made in 2014.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
— G. K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of GK Chesterton
I also investigated what it took to make an audiobook. I learned that I could create a passable recording space in my home with a minimum amount of materials and free software that can be downloaded from the web. I also learned that audiobooks are an increasingly viable and economically attractive way to increase the amount of potential sales an author can generate along with eBook and print on demand [POD] formats.
Turning over the Soil. (Credit: Photo by Keith Carreiro, May 2016.)
Jackson and Vavu. (Credit: Photo by Laura Carreiro, May 2016.)
Memorial Day Weekend loomed ever more closely, until the Monday before, being May 23, I drove back from seeing my grandsons, settled in, taught a guitar lesson and went outside to the vegetable garden and started getting rid of the weeds.
The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.”
— Helen Simpson, The Guardian
I went to a nearby nursery and bought some organic chicken manure and applied it to the top of the eight rows of the vegetable garden. Also spread on top of the rows was a grade of 10 10 10 fertilizer, containing equal percentages of nitrogen (N), phosphate (P2O5) and potash (K2O).
Prepping THE PILGRIM. Screenshot of the beginning of Chapter One.
There’s got to be a moral, or a message, to this reflection. What do you think it might be? . . .
Related Links:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1630.Ray_Bradbury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury
http://www.chesterton.org/who-is-this-guy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7014283.G_K_Chesterton
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/the-reactionary/308889/
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sylvia-plath
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/why-sylvia-plath-haunts-american-culture/309310/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
http://www.helensimpsonwriter.com/
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/55708.Helen_Simpson
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/07/featuresreviews.guardianreview9
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