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I was derailed for a few months but not deterred.

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

And … I’m back.

I never intended to let months lapse between posts, but for a while there, life took the wheel and I was just along for the ride. Just as I was getting back to feeling pretty normal following my knee replacement surgery in February, I found myself spending a week in the hospital in June with acute pancreatitis, ending with surgery to remove my gallbladder. That was definitely not in my plans for this year.

Still, all went well with the surgery, and the recovery has not been bad. But I was further distracted when, about a week after I got home from the hospital, the leg on my hundred-year-old mahogany bed broke, leading me to tackle a project I had not planned to do until sometime next year—giving my bedroom an entire makeover. That involved getting someone in to paint the room, having a friend bring his carpet cleaner over to give the rug a long-overdue shampooing, and then—the most tedious part—refreshing my entire bedroom set with chalk paint and wax. What a chore! And in the meanwhile, the projects I had intended to focus on this summer—replacing fences, reorganizing the back garden, and finishing my novel—got virtually no attention from me at all, along with this too-long-ignored Substack.

But now, with surgery scars healed and my bedroom finally put back together, I’m ready to get back to the two things I want to be focused on and, coincidentally, the two things this Substack is about—gardening and writing. So here’s where those things stand.

In the Garden

Photo by Terrance Raper on Unsplash

While I was recovering from knee surgery followed by gallbladder surgery, weeds launched a full-scale invasion in my back yard. They are mostly annual weeds, but of course, they’re the kind that reseed with total abandon. Most of my plants have been holding their own but I think I’ve lost a couple roses that I had intended to plant in my mother’s memorial garden. Deeply annoying but at least they are replaceable.

I had intended to get all the beds weeded before getting the fence work done, but last week I scrapped that plan and called a few fencing companies to come out and provide estimates for replacing both side fences as well as rehabbing a dilapidated carport into a new pergola. The first bid just came in and I’m still suffering from severe sticker shock. (Thank you, Donald Trump! Those higher tariff rates on Canadian lumber are not making us great—they’re making us poorer.) Still, the work has to be done and I know I will enjoy the garden so much more when these jobs are done.

The other thing that has left the garden looking pretty sad is that it seems that summer in the SF Bay Area was delayed until about a week ago. I’ve lived here all my life and I’m quite used to the idea that no matter what spring is like, we will inevitably spend June under a blanket of fog (“June gloom” as locals call it). This year, however, June gloom continued throughout July and well into August. The result? Stunted warm-season veggies and powdery mildew on my lilac, honeysuckle, and assorted other shrubs and perennials. I’ve had mildew on squash plants at the end of the season before and maybe a touch of it on strawberry plants, but never on perennials and shrubs. That’s how weird the weather has been this summer. But things are warming up now and we’ll have to wait and see if we get our warmest temperatures in September and October as we normally would.

On the Page

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

I’m embarrassed to say that since I got home from the writer’s retreat I went on in April, I’ve barely worked on my novel-in-progress at all. Whenever I did sit down to work on it, I was so lacking in focus that I more often ended up deleting text rather than adding to it. Apparently, I am un-writing my novel.

I’ve been wrestling with why this has been happening. I came home from the retreat feeling energized and enthusiastic, ready to power through the rest of the first draft and on to polishing the manuscript enough to send out. So what went wrong? I think I finally figured out the problem and it makes me cringe to admit it. All the feedback I got on the sample pages that were critiqued at the critique was almost universally positive. People really liked the story and expressed that would love to read more. One of the agents attending the retreat told me she would like to see the full novel when it’s ready. I couldn’t have hoped for a better reception.

And it was paralyzing.

I think every time I sat down to write, I was thinking that any words I put down on the page had to be as good as the pages I’d brought to the retreat, which, to be honest, I had polished and refined numerous times. There was no way the chapters I was working on now in first draft would be as good. I think I’m finally talking myself out of that bit of self-sabotage and slowly getting back to writing the rest of a “shitty first draft,” to use Anne Lamott’s technical term for it.

So I am getting back to focusing on the things that matter to me and that includes this Substack. If you’ve read this far, thanks for hanging in there with me. There’s more to come. I promise.