Early Summer

With the rash of crazy weather we've been having lately (it hit the low eighties at the end of February), I've been working like crazy on our little yard.

I replaced the landlord's garden with four raised beds that will include blackberries, rhubarb, and tomatoes, and I've cleaned up the preexisting raspberry beds in the front to the point at which they should produce quite well this summer.

Before:

After:

I transplanted about 32 blackberry bushes from my brother's house to one of my boxes and will hopefully have blackberries within a year or two:

I've done a whole lot of other generalized cleanup on the yard but that means I might be slightly behind on my editing. I do have the edits on the first book back from my editor and have been going through them. They have required some sweeping (i.e., minor, yet frequent) changes to my writing style and internal POV as well as plenty of smoothing out. Nothing at all I disagree with. So there's that.

I will admit I have struggled with the beginning of book two. It presents a number of challenges I have never faced before as I have never written a book two. I need to introduce old characters and new without boring my old readers with too much detail or alienating new ones with too little. It also has the distinct feeling of beginning in medias res. You know. Because it does.