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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation, enjoying the company of my two teenage grandchildren, Seth and Bailey, from Wisconsin. Author Leah Stewart was kind enough to offer to fill in for me today. Leah would love to hear from you; she answers all of her mail, and she is giving away a copy of her book Husband & Wife. You can reach her at: leah@leahstewart.com
Introducing author Leah Stewart . . .
When I moved to Cincinnati, I resolved to learn to garden. My new house, like my last, had beautiful gardens with an array of flowers I had no idea how to name or take care of. In the eight years we'd spent in our last house, my husband and I had let those gardens get overtaken by weeds and neglect, only to pull everything up and mulch indiscriminately when it was time to put the house on the market. This time, I wouldn't let that happen.
But not letting it happen turned out to be quite hard. First, I had to learn the difference between the good plants and the bad. Then I had to figure out where the good plants grow best and pay attention to where the sunlight fell in my garden. I had to figure out how much water was too much and how much was not enough. I had to mulch on my hands and knees in the heat while my four-year-old followed me around chattering and accidentally crunching the lilies. I had to suffer sore knees and an aching lower back, and then I had to suffer mistakes and bad luck--the shade-loving plant I let die in full sun, the cold wet spring that left a fungus on the hydrangeas. Sometimes I have had the very strong conviction that none of this time or effort is worth it.
This year, contemplating those black-spotted hydrangeas--$29.99 each!--I felt a powerful urge to abandon the entire project, perhaps even to buy a machete and level the garden to the ground. This frustration, this despair at the impossibility of perfection, this desire to give up was awfully familiar, because it's how I feel when my writing isn't going well. The book is never as good in reality as it seemed like it could be in my mind, and more than once I've imagined how satisfying it might be to delete all files, and burn a manuscript in the yard. Gardening works very well as a metaphor for writing a novel. There's good stuff and there's weeds, and every time you think you've pulled all the weeds out, you find another one, and sometimes the impossibility of ever getting rid of them entirely makes you want to stop trying.
I've never burnt a manuscript in the yard, and so far I haven't attacked my garden with a machete. I decide over and over to give up, and then I go back and reword a paragraph, or move an unhappy plant. So I suppose I must think the time and the effort and the trouble are worth what you can get from both pursuits--the satisfaction of bringing even a temporary beauty and order to your own small section of the world.
Leah Stewart
Say hello to Leah and enter her book giveaway: leah@leahstewart.com
About Leah Stewart...
Leah Stewart's latest novel, Husband & Wife, is a story about marriage and motherhood. Husband & Wife is just out in paperback and available at Target as an Emerging Writers pick. Leah is the author of two other novels, Body of a Girl and The Myth of You and Me. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati, and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two small children.
AUTHORBUZZ:
* To read more about A STRANGER LIKE YOU, and to enter this author's book giveaway, click on the link below, then click on A STRANGER LIKE YOU.
Elizabeth Brundage, today's featured author, writes...
In Hollywood, rejection is an everyday occurrence. But for screenwriter Hugh Waters it's not an option. When a young producer pulls the plug on his big film deal, claiming his story is implausible, Hugh determines to prove her wrong--by reenacting his violent ending and casting her as the victim.
To read more about A STRANGER LIKE YOU goto: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader
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