Lots of things in bloom here at Meadow Knoll this week!
When we moved here nearly 30 years ago, there were no redbuds, and we didn't have the money to buy nursery plants. Happily, a wild redbud lived beside the lane, not far away. So for several years, we harvested her seedlings and replanted them in our woods. This is one of those seedlings, all grown up and stunning in her springtime purple finery.
But the redbud isn't just another pretty tree. Native Americans made a tea of the bark to treat fever, diarrhea, dysentery--and threw broken branches into a pool to stun fish. The purple flowers are edible and taste a little like pecans. Add to a salad or pancake batter. When the seed pods are green and tender, you can cook them like edible-pod peas and serve with butter. There's also redbud relish. Interesting, fun to try. Experiment. Use your imagination.
Book report. Ruby Wilcox is blooming, too. The first book in her novella trilogy--NoBODY--is now available for Kindle preorder, with just a little over a month until the April 16th launch date. The second and third (SomeBODY Else and Out of Body) will be along in May and June. The full trilogy will also be available on other platforms.
I'm hearing disappointment from some readers who prefer print to digital formats. Folks, I do understand. There are some books I must read in print (keepers for my bookshelf, research material with lots of notes). And I still love the weight of paper and the heft of a book in my hands.
But the fact of the matter is the bottom line. At 134 pages, it would cost nearly as much to print/bind/distribute NoBODY as it would to print/bind/distribute China's upcoming (June) mystery, A Plain Vanilla Murder (294 pages). You and your local library simply wouldn't want a half-size print book at nearly the full-size price. Luckily, we can price digital books at affordable prices: NoBODY is just $3.99, which makes it accessible to most readers.
There's more. For me, writing is all about imagining. About discovering. About creating something new and interesting--something I haven't done before (and after 30+ years as a professional writer, that's a bit difficult). In a shorter length, I can play with genre, form, characters, settings, and language in ways that are new to me. In digital, I can do some things I can't in print. Photographs, for example. Hyperlinks for another. With hyperlinks, I get to play with the overlapping boundaries of text, and isn't that fun?
If Ruby's novella trilogy is successful, I have other ideas for digital-only projects that I would love to share with you. Yes, I plan to continue publishing in print--there's another China Bayles novel in the works, and I'm already thinking about another Dahlias mystery. Both of those will be in hardcover for libraries and collectors, in digital, and eventually in paperback. But I'm hoping that enough of you will like digital-only enough to make that format viable.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Reading note. When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while. ―