novel status, life status

Greetings! I'm nearly done with drafting my new novel, the World War II thriller. I'll be revising it in September, and then I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing with it. My stand-alone books don't sell all that well on Amazon (and hardly ever on other platforms), so I might try marketing it directly to publishers instead. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

After that, I'm not sure what I'll be writing. I have a lot of ideas, so whatever appeals to me at that moment.

Otherwise, I'm busy being a new homeowner. The lawn (which, by the way, I hate with the force of a thousand suns!) takes up about four hours a week. My vegetable garden is a much happier endeavor, and I enjoy the bit of self-reliance it provides. I have enough yard that I could be quite self-reliant. I live in a country-ish area that still has regulations but allows five hens per home with sufficient space. I also have 1/3 of an acre, and you can grow a lot of fruit and vegetables on that. Were I to convert the lawn to all vegetable and fruit garden, I could survive for at least nine months of the year.

Although, with the fight I had with cabbage beetles on my bok choi, I'd have to quit eating foods in that family, for sure.

Some cheap phone/ too blurry pictures of the state of my veggie garden a week ago. Potatoes (planted late), cherry tomatoes (coming in well now), regular tomatoes (barely approaching orange), bell peppers, squash. That poor pepper plant was transplanted three times, uprooted by a raccoon and dragged 20 feet across my sister's deck, and then a big tomato plant in a cage fell over on it in a bad storm, smashing it flat to the ground, and somehow it still is making peppers.

I promise to try and be more like that pepper plant!