2020 Christmas Letter, Part 3

Since tomorrow is Christmas Eve, I should be posting a blog about that blessed event we celebrate this time of year. Then I realized shortly after finishing up my Christmas letter last Wednesday that I had forgotten something else that happened this year. No big deal. No one cares. Then there was another thing and another and yet another, so I thought I should bite the bullet and backtrack.

I’d written a novella a year or two ago and had sent it to a few places to be published. I didn’t get a nibble, so the first of March, I thought I would try self-publishing it as an e-book only on Amazon.com. It went pretty smoothly, and even though I didn’t sell many, it didn’t cost me a thing and was way less time consuming than slaving away at finding someone to publish it for me. I continue to question the whole publishing business and ponder why I write and who I write for – for a score of paying fans or for myself. I have yet to figure that out, but in the meantime, I continue to write what I can when I can.

I’ve had a vegetable garden ever since moving into this house thirty years ago. Some years more so than others. The last few years, no doubt mostly due to my own neglect, the garden hadn’t been producing much. So early this past spring, we downsized it and put in raised beds. I was pretty pleased with the results.

In June, the kids put up a new garden shed for us. So perhaps my plants just grew so well because they felt they had a big brother watching out for them. Or, more likely, I actually fertilized and put down garden fabric to hold the weeds at bay.

 

The same weekend as the shed construction, my sister and I rented a cabin at a resort just north of here. It didn’t work out as hoped – my sister couldn’t stay as long as she wanted to and I didn’t get done as much writing as I would have liked. But the weather was beautiful and I talked my daughter into joining me one night.  

I think I already wrote about everything else worth mentioning. Except for my most recent overnight trip with my daughter to my son’s the first part of November. The weather was absolutely gorgeous – for that time of year – and we discovered this fascinating place. I haven’t blogged about it yet, so you’ll have to watch for that whole story come the new year.

And now I promise, that’s all, Folks. Chris