It’s been a jam-packed summer at Casa Clare. With the first snowflakes falling this morning, I thought I'd share some of the highlights with you.

As some of you know, I got rid of my lawn many years ago and have a huge flower garden and a productive urban farm. Our flower beds bloomed beautifully all summer. Several times, people stopped to tell us how beautiful it was. We love sharing that beauty with others.

We had record cherry, apple, plum, peach, and pear harvests out of our own garden this year. I have never pitted so many cherries in my life. We ate the peaches and pears fresh. We ate many apples, turned some into cinnamon apple sauce, and used some in pies. We still have plenty left.

Our tomato harvest was off the charts, as well. We had so many one-pound+ tomatoes that they were no longer exciting. Yes, another huge tomato. We've made so much sauce. We ate some fresh and froze the rest.

Cucumbers and shishito peppers. Herbs. Potatoes. Everything gave us a record harvest, come to think of it—everything except garlic. Something went wrong there, and I have no idea what.

Of course, having a large garden is a lot of work. When you grow that much fruit and veg, you need to preserve that bounty. In addition to applesauce and plum jam, I dehydrated cherry tomatoes and made pickles and dill pickle relish with our peppers and cucumbers. It took me three hours to chop the veg for the relish. I won't do that again! I now have a device to do it for me. I also got an electric water bath canner, which was a huge help.

I made things worse by having foot surgery in July. I had to get help with the garden while I healed. Still, I finished and released my 36th novel, Take Me Higher, featuring fan favorites Megs Hill and Mitch Ahearn. I had more fun writing their story than I've had in a while. 

Sorry to have been MIA again for so long. I have a good excuse this time.

Much has happened here at Casa Clare since my last blog post. We're deep into the gardening season with lots of landscape projects. I had emergency gallbladder surgery. Barely Breathing (Colorado High Country #1) got a brand new sexy cover that brings it into alignment with the rest of the series. And Conrad and Kenzie’s story (Colorado High Country #6) is in progress and due for release late this month.

Life on the Urban Farm

As some of you know, I love to garden and have completed some of the coursework toward a master gardener certification. We have a large rose garden that is a few days away from being in full bloom. We have lots of wildflowers for bees, along with herbs and lavender for sensory enjoyment. Last year, we put in an orchard of eight fruit trees.

We had a beautiful and unusually rainy spring. The trees—apart from the Honeycrisp apple and peach tree which wore themselves out fruiting last year—flowered and began to set fruit. Then we had a bad hail storm that tore most of the pears from one of our pear trees and took off a lot of leaves. We thought we'd gotten off okay — still lots of pears, still some apples, some plums, and lots of cherries— when we noticed that the Fireside apple tree and Bartlett pear tree had fireblight.

Heartbreak! Lamentation!

The wet spring and the hail damage combined to help the bacteria that causes this deadly tree disease to flourish. We've trimmed diseased branches off both trees, caring to dip the pruners in bleach between cuts, and more twigs die off. First the fruit withers and dies, and then the leaves die. I'm not at all certain we'll be able to save either tree.

Unless we want to break out toxic chemicals we're not really equipped to use, we really have no options besides doing our best to give the tree what it needs and hoping it fights off the disease.

Our strawberries got nicked by hail, but we've had our first few bowls for breakfast. There's nothing like homegrown strawberries. Our raspberries are thriving, too. So there are lots of things to be grateful for.

We planted a lot of potatoes, and those didn't seem to notice the hail. I expect a record spud harvest late this summer.

New cover for Barely Breathing

I’m sure Colorado High Country/Scarlet Springs fans noticed that the series changed its look between the first book (Barely Breathing, Lexi and Austin) and the second book (Slow Burn, Hawke and Victoria). Between those two releases, I’d done some research that showed that solo hero covers sell much better than couples. I made the change for the second book, but that left the first looking like it wasn't really part of the series.

I finally had time to do something about it, and I love the new look.

Conrad and Kenzie get their story

The last we heard about Harrison Conrad, the alpinist on the Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue Team, he had almost died in a catastrophe while attempting to summit Mt. Everest for the third time. His team, including his best buddy, were killed. He was the only one to survive. Rather than coming back to Scarlet, we heard that he was in Nepal.

Well, Megs has had enough of this, and she goes after him, finding him at a Buddhist monastery.

In Barely Breathing, you got the hint that Conrad and Kenzie, the search-and-rescue dog trainer, liked each other. It’s Kenzie — and a sweet little golden retriever puppy named Gabby — that help Conrad pull his life back together in the wake of tragedy.

Watch for an excerpt soon!

Take my gallbladder — please

In early April, I had what I thought was a terrible bout of heartburn. It was agony for more than two hours — and then it stopped. I stopped taking NSAIDs for my arthritis (misery) and tried to eat better. My doc at Kaiser ordered an ultrasound to check for gallbladder trouble, and it came back normal.

Then on May 17, it happened again. Agony.

This time I went to the ER. I was there at 6 a.m., and they could tell from blood work and my blood pressure (which was sky high) that something was wrong and that I was in a serious amount of pain. An ultrasound showed that my gallbladder was full of gallstones, even impacted gallstones, and was distended, i.e., not too far from rupturing. I was in the OR by noon. The post-op pain wasn't as bad as the gallbladder attack itself.

Side note: I wanted to see the gallstones, but they wouldn't save them for me. Not very nice.

I'm doing fine now and am very grateful that the ER radiologist was better than the guy at Kaiser, who clearly misread the original ultrasound.

Enough medical drama!

Many thanks to my sons, Alec and Benjamin, who stayed by my side at the hospital, and to my parents who welcomed me into their home for a couple of days where I could recuperate without cats trying to jump on my abdomen.

Needless to say, work on Conrad’s book came to a screeching halt for a couple of weeks.

What’s next in fiction? 

Conrad and Kenzie’s book — still no title! — will be out at the end of this month.

Then, in August, I’m bringing the I-Team heroes and the Scarlet Springs heroes together for an action-packed novella in the vein of every I-Team fan's favorite novella Dead by Midnight (which still has a 5-star rating on Amazon after 2.5 years). This time, the enemy will be wildland fire, not terrorists. Expect the heroes you love and the women they love to have to give their all to survive and save others.

Stay tuned for Conrad and Kenzie’s excerpt! Or join the I-Team or Scarlet Springs readers groups on Facebook and get excerpts and news before anyone else.

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Hey, everyone!

Thanks so much to those of you who helped make the launch of Falling Hard a success. One reader suggested I buy stock in a tissue company, given how many of you talked in your reviews about being moved to tears by the story. I cried when I wrote it, so we’re even.

If you were in a cave at the end of February and missed the book’s release, it’s available on Amazon for Kindle and in paperback. It’s also available at Smashwords (all ebook formats), IndieBound (paperback), Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

If you haven’t tried my new contemporary (NOT romantic suspense) series yet, Barely Breathing, the first book in the series, is only 99 cents.

And now for something completely different.

Before cancer, there was spinal surgery. But before spinal surgery, there was the urban farm. Who remembers my blog posts about planting and harvesting — all those green beans and homegrown broccoli and arugula?

There was a time not that long ago — back in the days of Project: Happiness and Man-Titty Monday on this blog — when we grew most of our own veggies. That was taken away from me when spinal surgery in my neck left me unable to bend over for long. Elevated beds were obviously the answer, but there was no time or money or energy for that after my breast cancer diagnosis.

I am now a survivor of two years and three months, and life is moving forward. Spring is more or less here in Colorado. And the urban homesteading bug has bitten again.

I've always been a believer in self-sufficiency. Gardening is in my blood. My great-grandparents were farmers. My grandparents on both sides of the family grew most of their own food. I had my first experience gardening at about the age of 2-1/2. I attemped to help my Grandpa plant onion sets then, to the delight of all the adults, told them, “This is hard work,” and walked away.

Yes, I still hear about this, and I’m 53.

Given the state of our nation and the state of this world, it’s not a bad idea for all of us to plant our own version of a Victory Garden and do what we can to rein in our expenses and increase our self-reliance. My gut as someone whose ancestors came to the Americas in 1610 tells me we’re headed for rougher times. This brings out my inner pioneer and makes me want to prepare. A big part of me wants dive into urban farming with a backyard orchard, elevated veggie and strawberry beds, raspberry, blueberry and blackberry bushes, grapes, along with chickens for eggs and bees for honey.

But another part of me thinks I should leave the house to my younger son and take off for Scandinavia, where my sister and most of my friends live. Both are my dream — an almost self-sufficient urban farm and living in Copenhagen with my friends or Stockholm with my sister (or both). Sadly, they’re not really compatible. Benjamin would not appreciate it if I left him with a ton of garden work, four chickens, two hives of bees, and two cats.

Yeah, so I have to work that out, don’t I? If I hold off on chickens and bees, however, I might be able to do both, living seasonally in Scandinavia.

In the meantime, we took the first step toward relaunching our urban farm. A couple of weekends ago, we worked in record heat for March (80 degrees! In Colorado!) to cover a big section of our back lawn with weed cloth and transplant seven established rose bushes into a portion of that new garden. This past weekend, we took delivery of 14 cubic yards of mulch — SO much mulch — and spent pretty much all of Saturday hauling it into the backyard and dumping it on the new beds. The weedcloth and mulch together will kill the lawn beneath.



The next step is planting berry bushes and trees. Regardless of any other decisions, we want more trees so that we can help expand the urban forest and do our part to sequester carbon emissions. (Yes, we believe what science tells us about climate change.) And so the debate is ongoing.

Which trees do we plant?

I’ve spent far too much time — dozens of hours — researching the kinds of fruit trees that do well in Colorado, with our unique combination of extreme heat and extreme cold, arid climate and clay, alkaline soils. There are a lot of options, and trying to fit them into the back yard is the real trick. I’m considering espalier and columnar apple trees that won’t take up much space, as well as dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties of other fruit trees.

We planted a bigtooth maple in our backyard last fall. Native to Colorado, their leaves turn brilliant orange and red in the fall. So that much is settled.

Right now, we’re looking at planting a peach tree (Reliance), an American plum, Bartlett and Red Bartlett pear trees, an espalier or columnar apple tree, and a sweet cherry tree. Sweet cherries and peaches are tough to grow here because of our tendency to follow warm early spring days with weeks of frost and late-spring snow. The trees bud and bloom — and then the blooms freeze and die. But I know people who have peach trees and get good harvests most of the time.



(The new beds are much bigger than they appear in the photo above. They’re more than six feet deep and as wide as our house.)

We’re also committed to blackberry bushes, raspberries, and a blueberry bush because, damn it, I  love blueberries. (In fact, when my younger son was little, he called me Pamela Blueberry.)

The trick is setting it up so that the trees are planted where they’ll thrive and where they won’t be crowded.

If you’ve never heard of espalier trees, google it. They’re trained to grow flat against a fence. The cool thing about an espalier apple tree is that it often combines more than one variety of apple in the same tree, so no pollinator is needed. If a pollinator is needed (as with most apple and pear trees), then you must have two trees. We can’t manage that.

We’d also like to fit a desert willow (so pretty), some kind of evergreen, and a serviceberry tree into the landscape somehow, along with additional flowers because we both love flowers. We have concluded that we need an extra backyard to plant all this stuff. Probably true. But we’ve only got the one. Still, I think we can pull it off.

The south side of our house where our old veggie garden sits fallow is big enough to accommodate some trees, though it’s so warm that it might make the more tender trees bloom too early. Our front garden might have room for a desert willow or evergreen. We just need to get out there and walk it out.



On my agenda for this spring, too, is learning to can — something I’ve never done — and learning to dry fruits and veggies. The point of growing an abundance of food is to set some of it aside. All I know how to do at this point is eat it.

All of this, plus I’m starting a new book. I’ve got a sloppy sort-of outline for Chaska’s story — or rather the first chapter of it. That’s all I really have when I start, so I guess I’m ready.

I hope to have his story to you on/around Mother’s Day, with another Colorado High Country novel for late summer. After that, we’ll see where the Muse takes me.

Yes, I do plan to give Joaquin (I-Team) his own story. Yes, I plan to write more historicals — and sooner than you might think. We’ll have to see how the next few months unfold before I can be more specific.

In the meantime, happy reading!

I would like to thank all of you who helped make the release of Skin Deep so much fun. It seemed like the book had been available for all of two hours by the time people were posting reviews. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, both for the main story and for the short story “Marc & Julian Make a Beer Run.”

This is my first 100-percent self-published book, so I was thrilled to see the response. I was away at my younger son’s college graduation last weekend, but I found myself laughing every time I logged on because so many readers flipped straight to the back to read the short story.

Thanks to everyone helped push Skin Deep up to No. 18 on B&N and into the low 200s on Amazon.com. And huge thanks to all of you who tweeted and posted on Facebook and your blogs. I announced the contest winners for the three free copies of Skin Deep in the last comment on my previous blog, so if you posted and were hoping to win, please check. Maybe you did. I’ve only heard from one of the prize-winners so far.

 It’s available right now on Amazon.com for Kindle, B&N for Nook, and Smashwords for everything else. It’s not yet available in iBook format because it takes such an extraordinarily long time for ebooks to get through the system and up on iTunes. I’ll let you know when it’s posted there. Some readers download the free Kindle app to their iPads so they can read Kindle versions and not wait for iTunes.

If you haven’t yet read Skin Deep, I hope you’ll give it a try. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll share that with your reader friends.

Other news:

Benjamin and his girlfriend Lucy pose for the parental paparazzi immediately after the ceremony.

Benjamin graduated Summa Cum Laude from Ithaca College last Sunday in a ceremony that had me in tears several times. I was so proud of him and his friends — Lucy, his girlfriend, and Del, his wonderful roommate from freshman year. Benjamin now has a B.S. in Cinema and Photography and already has a job in his field, working as an assistant editor for Sender Films in Boulder. They do climbing porn — rock, alpine, ice — which is fun for him, given that he comes from a climbing family. He pulled his first all-nighter this week, helping them get a film ready for a festival and sleeping on the couch after crashing at 4 AM.

Our flower garden is in full bloom at the height of its beauty, and it really is spectacular this year. Everything is about a month ahead of schedule, with white irises already past their bloom and my rose bushes exploding with scenterrific color. All you have to do to be wafted in the scent of roses is stand on my porch. We’ll be sharing photos soon!



The countdown to the release of Defiant, the third book in my MacKinnon’s Rangers series is about to begin. The book — the longest story I’ve ever written — will be out on July 2, so we’ve got a lot of fun and celebration ahead. I’m so excited to be sharing Connor’s story with you! I cannot tell you want this book means to me.

I’m working on the next I-Team novel now — that’s the as-of-yet untitled I-Team Book 6.

Stay tuned!

Lilacs are one of my very favorite flowers.

Benjamin plants a mahonia bush.

Our vegetable garden has been tilled and is ready to plant.

Last year we had an incredible year, though insects were more of a problem, too. I imagine it will be worse this year with the mild weather. We haven’t completed our garden plans quite yet — Colorado is still quite capable of dumping a blizzard on our heads — but I know for sure we’ll be planting: arugula, romaine lettuce, dino kale, swiss chard, carrots, green beans, broccoli, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers and tomatoes.

We have full southern exposure on the side of the house (as you can see), so we can really grow a wide variety of foods.

Another view of the lilacs and one of the veggie beds.

We don’t have an orchard yet, but once the big cottonwood is down in the backyard — I have to pay a small fortune to have it removed before it kills someone — I’m thinking that sweet cherries, plums and apricots or pears can go in the space taken up by the cottonwood.

Benjamin wants an oak tree.

We shall see.

They look pretty empty now, but these rose beds will be alive with color soon.

Of course, out front we have our rose beds.  We are rosarians — lovers of the rose. I don’t care much for typical hybrid teas and prefer historical roses that aren’t so cross-bred that they don’t even have a scent. I have three rules for any rose bush that is planted in my garden.

1. It must have a strong scent. Why have flowers if they have no scent?
2. It must be a proven rebloomer. I want flowers all summer long.
3. It must be capable of surviving in this climate.

Fortunately, historic roses and shrub roses generally fit those criteria.

Of course, tending the garden takes a lot of time during the summer. There’s planting, daily watering (it’s very arid here), weeding, harvesting, replanting... And it goes on typically until the first frost sometime in September/October, when I end up running out with kitchen scissors for one last quick harvest, usually of greens and broccoli, before winter arrives.

This enormous cottonwood is coming down soon. It’s almost dead and dangerous. I love it and will miss it.

In the meantime, I’m working on SKIN DEEP and getting nearer to the end. I probably won’t be posting again until the story is done. But I did want to offer an update. Excerpts of the book are posted here on this blog if you’re curious.

Only 70 days until DEFIANT is released! I’m so excited to share the story with you!

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks since my last blog post. I’ve been working on Skin Deep, but I’ve also been taking time to go to the gym and to stay on top of things around the house. With all the unseasonably warm weather we’re having, I’ve also needed to spend time outside watering my rose bushes, my flower beds and our trees and shrubs. Between all of that, my column for the paper, my work for the Happy Ever After blog, and getting a new endeavor off the ground — you’ll hear about that soon — there hasn’t been much time for blogging.

So it’s time for a Project: Happiness update.
Last time I talked about body, not only my own experience with my physical self, but also that of women in general and the ways that society influences how we live our lives in our bodies. This week I thought I’d talk about the mind.

Way back when — it really does seem ages ago now — I explained how I viewed the human experience as being comprised of three elements: body, mind, and spirit. Mind being in the middle  is kind of appropriate because I think it links the three together. Our spiritual self starts in the mind, and mind has a powerful influence over body, too. The brain, the organ that houses the mind, is a bodily organ.

So what does it mean to have a healthy mind? It’s not about being intelligent or educated. I’ve always been very confident of my intellectual abilities. My brain comes with some unique talents — a facility for foreign languages, for example.

A healthy mind is more about how you think about life. Maybe because of this, most people associate the mind closely with happiness.


Of course, we know that body influences mind. The intense spinal pain I endured from January 2008 through August 2010 proved that to me. I went from optimism to frustration to despair. Chronic pain can have a real impact on how a person thinks. That was true for me.

Physical pain and lost sleep tends to bring out the worst in me in terms of my mental attitude. So doing whatever I can to decrease spinal pain is very important. I had a bad week last week and into this week, and I got a refresher course in how much it sucks not to be able to sleep.

But I really realized I needed to re-vision my life was when my own “inner monologue” became darkly negative. And that had very little to do with pain and everything to do with writing. Writing is a very stressful activity at times, and writing under the conditions I faced toward the end of Defiant resulted in my feeling extremely depressed and negative.

My sister was here at that time, and thanks to her, I caught of glimpse of how my self-talk, if you want to call it that, looked from the outside. It wasn’t good.

I had to be honest and realize that I often get that way while writing. It wasn’t just Defiant. I very often reach a point of self-loathing when I’m writing because I just can’t accomplish on the page what I’m trying to accomplish. What I feel inside about a story so rarely makes it into a book. And the frustration that causes is overwhelming at times.

“You need a new routine,” Benjy told me after Defiant was done.

By that, he meant that there has to be a happier way to write books. Project: Happiness grew out of my desire to create this new routine.

I knew my new approach could not include the positive self-talk modeled by Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live: “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me!”

Puhleaze!!! I’m too cynical for daily affirmations, even ones that aren’t silly.  A good Buddhist koan or a line of poetry, sure. Affirmations? No.

So what is my new routine?


No more self-hatred. If I start getting into that mode, then it’s time to do something else no matter how much writing I got done.

Get enough sleep. A mind can’t work well without rest. The book deadline isn’t as important as a full night’s rest.

Get exercise. It has been proven to help mental function and mood. The brain and the mind it contains are part of the body, after all.


Accept that nothing I write will be perfect. This is really, really hard, because I am a perfectionist. I want to write something perfect. So even as I try to accept this, I’m still fighting like hell to achieve it.

Do nice things for myself—things that are healthy. A nap, a trip to the theater to see a film, a bit of Angry Birds — try to incorporate fun, not just work, in to every day. All work and no play makes Pamela a bitch. But I think a lot of people do things to be “nice” to themselves that aren’t good for them in the long run. That chocolate bar. Spending too much money on clothes. Sitting in front of the TV too often and for too long. Food has long been the “nice” thing that I do.

So far, the first three and the last one are moving along pretty well. But accepting that I will make mistakes and fail at my goals to one degree or another is very, very hard for me.

I will persevere. 

In other news:  

Skin Deep is moving along. I’m more than 25,000 words into the story. I ran into a really tough scene, which I wrote and now must rewrite. I anticipate two more weeks of writing, a week of editing and then a few days to get it uploaded and see it go live. So probably the end of April. Sorry! It’s that perfectionism problem I mentioned.

I will be certain to make a big announcement about it — you can read more about the story in the blog post below this one — and send out a newsletter so that no one misses the release of the novella. You can also stay in touch by joining my Facebook page.  If you want to sign up for my newsletters, click here. I only send them out when I have news, and I don’t share the info with anyone.

The copy-edited pages of Defiant are on my computer. I need to proofread them one last time and get them back to New York. So advance review copies will be going out probably at the end of the month. I’m putting together a list of events and fun ways to celebrate the release of Connor’s story, so stay tuned for that.

The Defiant discussion group has launched. Today’s chat about Surrender was a lot of fun for me. We continue through July, working our way one by one through the books in the series and ending with Defiant.  Thanks to Jenn LeBlanc for setting this up!

On Tuesday, April 3, I’ll be receiving the Colorado Coalition for Sexual Assault’s Excellence in Media award for my work on the issue of sexual assault. This is an amazing honor, given my own background and the fact that I went into journalism almost entirely because I wanted to be a voice for women. The ceremony will be held on the steps of the state capitol in Denver. I am deeply touched and honored by this.

Also, I’ll have an announcement possibly this week, maybe next, of a new endeavor that I am a part of and very excited about. If you read the article in RT, you might already know what I’m talking about. If not, expect an announcement shortly.

Last but not least, it will soon be planting time on the urban farm. We’ve got most of the prep work done. Depending on the weather, we’ll be planting our crops soon. We try as much as we can to eat food we grow because it doesn’t come with e coli or listeria or pesticides/herbicides. The new studies that showed a strong tie between certain cancers and common pesticides/herbicides really strengthened my resolve to have as much control over our food supply as possible. We rarely eat anything that isn’t organic.

Last year we grew: arugula, kale, swiss chard, romaine lettuce, onions (red and yellow), green beans, broccoli, acorn squash, delicata squash, zucchini, summer squash, radishes, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. We lost a lot of the broccoli to some damned egg-laying creature — white flies, I expect. So this year, I may get floating row cover to protect everything.

Growing food is such intensely difficult work requiring a lot of attention and time. But the result — being able to grab dinner out of the garden and know it’s good for you — is wonderful. As much as I think, “Maybe I’ll just join a CSA (community supported agriculture) this year and let someone else do the work,” there’s something about this time of year that calls me back to the dirt.

Have a lovely week, everyone!

I don’t watch television. I don’t have cable, and in Colorado if you don’t have cable you can’t watch TV. The mountains block signal. I remember growing up how irritated I was by this. Even with an antenna, the picture was always fuzzy and prone to disturbance.

But I do love a good documentary. If our local cable providers would permit it, I would order the History and Discovery channels a la carte. But they don’t. So about six or so years ago, I told them to take their converter box and shove it. I haven’t missed television (which I rarely watched even when I had cable) at all.

When I do watch television programs, it’s usually a DVD I’ve bought or sometimes a program on Hulu, such as Castle, which I love. (The writer jokes crack me up.)

But my sister knows me very well. She sent me a link to a new program that I've absolutely fallen in love with and which I want to share with the other history geeks out there. Of course, there’s every chance you’ve already discovered it. I’m a bit slow.

The name of it is The Edwardian Farm. It’s a BBC program that shows life on an Edwardian farm as lived through two archaeologists and one historian who move into an Edwardian farmhouse and begin living the way people lived in that area back around 1900. My degree is in archaeology, and the daily lives of ordinary people is one thing that draws me to writing fiction. No detail is too small. I find everything utterly fascinating.


And this program goes into great detail. How do you clean germs out of an outdoor privy in that time period? How do you maintain the hedgerows that keep your livestock from running off or getting into your crops? How do you plow a field with horses? How do you make quicklime? How do you preserve food without refrigerators? How do you clean a stopped chimney?

I have loved every episode I’ve watched — all of them on YouTube — and I can’t recommend it enough.

As some of you know, I’m very involved in urban farming and what’s called the “localization” movement. Localization is the reverse of globalization. It’s about making sure that your community produces what it uses, especially where food is concerned. The idea is to prevent unnecessary pollution and to make your community secure in case of a catastrophe. If you grow your own food and your community produces almost all of the food and goods and services humans need to live and thrive, then the global economy can go to hell without your family being hurt.

On a personal level, it means learning skills your grandparents knew — knitting, quilting, sewing, canning, growing gardens, having orchards, keeping chickens and bees. A person on an ordinary lot can do most of these things (depending on climate), and so provide most of the food their family needs. My grandfather built his own house and fed his six children on an orchard, grape arbor and vegetable garden that he cultivated in their backyard. They also had pigeons, rabbits and a goat (for milk).

We outsource most of that nowadays. Rather than doing these things ourselves, we’ve grown dependent on others to do them for us. That gives us more time, but what do people do with that time that really counts? Not only are we less connected to our own lives, we are at the mercy of the entire chain of people who supply the goods and the labor. This fact was driven home to me in December 2006 when six feet of snow fell in four weeks in my front yard and the grocery store shelves became empty. Empty. You couldn’t even buy sugar.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be dependent on an entire global mechanism for feeding my family. I don’t want to “outsource” my life. I’m trying very hard to “insource” it. (I invented that word, by the way, as far as I know. I’m involved in the localization movement here in the county and was trying to find a term for what we’re doing.)

This topic fascinates me, so if any of you are interested in the “transition movement,” which got its start in Great Britain and is also called localization, let me know. I may start a separate blog about that.

I enjoy being able to do things for myself and being reconnected with my own life in that way, rather than simply working for a paycheck and spending all that money on things I can learn to do myself. I find it very wholesome and appealing somehow, even if it is a lot of work. And this program, The Edwardian Farm, is basically about these three people learning the skills their great-grandparents had — i.e., reskilling themselves — and learning to be self-sufficient again.

So how do you clean a stopped up chimney back in the day? One option was to stuff a chicken down your chimney. It would flap and claw and break the soot free. But it was also kind of mean to the chicken — something that probably didn’t matter back in 1900. Another less chicken-y option was to take branches from a holly bush, bind them together and shove them up the chimney. Fascinating!

Apparently, prior to this, these three had a program called The Victorian Farm, which is equally fascinating. During the Edwardian period, technological advances included combustion-engine plows, indoor plumbing, gas ranges and so forth. When I’m done watching these episodes, I’m going to dive into The Victorian Farm and see what things were like back then.

Update: I’m still going to have the Dessert Diva as a guest together with Natalie. The two will be baking pies. I intended it to be a summer blog, but I have been so, so, so busy that it’s now going to preview holiday recipes.

Also, Carnal Gift will be live any day now on Amazon.com. It’s been edited and uploaded, and now I’m just waiting. This will be a very special release for me because finally — finally! — the book will be available as I wrote it, instead of missing 100 key pages.

It has taken a lot of time and effort to get the books online. Fortunately, my son Benjamin has handled a lot of it. I’ve been working on Defiant and trying very hard to stay off the Internet, which has a huge impact on my ability to focus and get work done. So if I’m not around, please forgive me. I need to write!

I’ll be back soon to announce the winner of the e-book copy of Sweet Release.

Thanks for being so patient! I owe it to you to put my time into my books and to make them the best they can be.

See that little peek of red amid the green vines? That’s our first ripe tomato of the season.

There ought to be a celebration for that day. There’s nothing like a tomato picked ripe from a vine in your own garden. Tomatoes taste like summer itself, and I can’t wait to devour this one.

High summer is here, and the greens that were so plentiful in early June — arugula, romaine, spinach — are history. They’ll be back in the fall, or sooner if I replant. But they don’t like hot 90+ degree days, which is all we’ve been having lately.

I planted the greens, together with swiss chard and broccoli, while it was still snowing back in April. Brassicas and greens generally tolerate cold fairly well, producing when it’s still cool and surviving all but a truly hard frost. So, we’ve enjoyed some broccoli and swiss chard, and both are still producing despite the heat.


One must wait, of course, to plant anything sensitive to cold, like tomatoes. So our tomatoes, green beans, peppers, corn and squash got planted in late May. Tomatoes do really well in Colorado, provided they don’t get beaten into the ground by hail — and you remember to water them. Corn, too, does well, and borrowing from Native tradition, we planted squash with them. Well, and cantaloupe...

Last year, we got a ton of green beans from two relatively small rows, so this year we planted a bit more than that, along with cucumbers, brussel sprouts and hot peppers. Mmmm...

I swear, I could live off arugula, green beans, radishes, tomatoes and broccoli — and last year I did just that for a time. So hopefully we planted enough this summer to keep me and my mum fed. She'll be staying with me after my operation and taking over the garden while I read and write and rest.




I believe strongly in the concept of economic independence. Economic ups and downs have much less impact on a family that is able to supply a lot of its own food and labor — stuff like plumbing, repairs, car maintenance. Knowing how to do these things one's self is important, I think. Canning, sewing, darning socks, knitting — skills our grandparents had but which were forgotten in a single generation.




People have proven that the average family can grow most of its own food in the average yard, and that’s our goal. These garden beds take up only the small south-facing side of the house. The front and backyard, though home to three big trees, also have lots of room where there’s full sun or partial shade. If we were to plant crops everywhere we have plantable space, and include a few fruit trees, a couple of beehives and backyard hens, we’d have most of the food that we need, apart from meat. And if we hunted or went mostly vegetarian... Well, you get the picture.

We won’t be able to accomplish all of this while I’m working full time and writing, of course. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. As it is, I work from the time I get up until dark either at the paper or in the garden — and then whatever time is left goes to having fun and/or writing.

I should add that all of this is organic. We don’t use chemical fertilizers, but rather compost. And we don't use pesticides of any kind, which is why you all heard screaming coming from Colorado this weekend. Washed some romaine and earwigs came running out.... Man, did I shriek!

I hate bugs... except for pretty ones like ladybugs and butterflies and dragon flies.

In the flower garden, the moment really belongs to rose mallow, a precious flower that bees love. It grows about waist height and is covered with small pink flowers. I love pink, let me say.


My roses are all rebooting. The big spring bloom is over, and now they've been deadheaded and will make another round of buds soon. All of our rose bushes are repeat bloomers. What’s the point of having roses that bloom once? Boooring.

Unfortunately, four of our bushes seem to have caught something. It’s nothing they’ve had before, and I wonder if it’s from the cool weather and rain — a fungus of some sort. The leaves are dying and falling off, and it upsets me. I hope we can rescue them!

In other news: Just trying to get ready to be away from the paper for eight weeks, and trying to prepare my mind for surgery. I’m almost looking forward to it, actually. Two weeks from this past Tuesday.

So how many of you are urban homesteaders?

I’m not sure how strong the movement is elsewhere, but here in Colorado, the idea of growing as much of your own organic food as possible and even raising your own chickens in your backyard is very popular — and not just with hippies.

Last summer, I decided to see how much food Benjamin and I could get out of re-opening one of our veggie garden beds. We have a very big yard, and the south side of the house, which gets full sun all day, was once entirely devoted to growing veggies. But that was back when my kids were little. Trying to handle a huge flower garden, two kids, a full-time job and the veggie garden was too much for me. I paid someone to put down weed cloth and bark the damned thing.

But Benjamin is all grown up now. So last summer, we ripped up the weed cloth from one of the beds and planted the things we like to eat most. Sadly, we did it sort of late in the planting season, so Benjy didn't really get to enjoy any of the results of his hard work. But I did. I didn't buy vegetables from about the beginning of August through October until the first hard frost.

I got a lot of broccoli, green beans, butternut squash, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers out of last year's "experimental" garden, so we're going all out this year. We worried for a while that my surgery would make it all too difficult for Benjy, because there will be a time when he will have to handle it himself. But it will be probably a month before I have surgery, and that's a lot of the growing season. We decided to go for it anyway with a hopeful attitude.

We opened all three beds, and I spent March-May nursing seedlings on my kitchen floor. (It made walking around a bit awkward, but that was okay.)




So this year our garden will include: arugula, broccoli, romaine lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, mixed spring greens, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, Navajo corn (what else???), radishes, carrots, tomatoes, acorn squash, zucchini, summer squash, cabbage, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe.... And I think that's all.

It will easily fit into the space we have — which we hope to learn to utilize better so that we can fit even more next year. And the stuff we grow is not only 100-percent organic, it's so natural that you might even call it “neglected.”

I want to plant some fruit trees to get our fruit needs met. Trees are tricky in Colorado. There were none on the plains, apart from cottonwoods near creeks and springs. And the mountains? Mostly evergreens. But there are some kinds of fruit trees that will grow on the Front Range with lots of TLC. I’m not an apple fan, so I won’t plant an apple tree. Boring. Right now I want sweet cherries, pears and plums. We’ll see how that works out.

And I want laying hens for the backyard, as well as a couple of beehives for honey. Fresh eggs every day? Our own honey? Sounds like paradise to me.

Yes, it's a lot of work, but when you grow it yourself you don't have to wonder what's on it or in it. And then you have a real reason to compost, which we already do. You can form your own happy little ecosystem.

There's a big "re-skilling" movement in our town. If you don't know how to can veggies or freeze food or quilt or sew or darn socks or whatever, you can take classes to learn to do these things yourself. It's kind of strange because my grandmothers could do all those things. My grandfather grew most of the food for his wife and six kids out of their backyard. But my generation — I'm a Gen-Xer — comes from parents that didn't do any of that. Have we lost these skills so quickly?

Urban homesteading feels so very Little House on the Prairie (except in the city), and I love it because I like thinking that we can be more self-sustaining. I don't like to shop much, and I do like good food. So it works out well.

I'd love to hear garden stories from any of you who have them.

Tonight I spent the better part of an hour harvesting arugula, swiss chard, spinach, romaine and mixed greens that I planted back when it was still snowing. Then I had to wash them leaf by bloody leaf. It took forever! And the funny thing is that, although we've been eating out of our garden almost every night, there's so much that it never looks like I harvested anything.

Of course, the pride and joy of this household is the rose garden, and it's about to go into high bloom. I can't wait to see it and smell it and share the photos with you all again. The winter was hard on the roses, and most died back to the ground. So the bushes are pretty tiny compared to some years. That's life in the Rockies.

I'm still on Chapter 7 of Breaking Point, but it will move forward quickly on Friday. Tomorrow marks the end of my workweek, and then back to fiction.

Have a good Thursday, everyone!

Who cares if it's May 7? Last night it snowed. It had melted by the time the sun was high in the sky, but it's still nippy with the possibility of more snow ahead.

Ah, yes, springtime in the Rockies.

Tulips do look pretty in the snow. And so does my lily of the valley, which is just beginning to bloom. Those flowers are so precious and tiny. I have to get down on my knees in the grass to sniff them. I’m sure that makes a lovely sight.

Out in the veggie garden, I have six-inch high broccoli plants, as well as arugula, spinach, romaine lettuce, mixed greens and Swiss chard. When Benjy gets home — and when it actually gets warm — we'll open a second bed and plant tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, peppers and squash.

One zucchini plant only, and even then... At the end of the world, there will be zucchini and cockroaches, as I’ve always said.

I’m taking a moment to breathe. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind. Big papers, special editions, bills in the Senate, hassles in the House, new five-book contract. After we heard that the Department of Corrections was attempting to gut or kill the bill, I found myself getting super stressed out, and that's just not good for me.

We have reached a compromise with them. I'm very reluctant to compromise because I feel that some important aspects of the bill have been removed. Right now it contains about 85 percent of what I originally put into it. But when they start removing phrases like "so as not to cause the inmate additional pain or suffering" you have to wonder WHY. I still don’t understand.

The House Judiciary Hearing is Monday morning. I'm first up to testify. It could be on the House floor as early as that afternoon and could pass the House by Tuesday. Then it will go into conference committee, where the two sponsors and others try to work out a compromise on the two different versions of the bill. Once they do that, both chambers have to approve the changes. And then, finally, it goes to the Governor.

It's been a real education for me to see how things work behind the scenes at the Capitol. I think along the way I've managed to annoy everyone who's been involved with the bill. Me and my temper. Oh, well.

But I'm trying to let go a little bit. I can't write books if I'm stressed out of my gourd and have a migraine. So...

I'm starting Chapter 4 of Breaking Point today. Bad things reach something of a peak for Zach and Natalie in Chapter 4 — and then begin to turn around. Right now, they are just voices in the darkness for each other as they talk through the wall of a place out in the desert where they’re being kept prisoner.

I hope you all have a great weekend. Thanks for your support here and on Facebook regarding the bill. The debate on the House floor will be available via live streaming. I’ll post the URL when the bill is about to come up.