Planting a Garden

Querying agents and publishers is mostly about waiting. 

After researching appropriate agents for my book and composing the perfect query letter, everything else is a waiting game. It takes very little time to personalize the query and click send on the agent email. 

As a writer, I could always productively use that time to resume work on another unfinished novel or write a poem or a book review on Goodreads. Or clean the bathrooms or vacuum the living room. Or watch TV or go for a walk.

Or plant a garden. Yes, plant a garden! Everyone's planting gardens! People have grown fat from baking bread and are raising saddle sores from riding their new bicycles. So now they're planting vegetable gardens. So natural, so Zen, so one with earth, so marvelous an outlet for restless Americans! So metaphorical with respect to life and rebirth and fertility! Just so...exclamation point! 

We are all planting gardens. Including me. 

Skeptics who hang on my every word will note in my bio (to the right of this post ) my aversion to gardening. But for months there was a box with five varieties of vegetable seeds sitting in my kitchen. The instructions said that the time to plant those seeds is NOW!

Yuck. Dirt, flies, weeds, stones, shovels, heavy bags of soil. But there I was, dropping tiny little seeds into little pots with burlap sides and within days witnessing shoots of various shapes and sizes thrusting through the perlite. That was nice, I guess. And then yesterday I was shown by my garden-hound wife how to fill large pots with soil mixtures and daintily transplant my shoots that, over time, will reward my efforts with tasty cucumbers, beets, radishes, lettuce, and onions. 

That is if I water them enough. If the sun doesn't kill them. If the deer don't eat them. Nature is remorseless, but I refuse to lapse into the metaphor jungle on that score. 

So, am I a gardening convert? Do I see myself volunteering at the local community garden? No, I'm not really a nature boy--mainly, I fear nature. It's that nature is so uncontrollable and apolitical. Nature is physics, chemistry, and biology--it will not bargain with you. As the saying goes, "Don't mess with Mother Nature." I do hope to literally taste the fruits of my dirt endeavor, but if it doesn't work out, that's fine too. I'm up against formidable natural forces.

But it sure beats sitting around waiting for the next book rejection.