Garden / Writing / Life Report April 12, 2025

A lot of changes recently, all good, but profoundly altering our previous patterns of behavior.

We were on the verge of abandoning our enclosure at the community garden.  The &#@%ing gophers found a way in through the underground wire barrier and we felt like throwing in the towel.

Fortunately the executive committee helped out by locating and reinforcing the spot where the pesky little rodents found their way in, so now we’ve been gopher free for a week and as such are willing to stay on.

In the period where we thought about abandoning the enclosure, we let the weeds run rampant, so they needed to be delt with.*  Fortunately we still had some organic weed killed left.  It’s basically concentrated orange juice; you spray it on the shoots and it works its way into the weed’s system, burning out its ability to carry water and nutrients, thus killing it.  The nice thing is that it’s 100% organic and breaks down in the soil within 72 hours so it can be safely used around food crops.

So we’re back to gardening.

. . .

My older daughter and son-in-law are training to be nurse practitioners, which is a good thing.  Not only will they be able to help more people in their profession, but they’ll also make more money doing so, which will enable them to provide for their autistic son as he grows into adulthood.

The thing is, with them both in training, I need to look after our grandson five days a week.  He’s a sweet kid but his autism is severe enough that he needs someone keeping an eye on him constantly, not necessarily hovering over him, but making sure you know where he is and what he’s doing at any given moment.

The other day he was sitting in our cul-de-sac, looking at his iPad when a delivery drive pulled in at a high rate of speed, much too fast for a community of townhouses.  Fortunately he saw our grandson and safely stopped, but now we can’t let him run around outside our home for fear some idiot might clip him.

Keeping an eye on him is energy draining.  I enjoy my time with him -- we have a routine of getting bagels in the morning then going for a Pepsi followed by a visit to the mall for pizza pretzels -- but it digs deeply into my energy reserve and usually by the time his parents pick him up in the evening I’m exhausted.

. . .

Which leads to the writing portion of this post. 

I’ve always been a night owl.  From the 6th grade on I stayed up late at night to watch movies or read books and magazines.  When I started working at Sunbow in the 1980s, I’d spend my day revising and editing other people’s scripts then come home and work on my own after the rest of the family went to be at 10pm, typically knocking off around 1-2am.

If stuck on a story point around midnight, we could call any other staff writer and know they were also up and working on their scripts at the same hour.

After my tenure at Sunbow ended, I kept the late night writing schedule.  In fact, I tapped into a group of other writers who frequently worked late, and once a month or so we’d often leave our homes at 1am, rendezvous at Jerry’s Famous Deli, and spend an hour or two talking shop over coffee before heading home to resume work.

The change in my daily schedule now saps me of energy I once used to fill those hours creatively.

I’m still writing -- I take a collegiate notebook with me to jot down ideas and blog posts while waiting for my grandson to wake up and start his active day -- but I’m no longer afforded the time to concentrate seriously on writing lengthier works.

I started a new novel a month or so ago after doing a enormous amount of research on the 1890s.  Unfortunately, the nature of the story -- a kind of Great Expectations tale -- required an enormous info dump at the beginning as my heroine went from zero knowledge of her secret benefactor to taking over their business in the figurative blink of an eye.

Logically and in the real world, a perfect excuse for a lengthy info dump.

In fiction, a surefire way to kill interest in a story before it even gets started.**

For a while I toyed with the idea of restructuring the work to be told in flashback via courtroom testimony but that wasn’t jelling, either.

With the change in schedule sapping me of energy, I’ve opted to put that story aside, maybe for a few months, maybe a few years, maybe forever.

. . .

I’m going to be 72 this year.

I’m at that stage when I realized the old saw of “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” is synonymous with “Today you are one day closer to your death.”

I have a magnum opus that’s been brewing for literally decades.***

It’ll be a series of interrelated historical novels, each a standalone yet when read in sequence revealing a much larger story.

Currently I have six completed novels I’m trying to find homes for.  No agent I’ve approached seems interested.

They’re humorous novels, affectionate satires on American culture, both contemporary and vintage. 

I realized in writing them that they reflect a love and optimism I have for this country, not the brainless self-worship of so many so called “patriots” but the love and optimism found in the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte and others.

My magnum opus will probably be a bit more somber, but I intend to still reflect that love and optimism.

I see myself as a time traveler from the past, trying to tell generations yet to come “This is what it felt to be alive in this time and in this place, and this is why that matters.”

I’ve been doing a lot of preliminary research, I have stacks of books and articles and popular culture media of the era I need to go through to fully prepare myself.

What I don’t have is copious free time.

That’s why my novel writing will be put aside until my schedule clears in a year or two.  As mentioned, I’ll still be blogging and participating on social media and giving interviews, but the heavy duty writing time now needs to be channeled over to research.

I may very well write more books after completing this magnum opus, but that’s not my concern now.

Now I am focused on this and this alone.

. . .

Anyway, that’s the situation today at Casa Dixon.

How are you doing?

© Buzz Dixon

*  Hey, gophers, ever think about eating weeds instead of veggies?  We would love you guys and start leaving out treats for you.

**  Wanna see how beautifully Leigh Brackett could execute an info dump?  Check out my post “Writing In The Fred Astaire Style.”

***  When it’s done I might lay out the weird evolution this story went through from first conception to now final form.  Let’s just say it ended up as a radically different concept from when I first imagined it.