The Weekly Compost

It’s a wrap for the year with Garden Smart

Last time I sat down to work on the book was an entire week ago. It seems like months.  Now it’s Saturday morning and too early to get up on a weekend. Now it’s down to merciless writing at this point. Every hour counts (as it did before) but with the deadline looming and much to do, there’s no time to spare.  I hope you’ll forgive the infrequent blog entries in the meantime as I focus on the book writing.

Last night I returned home from a long week on the road.  Garden Smart wrapped up their season for this year as we taped three shows in Charleston, SC. I recently saw where South Carolina was named as the third most popular city to visit in America.  I can see why.  There’s plenty of history, some amazing buildings and lots of great gardens.  In fact, Charleston has quite a horticultural history, boasting Charles Audubon as one of its earliest members.

On day one, we featured the Charleston Garden Festival, an outdoor event that boasts many designs from some of the top landscape architects and designers in the area. They invite top national gardening speakers and create quite an event.  The festival is held on the grounds of Middleton Place, a historic and former rice plantation dating back to the early 1700’s.  The gardens and views of the river are amazing and October is the best time to be there. We taped our third show there as well and focused on the grounds and gardens themselves.  Middleton place even holds claim to having the oldest formal landscape garden in America. 

Our other show was taped just down the road at Magnolia plantation.  If you like Camellias and history, come to this place.  They’ve recently hired one of the top camellia experts in the country, Tom Johnson, to restore the gardens to the showplace it was.  It’s one of the most photographed gardens in the south and their gardens in winter are prime time.

That’s the lowdown of last week.  I’m wrapping this up to get back to the book.  Thanks for checking in.
JL

Just so you know…I’m still here

I’m writing this entry at about 4:30 a.m.  You’ll understand why in a minute.   I’m certainly overdue to check in!  But, it’s not like I haven’t been doing anything though.  Running a company and traveling as much as I do challenges me to keep many balls in the air at the same time.  I realize the ‘blog ball’ was about to hit the ground.  Here’s an update.

First off, you know by now I’m deeply involved in writing my next book which is due November 15th.  I’ve very excited about it and I wish I could tell you some of the very cool things going on because of it.  But I can’t just yet.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be deeply involved.  I tend to throw myself completely into projects.  But in this case, it wasn’t like there was a choice.  This 357 page book is due in less than five weeks.  If that wasn’t bad enough, remember I travel?  I sure do and it’s weighing on me more than ever.

My editor (God bless him) was kind enough to break it down for me in a recent email.  Here’s an excerpt:

The schedule I sent you assumes you're going to have weekends off to actually have a life, writing 8 hours a day, five days a week. But it seems to me that you may need to forget about many personal weekends off until this book is done, don't you think? But however you get it done is up to you of course.  As Bill you-know-who said, "I feel your pain."

From here on out you need to write an average of about 3600-4000 words per day——and that doesn't include if you get behind or need to get ahead to make up for missed time. That's one 400- to 600-word tip per hour! For six weeks without letup.  And there's not much allowance for time for any rewrites, which puts even more pressure on you for tremendous quantity of output that's right on the money, quality-wise, first draft. Whew. Talk about pressure!

REALLY???  Thanks Michael!  Honestly, after recovering from my sudden heart attack, I realized I needed this email to appreciate just how precious my time is between now and then.  Breaking it down into words per hour hit home hard, causing me to count time like I’ve never done so before. 

So, since I’ve now spent 18 minutes and 34 seconds writing this entry, I need to wrap it up.  I just cut into my words per hour deadline.  The pressure just went up.
JL