The Sunny End of the Big Bed

I’m not an expert gardener or anything, but I have pretty good luck sticking live things in the ground and then getting live things to come up. So, I can’t decide what I’m doing wrong at the sunny end of the big bed. But nothing I put there–even with all the amended soil–grows.

This year I’m going to try a mix of wildflowers, sewn directly, as the directions recommend–half on April 1, half on April 15th.

But first I need to dig it and turn it, which I guess means this weekend. And I need to fish the stepping stones for that bed out of the undergrowth and reset them. I try to do it yearly, but I forgot to last year.  And there’s a tiny bit of privet that needs to be cut out.

So, this weekend is the big bed, except for planting. Then next weekend, I hope to do the hollyhocks by the shed. Then the weekend after that is the fountain (though both the fountain project and the hollyhocks are small enough that I might do them both at the same time). I still haven’t decided what to stick in the fountain.

But I’m feeling less overwhelmed than most years, so that’s good.

I Need Guts for Project X

So, here’s where we are–I’ve been through it a bunch. The project director went through it once and suggested a few big changes. I made them. He went through it again and suggested some minor changes and I made them. He and I are going to talk on Friday about some stuff and then it’s ready to go to K.

Except… at the end of the book, the narrator goes looking for someone who would be an expert not only on official Nashville history, but someone who would know the lore and gossip from the past 200+ years. And then there’s some question about whether this person is a werewolf. But an incredibly classy werewolf who deals with the lycanthropy as if it is just one unfortunate turn of events among many that might befall a man in this particular time and in this particular place.

(I really love this because it manages to really leave open-ended what happened to the narrator before this–did the Devil kill her? Did she stop hunting the werewolf because it effectively went away when it became this person? etc.–while still letting the story move on.)

So, I need a historian up on fact and lore from an old Nashville family, one who is classy, but has a good sense of humor. And I’d like him to be a real person. So, the person that is is pretty obvious.  It’s Ridley Wills II.

But, you guys, I am so being a giant chicken about asking him if he minds if I make him the last known werewolf in my book. Which means, right now, it’s all set up to be him without obviously being him. No name, enough plausible deniability. But it’s not what I want. Either I want it to be him, really him, or I’ll rework it and ask, say, Tom Wood if he’d mind being the werewolf. I want it to be a real person, though, and I want it to be a real person that, when people see his name, they’d say “Yep, you know, if I had any questions about whether there were stories about there being a werewolf in Nashville, that is one of the people I’d think to ask.”

Why am I being such a baby about it?!

Okay, folks, now I’ve told you. I have to do it. I’m going to track down a physical or email address for him today and ask him. If he says “no,” I’m going to ask Tom.