Writer and Editor C.B. Calsing/ G.G. Royale

The last week of summer break has arrived. This always makes me sad, mainly because it means an end to my prolific summer months. No three thousand words a day. No daily submissions off to markets. No Tweeting every hour about how much I've gotten done. I'll have a dry spell until, oh, about Thanksgiving, when I get a few days off and decide to work really hard on something. That fervor might carry me through winter break as well. Last year, I finished two novellas in the November to New Years stretch. Hopefully I can do the same this year.

I finally feel that I can start to spread this around because I finally got my contract today. My collection of short fiction, All Along the Pacific , has been picked up by Open Heart Publishing, the same company that releases   the An Honest Lie  anthologies. Fingers crossed, the work will be out by the end of the year. I'm also very fortunate to include artist Diana Bittleston.  She created ten original illustrations, one for each story, as well as the fantastic cover art which ties everything together: trains, coastline, and the Pacific Ocean. I couldn't be happier with the artwork and was totally thrilled to be able to work with her on this project.

Bonnie is predicted to descend on New Orleans early Sunday morning. This will be the first tropical storm of the season to hit the coast, and all I can do is hope that it stays a tropical storm. I really wish I had another rain barrel too, so we could have more back-up water. Oh well. So I might be out of contact for a while, depending on how long the power goes out for. My chickens made it through Gustav, so I know they'll be okay, but I'm worried about the bee hive and the new bean plants. I hope they don't get too beat up. Perhaps what bothers me most about Bonnie is that she doesn't seem to understand that tropical storms and hurricanes are not supposed to hit until after  I've gone back to work. I need those storm days in late August or September to re-energize. Now she's just messing with my schedule. Off to copy out calls for submissions on Duotrope so I have something to do when the power is off.

Now that I have honey for sweetener, eggs for protein, fruits, and a lot of plants growing to add flavor and greens, my focus turned to starches. We both love potatoes, but it seems potatoes don't love Louisiana. Thinking about our environment -- we are zone nine here -- it seemed worthwhile to start exploring more tropical-type starches. The two most common are cassava/ yuca/ tapioca plant and taro. Luckily for us, we have an excellent Asian market on the West Bank called Hong Kong Market. They had two types of taro and cassava there, so we bought some and brought it home. We tasted both just boiled with no seasoning, and then fixed them two different ways. Taro seems a lot easier to work with all around. First, it's not poisonous in its raw state, which means the leaves and peels can go to the chickens without concern for their safety. Second, it pounded out much nicer in my pilon than the cassava did. It got perfectly smooth. Third, it seemed it would be more versatile for...

So many of you know that I'm sort of into backyard farming. Two things happened over the last week or so that have reinvigorated that. First off, I saw Manny Howard on The Colbert Report . I thought he was pretty funny, and I thought the book he was pitching -- how he turned his backyard in Brooklyn into a farm -- sounded right up my alley, so I bought it with an Amazon.com gift card I "eared" doing online surveys. It came yesterday. The assignment he was given by New York   magazine necessitated that he be a little more gung ho about the whole venture than I need to be, but I think it should prove an interesting read for someone as into this stuff as I am. I know it's a cynical treatment of locavorism, but still... The other thing that we did this week was discover Laughing Buddha Nursery at 4516 Clearview in Metairie. If you are into any kind of sustainability, this is the place to go. We only left with an old olive oil drum to make into a rain barrel, but the con...

As some of you may know, one of my hobbies is urban self-sufficiency/ sustainability. I live in an old neighborhood in downtown New Orleans that used to be part of a plantation. My property was subdivided in the 1770s, and my house built about one hundred years after that. Like many New Orleans houses, the front sits right on the sidewalk, but I have a rather large back yard, about fifty by thirty feet. Plenty of room to do lots of things with. We always have a few vegetables -- tomatoes, basil, peas. We've planted many fruit trees: satsuma, apple, Seville oranges, key limes, peach, and lemon. We have two types of grapes: Thompson seedless and scuppernogs. Our big venture started in March of 2008 when I began raising chickens. I ordered a dozen bantam Silkies from an online hatchery, built a coop, and so far have loved every second of it. About a year ago, we hatched our own too, and ended up with eight new hens and only one rooster in the brood. Since the chickens were ...

One of my science fiction stories, "Tangwen's Last Heist," was contracted today by Pill Hill Press for their Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space  anthology. It took me a few different stories to get my foot in the door there. I'm glad this one worked out. I'm happy knowing more of my science fiction is getting out there. On the downside, I didn't win the flash fiction contest at Crossed Genres.  Though I still do have to write another story for them for a different call. I really should work on that now...