Dirt By Amy Stewart

What's Wrong With My Book

Someday I'm going to have a T-shirt printed up that says, "Uncorrected.  Please Do Not Quote Without Comparison With Finished Book." Because that so perfectly describes how everything in my life goes. 

This is the standard language that appears on galleys, also called advanced reading copies, those early paper-bound version of a book that are printed up and sent out to reviewers before the finished hardcover edition hits the shelves.  The book has not been through its final proofreading at this point, so it inevitably goes out with typos, errors, and odd half-fragments of sentences that are left over from an earlier round of proofreading gone wrong. 

Many of the typos are mine and I take full credit for them; some of them are typesetting or copyediting errors that happen after the book leaves my hands.  Others are a complete, unholy mystery.  For instance, after one grim passage in the book about plants poisoning innocent children or kittens or some such thing, someone wrote "Cool!" in the margin of the manuscript,  and the copyeditor thought that was an actual addition to the text.  Fortunately, we caught that one before the galleys were printed.

Usually I cringe at the typos in my galleys but don't think much more of them. The reporters and book critics who read them know that they are looking at galleys, and I just have to hope it doesn't bother them too much.  But in this marvelous technicolor age we live in, when it's so easy to just pop an e-mail off to the author, I'm hearing from friends and complete strangers every day about the many cringe-worthy errors in my galleys. 

So I would like to say for the record:

1.  I did not dedicate my book to PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service. As much as I appreciate their fine programming, I dedicate all my books to PSB, my husband, P. Scott Brown.  I actually call him PSB or PS, so this is sort of a term of affection between us.  It is, for some reason, an easy typo for the typesetter to make, as it cropped up in an early proof of one of my previous books, too. Fortunately, Scott is good-natured about the whole thing and of course we'll get it fixed.  (A funny sidenote:  in The Earth Moved, I refer to 'my husband Scott' a few times but never mention his last name.  Check the index--you'll see that he's listed there as Stewart, Scott, not Brown, Scott, because the indexer didn't know we had different last names and simply assumed.  Scott was good-natured about that, too.  He's a good-natured guy.)

2.  I know that LSD was invented by Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, not sixties activist and LSD enthusiast Abbie Hoffman.  I have no explanation for this error.  It must be all that LSD I did in the sixties.

3.  It is not my fault that you plant taxonomists keep changing the names of the damn plants.  I mean, really!  Isn't it enough that I stumble through Latin to please you people, and then you go changing your minds about which unpronouncable Latin name a plant should have?  You realize that if plant taxonomists were manufacturing cars we'd all be driving Transmissionari automaticus x powersteeringii and we still wouldn't be able to find our car keys, but now we also wouldn't be able to pronounce the name of the thing we needed the keys for, either.

I jest.  I love plant taxonomists, and I take great pride in the twelve or so Latin names I can pronounce correctly.

And I mostly spell them correctly, too. Just don't quote me without comparison to the finished book.

Hello, Visalia!

I'm off to Visalia for the Tulare & Kings County Master Gardeners annual Landscape Extravaganza.  I'll be giving a keynote speech in the morning and then a workshop on worms.  This is a really interesting event--a truly in-depth horticultural symposium with lots of interesting speakers, including several people I've been wanting to meet for years.  If you're in the area, stop by.  It all happens this Saturday, Feb 28.

Press Kits & Galleys

Algonquin's press kits for Wicked Plants have gone out into the world, along with the galley!   I should have actual finished books in a couple of months.

Who Needs a Website When You Can Have a Blog?

I try not to blog about blogging too much, but this is so cool I just had to share it. (and by the way, Seth Godin wrote about this years ago and HarperStudio recently asked this question, so I am by no means the first person to think of this)

Let's say you're a small garden center. Or a landscape designer.  Or a non-profit.  Or an author,  an artist, or a consultant.  You need a presence on the web, but you don't want to spend a ton of money having a professional website designed.

Don't bother!  For very little money and very little time, a blog can do everything a website does.  And that doesn't mean you have to blog, in the sense of putting up a post every day and basically keeping on online diary.  You're just going to use the blog platform to create a website for yourself.  And the blog posts--which go up in date order, with the newest on top, will serve as a kind of "What's New" page, and even an e-mail newsletter, if you so choose.

Here's what I mean.  Check out the blog-based site that this local arts organization has created.

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin

On the event of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, I am thinking about his fabulous book, The Formation of  Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms.  If you're going to read any book by Darwin, start with this one.   He did the most fascinating earthworm experiments and documented them in meticulous detail.  (And yes, I devoted a chapter and more to him in The Earth Moved.)

So in his honor, I have resurrected an earthworm quiz I wrote but never used when The Earth Moved came out.  Enjoy!

Match each quote with the person who said it.

1.    “I must own I had always looked on worms as amongst the most helpless  and unintelligent members of the creation; and am amazed to find that they have a domestic life and public duties!”

2.    “We even recorded the sounds of them eating.  And we’ve got worm tunnels you can crawl through to give you an idea of what it’s like—you know—what it’s like to be a worm.”

3.    “I’ve got so many new worms here, I could spend years identifying and classifying them.  I’m thinking about putting them all on a website.  People can get a worm named after them, or you could get one named for your husband for an anniversary present.  You know, like they do with the stars.  What do you think?”

4.    “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light.”

5.    “As few as 11 large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin.  And 11 worms form a small part of a day’s rations to a bird that eats 10 to 12 earthworms in as many minutes.”

6.    “I used to say that one ton of worms could eat one ton of garbage.  I was always thinking big like that.  Then I found out that Seattle had distributed four thousand worm bins.  I did some figuring and realized that worked out to ten tons of garbage going into worm bins.  That’s when I realized—it’s happening!  It just isn’t happening the way I originally thought it would.”

7.    “When stepped on, the worm curls up.  That is a clever thing to do.  Thus it reduces its chances of being stepped on again.  In the language of morality: humility.”

8.    “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”

9.    “I spent whole afternoons in the dirt, making my patch of ground flawless.  I even cleared the worms away, before I found out that all the tunnels they make give air, and probably other molecules I don’t know about yet, to the plants.”

10.    “People ask me, why bother cataloging earthworms?  Well, why catalog anything?  It’s how we learn about the world we live in.  Besides, some of these worms are going extinct. How do you know what you’re losing if you don’t know what you have?”

Who said it?

A.    Mary Appelhof, worm composting activist and author of Worms Eat My Garbage

B.    Joseph Hooker, 19th century British botanist

C.    Sam James, freelance earthworm taxonomist living in Fairfield, Iowa

D.    Charles Darwin, father of earthworm science and author of The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Actions of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits.

E.    Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th century German philosopher

F.    Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, on the role of earthworms as vectors in DDT contamination

G.    William Shakespeare on the earthworm’s transformative power

H.    Jane Hamilton, The Book of Ruth

I.    John Matthews, founder of the Giant Worm, a tourist attraction devoted to the ten-foot long Australian earthworm.

J.    John Reynolds, Canadian earthworm taxonomist whose collection of 100,000 earthworms resides with the Canadian Museum of Nature

The key is after the jump.

Where Did The Paintings Go?

I am still painting--I just haven't been posting lately.  Before long I'll be on a book tour and this blog will be full of book tour news and weird cell phone photos taken from my hotel window  (I know, you can't wait, right?) and other such things.

But.  The good news is that I have been asked to join four amazing painters in a new venture, Lost Coast Daily Painters.  One of us will post a new painting every day.  Most of them will be for sale on eBay, but we also have a 'Buy It Now' section  where there will be some good bargains on paintings available directly from the artist for a fixed price.

We officially launch in March, but we have each put something up this month just to get ourselves familiar with how it all works.  Consider it a soft launch.  Right now there are some incredible bargains--one of Humboldt County's finest landscape painters has some lovely work up with starting bids at only $25.   Check it out, and tell your friends!

Oh, and about this chicken?  That's Dolley.  And no, you can't have her!  I am doing a series of four portraits like this, one of each hen, to hang in my own house.  Then I may do another, very similar series to sell.  But this one's just for me.

The Teleflora Superbowl Commercial

In case you missed it.  And if for some reason the video below doesn't play, watch it here.

Now, here's what's interesting about this. There's an unwritten rule in the flower industry that you don't put down someone else's product to promote your own.  Over the years, the Society of American Florists has sent letters filled with self-righteous indignation to the peddlers of diamonds, teddy bears, electronics, appliances, and other such niceties, asking them politely to stop putting down flowers in their "Why Send Flowers?  Teddy Bears/Diamonds/iPhones/Roombas Are So Much Better!" advertisements.  They do their best to extract a promise that in the future, the product will be promoted on its own merits.  They usually get that apology, although sometimes a company will respond by saying, "Actually, we think our diamond/teddy bear/electronic is better than a bouquet of flowers.  In fact, that's our whole business model.  So lighten up, SAF."

And now we have Teleflora, a wire service that takes a cut of your floral purchase in exchange for passing your order on to a local florist, bashing one of its own in this ad, which suggests that getting flowers in a box is a miserable experience compared to ordering them from Teleflora (and therefore having them delivered by your friendly local florist.) They are going after companies like Organic Bouquet  , Flowerbud , and ProFlowersthat ship flowers directly to you, leaving you to cut them and arrange them yourself. And apparently the prospect of being presented with a box full of flowers is a demoralizing and miserable one. Or that's what they'd have you believe.

So folks, the big day is only a couple weeks away.  What say you?  Roses from a florist?  Lilies from the UPS driver?  (no fantasies involving brown uniforms, please.)  Or something else entirely? 

And in case a certain someone is reading, I would like a big bouquet of extraordinarily fragrant Oriental lilies, if you please.