My Latest: Gardening and the Apocalypse

It's Garden Week over at Crafting a Green World, and my latest two posts celebrate that with a tutorial for propagating the wandering Jew--

and another tutorial for growing yummy microgreens in plastic salad containers:

I also have a new writing job that's started this week! I now write weekly for Insteading on subjects that cover homesteading, survival skills, and post-Apocalyptic scenarios. I get to review my favorite post-Apocalypse and dystopian books and films--you might not know this, but post-Apocalyptic and dystopian fiction are BIG loves of mine--and I even get to write about my most favorite post-Apocalypse micro theme: ZOMBIES!!!

This week, I talk about the theme of cannibalism in fiction, and why this would be a very bad idea in reality, and I review the Susan Beth Pfeffer Moon Crash series:

Its dystopian society is feudalistic, which, as a former Medieval scholar in grad school, I am all about.

I like to think of myself as a writer along the lines of Virginia Woolf these days. In A Room of One's Own, she claims not only that every woman should have a room of one's own, but also that writers should write all kinds of things, not just fiction OR biographies OR blog posts, but all that and political essays and memoirs and poetry and non-fiction of all sorts. I don't completely have a room of my own (well, I sort of do, but it doesn't have any doors), so I mostly find myself writing in my chair at the living room table, a nosy neighborly view out the windows on two sides, in ear shot of all children wherever they might be shouting at each other, but I do write all kinds of things, especially if you agree that you can define "all kinds of things" as lesson plans, tutorials, essays on post-Apocalyptic themes, blog posts, and fanfiction.

Fanfiction is an especially noble genre, I'm sure you'll agree.