Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Trimming and pruning

Picked the last of the blueberries and now the figs are coming on strong. I sent some of each home with our youngest when he left after the weekend. We've been freezing the berries and I've been eating the figs as fast as they ripen. Don't you just love summer?

It's been a season of changes as far as our landscaping goes. First, the power company came and trimmed some trees in our back yard. Their idea of triming and mine don't go hand-in-hand; I would say they were cut in half, straight down the middle.

Then a humongous limb fell off the sweet gum in the front yard. We decided to have the tree removed before more limbs--or the tree itself--fell on the house. The front yard looks woefully bare, but I will not miss stepping on a sweet gum ball while in my bare feet on my way to get the newspaper in the mornings.

After that, we noticed one of the trees in the back that had been trimmed was dying. We called the power company and their rep said it wasn't stress from the cutting, as we had thought, but bugs. He said they'd take it down anyway. I don't think he was just being nice; I think he looked at the height of the tree and the distance from the power line and thought "Better now than after it falls and takes out the line."

I'v'e been doing some trimming and pruning of my own on my WIP after getting responses from my beta readers, and now my chapter-by-chapter comments from my critique group. The landscape of the book is taking on a different look as I lop pages off here and prune paragraphs there.

Like our yard, it looks better without the deadwood and easier to navigate without the prickly little errors scattered about.








3 comments:

  1. Nice parallelism here, Sandy. I like.

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  2. Love the comparison, Sandy. I need to do some trimming myself, in the yard and on the most recent story.

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  3. Those are choices authors, like landscapers/tree trimmers must make Sandy. Nice comparison. I know it will be perfect when you are done... the book and the yard. :)

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