LASR Anniversary: Victoria Pitts Caine

August 26, 2016 By 9 Comments

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Growing Succulents

My new passion is growing succulents. Last year I made a succulent wall out of concrete bricks, stacked just right to expose the center hole, filled it with potting soil and I had an easy care garden. My front porch holds a very large and very old Jade plant.

Succulents are also known as fat leaves since they store their moisture in various parts of the plant. There are sixty different plants families including succulents and they do well in a hot, dry climate which is what we experience a good six months of the year.

If grown indoors, they need five to six hours of sunlight and don’t go with the temptation to overwater. You need a well-draining container and they’re less happy in glass. They prefer 70 to 80 degrees, so if you’re comfortable, they probably are, too.

This year for my spring birthday and Mother’s Day, I received a basket of succulents and a box of succulent starters. Since the starters were routed from California to the vendor on the east coast and then back again, I was worried they’d survive. They also sat in a delivery van and the little box was hot when I received it. I busily got them planted, hoping they’d endure their ordeal. Thankfully they did, and I have a beautiful planter to keep my other succulents happy at the entryway.

I have been told you can water them and ignore them, probably why I do so well. Did you know the best thing for succulents is a spray bottle? Spritz and forget.

Cairo_Cover_medLiz McCran and Donnie Barnes travel to Cairo, Egypt, in search of Addie and Gary Wright, who were asked to deliver a mysterious envelope. Within days of their arrival, the couple has vanished. When Liz locates the Wright’s contact, Mr. Moustafa, she receives the first of several riddles.

Rayhan Shenouda, an Egyptian working at the American Embassy, agrees to help but his desire is to win Liz’s heart. Following his traditional customs, and much to her surprise, he proposes within days of their meeting.

Will the Wright’s be found? Can Rayhan and Liz’s love withstand an inevitable collision of cultures and customs? Or will it all end at the hands of a nomad insurgent named Ahmad?

About the Author:Victoria Pitts Caine is a native Californian and lives in the central portion of the state. Her varied interests include genealogy and exotic gemstone collecting both of which she’s incorporated into her novels.

The author has received recognition in both fiction and nonfiction from: Enduring Romance top 10 picks for 2008, William Saroyan Writing Conference, Byline Magazine, Writer’s Journal Magazine and The Southern California Genealogical Society. Her first novel published in 2007.

Victoria is a former staff technician in air pollution control. She is the mother of two daughters. Victoria and her husband enjoy travel, cooking, and are self-appointed “foodies”.

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LASR Anniversary: Carolyn Haley

August 26, 2016 By 7 Comments

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Gardening

The first gardening mistake I made when we moved to rural Vermont 17 years ago was thinking that perennials are something you plant once and enjoy forever.

Ohhhhhh no. Oh-ho-ho-no.

Well, in some cases it’s true—we’ve got peonies, for example, that came with the place and must be decades old—but the very fact that perennials stay in the ground makes them subject to seemingly endless variables, all exacerbated by the seemingly endless microclimates that characterize the region in general and our yard in particular.

I knew going in that some perennials, such as gladioli, are sensitive and must be brought indoors for the winter then reestablished in the spring. So I skipped those. I also knew that some perennials, such as most everything in the mint family, are invasive and must be either contained or planted where they can run amok. So I avoided those, too.

Then went on to plant my favorite species, since our well-established perennials represented a previous homeowner’s taste. Pretty much everything I put in failed within 1-3 years, while the established plants flourished. Huh?

I can divide or transplant the established perennials with shocking brutality and they just keep going like Energizer Bunnies, but my carefully selected, carefully tended new perennials just don’t last. Heck, I’m the only person I’ve ever met who can’t keep daffodils!

Even after I got smart and started planting only Zone 3–hardy specimens (learned from cataloguing everything established and finding that to be the common denominator), I still lose the new ones. Or else they shrink back in number to a few feeble survivors that keep returning enough to keep giving me false hope.

The experience has taught me a lot about the dominance of microclimates over zone maps, the difference between reproductive techniques, and perennial vs. diennial growth patterns. It also clarified the definition of “partial sunlight.” The thing that surprises me year after year, however, is the fact that some perennials move.

It’s a creepy thought that nags at me during the winter. While the land is frozen for months, somewhere below my feet there are tendrils reaching out, or seeds that fell over the summer, which will result in plants emerging somewhere other than where I put them. Thus I’ve had grape hyacinths and glory-of-the-snows pop up in the middle of the lawn. Thus I’ve had a crocus appear even though I never planted one. Thus the horseradish emerged in the woods 30 yards away from its calculated placement, the phlox choked out a complete garden, the lupines stepped sideways two feet, and the bee balm took over the compost pile.

These plants behave, in fact, like certain weeds. Heck, perennials are weeds, if you consider this definition: “What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it” (E. J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935). In my yard, some perennials are invasive weeds—like the nightmare phlox, along with lilacs, anything in the rose family, and lily of the valley, which to me is as pernicious as grass. I have come to hate grass, which grows like a metastisizing cancer where you do not want it and refuses to grow where you do.

What this all adds up to is a three-part lesson: (1) Do thorough homework before you plant perennials. (2) Be prepared to monitor them closely and manage them regularly. (3) Make sure you put clumpers in the garden and movers somewhere they can spread.

Else you’ll discover that perennials are actually annuals, because you’ll be reinventing your yard and garden every year!

IntotheSunrise_w9422_300On one day in 1975, Linny Eagan loses her job, her beloved, and her dream of becoming an equestrian champion. So she adjusts her dream to include only horses, since unlike men they can never betray her.

While recovering on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after a fall in a show, she meets Con Winston, trail leader at a stable. Con dreams of being a cowboy artist on a Montana ranch, but must play family head-games with his father until his twenty-fifth birthday, when he will inherit a fortune that will actualize his dream.

Though Linny needs love and money, she needs independence more. With neither of them willing to abandon their dreams, they continue in opposite directions despite a perfect match of heart and mind. Only Con’s horse connects them, until distance proves that pursuit of a dream needs love to sustain it.

About the Author:Carolyn Haley is a writer, editor, and reviewer living in rural Vermont. Through her business, DocuMania, she writes magazine articles and commercial copy, while helping book authors through editing, production, and education. She is author of The Aurora Affair, a metaphysical romance, and Open Your Heart with Gardens, a primer about interacting with the living green world.

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LASR Anniversary: M Pepper Langlinais

August 25, 2016 By 7 Comments

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Books in Season: Summer – M Pepper Langlinais

I’ve always felt that books, like movies, have a season. For summer, I prefer lighter fare, the stuff I can speed through, the “popcorn” of books. If I want a mystery, I’ll reach for Agatha Christie (John Le Carré is strictly fall/winter reading). If I want a thriller it had better be Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy or some similarly plot-driven tome. And I have a very particular memory of reading The Godfather while in Cancun one June. I also very much enjoy indulging in Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series while sitting outside on my chaise lounge.

My sense of books having seasons began with my father who each fall would pick up The Hobbit and read it and The Lord of the Rings trilogy over winter. Then in the summer he would return to things like Stephen King or the Conan the Barbarian novels. On summer nights we would sit out on the deck together, and Dad would set up the telescope so we could search for planets. And while we did that, Dad would tell me the stories from his books. I first learned of Bilbo and Frodo and Galadriel—oh, how I was obsessed with her power and beauty!—from my dad’s oral history, and I first heard the terrifying story of the rabid dog Cujo that way, too. (I still have never read Cujo, though I’ve enjoyed many Stephen King stories since.)

One particular night when I was in fifth grade, Dad told me a mesmerizing story of time traveling Nazis and later slipped me his copy of Dean Koontz’s Lightning with the caution, “Don’t let your mother catch you with this.”

My parents were both readers, my mother leaning more toward torrid romance until the day she decided it was too sinful and she switched to what would be called “sweet” romances now. I did eventually develop my own taste for Regency romances, and those are also good summer reads, or most of them anyway. The Christmas ones are better for the holidays, naturally. Victoria Holt, however, is fine summer fare, as is Jane Austen.

In truth, summer books really are like summer movies. They move fast and don’t require too much work on the part of the reader (or viewer). Just like summer itself slipping past at an impossible speed, the long days getting shorter, the darkness closing in so slowly we pretend it will never come, summer books fly by like pages ruffled in a stiff breeze. And that breeze grows just a little bit cooler, day by day, as we rotate toward autumn. So enjoy summer now, and the books that go with it. Because there’s almost nothing worse than picking up a book and realizing it’s out of season and you can’t read it yet.*

*Of course you can read a book any time. I realize that. But, at least for me, the mood has to be right. Ripe. Hence my sense of books having a season.

The_Fall_and_Rise_of_Peter_Stoller_by_MPepper_Langinais-500In 1960’s London, British Intelligence agent Peter Stoller is next in line to run the Agency—until he falls in love with cab driver, Charles, and his life goes off the road. When Charles is accused of treason, Peter is guilty by association. Peter manages to extract them both, but the seeds of doubt have been planted, and Peter is compelled to find out whether his lover really is his enemy. Is ignorance truly bliss or merely deadly?

About the Author: M Pepper Langlinais is the author of several Sherlock Holmes stories as well as a produced playwright and screenwriter. Her latest project is the YA fantasy series CHANGERS. She lives with her husband, children, hamster, and cat in Livermore, CA. Find her at PepperWords.com.

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LASR Anniversary: T.C. Tereschak

August 24, 2016 By 3 Comments

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Clayton’s Balls

When it gets hot; sticky, Mississippi delta hot; it always takes me back to that summer; the summer I turned twelve, and Clayton Sproul.

“Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the midday sun” or really bored twelve-year-old boys. In the shade of the maple trees that lined Spring Street, my best friend, Ed Compton and I were playing “homerun derby” using my whiffle ball bat and a ratty, old tennis ball Ed had brought. I’d just sent the ball sailing to the other end of the block for the third time and Eddie refused to get it. “Too hot,” he said and plopped down on the curb.

“Bullshit!” I protested. “I fetched for you. I’m, sure as hell, not getting it.”

“Leave it; full of dog slobber anyway; had to wrestle it from Bandit.”

Some dweeb, on a baby-blue Schwinn, dashed after the ball and came back with it. “Can I play?”

“Steady fielder,” hissed Ed.

“Meaning… I don’t get to bat?”

“You’re a genius,” said Ed, dismissively.

The dweeb started pedaling away.

“Hey, kid! My ball?”

“You didn’t want it. It’s my ball now. Finders keepers…”

Ed stood up. “Give…, or I’ll give you a fat lip.”

The kid got off his bike and tip-toed to get in Ed’s face. “Try it,” he spat.

I started roaring with laughter.

“Ballsy little prick,” tittered Ed and waved off the advance. The kid gave a smug nod and with that, our friendship began.

He name was Clayton Sproul; a year older; small and pale; an only child from Cherry Hill, New Jersey; banished to northeastern Pennsylvania to spend the summer with his aunt while his parents “worked out” some problems.

Over the next two weeks, our bond and the temperature, grew. Too hot to move, we spent most of our time flopped down somewhere in the shade swapping lies.

It was Ed who came up with the idea. “I’m bored outta my gourd. Let’s hit the Cubbies, tomorrow, early, before the sun comes up. We’ll catch some fish, then swim.”

“The Cubbies?” asked Clayton.

“Two swamps; peat bogs really; up on a mountain ‘bout eight miles away,” I explained. “First Cubby is crystal clear; good for swimming but not for fishing. Second Cubby is as black as coffee, but great for bullhead and perch.”

“We’ll fish Second Cubby first, then, when it gets too hot, we’ll mosey on down to First. If no chicks are around, we can skinny dip.”

“Smashing idea old chap,” said Clayton in a dead on British accent. We cracked up.

The following morning, we got up and pedaled our butts off. Drenched in sweat, we baited up and cast out into the black water. Four hours in, the only thing biting were the bugs. Midday, some high school kids showed up with beer and weed and started splashing around.

“We ain’t gonna catch shit now,” complained Ed.

Clayton peered into the murky water and asked, “How deep is it?”

“Deep…” I said.

Clayton climbed up onto a large rock, beat his skinny, white chest, did a half-descent Tarzan call and jumped in. Ed went next and then me. We jumped off that rock for hours.

I don’t know why we weren’t paying attention; can’t remember… but when one of the potheads said, “Man, that kid can really hold his breath a long time,” I looked around, and my heart sank.

We dove in a hundred times looking for him. The fire department sent divers in for a week. They said the lake was bottomless; nothing but mushy peat, who knows how thick, and he must have sunk in it.

Decades have gone by. The mountain is now a ski and golf resort, the second Cubby a water hazard where Clayton rests on the bottom; preserved in tannic peat; forever thirteen; pale and skinny.

Sometimes, I stop and watch the golfers. Occasionally, a ball will plunk into the black water but I’ve never seen anyone brave enough to reach in and fish it out. If they did, I wonder, would Clayton pop up and snatch it back? “You didn’t want it. It’s my ball now. Finders keepers…”

BabaFete_w10513_750There are some who say, at just the right moment, you can steal another’s soul…

About the Author:T.C. Tereschak is a horror fiction writer and lover of history, mystery and macabre.

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