A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

I’ve been a very bad girl this week, and am still catching up from being out of town. So, I will be at the drawing board a lot. And I am being punished because I did not get an invoice in this week, and won’t be paid for two whole weeks, and that’s what happens when you have been a very bad freelancer.

You don’t have to reward me for being a very bad freelancer, but feel free to slip me a tip for being a very good blogger.

We’re still tinkering with my new portfolio website, and I am doing major rethinking of my online monetizing efforts. This site will remains as is, with lots of blogging about industry concerns. The other site will feature my art and nothing else.

Also, the long awaited new line of goods at my Cafe Press shop is still in the works. I have a lot of freelance work to do around all that, so it is taking a little more time than I had hoped. I’m slow with my computer design progress. I’m very happy with the progress of my computer painting, however.

A quickee update on my work:

Stealth Tribes now has a minimum production schedule for completion. So, it’s back off work hiatus.

Gone to Amerikay has a production schedule and is not going to be out until 2011. No, we didn’t screw the pooch. Considering, DC’s original GN releases next year, 2011 is the better option.

The old ways are dead: getting a GN completed and having it out three months later is not done. Publishers want books nearly a year in advance.

I have another GN contract which begins production next year. I cannot discuss it.

A Distant Soil is being picked at in my spare time. Yeah, I have so much of that.

I am also doing some conceptual work for a TV show in development. It’s nothing to get excited about, since these things come and go. No, it’s not related to any of my other work.

I’ll be loading long out-of-print short stories to the portfolio site, some which have not been seen in more than a decade. And, of course, A Distant Soil will continue right here. Haven’t decided if I want to go on at 5 days a week or cut back to 3, but we will see. New planning with my monetization may help.

I want to once again thank DC McQueen for her great work here. Not only has she created a very easy to navigate website for my readers, but she made it easy for me.

Our site traffic has gone up like a rocket since it opened in January. I was comparing our traffic to a much older comics site, with nearly 10,000 pages of content. We only have 600 pages of content, but our ranking is higher and trending higher still. Also, we had frequent outages with our old server, and every time we had a popular link, the site went down. Since DC switched us over to her company, we have not had outages at all. Thanks to DC for all that! Check out her work at Girlamatic!

In the meantime, have a gander at autumn beauty down here on the farm.

Here’s a look at the barn, with new hothouse attached. Actually, that’s an old hothouse. A very nice elderly lady whose long-neglected hothouse had become a burden, offered it to us if we would cover all costs of removal, and make minor repairs to her house after.

I’ve already planted veggies in pots and look forward to having fresh winter crops.

BTW, I have not seen my car keys since I got back from out of town. I guess they are buried under leaves somewhere. The chances of my seeing them again until spring are slim. I will be losing a day’s work going into the city to have new keys made. What a pain.

The view from the stream, looking toward the house. I wish I had taken these pictures a week ago. The colors were brilliant.

The front yard is big. This should give you some idea of how big. That tiny little thing way far away in the picture is my greenhouse. It is wonderfully handy to have both a hothouse and a greenhouse.

I put the garden way down there because it has the most fertile soul. In short order, we realized that we lost so much food to moles and voles, we had to build raised beds with wire underneath them to preserve the roots. So, it turned out to be completely unnecessary to put the garden way over there. We could have put those raised beds anywhere, since we had to truck in hundreds of pounds of new dirt for them.

I tried putting a flower garden along the treeline on top of the hill, but that was a bust. After several years, the plants have not thrived, except for bulbs and some herbs. The ground here needs hundreds of pounds of lime. I decided to move the flower garden and let nature have its way with the top of the hill.

Ironically our farm is named Knock na Garry, which is Gaelic for “The garden on the hill”. And there is no garden on the hill.