Growing | The Musings & Artful Blunders of Scott D. Southard

I am lousy with plants.

I don’t feel particularly defeatist about this, this is just something that has never interested me, and clearly I have little skills around nature. So both sides seem to acquiesce to mediocrity.

The first time I even attempted to grow something was when my wife and I got a little live Christmas tree as a gift. This was back in the quiet days before kids and we were living in an apartment and I thought what the hell? Why not try to keep this thing alive. It deserved a chance to live, right? It was either that or throw it away. The second option felt cruel (picturing a little cartoon voice screaming in my imagination), so there you go.

After re-potting this little tree, I began to water it and keep a daily eye on it as it sat by the window. When the weather got warmer, we moved it to the balcony and, I’m still not sure how this was possible, a frog began visiting it. This frog would somehow get to our second floor balcony every night, and then relax by it, maybe under it or on the railing nearby. It would just chill, the tree would just chill, and we would sit by the window watching both, chilling as well.

A strange and beautiful moment of peace.

Sadly, this was not to last and the tree didn’t survive the summer with its branches turning from green to brown. There was nothing I could do. My wife explained that little trees like that are not really breed to survive. So my dream of it growing into a full tree that I could plant in a future yard and each year decorate with lights, telling my perfect future kids about how I had grown it from a little sprout… well… that wasn’t going to be.

I know we gave that tree and frog both names, but I can’t remember either of them right now. Continue reading →

Today, to help support the release of A Jane Austen Daydream in April by Madison Street Publishing, I am pleased to have an article up on the Novel Travelist. The Novel Travelist is a fun site for writers hoping to explore the world, writers, and history. Here is the beginning of my post, Writing Advice – Leave Home:

We writers are isolationists, introverts. How else do you explain the fact we spend our time alone creating friends and worlds? We are not made for the outside; we’d rather stay inside, thank you very much.

When I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree, as much as I cared about the degree, I was more interested in something else. It was always my dream to be that young traveler/writer by himself going through Europe, with nothing but a notepad and a few paperbacks in a bag. I saw myself sitting under trees in Jane Austen’s garden, opening my soul to the romantic poets, or wandering the halls of Charles Dickens’ home hoping for a message from beyond. I even sometimes thought about smoking a pipe (I didn’t, but wouldn’t it look cool?)

What I actually experienced though really was not at all what I expected. The rude awakening of being thrown out of my “universe,” my norm; well, I had to adjust for that in a major way.

There were no little safe places to go, like I could when I wanted to write or just read at home; here everything was new and different (as well as the people around) and for an introvert it can make one’s hair stand on the back of one’s neck… permanently.

Still, I know that this experience made me a better writer. I look at what I did before I went on that six-week trip and what I did later and I see a more imaginative, more creative, more introspective, and more worldly writer.

You can read the rest of the editorial here. I hope you enjoy it.