Author: Karen GoatKeeper

Karen GoatKeeper loves to write. Her books include picture books, novels and nonfiction for science activity books and nature books. A recent inclusion are science teaching units.
The coming year has goals for two new novels, a picture book and some books of personal essays. This is ambitious and ignores time constraints.
She lives in the Missouri Ozarks with her small herd of Nubian dairy goats. The Ozarks provides the inspiration and setting for most of her books.

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Latest From High Reaches

New Septic Tank

When A-1 Septic came out, the man found out our ancient metal tank had rusted almost through. Luckily our vehicle normally parked in the garage hadn’t fallen through. We needed a new septic tank.

A previous owner of our house built a garage over the old one. This is not a good arrangement so the new one would be put in the front yard.

My goats were not impressed when the backhoe, the Bobcat, the big trucks and several men arrived at milking time. They got milked anyway.

500 gallon septic tank is big
The new septic tank isn’t that heavy. It does more than fill up a regular pickup bed. The rib design is to add strength to the tank sides.

Setting Up For the New Septic Tank

In the meantime the backhoe had dug a big hole. The new septic tank holds 500 gallons of waste and is four feet long, three feet wide and three feet deep. It needed to be a foot underground.

The old tank was crushed. A thick layer of gravel cushioned the new pipe going across to the old pipe and out of the garage. More gravel went on top of the new pipe.

Once the tank was in place and the pipes connected, a new problem arose. In order for the new septic tank to settle correctly, it needs to be at least half full of water. We have no hose.

new septic tank in hole
A backhoe lowers the new septic tank into the hole it dug for it. New pipe is needed to hook the tank up to the sewer system. Being plastic, the tank doesn’t stay settled down in the hole very well so it needs to be half filled or more with water. Then the dirt is piled back on top.

Problem?

We do have rain barrels. The rain barrels have tadpoles in them. I grabbed my fish net and started moving tadpoles out to only one barrel.

A small pump moved the water into the new septic tank. We ended up with one barrel of water to hold my plants over until rain could fill the now empty barrels back up.

Now the pile of dirt started going places. Some went back on top of the new septic tank. Some went into the garage to fill in that hole. The rest is sitting in front of my vegetable garden to fill containers and raised beds once the rocks are removed and compost is mixed in.

Surprisingly, this whole operation only took a couple of hours. It’s a nice feeling to have this potential disaster averted.

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Dealing With Septic Tanks

In the city everyone hooks up to the sewer system. No such system exists in the country, so most people use septic tanks.

Decades ago these tanks were made of concrete or thick metal. Polypropalene ones and concrete ones are available now.

Kinds of Waste Water

Two grades of waste water flow out of the house. One, the grey water, is from sinks and the bathtub. This water has mostly water, dirt and soap in it.

The second comes from the toilet. This has urine and waste in it.

Many old houses like mine have two sewer systems. One takes out the grey water. The other takes the sewer water to the septic tank.

A-1 Septic helps dealing with septic tanks
When a septic tank gets full, a service like A-1 Septic in Salem, MO, sends out a truck to pump the solids out.

Taking Care of Septic Tanks

Since septic tanks let solid matter in and keep it there, the less that goes in, the longer it takes to fill it up. Water flows through the tank and out to a leach field.

One way to cut down on the solids going in is to not flush paper down. Instead this paper is burned or put out with the trash.

According to Daniel Black, owner of A-1 Septic, the tank should be pumped out every three to five years. This keeps it from packing so solid it is hard to empty.

The solids are taken out to be sprayed out on hay fields as fertilizer. It breaks down quickly to grow grass well. A field isn’t cut for over a month after spraying so the waste is washed by rain and broken down by bacteria and the sun.

Old Septic Tanks

I’ve learned a lot about this lately because my tank needed to be pumped out. It had seemed just fine for three decades and was easy to ignore.

The crew came out. First, they had to find the tank. They have a little camera on a long line that goes up the pipes to the septic tank exit. This can be found by a device like a homing device.

Second, the dirt is taken off of the top of the tank. The smart way is to have a clean out pipe, but mine didn’t have one. This is not unusual for old houses.

Metal tanks have a big defect. The metal rusts. My tank had almost rusted away.

Now I need a new septic tank.

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GKP Writing News

Coloring Little Spider

Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.

Planning “The Little Spider”

I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.

I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.

Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).

Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.

Coloring Little Spider

Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.

My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.

Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.

coloring little spider and her journey
The little spider says “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” Why? Follow along to find out as the little spider leaves her web behind and searches for a high place. Her first attempt is a long blade of grass as shown in this image.

Patience?

I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.

That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.

This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.

My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.

This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.

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GKP Writing News

Social Media

“Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be available to readers by next week. That leaves me looking at more ways to let people know about my new book. The suggestion so many have is to be on social media.

Irritatingly, people and businesses assume everyone is on these various platforms. The only two I am on are Pinterest and Goodreads. There are no plans to be on any of the others.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
As I launch this new novel, my dream is for people to notice and read it. But people won’t notice it unless I can let them know it exists.

Why Not be on Social Media?

Time is a big reason I am not on these platforms. Since I am not online at home, my internet time is very limited, usually about five hours a week. This does not go very far.

Perhaps I could be online at home, but the service stinks. There is good service up on top of the hill because a teacher lives there and it was put in for virtual teaching. Those lines do not come down to me and won’t any time soon.

That leaves me with slow, unrealiable service be it through the phone company or satellite. It’s much cheaper and better to use the internet at the library, so that is what I do.

Nor can I use a cell phone to access the internet. Well, I suppose I could, if I wanted to go hiking across the creek, down two pastures and up on a hill to find service.

Privacy

Another big reason for me to not be on social media is privacy. The companies behind these platforms only want to sell me things I have no use for or sell my information to others who want to sell me things I do not want. It’s bad enough using Yahoo.

Yes, I do know privacy is a thing of the past. However, I enjoy the illusion.

Even more chilling for me is the amount of misinformation found on these platforms. I am not interested in sifting through the lies, the political rhetoric, the deceptions, the frauds and more.

When you do seek information, how do you know it’s for real? I’m reminded of a cartoon from some magazine of a dog at a computer saying “Online, no one knows you’re a dog.”

Where does this leave me?

It leaves me a website few people visit. It leaves me a network of people I know through Goodreads and NaNo (National Novel Writing Month).

My first promotion of Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be free downloads through Smashwords for two weeks. If you are reading this and wish to take advantage of this offer, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a positive review of the book on its Smashwords or Amazon book page.

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Latest From High Reaches

Necessary Rain

City people might look at rain as a nuisance. Country people don’t usually. This necessary rain waters gardens, grows pastures and woods and brings up mushrooms.

The lack of and the abundance of rain are the mainstays of rural conversation. Here in my part of the Ozarks both conditions have been topics this summer.

cover for "My Ozark Home" by Karen GoatKeeper
Floods and rain are some of the images and haiku topics found in this retrospective of our first 25 years living in the Ozarks.

Local Focus

News is reporting on both ends of the rain spectrum lately. New England is flooding. The Southwest is dry and being cooked.

These reports are disturbing. Even the reports of similar problems in Europe and Asia are concerning.

However, my focus is here. I rarely go even thirty miles from home. This is my world. I do sympathize as such weather, to a degree, has come here. But the reports are for far away places I will never visit. I live here.

More than necessary rain
This is from a flood in 2015 here in the Ozarks. It took off most of the planks from our bridge. They got caught down the creek where we found them and hauled them back. The creek was a foot over the bridge, but dropped rapidly after the rain slowed and stopped.

Heat and Drought

Last summer saw temperatures over a hundred here along with dry weather. Hay fields burned up, including mine. Hay prices soared, if I could find any.

My goats survived on mulch status hay and cold pastures over the winter. The garden lasted into early winter under plastic with well water and mulch.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
Storms are part of life in the Ozarks and are the subject of some essays and photographs in “Exploring the Ozark Hills”.

Cool and Rainy

This summer has stayed cool, rarely seeing even ninety degrees. A couple of days flirted with the hundred degree mark during a dry spell.

Now clouds cover the sky for days. They don’t drop a lot of rain, but enough for make the pastures lush.

Hay is still a problem and the prices are still high. First it got too dry and burned the fields. Now the necessary rain falls and it’s too cool and wet to make hay.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
In this new novel the main character Mindy must survive a major flood and put her life together afterwards.

How Does This Matter?

In my world, this matters a lot. This is where I live, where my goats live, where my garden is.

For the people living in other places, enduring weather so much worse than I am seeing, it doesn’t matter. What matters is their local weather because that is where they live.

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Summer Squash Time

Gardening is rewarding, sometimes too rewarding. Summer squash is one of the prolific rewards.

There are many varieties to choose from. My preference is Zephyr.

Planning for Summer Squash

One garden bed is designated for planting these big, demanding plants. I dig down at least a spade’s length and dump in a pile of manure. The soil is put back on top to form the hill. Three fit in one bed.

Mulch hay is packed around the hills six inches or more deep. This will keep moisture in the soil and keep it cooler as the Ozark summer sun is hot. It does provide a place for squash bugs to hide.

Zephyr summer squash
Zephyr summer squash has distinctive coloring. The squash seems to stay tender to a bigger size than many summer squash types.

Planting

Summer squash is very frost sensitive. It is also fast growing. I stick three seeds in each hill.

The advice is to pull two of the three sprouts. I ignore this. I know squash bugs and borers will move in and can decimate a plant overnight. Leaving all three in each hill is insurance some will survive.

Growing

The fun part of growing my plants is watching them get started. They put out their first leaves. Their little roots are reaching down through the hill.

Those roots find the compost. Overnight the plants double in size and keep growing. The leaves are bigger than dinner plates. Flowers open.

squash bug eggs
A main enemy of summer squash is the squash bug. This is a cluster of squash bug eggs. The eggs are often on the under side of leaves, but can be on stems or on top of leaves. They should be destroyed.

Bug Wars

My big plants make the bug wars easier. I can get down on the ground and look up to see under most of the leaves. Squash bug eggs are collected and dumped into the tadpole rain barrels to drown. Bugs are squashed.

A watering can is another weapon. These bugs panic when they get wet. I water the much and stems so I can dispose of the fleeing bugs. I know I will eventually lose, but this delays the inevitable.

squash bugs
The newly hatched nymphs are green and barely an eighth of an inch long. They soon turn gray and grow quickly to this one close to adult size. The adult has the triangle on the back and overlapping wings of a true bug. The predatory wheel bugs look similar, but are good to have around. Squash bugs can destroy a squash plant overnight.

Harvesting

Summer squash must be checked and cut every day. Everyone’s plants produce about the same time. There is a glut of summer squash.

There are lots of recipes using squash available. I don’t do much cooking in the summertime and rarely do any desserts.

What do I do with this bounty? I sell some. We eat some. The goats eat some. I cook up some and puree it, freeze the puree and have great soup stock for next winter.

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GKP Writing News

Designing Picture Books

Designing picture books is challenging. I’m wrestling with this now as I do sketches for “The Little Spider”.

If you think all you need are a bunch of related illustrations and some simple text, you are not writing and have never written such a book.

The Framework

There are two themes to a picture book. One is the text story. The other is the picture story. They are separate, yet they merge the two into a whole.

Although these books are no longer limited to 32 pages, they do usually have a page total divisible by four. This has to do with how the books are printed.

The Text

The amount of text depends on the age range of the intended reader or listener. Very young children have books with very little text with a limited vocabulary. Very good examples were written by Dr. Seuss.

As the age of the reader increases, the amount of text increases. The books become more like illustrated stories.

“The Little Spider” is for the younger set so the text is limited and repetitive. The illustrations help by showing what the text is talking about.

photographs for designing picture books
One of the little spider’s adventures is meeting up with a bee in a flower. I took the camera out as the little spider was climbing a chicory stem and met a green native bee in a flower. The bees are camera shy, but I persevered. This picture became a model for some picture book sketches.

The Illustrations

Often the person doing the illustrations is not the person doing the text. Instead, that person is known for their art be it watercolor, pen and ink, decoupage, pencil or many other possibilities.

I and many other authors do both the text and illustrations. This gives the author more control over how the two work together in the book.

“The Little Spider”

This book is a simple story of a small spider that balloons to a new location. To do this, the little spider must find a high place and spin a line of silk for the wind to carry it off.

In designing picture books like this one, I first write out a series of text lines. The repetitive line is “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” This is found on the left page as the little spider ends each attempt and goes on to the next. The next action begins on the right page.

So far, my little spider has had seven attempts covering 14 pages. That leaves me devising seven more adventures.

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Finding Culver’s Root

Finding Culver’s Root was a challenge. This wasn’t because the plant was hidden away somewhere or growing in some special place.

The plant was growing right there along the road. It was even in the same general location where I had seen it several years ago.

Memory versus Reality

I remembered Culver’s Root as being tall and robust. The flower column was several inches tall lined with white flowers. It caught the eye.

The guide book “Missouri Wildflowers” reports the plant can be six feet tall. Maybe my memory wasn’t really at fault.

This year the Culver’s Root plants are much smaller and thinner. Perhaps the recent dry weather and late spring frosts affected them.

Waiting

Finding Culver’s Root was only the first step. The whorled leaves and flower stalk marked these few plants as the ones I sought.

However, the flowers were still buds. That means checking the plants every couple of days until the flowers open.

Culver's Root flowers
Sometimes the flower spike on Culver’s Root stands straight up. The plants I found had interesting curves in theirs.

Photographer’s Problem

The Culver’s Root plants were beside the road. They were also near the top of a hill and over the edge. This is a steep hill dropping down into the creek bed.

Although I know the drop is only 30 feet or so, it looks much farther to me. I don’t want to slip on the gravel and go over. Heights bother me.

The Solution

The flowers started opening. As is true of many such flower stalks, the lower flowers open first. As these fade, the ones above them open until the top flowers open.

I sat down on the edge of the road. The plants were just within reach. I pulled a couple over, steadied them and took some pictures.

Now that finding Culver’s Root is off my list, I think I’ll tackle the native cactus. A friend spotted a plant so the waiting for it to bloom begins.

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GKP Writing News

The Little Spider

In late spring long lines of spider silk waft across the yard. These are single strands, not webs. “The Little Spider” was written as I found out more about these gossamer strands.

Lots of spiders call my place home. They come in many sizes and colors. They are welcome as they help decimate the fly and mosquito populations. The orb web weavers are the main ones to make gossamer silk in the spring.

Spring Spiders

Wolf and jumping spiders survive the winter hidden in building crevices or leaf litter in the woods. They come out on warm winter days and in the spring. By summer these have laid eggs that hatch over the summer into fall. These rarely make gossamer silk.

The Little Spider was once an egg in a case
In late summer the large garden spiders – all females – mate and create egg cases like these. The spiders will die with frost. The egg cases will survive the winter protecting the eggs inside. These will become baby spiders once spring warms the area.

Orb weaving spiders die in the fall. They leave behind silken egg containers filled with eggs that hatch in the spring (Remember “Charlotte’s Web”?). These spiderlings scatter and build tiny webs in the grass. I see them decorated with dew shining in the morning sun.

These spiderlings are nearly blind as were their parents. However they do want to move away into their own territories so they can get more food.

Spiders On the Move

Tiny spiderlings may run fast, but it takes a long time for them to go any distance simply because they are so small. “The Little Spider” is about such a little spiderling that wants to move and has a way to go a great distance.

When the temperature is warm and the air has a slight updraft, spiderlings find a high place to stand. They spin a strand of gossamer silk. The air catches the silk and pulls it upward.

When the silk is long enough, the pull is great enough for the spiderling to be pulled aloft. This is called ballooning.

How Far?

Although most spiderlings don’t drift very far, others do. They have been found thousands of feet in the air on airplanes or miles out to sea on ships. Some cross the English Channel.

gossamer spider silk on pasture
Gossamer silk spreads across the pasture after spiders go ballooning and return to earth. A few build webs soon after landing.

After landing, the spiderlings cut loose their silk strand. These gossamer strands are left spread across pastures, buildings or blowing in the wind.

This journey is the story in my proposed picture book “The Little Spider”. Being a picture book, illustrations are important and take a long time to do. They begin with the sketches I am doing now just as a tiny spider’s journey begins with finding that high spot.

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GKP Writing News

Changing Novels Into Books

When I wrote my first novel, “Broken Promises”, I had the idea that completing the novel was all there was to it. How wrong I was. Changing novels into books takes lots more work and thought. Open any novel and you can see all the extra things added.

Front Matter

All the pages before the first line of the novel are referred to as front matter. This can include the title page, copyright page, dedication and table of contents. These are not always the same for a printed book and a digital one.

My title pages always have a reference to the place the book is published. I have my print copy, GoatKeepers Press; the Kindle copy, Kindle Edition; and the Smashwords copy, Smashwords Edition.

The Table of Contents lists the same chapters. It doesn’t have to be in the printed book, but must be in the digital ones.

Each chapter has a title. The print book has page numbers. The digital copies have hyperlinks from the Table to the chapters and back again.

The Novel

Well, this is what I wrote, isn’t it? Changing novels into books means making changes here too.

Look at a published novel. All the text has even edges on left and right. There are page numbers. Each chapter usually begins on a new page.

And the last page of each chapter is not only a line or two long. If this is the case, I go back in the chapter and either add text or condense so the last page has several lines or becomes part of the previous page.

Digital copies have no page numbers. Usually, they have few page designations as the text flows freely on the ereader. The text is not justified with those even edges, but left justified.

part of changing novels into books is writing the back cover
Potential readers often look first at the title, then the cover and last the back cover for a summary of the book. Each indicates something about the book letting the reader know if it is a book that sounds interesting to them. The novel is important, both the story and the editing. but the title and cover are just as important as the novel will never be read if the others don’t interest the reader enough to open the cover. This one needs work.

Back Matter

Lots of stuff can be at the end of a novel. Some series have the first chapter of the next book. Acknowledgements by the author to people who helped with the novel, comments about the novel and lists of other books by the author are common.

Print books list the author’s website or other social media platform. Digital copies may even include links to these places.

Changing novels into books takes time and thought. But a book is not complete without all of these additions.