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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GKP Writing News

Fast Novel Writing

I came across an article about writing novels for Kindle. It seems this author was turning out a book every nine weeks. That is fast novel writing time.

Now, I can write a novel draft in four weeks. NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) has taught me how to do that.

The steps are easy. I get an idea and think it through. Then I write down a bullet point list of plot ideas which may or may not appear in the draft. The last step is writing the draft of at least 50,000 words.

This is a rough draft. The characters aren’t really fully developed until half way through. Sometimes they even change names.

The plot has holes I can drive a semi through, if I drove a semi. There are side trips to places totally unrelated to the plot.

Facts are made up. I plan to check them out later.

In short, this is a draft, not a novel. It may be fast novel writing, but it isn’t ready for anyone to sit down and read.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
It took eight weeks to write “Dora’s Story”. It took a year to edit the novel. The draft timeline was wrong. The goat shows needed linking. I needed an illustrator. Then the grammar and spelling had to be checked. “Dora’s Story” was definitely not a product of fast novel writing.

Finishing Writing a Novel

Rewriting and editing can take months. All those facts need to be checked out. If I guessed wrong, the whole premise may fall apart leaving me writing an entirely new draft.

There is another reason I will never do fast novel writing for Kindle. I have a life outside of writing.

An author in my old writing group wanted to make it as an author. She raised sheep at the time. She sold all of them. Her husband joined her as they went to conferences.

The last I heard, she had made it as an author. All she did was research and write for her novel series.

I like my life. Going hiking and taking plant pictures. Milking the goats. Gardening. Watching the chickens.

Yes, I like writing. But fast novel writing consuming my life is not the way for me.

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Latest From High Reaches

Brushcutter Coming

City people don’t have brushcutters. In the country a brushcutter serves an important purpose as so many rural roads are lined with wild plants.

That is the draw of the roads for me. Many plants grow along the roads and are hard to find anywhere else. There are other advantages to plant hunting along the roads too.

before the brushcutter comes
Yellow ironweed lines the road. Tucked under it are the asters just starting to bloom. Several smartweeds, ground cherries and more line the road trying to set seed to grow next year.

Why Walk the Gravel Road?

First and foremost at this time of year is the lack of seed ticks. You’ve never heard of seed ticks? Lucky you.

Ticks lay eggs. When these hatch into hordes of barely larger than microscopic seed ticks starving for a meal, any passerby is fair game. They latch on by the hundreds, even thousands. And bite. And suck up a blood meal. The only good thing about them is their lack of diseases. Those they pick up from their hosts.

Second is the ease of walking. Roads, even gravel roads, are fairly open, level and hard making walking easy. Pastures and hills are much harder walking due to exuberant plant growth and terrain.

Third is the definite path. I don’t know how many plants I’ve found out in the woods and could never find again. Not even trying to have a landmark near the plant helps as some creature can come by eating or stepping on it.

brushcutter coming
The brushcutter is big. The rotary cutter can be turned to shear off bushes sticking through the fence. It can reach up to trim the trees overhanging the road. Very few plants escape it.

Disaster Looms

My nemesis is the brushcutter.

This huge machine has a rotary blade on a long, jointed arm. It mows down every plant along the road to a height of four inches. It shatters tree limbs to keep them from sagging down into the road.

After the brushcutter leaves
The flowers are gone. The plants are four inches tall. Many people like this as it increases their visibility driving down the road. Those people rarely notice the wildflowers. The brushcutter operator did skip a few places I flagged and I savor those places still covered with wildflowers.

I am left with few alternatives. One, I can stop photographing plants for the year. Two, I can restrict my walks to ShawneeMac Lakes Conservation Area. Or three, I can brave the seed ticks out in the fields.

No sprays seem to discourage seed ticks. I will lay in a supply of masking tape to remove them. And continue to take pictures.

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GKP Writing News

Teaching Basic Chemistry

Teaching basic chemistry was something I looked forward to when I was teaching high school sciences. Every year brought new challenges.

I suppose chemistry can be taught strictly from a book. That is so boring to me because science is hands on, experiments, seeing how things work. So my classes spent a lot of time in the lab.

There are lots of experiments available for a chemistry class. Most of them take lots of expensive equipment and chemicals. Small schools like the ones I was teaching basic chemistry in often don’t have lots of money for such supplies.

Some of those chemicals can be dangerous. Acids, poisons, fumes. These were not things I wanted to use a lot of in my classes. High school students aren’t always the most careful people.

Writing Science Activity Books

After I left teaching in a classroom and started writing books instead, science activity books seemed a good fit. Except I didn’t want a textbook, I wanted something more fun, more challenging.

I tackled botany first with “The Pumpkin Project” and found the concept of a science investigation, science activity, trivia, puzzles, stories and more fit the bill. But I also found writing such a book was a lot of work.

cover of "The Pumpkin Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fall investigations in “The Pumpkin Project” ask things like how to count all the seeds in a pumpkin (There’s more than one way.), just before you use the recipe for roasting them. How much water is in a pumpkin? Find out and make some pumpkin cookies too.

Instead of writing another book, I put chemistry projects first and motion physics later on my website. This brought up the challenge of how to do these without all the equipment I used to use from my storage closet. That forced me to take a good look at the experiments to find ways to achieve the same goals using everyday supplies.

This led to my second science activity book, “The City Water Project”. It has the investigations, activities, trivia, puzzles and stories I like to include. Lots of work went into doing all the investigations, activities and puzzles.

Tackling Basic Chemistry

Those chemistry projects sitting around bugged me. I started playing around with the idea for “The Chemistry Project”. Trivia and puzzles are harder for chemistry. Story ideas are harder too.

Still, there is the challenge of teaching basic chemistry for fifth grade up and all those projects using easy to obtain equipment and supplies.

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Latest From High Reaches

Datura aka Jimsonweed aka Thorn Apple

You can buy various varieties of Datura through garden catalogues. A lovely one, D. stramonium, grows wild here in the Ozarks.

This plant isn’t popular with livestock owners as it is poisonous. Another reason to avoid it is its seed production. If you grow one this year, you will have a hundred or more next year.

In a good location and year, these Datura plants get four feet tall with many sturdy branches. Each branch has tufts of large leaves and lots of flower buds.

Datura trumpet flower
Although in the nightshade family along with potatoes, tomatoes, ground cherries and more, Datura stramonium or Jimsonweed has big, spectaculat flowers. These resemble trumpets and are six inches long.

Since the flowers are lovely white trumpets, I leave a few around the workshop area. The rest succumb to the mower.

Other enemies attack any I miss. Flea beetles riddle the leaves with holes. Other insects come and go, usually escaping before I get close enough to see what they are.

Last year there was a huge plant growing in the barn lot next to the fence. The goats ignored it completely. The plant does have a rank odor when you are close to it and the goats don’t seem to like that. Poisonous plants and animals often advertise themselves to ward off nibblers.

After frost, I cut the plant down as it had a three inch trunk and dragged it out to a brush pile in the pasture. It had lots of thorn apple seed pods on it.

Looking into a Datura flower
This Datura flower isn’t open all the way, but this is my favorite view with the pinwheel effect and violet center.

This year I have a Datura colony around the brush pile. These plants are short as the grass resents the competition. They are retaliating by covering themselves with flowers every evening.

Datura is a night bloomer pollinated by moths. Big sphinx moths home in on the flowers as soon as they open. One variety of sphinx moth then lays hornworm eggs on my tomatoes.

There are very few hornworms on my tomatoes in spite of this abundance of moth food. This might be due to wasps as these very useful insects need protein for their larvae. At least one variety attacks young, soft caterpillars like hornworms.

So I get to admire the lovely Datura blooms without a hornworm infestation.

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GKP Writing News

Writing Fear Procrastination

Many writers have this little voice inside that says their writing stinks. I have that plus a legacy of being told I couldn’t write anything worthwhile. These blossom into a writing fear procrastination that kills books.

At present there are four writing projects begging to be worked on. Two are nearly ready for a final rewrite as soon as I finish up another twenty to thirty pages of draft. One is a new attempt to finish up an old idea for a science activity book. The last is my Dent County Flora, a project I have little hope of ever completing.

I do love to go hiking and taking pictures. The Flora project encourages me to do both. It’s easy to immerse myself in this project, especially in the spring and summer when so many plants are blooming. This year alone has added at least a dozen new plants and completed the picture series for even more.

passion flower lure away from writing fear procrastination
Passion flowers are one of many Ozark wildflowers luring me away to go hiking and taking pictures instead of working on my novels. It’s so easy to justify writing fear procrastination.

Except there are 2,000 plants to find in Dent County. Many grow in places some distance away from home where I have difficulty getting due to time constraints.

This should be a fun hobby, not my main writing project.

All summer I have done little except the website posts and the Flora pages. My two novels have been ignored. Even worse, I see my writing fear procrastination in full force when I even think about them.

There is a cure, sort of. Nothing really makes those little voices go away. However, they can be shoved into a corner and ignored.

The cure? Sit down at the computer. Open the novel file. Find where I left off on the draft. And write 500 words every day. In two weeks the draft will be done.

Except today I have to finish the two posts for the website for tomorrow. This means downloading pictures. So much for another hour.

And writing fear procrastination wins for another morning.

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Latest From High Reaches

Monster Squash Attack

Winter squash does put out long vines. But my Yuxi Jiang Bing Gua squash and Tahitian Melons are monster squash.

I’ve grown them for several years so I know they tend to get big. This year I planned for that. At least, I thought I did.

Yuxi Monster Squash
Those leaves really are huge, nearly 18 inches across. This Yuxi winter squash can be eaten young like summer squash or allowed to shell and kept as winter squash. These have a scallopped edge with a shape much like patty pans.

The Yuxi went into a plot about twenty feet square. It has deer fence eight feet tall on two sides, chick fence six feet tall on another and the four foot tall garden fence behind it. I expected to keep the vines growing around the area.

This monster squash had other plans. It stayed small for a week or so gathering root power. Then the vines shot off in all directions. I tried to curve them around. They sent out branches. They climbed the fences. They invaded the garden.

How fast does this monster squash grow? I’m not sure, but a foot a night might be a low estimate.

Tahitian Melon Monster Squash
Although called Tahitian Melon, this is a winter squash allowed to shell with huge keeping times, a year and more. They are large with a long curved neck. The vines are huge and refuse any efforts to contain them. The male flowers with their single fused stamen are large. The female flowers with their four sided pistil are the size of dinner plates. The baby melons grow fast.

The Tahitian melons, actually a winter squash, had no intention of letting the Yuxi have all the fun. These had a thirty foot run to the far fence. This had deer fence along the side and at one end. The other two sides are against the garden.

Ten tomato plants are unfortunate enough to be against the garden fence side. Picking is done by leaning over the garden fence. The melon vines are climbing over them and up the side deer fence.

Tahitian monster squash has huge leaves, bigger than the Yuxi which is no slouch. These are bigger than dinner plates. It too grows at least a foot a night. That is every vine tip doing this.

The Yuxi finally opened a few male flowers. It is behind the Tahitian melons. And those have the biggest flowers I’ve ever seen on a squash plant. The melons are over two feet with a strong hook.

Will these monster squash ripen any fruit before frost? My goats hope so. They love these almost as much as they love pumpkins now buried under the Yuxi.

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Latest From High Reaches

Stopping Future Weeds

Gardens attract seeds of all kinds. The objective is to grow the ones the gardener plants, not the ones that blow in from wherever. Part of my fall garden work is aimed at stopping future weeds.

Those weeds aren’t growing yet. I’m hard at work removing the rest of this year’s weeds. Why don’t I forget about these hypothetical weeds and concentrate on today’s growth?

Because I’m tired of doing so much weeding.

Last year I had very few weeds in my garden. I had taken the time to prevent those seeds from germinating and growing.

Over last fall and winter life threw me a few curve balls. Stopping future weeds was shunted aside. And I am paying the price this year.

Not next year. At least, I hope not. And that takes preparation this year.

One Idea

My method of stopping future weeds is not new. Ruth Stout had a similar method in her book “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book” back in 1971. It was called mulch.

I like using mulch. It helps with retaining water during dry spells. Mulch keeps the ground cooler during hot spells. And it discourages weeds.

Note the word discourages. My weeds are discouraged, not prevented by mulch alone. Morning glories for one will grow through six inches of straw. I need more than mulch.

cardboard working to stop future weeds
Tomatoes are crowding this garden pathway now covered with doubled cardboard. The plants in bloom at the end are garlic chives, good eating and great for attracting pollinators.

Enter the Cardboard

I wanted a way to keep those seedlings from getting up through the mulch. Gardening catalogues sell plastic to put down. This blocks planting the seeds I want and puts plastic in my garden.

Now, I’m not fully organic. I use wormer and medicines for my goats. However, my garden is as close to organic as I can manage. Plastic is not organic.

The idea is good. Cardboard is a more natural alternative. My feed store is a good source of cardboard. Furniture stores and neighbors who order lots of stuff online are other sources.

Cardboard Results

If I put down cardboard over my pathways in the fall, I’m definitely stopping future weeds from germinating this fall into winter. However, the cardboard must be weighted down to prevent removal by wind. And it must be replaced in the spring.

On garden beds mulch over the cardboard keeps it in place. It breaks down over the winter for easy spring planting.

And cardboard is a success in my garden.

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GKP Writing News

Choosing Fonts

Being a former science teacher, I still browse through several science magazines like Science News, Discover and Smithsonian. These normally ignore writing, except for a little article this month on choosing fonts to keep the readers’ interests.

What does font have to do with helping a reader remember a piece of reading?

Who Wanted to Know?

A psychology study compared how fonts affected a reader’s learning and memory when reading an article. I know. A psychology study. Highly subjective. Be skeptical.

However other experiments confirm this study’s conclusions.

Comparing Fonts

Anyone with a computer knows there are certain favorite fonts, default fonts. Times New Roman and Arial are very popular because they are easy to read.

These flunk the retention test.

Instead, fonts such as Bodoni, Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva increase retention. They are harder to read and force a reader to pay attention to what they are reading. That gets the mind to focus on the article more.

choosing fonts has a new twist
Do you recognize these fonts? Each line is a different font. In line order: Ties New Roman, Georgia, Arial, Bodini, Lucinda Cartography, Old English, Comic Sans and Montype Corsiva.

Unfortunately, my favorite font, Georgia, is not the ideal font to use. It’s similar to Times New Roman only slimmer, cleaner looking to me. I happen to like serifs on the letters.

Perhaps I should change to Monotype Corsiva. It too has the serifs. And there is that hint of italic slant. Even better, people pay attention more when reading it.

Dressing Up Fonts

The study did check into Bold and Italics. Both did increase retention when used sparingly. It seems using these to emphasize something makes the mind pay more attention to the words leading to better retention.

Choosing Fonts for Me

In spite of this study, I will stay with my favorite font. When originally choosing fonts to use both on my website and in my writing, I looked at all of the ones available on my computer at that time. Georgia is still my favorite. Although I used Lucinda Calligraphy on the pages of my Dent County Flora project.

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GKP Writing News

Finding Book Readers

All of my books are special to me. That doesn’t mean everyone else will find them special. Finding book readers interested in each book is part of marketing books.

Saying a book appeals to everyone is dreaming. No book appeals to everyone. How do you find those people a book does appeal to?

Determining Book Audiences

Finding book readers for my books will take some thought. Let’s focus on these four: “Waiting For Fairies”, “Capri Capers”, “For Love of Goats” and “Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States”.

The first step toward finding book readers is taking a good look at the book. What kind of book is it? Who might want to read it?

Looking at “Waiting For Fairies”, I see it is a picture book to be read to a young child. It has a number of Ozark night creatures in it. And it has a bit of whimsy with fairies in some illustrations.

cover for "Waiting For Fairies" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fairies capture people’s imaginations. They do lure this young child out one night to watch for fairies at a ring of mushrooms called a fairy ring.

This book might appeal to parents of a preschool child, if the family is interested in nature along with fairy stories.

Both “Capri Capers” and “For Love of Goats” have goats in them. Both are humorous. The first is an over-the-top melodrama complete with dastardly villain, heroine and hero with lots of action. The second is fun short selections about goats, many filled with tongue twisters and alliteration.

These might appeal to people raising or wanting to raise goats. The first might also appeal to a reader who likes a fast-paced, humorous story. The second might appeal to people who like words and the sounds of words.

Nonfiction Poses Challenges

“Asclepias” is far different. It is a serious botanical work on milkweeds covering how milkweed flowers work, growing milkweeds along with the history and detailed descriptions of each species of milkweed found in the United States. It is highly illustrated with diagrams and photographs.

cover of "Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States" Volume 2 by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
These are large, full-sized books with a total page count near 900 necessitating breaking the work into three volumes.

Dr. Rintz wrote these volumes so the serious amateur not necessarily familiar with botanical terms could understand what he was describing. The readers for this book might be these serious amateurs along with professional botanists interested in milkweeds.

The next step after finding book readers in theory is finding them for real. For me that presents big challenges.

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Latest From High Reaches

Fall Gardening

Hot, dry days are a memory now. Summer crops are bountiful. Still, it’s time for fall gardening to begin.

Timing is everything when planning for fall crops. Killing frost (dreadful thought) is not that far away. These plants need to be nearing maturity before it arrives.

Ozark weather has become increasingly erratic over the past five years or so. The average frost date may be the beginning of October, but cold snaps start in September.

Fall Crops

Good fall crops for me include spinach, winter radishes, lettuces, bok choi, Chinese cabbage, turnips, beets, rutabaga (I like these, but rarely grow them successfully.) and cabbage. There are other good crops available like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, Swiss chard and kale. The first three take up lots of space for low return. The last two are not on my menu.

Some of these crops need little protection before the temperatures get down around twenty. Some of the others need protection by the mid-twenties. Grouping them accordingly makes things much easier.

cabbage transplants are part of fall gardening
Cabbage and other cole varieties are good fall gardening prospects as they laugh at light frosts. Cold weather does slow them down, so planting them at least a month before frost date is a good idea. Mulch helps cool the soil in warm weather and keeps it warmer in cool weather promoting plant growth. Fall weather starts in August in the Ozarks.

Winter Protection

My main raised bed is set up for a plastic tent. In low temperatures, old blankets are added protection. I plant spinach, winter radishes, mizuna and bok choi in it. These crops will provide fresh food into January or even into next spring.

After killing frost, I pull off the tomato vines and cover the shade house with plastic. This turns it into an unheated greenhouse. Since it gets full sun, I often have to open the door to keep it from overheating during the day.

Larger drops like cabbage, beets, Chinese celery and Chinese cabbage grow inside. The Chinese celery is frost sensitive, but I grow it inside a wire ring and cover it with old towels on frosty nights.

My new raised bed is an unknown quantity this winter, it’s first winter to be planted. I will try various lettuces and a few cabbages in it. It too is set up to be covered with plastic.

Turnips and rutabaga are planted in an open bed. These too can be covered with plastic and old blankets on really cold nights.

Winter Supplies

By now it should be obvious my fall gardening plans include a supply of old blankets, old towels and so-called clear plastic from the hardware/lumber yard. A water supply completes my supplies.

Fall gardening lets me enjoy fresh, home grown produce well into December and beyond. All it takes is planning, work and care.