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

Wild Capri Capers

We were watching some old Rin Tin Tin movie serials and I wondered if I could write a serial about a goat. Every episode ends with a cliff hanger, so a wild Capri Capers took shape.

Movie Serials

When movies started and were only shown in theaters, the theaters wanted a way to keep people coming back every week. The movie serial was born.

These serials lasted for weeks with a melodrama plot. Each episode was full of action and ended with something dangerous happening leaving the hero or heroine in mortal danger.

The following week the dangerous happening was shown again with changes. Those changes let the hero or heroine survive to continue the plot only to again get into a dangerous situation.

cover for "Capri Capers" by Karen GoatKeeper
Begun as a lark and an experiment, Capri Capers was such fun it became a book.

Melodramas

These are simple plays. They normally have three main characters: a hero, a heroine or damsel in distress and a villain. The villain had some dastard scheme to capture the heroine and was foiled by the hero.

My father and his friends made up these plays up every week while he was in high school. They put on the plays for the students during lunch every Friday. My father always played the villain.

Proper protocol had the audience greet the hero with cheers and the villain with hisses and boos. At graduation all the students booed my father in honor of his years playing the villain.

Wild Capri Capers

The original draft of Capri Capers was in true movie serial format. Every chapter ended with a cliff hanger. The next chapter looked at the cliff hanger and solved it before launching the plot into the next cliff hanger.

Every name was chosen like a melodrama name. Dan Janus is after the two faced Roman god. Leroy Rogue and Roscoe Rascal are the villains. Harriet Zeigenhirt’s last name is German for goat.

The final draft changed the cliff hanger repeats into a more familiar novel plot line. However, the cliff hangers are still ending the chapters of a wild Capri Capers tale.

Oh, yes, there is a goat, several goats in the story. Capri is a goat and plays a big part in the story.

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Latest From High Reaches

Forever Mullein

In 1849 a professor at Mishigan State University got curious. Farmers kept asking him how long weed seeds remained viable in the soil. Little did he suspect his long acquaintance with forever mullein.

In my own garden weeds are a constant battle. I can pull every one in a given area, come back in a couple of weeks to find weeds covering the same area.

forever mullein plants
Mullein is a biennial. The first year a rosette of hairy gray-green leaves tries to hide down in the grass. The second year the leaves get huge as the spire rises up, sometimes branching to make a candelabra up to six feet tall. The flower spike opens flowers more-or-less in circular arrays moving from the base to the top.

Weed Seed Bank

Whenever a weed succeeds in producing and dropping seeds, they join others hiding in the soil. These wait, sometimes for years, for conditions to be right. Then they germinate.

Desert wildflowers are a good example of this. For years an area of desert may go without rain. No wildflowers grow.

Right after a rain, the desert blooms as seeds hiding in the soil germinate. People come for miles to see the array of flowers covering what is usually bare dirt.

Longevity Experiment

This professor devised an experiment to find out how long weed seeds would survive in the soil. He put damp soil in over twenty glass bottles. Seeds from twenty-three different common weeds were collected and fifty of each were added to this soil. Then he buried them in a container outside.

For several years the professor took out one bottle and germinated the weed seeds. Another professor took over the experiment leaving years between when a bottle would be dug up.

Fewer and fewer kinds of weed seeds germinated. After 142 years, a bottle was dug up. The seeds were coddled in an attempt to germinate them. Only one kind still does, the forever mullein.

forever mullein flowers
Called a weed, the forever mullein has lovely yellow flowers overnight into the morning. They are primarily moth pollinated to produce those long lived seeds.

Weed Free Hopes

Most of the common weed seeds only survived a few years. If I can keep any new weed seeds from being added to my soil for five years, most of my weeding problems would be over.

One weed would remain, the forever mullein.

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Latest From High Reaches

My Carduan World

Sitting at my computer now I am being serenaded by gray tree frogs. In the distance are several different birds settling on their roosts. Later on the whip-poor-will will call. This will be the Carduan world.

A thunderstorm went through earlier this evening. Storms are common during an Ozark spring. Ice and snow fall in February, maybe March. Rain in March and April. Thunderstorms mark the change from spring to summer in late April and May. This will be the Carduan world.

Being Complacent

There are lots of interactions going on between the nine Carduans. It is easy to focus my writing on these and toss in a storm now and then. But that isn’t real. It’s being lazy, being complacent, not thinking about the natural world.

Putting the natural world into the Carduan world will take outlining the various weeks. They do have approximate dates assigned in the outline I already have. Now I need to do a second outline with the weather, plant blooming, animal appearances, sounds that might occur during each of those weeks.

Dandelions food on Carduan world
One of the first edible plants easy to find in the spring is the dandelion. Although it is an import from Europe and occasional near creeks and pasture edges, it could be found by the Carduans. Both the flowers and leaves are edible. The root can be roasted and used for a coffee substitute.

How do I Know These?

That is the good thing about setting Cardua in an Ozark ravine. I’ve walked ravines, pastures, explored creeks, watched various storms and their aftermaths for thirty years.

No, I don’t know everything that happens. No one does. But I can add enough of these to make the Carduan world seem real. And that matters to me and, I hope, to readers of this massive work once it gets done.

When will “The Carduan Chronicles” be done?

I am impatient to see this story finally get written. It has been several years in the planning, drafting, rewriting and editing. I want to move on to other projects.

However, I want these books, and I find there will be four of them, to be right. That takes time. I’m hoping the first one about Ship Nineteen will be done and out this fall. The one on Ship Eighteen should be ready about the same time.

This depends on my writing time and getting the Carduan world right.

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Latest From High Reaches

Purple Milkweed Blooming

Missouri is home to a wide variety of milkweeds that spread their blooms over the warm months. The purple milkweed blooming along the roads and in the edges of the woods is the first of the milkweed parade.

No Milkweeds Means No Monarchs

This is what the Missouri Conservation Department keeps saying. And it is true as milkweeds are the only plants their caterpillars feed on.

Those milkweeds are fewer in number every year as the places where they grow are plowed under, sprayed and mowed. They have no modern economic value, so they are destroyed with little thought for the consequences.

butterflies love purple milkweed blooming
Butterfly gardens, especially those with milkweeds are popular for monarch butterflies. Purple milkweed, Asclepias purpurescens, is a good choice for semi shade. It is a lovely plant and very popular with butterflies, wasps, bumblebees. clearwing hawkmoths and more.

Valuable Milkweeds

Although the big push to grow milkweeds is for the monarchs, there are other reasons too. An easy dozen kinds of insects visit the flowers.

Purple milkweed blooming is a magnet. Frittilary butterflies were tromping around drinking nectar. Dodging their feet were wasps, bumblebees and bees. Another visitor is the clearwing hawkmoth that hovers like an hummingbird.

Flower or crab spiders ambush prey on the flowers. Various beetles move in. The plants attract aphids and milkweed bugs.

Perennials

Because milkweeds are perennials, they are great for erosion control. Some are very showy like the popular butterfly weed. Others need lots of space like the common milkweed that spreads into a patch. Most like lots of sun.

A huge patch of purple milkweed blooming is gorgeous. The clouds of orange, brown, yellow, white, purple, black and more butterflies shifting between the upright umbels add to the beauty.

cover for "Missouri's Milkweeds, Milkvines and Pipevines" by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
A guidebook and more to the milkweeds, milkvines and pipevines known to grow in Missouri.

Growing Places

I see purple milkweed blooming in places with some shade and moisture. The common milkweed does well in road ditches, sometimes reaching six feet fall or more. Butterfly weed likes it drier and sunnier. It is rarely over two feet tall. Water gardens or the edges of ponds and lakes is favored by pink swamp milkweed.

Green, whorled and spider milkweeds are easy to grow too. They like dry and sunny places.

Butterfly gardens need milkweeds.

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Latest From High Reaches

Storm Reports

Lately the news has lots of storm reports. One of my latest reading books was “A Storm Too Soon” by Michael J. Tougias about a storm to rival the reports.

This excellent nonfiction thriller follows three sailors on a sailboat crossing the Atlantic. They left a month before hurricane season, but two low pressures joined forces to create a hurricane.

When the sailboat sinks, the Coast Guard rescue units attempt to find the life raft and rescue the sailors. There are photographs in the book of the monstrous eighty foot tall waves.

Local Storm Reports

Storms much tamer than the one in the book have been passing through the Ozarks lately. One caused a flash flood. Most drop an inch or less of rain, maybe have some lightning and thunder and big winds.

The frequency can be a nuisance. The grass loves the rain and warm weather. The mower doesn’t mind the warm weather, but doesn’t like the rain or resulting wet grass. Barn cleaning is no fun in wet weather either, especially rain as the goats are in the way.

I’ve written about Ozark storms in both “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and “My Ozark Home”. The ones in recent years are different as they are usually small rains or big downpours.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
Several of the nature essays in this book concern storms, rain, ice and snow, and the results of those storms.

Gardens and Rain

With summer plants and seeds going into the garden, the frequent small rains are very helpful. I put in the squash seeds, let the rain water them in and watch the seedlings appear a few days later. Tomatoes and peppers love the rain too.

One problem has come up. The flash flood filled in the creek pool I use for water during dry times with gravel.

That is another aspect of the new weather patterns. A wet time is followed by a dry one that borders on drought before the next wet cycle begins.

The gravel problem is one of many to solve. For the present I will watch the storm reports.

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GKP Writing News

Menu Planning

I’m reading a fun book now called “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown in which a robot is marooned on an island. Being a robot, she doesn’t eat so Brown is saved the problem of menu planning.

On the other hand, my Carduans are alive and do eat. They need to explore their ravine and find foods they find palatable and obtainable.

Plant Menu Planning

Since the Carduans arrive in the ravine in mid February, their plant choices are very limited. Most plants are dormant until the weather warms up. The plantains, chickweed and dandelions I see in my garden are not often seen in the ravines as they are alien plants, although they emigrated here in colonial times.

As the weeks go by, the weather warms and lots of plants start to appear. The action takes place over fifteen six-day weeks, so there is a time frame.

My research covers when different plants appear, grow and bloom. Then the question is whether they are edible. Some like yellow rocket are edible, but bitter. Water cress is edible, but an acquired taste. Spicebush and redbud blooms are tasty, but hard to reach for the Carduans.

Menu planning for squirrel
Although a squirrel would be a good meal for the Carduans, catching one is quite a different matter. Squirrels are bigger than they are and easily climb trees. They are also fierce fighters.

Meat Menu Planning

The Carduans are omnivores, eating both plants and animals. However, the Carduans are limited in what animals they can tackle.

People think of deer or wild turkey. These are far too big for the Carduans to tackle. Even rabbits are bigger than they are.

The most available creatures small enough for the Carduans to tackle are mice, voles, minnows and crawdads, possibly moles, chipmunks and squirrels. Since the permanent camp they establish is near what they call a river and we call a creek, minnows and crawdads are easily found. The others are harder to find.

One other source of food is one most people would avoid: insects. Many insects are edible, the right size and, during warm months, available.

Menu planning for such small characters is challenging. It forces me to think outside the box.

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GKP Writing News

Rainy Weather

Ozark springs are usually filled with rainy weather. After a time, the rain gets to be annoying. However, those days will be lookied back on longingly during hot, dry summer weather.

How Does Rainy Weather Relate to Writing?

Ship Nineteen in the Carduan Chronicles arrives in the Ozark ravine in mid February. Over the next few months, spring arrives with its rainy weather.

Now, for people rain is not a big problem unless there is a flood. What is it like for something as small as a bird? What happens to an insect hit with a big drop of rain?

Occasionally there is mention of such things. Mosquitoes are shoved out of the way by the air wave surrounding the rain drop. Most insects hide under leaves or other coverings for protection.

rain makes finding writing time easier
Spring floods aren’t uncommon in the Ozarks. If you were only four inches tall, how scary would this sight be? And would you consider a creek to be a river?

And the Carduans?

My characters are four inches tall. A thunderstorm downpour could prove deadly to one of them. And, as their home planet is arid, they are not very familiar with rain.

That is part of the story. This group of nine must learn about and learn to survive in this Ozark ravine.

Writing the Story

One of the challenges of writing about these tiny characters is visualizing what the world would be like for them. There are so many times I find I must go back and rewrite a scene as I wrote it for someone my height, not theirs.

Another challenge is the timing of spring events. What types of weather happen during this time? It isn’t only rainy weather. Which plants are blooming? Are they edible?

What animals are moving around? Which will ignore the Carduans? Which will consider them snack food? How can these characters defend themselves? Which animals can they consider food? How do they catch these?

I am now half way through the rewrite for Ship Nineteen. The draft has long left the original behind leaving me to scan the old story and decide which parts to incorporate into the new story. And rainy weather certainly must play a part in the story.

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Latest From High Reaches

My Favorite Tree

While browsing through the picture book shelves, I came across “My Favorite Tree” by Diane Iverson. This isn’t really a picture book for young children, but a book about trees for older children.

Each two page spread has one picture book side with something about why the children in the picture like that particular kind of tree. The other page gives the name, description, range map, trivia and champion tree.

Looking at Trees

Now, I like trees. They have lovely shapes. Their shade is very welcome on hot days. Some have beautiful flowers and great fruit.

My problem with trees is how big they are. I can’t even reach the lowest branches of most trees. Climbing them has never been something I want to do.

My favorite tree in late spring is the dogwood
After the wild plums turn white with flowers and the redbuds don their pink slippers, the dogwood spreads its white clouds in the woods.

Tree Appreciation

A newspaper article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch reiterated something I also read about in Science News. Trees are very valuable in the city.

Trees cut noise, absorb pollution, cool hot temperatures and make people feel better. Cities should find ways to plant more trees. The suggestion for St. Louis was to plant trees on some of the abandoned house lots after removing the condemned structures. Most cities have such places and a small neighborhood park would increase property values for surrounding houses.

Which is My Favorite Tree?

As I read through “My Favorite Tree”, I asked this question. So many of the trees listed were ones I was familiar with. The pages brought back many memories.

Standing in the midst of a redwood grove. Sniffing pine trees for the scent of vanilla as Ponderosa Pines smell of vanilla and Jeffery Pines don’t. Fir forests looking like Christmas in a blanket of snow. Saguaros standing like sentries across the desert. Stopping under a Joshua Tree to take a picture of it and my new car.

Other trees are familiar ones around my home. Redbuds with their pink slippers that taste nutty. Dogwoods spreading white clouds in the woods. Persimmons and sycamores giving fruit and leaves to tempt the goats. Gathering black walnuts.

My answer really was that it depends on which tree I am focusing on at that time. In spite of their great height towering over me, I like trees.

white oak in winter
One of the interesting sights in winter are the shapes of the various trees now bereft of leaves. Different kinds of trees have different shapes. Trees growing close together change their shapes to compliment each other.

Using This Book

The trees listed are from many places and no one will see them all close to home. But the book offers a way to entice children outdoors to take a look at these mighty neighbors, learn their names and find out more about them.

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Latest From High Reaches

Noisy Country

There is a mistaken belief that the country is quiet and peaceful. Maybe it is at some times. Right now the noisy country is in full swing.

tree frog waiting for dark
Easily mistaken for a lump of mud and hoping to be ignored, this gray tree frog sat near my trays of seedlings all day. I would prefer that it was a bit more active in the bug eating realm. It was resting up for a night calling from the neighboring rain barrel.

Tree Frogs

The house is ringed with rain barrels. We use the water for plants inside and outside the house.

Looking around the house there are these gray mottled lumps tucked into nooks. Closer inspection shows these are frogs, gray tree frogs. They don’t seem to do anything all day. It would be nice if they would snack on some of the flying insects zipping by them.

As evening approaches, these frogs migrate to the rain barrels. They think the barrels are there just for them. One or more line up along the top edges. By dark the chorus is in full voice, almost loud enough to drown out any converstaion or other noise near them.

City people find this annoying. Noisy country frogs make sleeping impossible.

Whip Poor Will

One lone whip poor will still comes to the valley. He claims the valley as his own, moving from place to place calling whip poor will over and over.

This year the bird begins calling at eight thirty and continues until dawn. I can listen while I milk. Some nights he sits just outside the milk room to serenade me.

noisy country culprit: red-eyed cicada
Every year the green annual cicadas announce summer’s arrival in the Ozarks in June to July. The red-eyed cicadas appear in their thousands only rarely. They are earlier than the annual invasion. Last time they hung on bushes and trees all over the hills. This year they fly up into the trees where they are heard, but not seen. This one stuck around long enough for a couple of pictures, then flew off to join the chorus.

Cicadas

This year the cicadas are already buzzing from the time the sun lights up the trees to sunset every day. These are the ones that emerge every thirteen or seventeen years.

Usually the annual cicadas don’t start emerging and calling until June or July. Their chorus is louder.

People

I’ve heard people complain about the noisy country sounds. Then they drive down the road with their radios blaring. I can hear them laughing and shouting for a quarter mile as they pass the house. Then the four wheelers and side-by-sides with no mufflers come roaring by.

Given the option, I far prefer my noisy country filled with cicadas, tree frogs and birds to the noise people make.

More of the wildlife is featured in essays in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.

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GKP Writing News

Long Lived Books

Some books are called classics, but really aren’t. Classics are long lived books that speak to readers many years, even centuries after they were written.

An author may dream of writing such a book, but it’s rare to achieve it. And the author will probably never know their book has become a classic.

What Makes a Classic Tale?

The simple answer is: I don’t really know. The things such books seem to have in common are: timeless themes; unforgettable characters; and intriguing plots.

Another thing classics seem to have in common is how well the theme, characters and plot can be molded into new tales. Romeo and Juliet comes to mind.

Shakespeare based his play on a tale he knew from his time. That tale is long forgotten. But his play lives on even though his lines are difficult for modern people to say and understand.

How many other stories, novels, plays and movies can you think of that are rewrites of Romeo and Juliet? West Side Story is an easy one for me.

Why Think About Long Lived Books?

I’ve just finished rereading “Gift From the Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindberg. My copy is a 1975 reissue printed 20 years after the 1955 original with a note by the author at the end.

whelk shell
Using shells such as this whelk, Anne Morrow Lindbergh in “Gift From the Sea” invites the reader to examine her life, to find the perfect shell that gets buried by life.

It’s a series of essays revolving around shells she picked up on a beach during a short vacation. Each shell is linked to a time in a woman’s life.

The idea behind the essays is a chance to re-evaluate your life. Her answer is to try to simplify, admittedly almost an impossibility for women with so many responsibilities. Yet, it sets a goal for a woman to find herself and hold on to what she is in spite of all the distractions and responsibilities. One aspect so many of us have lost is taking time for ourselves, for reflection, for thought, time without interruption by phones, texts, emails, children, friends, family. This may be only a short time each day, but it lets us define who we are for ourselves instead of letting others tell us who they think we are or should be.

Classic?

“Gift From the Sea” may not be a classic tale, but it is one of the long lived books. I would be thrilled to have one of my books be so valued by readers, still speak to readers, 20 years after I wrote it.