Lovely Sunday Morning in Athens, Ohio

Going outside to retrieve the Sunday newspaper can bring a scene so sweet that the news of the day fades away as I grab my camera and with a small dog following behind, try to capture the loveliness.

Refrigerator pickles!

Ah, those little seeds I planted in tiny pots in my garage in late April are paying off.... the first few cucumbers were ready to pick and pick them I did. Traipsing through the weeds, pathetic tomato plant, past the summer squash with their flamboyant flowers and the basil gone wild... About 2.5 lbs of cukes. Only one matched the photo on the seed packet. The others ranged from squat to bulbous to something resembling Madonna's 1980s bra. Still, once Mark sliced them up they all looked fine. We weren't being graded after all.

We used a recipe that was in the Columbus Dispatch a week or so ago and Mark took this photo last night.

This morning...voila!...pickles and a bran muffin for breakfast! Then, out to water the...ahem...garden for what is supposed to feel like the hottest day of the year. There, several pickling cucumbers hovered under leaves, wondering where their more stout littermates went to. Ah ha ha!

eBooks and Digital Rights Management

If you are interested in blogs on publishing and writing, please visit www.luckypress.blogspot.com -- a new blog I've started that will focus on the world of a 10-year-old independent publisher, Lucky Press, and issues pertaining to authors. Here is some information that I recently posted on Lucky Press LLC's Facebook page.

As Lucky Press expands its print books into ebooks, and launches some titles in ebook only, Digital Rights Management, poses questions on which this publisher is musing. When we upload an eBook to a distributor, we are asked what level, if any, of Digital Rights Management should be implemented.


As the publisher of titles for writers, and as this publisher is also a writer herself, published by another company, I find myself in a "sticky wicket." The writer in me says "protect the content" and that is what we are trying to do when offered a choice, opting for "medium" protection in MS Reader. The publisher in me wants to protect LP's assets. Our titles are our assets and we (myself, my family, LP writers) have worked too hard to "give" anything away (without our permission, aka "theft"). Yet the marketer, optimistic voice in me says that "if you love something set it free and it will come back to you" (cue pan flute). Also I wonder if getting the books in more hands and more places (people only willing to purchase a non-DRM rights protected eBook and putting it on more devices that they have now or may have in the future) will perhaps be a step in the right direction.

(From a marketing standpoint: most of our books are being put on Google Editions where up to 20% is readable without purchase. All of our eBooks are on Kindle, which offers free samples. All of our ebooks are availlable in MS Reader format, but at this time moderate DRM settings are in place. FYI: When a publisher uploads a book to the distributor she must choose "once and for all" whether DRM is activated or not.)

What works for you as an author and/or an eBook reader?


Is it important to you that your purchased eBook can be read on more than one platform/device?

Wikipedia on DRM

Interesting article posted August 7, 2010:
Cory Doctorow places DRM-free e-books with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo; Apple and Sony hold out

O'Reilly drops ebook DRM, sees 104% increase in sales

Note from Janice: This article is a must read! A (Probably Naive) Attempt to Move the DRM Conversation Forward

Amazon gives publishers easier control over DRM in Kindle ebooks

Funny graphic on DRM

@ eBook Summit: Sony’s Haber: You Can’t Make Money Selling E-Books For $9.99; DRM Is A Good Thing

DRM or not? a debate that won’t be over anytime soon
"My hunch is that the biggest authors will continue to insist on DRM and that they are sensible to do that. And that lesser authors will often be comfortable without DRM, and they are probably sensible to do that as well. But as the establishment stage of ebook adoption continues, I’d also expect that the “viral effect” of non-DRMed titles will stop being healthy for sales. This is an argument that still has a long time to run."

Digital Rights Managment vs the Inevitability of Free Content

August already?

Summer is supposed to be lazy, right? But mine has been more of the "hang on by the seat of your pants" variety. There's been so much to do--and all of it good. Within the scurrying around doing this and that, I hold in my heart the memory of...

Being a little girl, in the summer... spreading out a blanket under a tree and carting all of my Barbie dolls and their various accessories outside. Spending hours just playing and being, in the yard under that tree with my dashhound, Joey. My grandmother made cinnamon rolls, my mother made apple pie. Andy Griffith was on TV then and I had three pet turtles...

When I was 17, just, my parents let me go to West Virginia to partake in a two-week watercolor workshop. I remember the beauty, the hills, the pleasure of feeling "grown up"... There was no doubt I would pursue art after that...

And then, in college, taking a break and with a blanket heading to the wooded hill behind Taylor Hall (at Kent State). Four years earlier National Guard had marched up it with firearms, but for me it was a place of rest, looking down as it did on the oldest dorm on campus and the School of Fine Arts. I remember being 19 and rolling down that hill, laughing, and trying to figure out love.

A few years later, I worked all summer long at a store selling paintable figurines. I drove home through awful Akron traffic. One time a dryer fell right off a truck in front of me on the freeway! What I remember about that summer is the heat heat heat...and scrounging up $17 to buy a box fan and then sitting in front of it with a book, thankful.

And then, with my own children, sitting under a big banyon tree on the grounds of the Ringling Mansion in Sarasota, FL. Taking a picnic lunch there, gazing out at the Intracoastal Waterway, listening to seagulls...

As my sons grew, we'd spend mornings at a pool, or head to the beach as the sun began to wane. I remember all the sounds of being by the water and their young-boy voices. My youngest drawing cars in the sand with a stick. My eldest wearing a white bathing cap to protect his ears, his body so skinny and white, slathered as it was with suntan lotion. He was more at peace near the water than anywhere else.

And then, still more, the summer my sons finished high school. And letting go of my youngest one as he left home and moved from Ohio to CT. The summer memory I have then is of an old Saab and a young man heading away from me down the street.... I felt then, and still feel now, that life should have offered a ceremony to mark the occassion. Something both somber and joyful, heavy with grief and celebration.

And then, it was the end of summer and my eldest and my sister and I were in NYC on 9/11/01. Only sleep, a summertime's morning slumber, kept us from hurring off to the WTC to see the Statue of Liberty from the observation deck. That was the summer of emotion, so much that I could only grab a blanket and return to that mental place under a childhood tree and regain my equilibrium.

And then, some more summers and I was getting married! The church was hot, the nervousness was palpable, but the joy was great. It had taken me awhile, but I'd learned a few things about love since rolling down the hill at Kent State.

And then, BASEBALL! As my son, Jesse, and my husband, Mark, taught me the game up in the stands at the Phillies' ball park. I learned how much fun sports can be. Especially when a day outside was followed by a wonderful meal with family in one of Philadelphia's great restaurants.

[Photo: Bryce and my mother, hiking in Athens, June 2010.]

And also, it was in the summer that we found our new home, here in Athens. How wonderful these trees, this hill, this home this place called "ours."

I no longer sit on the ground on a blanket...I bought a park bench and it sits under the trees. I have a French easel, a Kindle, a garden, a pitcher of lemonade, and an epipen. The trees provide shade, the birds provide music, my husband is nearby, my children a phone call away.

Even in the busiest of schedules, life beckons to us to enjoy summer....

Shameless self-promotion alert!

I've brought more than 200 books to life! - ohio , us states - selfplug.com

Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was an outstanding book. For anyone who appreciates cartoons or comics. It really sheds light on how we perceive stories told in sequence through line, expression, color--why we related more to some styles than others, how our brains interpret iconic images...along with some art history... There is so much info in this book that after reading a library copy, I am purchasing a copy for my home library. I know I will refer to it again when illustrating childrens books.

I also, in a completely unrelated subject, found the comments on sensory information and also how we empathize with comic characters very interesting, as the parent of a kid with autistic-like challenges and sensory integration dysfunction. I think it is worth the reasonable price for parents of such kids to get the book and just read the few chapters on how we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

Cartoons and comic books and sequential art is everywhere, this book adds a lot to our understanding of this part of our culture.

View all my reviews >>

At each home, a towering tree...

Recently, Mark and I enjoyed a two-week visit from my mom. When it was time for Mom to leave, I drove her from southern Ohio northeast to Canfield and Austintown. It was about a 4.5 hour drive; a very enjoyable one on a beautiful summer day. We visited Canfield, where I lived from age 1 through 17. Then, we visited Austintown where my mother (and older sisters) grew up. We saw the cemetary where my father, infant brother, murdered cousin, grandparents, great-aunt and -uncle and their brother and son, and my mother's brother, who was killed in his twenties in a car accident, were buried. As we stood there I thought of how much life has gone by without these loved ones. My eyes welled with tears and I felt so much pride in my mother, who has handled sorrow and loss with grace and beauty. What an example she has set...

Canfield center is still there, the bandstand and several historic buildings still there. The Dairy Queen... the library. But the storefronts I remembered have been torn down and brick banks, etc. are there now. The road I walked on to buy Billy Holliday and Elmore James records and take my homemade dolls to the craft shop to sell is so much more developed. And the place were I went ice skating on a big pond with the empty 19th century Old Folks Home looming over and scaring us kids is gone. In its place is a big development with huge, beautiful houses and manicured lawns, some with swimming pools.

The farms that ran behind my friends' houses on Blueberry Hill are filled with streets of suburban houses.

And our own house on Glenview Dr. in Canfield, sold in 1970, is dark brown, not light green. And they have changed the house number! It is no longer 332, an address that always had an open front yard with a few trees my father planted. Those trees now totally envelope the front yard in shade, one can hardly see the house when looking at it from down the street (see photo). The hill I went sledding on was not as big as I'd remembered and it's all landscapped beautifully now. Kids can't search for rocks on it anymore, but there are a lot of flowers there.

The new owners added on a 3-season porch to the back of the house, rerouted the cellar steps, and enlarged the big bedroom at the back of the house that my parents had once added on. It was strange walking down the walk and seeing the door to the garage, the mail slot on the garage wall, the front porch where I played jacks and the front door and doorbell are the same. It was interesting...and disconcerting. Who was this family living in "my" house? "Did you raise children in this house?" "Oh yes!" Then I realized there are other adults walking around having dreams at night of their childhood home, the same one, sort of, that I am dreaming about, but not quite. Two realities. As real as a memory can be.

There's the house where the dog bit me. There are the corner windows of my bedroom as a middle-school student. I had seen a desk and shelves in a magazine and my father helped me build it for that room. My windows looked to the house next door where I babysat the neighbors young son and daughter. The parents have both passed away and the creative, energetic child I watched died a few years ago...

I didn't go down into the basement to see if my ballet barre was still there. Or the ping pong table where Dad and I battled it out each night. It seemed odd that someone had moved my aquarium from where it usually sat at one end of the dining room. Who had moved our old clock and why was there a desk next to the living room fireplace, a room these strangers "hardly ever use."

The flowers in the backyard were beautiful, but they were not mine. This must be what it is like to be old, I thought. But my spry 89-year old mother handles it all with the optimism and open-heartedness that have won her a lifetime of friends.

We went back to see Mom's childhood home in Austintown as well, and that's a whole 'nother story. The country road she lived on and rode her bike in the 1920s was there. But where her father farmed fields across the street to obtain fresh produce for his family...these are now filled with houses, and not new ones either. Yet, Mom remembers the names of her neighbors, the home of her best friends. The country house she lived in is 400 or so feet from a four-lane road overrun with car dealerships, restaurants and plazas. It is not quiet or "out in the country" any longer.

I also saw the second house my mother's parents owned in that neighborhood. A bigger house; they'd only lived there a month when her brother Donald was killed in a car accident at age 21. I imagined sorrow filling the house and I didn't take a photo of the structure.

It was odd to see this "other town," Austintown, where my mother grew up, where my sister once had an apartment, where I saw the house where I lived for the first year of my life, a different house located on Rosemont, that now has a handicapped ramp in the front. I imagined my mother and father bringing a baby me home from the hospital. In the front yard a large tree, planted by my dad over 50 years ago, dominated.

Mom pointed out the house diagonally across the street where a WWII concentration camp survivor lived. My mother's boss gave him a job. He played the "mouth organ" at night on the front steps. I could almost hear him there...

Across the street was a house where there once lived a young boy. He promised my older sister a sewing machine, if she, age 10, agreed to marry him. She didn't.

I saw where my sisters (9 and 12 years older than I) went to school and realized that not only does another family inhabit my childhood home in Canfield, but my own family had an entire life lived in a place I knew so little about. And I realized again how personal, how unique and individual, are our memories. And how important--in the creating of them and the holding on of them. And perhaps how important it is to let go.

I was unimpressed with the elementary school I attended; it seemed not to have caught up with the upper-middle class homes surrounding it--perhaps all I remembered was the teasing I endured from the large family who lived next to it in my childhood. The feeling of discomfort was still lingering in that parking lot, as far as I was concerned. A feeling of happiness entered my heart, though, as I pulled into the parking lot of the library, where I spent so much time as a teenager, walking there after school and in the summers. It looked pretty much the same. (see photo)

We are traveling northeast to Brookfield, where my family moved at the start of my senior year. It lies on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. We had a beautiful home there too, and my dad planted several trees in the backyard. I wonder if the house will be easy to see with all those trees. It is at this home I learned to drive, and learned to leave childhood behind. It's the home I brought my toddlers to, to visit their elated grandparents. It's where my father let me purchase a 12 ft high Christmas tree, because we had a 16 ft high ceiling.

And then I will leave my mother in the company of her friend of 85 years (see photo, Mom is on the left) and drive back to the most important home of all....the one I live in now, the one where the man who loves me waits with open arms for us to create memories of our own. He planted three Japanese maples last year. And we have four acres of trees for me to measure my life against...

Postscript: The home in Brookfield, Ohio, where I lived in my senior year of high school and where Mom and Dad stayed until they retired and moved to Florida, looked nothing like it had in the past. Several additions, new siding, a fenced in backyard... But several things remained, trees my father planted. A huge one towered in the front yard. Just like in Austintown, just like in Canfield. We stopped to visit the neighbors across the street. They laughed when we mentioned Dad's trees. I guess everyone was interested in what he was planting back then.

My father's name was Woodrow Wilson Phelps, Woody for short. He lost his parents before the age of five, and perhaps a sense of inner impermanence gave him a love of tall things that outlive us. His trees remained in our old home yards as if to welcome the child in me, so that I wouldn't feel a stranger in this world that moved on without him, and without me.

Additional postscript: Under the heading of, "Just because I remember it, doesn't mean it is still there..." My sister sent me this link to Idora Park on YouTube. This was the amusement park we went to as kids...I didn't even realized there'd been a fire in 1984 (I was living in FL then) and that the park closed that same year. Seeing these happy people in the film, I wondered if one stands on the now-empty land, if you could hear, in some way, their voices. Does the land hold spiritual aspects of the people who lived there? This is something I've always wondered about.