Am, that's lovely! I wish I could digest raw apples, damnit; they always look so good.

Here's one, because I'm staring out my office window down into my garden, even as we speak.

The Witch's Garden

At the heart of the garden is a bush of English comfrey. It wasn't supposed to thrive in the California climate, but somehow, a small triumphant miracle, it comes back larger and hardier very year, throwing out small purple flowers.

The herbs surround it, rosemary, sage, basil, seeded oregano. There are flowers, as well, long-stalked roses, spectacular beared iris.

Guarding the heart of witchcraft are the trees, the sentinels: peach, apricot, fig, blueberry. The figs are huge and green, the peaches small and hard, the blueberries succulent. We're still waiting for the first apricots.

They are my perimeter, my protection.

edit: and erika, you have mail, bebe.

Received and replied, though go ahead and respond to my profile address...The yahoo one. Because the spam filter delivers the spam and not the messages from my friends. Grr. Argh.

A second fruit drabble:

Mulberries. The adults hated them, messy weed trees. The birds loved them and showed their love with purple streaks down the sheets on the clotheslines. The berries were sweet but flat, needing more sourness, more character.

I am sitting in a mulberry tree. I am foraging for food. I am a survivor of a shipwreck, about to meet Robinson Crusoe. I am a more adventurous Jane, finding food in the African jungle. I was tied up by counterfeiters, but I wriggled free and am making my way to the cops. I am a purple-tongued, sticky, freckled Indian with blonde-streaked braids.

Just spent an hour and a half editing the Lucy manuscript.

Call me Susan the Adverb Slayer.

Indubitably.

t snerk

There are still quite a few left in the text. Like Buffy, I can't stay out of bed with the enemy.

Call me Susan the Adverb Slayer.

Seriously?

I like adverbs just fine. I just don't like them when they're filler instead of meat.

Am, that's lovely! I wish I could digest raw apples, damnit; they always look so good.

Deb, thank you.

I'd written this anyway, and was hesitating over whether or not to post it, but having heard that, I think I will.

- - -

Bursting at the seams as I press my spoon down on the skin, the baked apple is a winter treat: brown sugar and raisins filling the hollow centre where the core used to be, with rich fruit juices (grape, a hint of pear, and of course apple) soaking upwards.

Inside, the flesh is soft—not too mushy, not too floury, but almost melting—and pale; steam rises in scented curls. The juices have seeped into it; the sugar met them there; they've blended, sweet and heady, in a hot cocktail that's the closest to heaven my cooking has ever come.

- - -

I love the witch's garden drabble, especially the first paragraph about the comfrey.

Ginger, that's nice work: very tight, with a lot in it, and I like the final line. And the one about Jane.

I like adverbs just fine. I just don't like them when they're filler instead of meat.

The ones I'm slaying are filler, trust me. Something about using a first-person narrator made me abuse qualifiers like seemingly, apparently, clearly, obviously, etc. when Lucy was describing her observations of others.

Susan, I was teasing - I generally go back and trim some of mine.

And really, I could have said "I make a habit of going back and trimming some of mine" but I use adverbs a lot in my own speech. They're part of my speaking voice, as well as my writing voice, and I tend to strangke a bit without them; it's like trying to speak F2F without using my hands. Hard.