ALL LEMONS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

 ALL LEMONS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

It's Meyer Lemon season. The season runs from November to March. The lemons you see in the grocery store are called Real lemons. A Meyer lemon is the marriage of a Real lemon and a Mandarin orange. They are smaller, rounder, and more orange in color.

You probably won't want to eat them plain. They are still a lemon, but they don't have the pucker power of a 

Real lemon.

To take advantage of their diversity, squeeze the juice in salad dressing, make lemonade or add some punch to a cocktail or tomato juice.

Here are a couple of  places to get wonderful Meyer Lemon recipes. 

Foodie Crush

100 Things to do with Meyer Lemons- LA Times

DO YOU HAVE A GREEN THUMB?

These lemons are extremely easy to grow. 

Keep the biggest seeds out of the lemons and put them in a small pots with potting soil. Set them in a sunny window. Keep them moist. If you grow more than one, you could give them to your friends. A lemon tree is not actually a tree, it is more the size of a Peace Lilly or a Schafferla.

When your newly planted tree reaches about 6 inches tall re-pot it.

 Our tree is in a ten inch pot.

Put it outside after the last frost and bring it in before the first frost.

Our tree bares 8 to 10 pieces of fruit at a time.

It is my goal on this segment of my blog to teach you to broaden your eating horizons and how to grow most of the food I write about.

Please leave a comment below. 

I'd love to hear what foods you are most interested in. 

We won't be able to grow all the foods .

How to Write A Book

How do you write a book?

Okay, I will tell you.

Suppose you are driving a car from New York to L.A.. You are having a great time, riding by yourself, you stop anywhere you want, you linger here and there. Then in Chicago, you pick up a rider. The person you picked up is your reader. You drop down and swoop them up, and set them down smack in the middle of  someone's life in the middle of his/her day.  The trip we are on will be represented by the car and driver and those we pick up along the way

Now, I have a reader and a story. I'm back on the road to LA.  I can no longer travel at any speed I want. I need to keep moving. If I don't go fast enough, the rider will think I am boring and want to get out. Oh, Oh, too slow. She is getting antsy. Maybe there is something on TV. I had better take this road over here with all the twists and turns. I bet my rider would rather hold on for dear life than meander along uninterested by the countryside.

Look, there is a gorgeous red-head standing by the side of the road. She has on a blue dress that doesn't cover much. I wonder if she realizes how low cut the bodes is?I can almost she her, oh, never mind. I will pick her up and make her the runaway mistress of the local drug lord.

Jeez, there he is, we had better outrun him.  It's a shame he's so damn good-looking. Too cute to shoot.

Let's stop and eat. Stopping to eat represents your "backstory".  The backstory is the part of the book that tells you what you need to know about the drug lord and the damsel in distress, before you picked them up.  I always take the drive through and grab a sandwich. It doesn't pay to have a five course meal. We are back on the road with as little interruption of our trip (current story) as possible.

We need some peripheral characters, maybe a weird grandmother who whoops the big handsome drug dealer into shape once in a while or makes him help her with Sunday dinner. Could be a toy poodle he loves but doesn't want anyone to know he has. If he isn't human, why would we care if he and she get together?

Oh, man, I ran a stop sign. I bet I get a ticket. The answer here is to know the rules of the road. How do you learn them? There are hundreds of ways. Chicago Book of Style will help , as well as reading or studying grammar. Use your spell check and have a writing program that edits your work.

The other thing I need to get across country is gas. I have to fuel up to keep going. It's not hard to get petrol. There are stations everywhere. There are writer's groups, seminars on writing, conferences, classes at the library, mentors, people who love to read and the list goes on and on.

So, I wanted to go from New York to LA. I thought the idea for the trip was interesting enough to take someone with me. I made the riders as interesting as I could so I wouldn't get bored on the ride. I bought fuel when I needed it and ate when I couldn't stand it any longer and had to stop.

We are in LA. Now what? There are so many answers to that question and you didn't ask me how to sell a book, just how to write one. More later.

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, no not Arithmetic: MARKETING.

There are as many ideas about how to market your book as there are books. For those of you who don't know, 900 books a day come onto the market. That is about 386,000 books a year. Of those, most sell about 500 copies each.

We are all sure we wrote the great American novel. Our characters are unique, our story is one of a kind, and we have edited it into a fine tuned piece of literature. The rub is: so did most of the other people in those 386,000  cases.

So what do we do to make our novel, book, short story, thriller, romance, non-fiction, soon to be classic stand out in the crowd?

I am becoming an expert in this field. At least an hour or two a day, I cruise Google, YouTube, marketing sights, and blogs, trying to come up with new ideas.
Here are some of the best so far.

1.Write a press release. Make it no more than 300 words and write it in 3rd person. This lets you avoid the "I" word all the time. 

2. Send a picture of you with your book any time you do a correspondence. If they have the story AND the picture, you have a better chance of getting your article in the paper, magazine or whatever venue you are addressing.

3.Take signed copies of your book (s) to the local library and donate them. Try to make this a photo op and ask them to put it on their bulletin board so everyone coming into the building can see it.

4.Offer to read your book at the library if it is a children's book. If it is an adult book, offer to give a book review. If you don't think you are an expert, think again. You are a published author. That carries weight and everyone wants to know what inspired you, how you developed your characters and chose your location.  Remember, everyone thinks they have one good novel inside them. You could be the inspiration to get them started.


5.Take books and business cards everywhere you go. Don't be afraid to tell people you are a writer.

6. Call schools, offer to read your book  (children's) to classes. Don't charge, but tell them to let the parents know you will be there and how much the book is, and WHO to make the check out to if they are paying by check. Believe me, if the check is made out to the school you will NEVER get it and will have to resign yourself to the fact that you just donated your proceeds.

7.Talk to schools about speaking to older children about writing books. They love it, they ask great questions and again, they won't have money with them so take cards, and/or bookmarks, and hold you book up a lot so the cover  makes an impression on them.

8.Have a Face book presence and post tidbits about your book.

9. Look at trailers on YouTube and make one yourself. They don't have to be as elaborate as some you see.

10. Take copies of your books to popular local shops. Offer them 10-15% of the cover price for selling them on consignment.

11. Visit your local bookstores and do book signings. They love having you.

Okay. That's enough for today.
Good luck, happy selling and don't forget to support each other. No one knows more than we do how good it feels to see a friend or acquaintance has re-tweeted or re-posted our stuff.