Early this summer, we noticed a hardy green vine beginning to unfurl from the corner of the driveway, in the seam between the cement and the compost bin.  Soon the vine sprouted huge, prickly leaves, which were joined by exotic-looking orange blossoms.  Then the blossoms closed up and turned into pumpkins (which have already approached beachball size), while the vine continued its conquest of a massive swath of pavement.  Now we have to take running leaps to jump over it.



Our best guess is that a seed from the compost slipped through the cracks and sprouted.  Nursed by compost tea and sheltered by the garage wall, it's a lot happier and healthier than any pumpkin vine I've ever grown on purpose.  In fact, it may have plans for world domination.



(Accidental Pumpkin Husbandry -- You too can grow gourds on your own driveway!)

There's been a lot of accidental gardening around here this summer.  Blackberry vines reached through the neighbor's fence and rooted themselves in our yard.  I (apparently) planted some carrots, forgot I'd planted them, and was delightfully surprised to pull them up, fully grown, a few months later.  Morning glories, whose seeds scattered from the vines we planted last year, have taken root in every crack of our back walkways, and now cover the railing to our back steps and keep trying to wind themselves through the door handle.  If the pumpkins and the morning glories start to conspire, we may not be able to get into our house at all.



For the first time in several months, I have poetry news!
- My poem "Buying the Muse" appears in the September issue of the glorious Ideomancer: http://www.ideomancer.com/?p=1054, and "Styx," a piece written several years ago, has found a home in the "Soul of a Victorian" issue of Niteblade: http://www.niteblade.com/september-2011/2011/09/styx/.

A new writing-focused interview can also now be found at Writing Raw: http://www.writingraw.com/interviews.html

In Books of Elsewhere news, I just received my sample copies of the Scholastic Book Club edition of The Shadows.  As a grade schooler, I LOVED Scholatstic's classroom order forms -- Arrow!  TAB!  The names alone still make my heart jump!  They were better than the Sears Christmas catalog! -- and I looked forward to the school book fair all year long.  It makes me awfully happy to know that something I wrote will be discovered this way by a new generation of book lovers.