If all goes as planned, you'll get to read Watermelon Summer, my first young-adult novel, in about a week.  The title is courtesy of my father, who also talked me out of my last-minute jitters and told me the third draft was ready to fly.  (After it gets back from the copy-editor, that is.) 

I don't have a cover yet (although I'm starting to envision one based on a heart-shaped piece of watermelon), but I did add a few "Excerpts from Thia's Notebook" to the back, of which the image here is one page.  As you can tell, the protagonist deals with some of the same issues Mark and I have, although her solutions are often different from ours.  In fact, even though young adult isn't everyone's genre, I think most of our blog readers will get a kick out of this little book because it captures many truths about our homesteading experience that are too personal to make it to the blog.

I'm going to use Watermelon Summer as my first experiment with print-on-demand paperbacks too, although I suspect it might take an extra week or two after the ebook becomes available before you can buy a paperback.  I may be dreaming, but I like to imagine actual young people ending up with a copy of this book and deciding that they want to homestead and perhaps explore the idea of intentional community.  Thus a print copy that's easy to pass around and turn up in a used book store.

I hope you're engrossed in fun projects as well!  Thanks for reading my ramblings.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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