Today, I learned tea plants aren’t always bushes. Bear with me as I try to avoid the words “tea tree”, since that is actually genus Leptospermum from the myrtle family Myrtaceae, native to Australia, from whence “tea tree oil” that you see in shampoo comes.

But it’s true… if you abandon a tea estate for 130 years, the 3-5 foot shrubs of Camellia sinensis become 30-50 foot tall trees.

Alas, that an abandoned snippet or Work (No Longer) In Progress does not similarly grow when untended… At least, not on the page or in the file.

But it does have an opportunity to grow, unattended, unwatched and unmonitored, in our subconscious. Many will die in darkness, but some, when you come back a few months to many years later, will have grown with all your experiences changed all out of recognition… though they are still, at heart, the same story.

As I’ve been recovering from a nasty sinus infection, I find myself flinching from opening the WIP back up. So, I pulled out at story that ran on the reefs of an intractable problem and died at 48K a few years ago… yes, it was almost to the climax, and almost to being a novel. With a few years distance, I can now see the problem was focus – the motivations or main characters wavered, the genre slipped and slid, as spite for the story that it parodied was a great reason to start it, but not enough to pull it all the way through coherently as characters started to take on more internal motivations, and the world built its own internal logic that is independent of the parody that it started out… and time has only strengthened the drift, as the memory of the source I’m parodying thankfully fades.

It is growing into very much its own thing, to the point that if I pick it up and rewrite the tone from the beginning, only my Alpha readers who were there for the rant and the first pass will be able to easily determine the source material. And that… is perhaps for the best.

Because no matter how it started, it ought to stand on its own as the complex and curious thing it’s grown into.

Which is… not unlike the tea from a 140 year old tea plant grown wild into a tree.

(Picture from Rakkasan Tea Company, who sells this tea here: https://www.rakkasantea.com/products/warnagala-wild-sri-lanka )