All Art Is A Conversation.

Sometimes it’s an argument with a specific book, and starts in spite to show how it can be done better. Sometimes it’s a pastiche, knowingly or not, and an homage to things you’ve read before that inspired you. Often there’s an element of “Yes, but…” or “No, and furthermore…”

And then there’s gardens in space.

Look, I figure humans are gonna human, no matter how advanced the environment. Unless there are extremely strict environmental and human regulations, once people relax a little – and sometimes even before then – someone’s going to bring a pet, someone’s going to start making art, and someone’s going to start growing things in excess. Sometimes all of the above, which is why I’ve read the poetry on birdwatching in a warzone, and heard the tales of the pet camel spiders and scorpions… and if you spend enough time in enough laboratories, maintenance spaces, and their associated cramped office spaces, inevitably, there’s the one that looks like an overgrown jungle.

So when Cedar told me that she’d gotten pushback on the statement that there would be gardens in space, I said it was silly. Combining that with reading a book that had so very much potential but unsatisfying execution, my backbrain started giving me a tale of a pilot whose love of gardening is tolerated as a quirk by her crew until it’s taken over most of the ship. Now, at the pace I’m writing it’s going to be months to finish this, but I throw chapters at Cedar every now and then… and I neither confirm nor deny her accusations that some of the chapters are poking loving fun at some of her long-running tendency to turn everything around her into an overflowing permaculture version of an English Cottage Garden… including my own backyard…

(Look. We have the kind of friendship that includes “You ended up with too many quince trees? Sure, bring it on over and plant it here. But I’m not helping you dig the hole unless you need it to be six feet deep to hide the, ah, fertilizer, underneath.”)

I wasn’t expecting her to reply with a novel. (I do find it hilarious that due to differences in writing speed, the world will get her response long before they get my statement, so it’ll look like I’m responding to her… but then again, who’s to say I won’t in a fistful of chapters more?)

But the cherry on top? The cover art.

She’s an amazing artist, and when she was generating rough thumbnail sketches, she tossed a couple out to see how I’d respond as a genre/subgenre match. And there was one that was wrong for her story, but it made me go “Oooh!” and make little grabby motions.

I showed it to my Calmer Half, and asked if he thought I could get away with grabbing it as the cover for what I’m writing.

He contemplated it, and replied, “No, too risqué. That’s the cover for your next Summer Grayling.”

Neither he nor Cedar seem terribly put out by my flabbergasted, “But… but… I have too many WIPs right now! I need to finish everything I have, not start something completely new!”

There may have been giggling. (Or in Calmer Half’s case, quiet chuckling.)

So there may be even more tangles to this conversational thread, because now I have a very rough draft of a cover for a book I haven’t even come up with yet, as well as an overgrown starship to finish…

Yeah, there’s nothing abstract or literary about “all art is a conversation.” Those conversations include overflowing beds of volunteer thai basil after all the carrots died, and poking fun at orchids, and excess cover art.

The fruit they bear may be strange, but it’s fun!