This is part of our series retelling Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-460-5).
Before you buy a single seed or touch any dirt, Pezza wants you to sit down and make a plan. And she’s right. The number one mistake new gardeners make is jumping straight into planting without thinking about what they actually want. Then they end up with thirty zucchini plants and no idea what to do with them.
Chapter 2 picks up a few days later. The bruise from the orphan boy’s punch has faded. Pavek is back to his regular duties, transferring salt sacks in the customhouse, ticking off counts on a wax tablet. Just another day of grunt work for a third-rank Regulator.
There are over 20,000 species of bees on this planet. Twenty thousand. But only 7 of them are honeybees. So what makes those 7 so special?
Chapter 1 opens with a scene-setter that tells you everything you need to know about Athas. The twin moons have set. The sky is black. The heat of day has turned to bone-numbing cold. And the first thing Abbey tells us is the law of this world: nothing changes. What was will always be.
This is part of our series retelling Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-460-5).
Pezza starts the book by making a simple but important point. Gardens aren’t just about making your yard look pretty. For most of human history, gardens existed for one reason: food. Flower gardens and decorative landscapes came later. The original purpose was survival.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Story: Introduction Author: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1
Before we get into the practical stuff about keeping bees, let’s take a step back. Way back. Like, 60 million years back.
So you want to grow your own food. Maybe you scrolled past one too many “farm to table” posts on Instagram. Maybe you’re tired of paying five dollars for a single bell pepper. Or maybe you just want to know where your food actually comes from. Whatever your reason, you’re in the right place.
So I picked up this old fantasy novel from 1994 and honestly? It hit different than I expected.
The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey is the first book in the Chronicles of Athas series, set in the Dark Sun campaign world. If you’ve never heard of Dark Sun, let me fill you in. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons setting, but forget everything you think you know about D&D. There are no lush green forests. No friendly taverns with smiling barkeeps. No rain.
Book: Thieves’ World: Turning Points Editor: Lynn Abbey Series: Thieves’ World New Series, Book 1 Publisher: Tor Books, 2002
If you’ve never heard of Thieves’ World, here’s the short version. Back in 1979, editor Robert Lynn Asprin had a wild idea. What if you took a bunch of fantasy authors, gave them the same city to play in, and let them write stories that shared characters, locations, and consequences? What one writer did in their story would actually affect the world another writer was building in theirs.