House of the D.

Okay, this site is pretty much dead...

2009-11-14T06:04:00.002-07:00

Please go to www.blog.deannaknippling.com. It's not perfect, but it's home now. I'm going to leave the content here for a little longer, but there will be no new updates.

Writing Contest

2009-10-12T16:06:00.003-06:00

I entered Scalzi's SciFi Writing Contest over at AMC, Option 9:

9. Stung by the reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that describe the flick as being utterly without any redeeming qualities, director Michael Bay declares that the next Transformers movie will have a story and script based on one of the plays of William Shakespeare. In no more than two paragraphs, write a synopsis of that movie, using any Shakespeare play you like. NOTE: No fair using Titus Andronicus.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S MACHINE (2013): Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox return in Michael Bay's latest installment in the Transformer series. Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) and Mikaela Banes (Fox) have split up. Mikaela is about to get married to Max McNabber (Simon Pegg), while Sam is about to propose to Elaine D'Lessoin (Malin Akerman), who used to be his girlfriend - until Elaine accidentally betrayed Max, a scientist who had discovered how to use a fragment of the AllSpark to interface a human brain with a machine.

After Optimus Prime's (Peter Cullen) AI is accidentally exchanged with the mind of Agent Reggie Simmons (John Turturro),* Megatron (Hugo Weaving) and Starscream (Charlie Adler) are free to wreck havoc on the humans. However, a mysterious female robot, Nightbird (Sigourney Weaver) attacks Megatron, accusing him of betraying her - Nightbird is the result of a human-Decepticon experiment abandoned by Megatron. Starscream tricks Nightbird into blaming Optimus Prime while simultaneously attempting to transfer Megatron's AI into Agent Simmon's body, destroying Optimus Prime's mind. Nightbird traps Optimus Prime (with Agent Simmons' body). It's up to Sam, Max, Mikaela, and Elaine to resolve their differences, discover how to return Optimus Prime and Agent Simmons to their own bodies, and trick Megatron and Nightbird before Megatron can take over Optimus Prime's brain and destroy them all.**

*I.e., an ass.
**I almost want to see this now. And of course the resolution will include a fake-death scene. O Pyramis!

[Insert snickering to self.]

Continued issues with WordPress at the other site

2009-10-12T14:43:00.002-06:00

...but I really like playing with their toys, so I will probably persevere.

Thanks, Dave and Doyce :)

On cursing.

2009-10-12T14:23:00.003-06:00

Somebody gave me what has to be the first reason not to curse that I can respect:

"It takes no discipline to curse."

Just so.

Except, personally, I disagree.

I grew up so shy, so self-contained, and so afraid of breaking the rules that cussing is a sanity check for me. If I let one slip and proceed to panic, I know I Need to Calm Down.

I had to practice to be able to curse, out loud, in front of other people. (I still would rather walk around pantsless than try to spit in front of someone.)

I still think cursing at someone to make them feel bad is repulsive. I do it sometimes and am repulsed. I feel embarrassed about cursing in front of someone who finds it offensive or improper (or excessive). I also feel embarrassed when a ridiculous number of cuss words show up in my novel - on the level of using too many exclamation points or adverbs. I feel like cursing in the car is losing my cool when I need it most.

But, in general, it takes me more discipline to keep myself relaxed enough to curse and not grit my teeth afterwards than to keep my mouth shut in the first place.

BLOG MOVE!

2009-10-10T21:22:00.000-06:00

My blog is moving - to www.blog.deannaknippling.com.

Recipe: Butternut Coconut Soup

2009-10-09T18:37:00.007-06:00

I don't like squash. It's mushy. It's baby food. It's bland. And sometimes it's spaghetti squash, which for some reason I find absolutely disgusting even to look at.

Bleah.
But someone was talking about making butternut squash soup, and it sounded good, so I made some.

Lee: Are you planning to make anything for supper tonight?
De: Butternut coconut soup. But I don't think you'll like it...whatever you make, make some for Rachael, okay? I don't think she'll like it either. I may not like it either. But I need to experimente.
Lee: Okay.

They had peanut butter marshmallow grilled sandwiches, which I think might be the perfect accompaniment to the soup.

Being generally against the idea of squash and the eating thereof, I have no idea what to do with them. I look up a butternut squash soup recipe on the internet. Step 1: Roast at 350F for 1.5 hours. Hm. I don't hate squash enough to spend that much time torturing it. I decide to peel the squash and saute it.

With my good, sharp, trusty knife, I cut the squash in half lengthwise, which is like cutting a 2-by-4 with a wet noodle. Wow, that was tough, I think. Maybe peeling it will be easier.

After jamming my fingernails several times into the peel and getting painful Chinese-under-the-fingernail torture, I realize peeling the butternut squash is a bad plan.

I turn on the oven. I turn off the oven. I'm NOT roasting something for 1.5 hours just to get the damned peel off. I turn toward the microwave, which whimpers.

Which was not nearly as amusing as the sound of the butternut squash screaming after 3 minutes nuked on high. HAHAHA! I should have pricked the flesh with a fork, but that wouldn't have been nearly as much fun. However, the squash is still not coming out of its peel, so I nuke it some more...about ten or eleven minutes total. I'm not sure how long; as soon as I could scrape each piece off its peel, I pulled it off the plate. Also, I kept opening the microwave door as Lee and Ray walk by, so they can hear the squash screaming too.

Meanwhile, I chopped half a red onion and a couple of tablespoons of ginger and sauteed them in a few Tbs of butter. I added a teaspoon of Rogan Josh seasoning, which I got from Penzey's last year. A year! It's a shame; I really don't know how to handle Indian spices, and all I'm using the RJ for is seasoning food that turns out to be too bland, while I'm at work.

Then, knife in hand...

Hassan Chop!
...I spy the McIntosh apple sitting on the counter.

Now, the McIntosh apples I find at the grocery store are nowhere near as good as the apples we used to have on the farm, at least as far as I can remember. The flesh is too mushy, not crisp enough (my perfect apples, in non-memoryland, are Pink Lady, so far). But the McIntoshes still smell right, the one true apple breed as far as I'm concerned. If I ever get around to making cider, I'll have to start with McIntosh.

Goodbye, apple.

Then I add one container of coconut milk. Coconut milk is one of those things that, if you're going to buy it, get a reasonably pricy brand. Cheapass coconut milk is AWFUL. I got the Sunflower house brand this time, and it was just fine.

Things are starting to come together in the soup pot. It smells good, anyway. But I can't resist screwing around, so I add a tablespoon of peanut butter.

I'm more used to the Thai flavor profile than the Indian, so I'm thinking in Thai, coconut + peanuts = good. And it's tasty. Not spectacular or anything, but tasty.

After I got the kitchen cleaned up and simmered the stuff for about 10 minutes, I pureed it all in the blender. [Insert blender sound effects here.]

I make Lee and Ray taste it:

Lee: It's okay...it tastes like squash.

Ray: It's missing the main thing.
Me: What's that?
Ray: Well, coconut.
Me: I put a whole can of coconut in it and I'm not going to do anymore.
Ray: [Walks away. Probably the safest option at that point.]

I thought it was too bland.

So I added another teaspoon of RJ. And a teaspoon of true cinnamon. And a teaspoon of thyme, because it sounded good. And a teaspoon of salt.

Hm...suddenly I can taste the peanut butter, in a good way. Not enough onion; red was probably a poor choice, and half an onion not nearly enough. And spicier = better. Not enough to make my nose run, though, so I'll probably add some more when I reheat the leftovers.

Conclusion: DEATH TO SQUASH!

I would eat butternut squash again, if in a spicy dish for sure, and I would consider using pumpkin instead of butternut squash here. I really don't eat pumpkin, either. Could be interesting...

Suggested recipe:

1 butternut squash, heated to mushiness via microwave (about 10 minutes) and peeled
2T butter (or more)
1 yellow onion, diced
2 T ginger, minced
1 McIntosh apple, or anything but a Red Delicious, diced (didn't bother peeling, no issues)
1 small can of coconut milk, and an equal amount of water (or 2x the amount; the soup was really thick)
2t Rogan Josh seasoning (cardamom, bay, cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne according to one recipe)
1t cinnamon
1t thyme
1t salt (or to taste)

Saute the onion, ginger, Rogan Josh, and apple in butter. When the onion is translucent and soft, add the coconut milk and water and bring to a simmer. Add the squash as you remove it from its skin, chopping the squash roughly if necessary. Simmer about ten minutes, then puree. Add cinnamon, thyme, and salt to taste, and serve.

Half-assed.

2009-10-07T21:23:00.002-06:00

I am a MAD KITCHEN ALCHEMIST.

Hereby.

Because I said so, and it makes me happy.

On the importance of importance.

2009-10-01T18:22:00.002-06:00

Sadly, I don't know that I have anything to say that can't be said in 14o characters or fewer. If you see a blog post after this, I must have figured out something to say...

I've been thinking over the last couple of days about things that are important. What is, what isn't, and why.

Is being right important? Is being nice important? Which is more important?

Is being "good" at something important? Is having "fun" important? What about being so obsessed about something that you get good at it, is that even healthy? Should I let Ray go off the deep end about various things, trusting that she'll be back eventually? Do I even have a choice? What's the difference between going nuts about something and not knowing what else to do with your time?

When I don't have time for the things I love, what do I give up? I can only give up so much downtime before my brain fries. Why does everything have to be so important? Why do I have to care about EVERYTHING? Why do I let myself get backed into doing something I don't love, don't want to do, but feel to guilty to abandon? On the one hand, you have to try new things, or you'll never find out whether you'll like something or not, but on the other hand, when do you burn your bridges on something you're trying out?

Why don't I make time for the things I want to do? Why am I so attached to commitments that aren't worth my time?

In the middle of all this, my position at work is on very shaky bedrock. I probably won't get fired tomorrow, but the next few months will be rough. Do I take a job I don't like? I'm not ready to go freelance, for financial reasons, but more than 50% of my brain is saying, "please fire me...please fire me..."

I'm not working much on computer stuff. Thinking about computers makes me panic, honestly, and I keep telling myself that I have to get the novel out before I can go back to computer stuff. But I obsess about it daily. I'm pretty sure being an IT tech is not the job for me. I mean, it's bedrock stuff, and I'd be ashamed not to know it, but I've been skimming through Lee's Make magazines, and the articles about fussing around with hardware just don't twirl my eggs.* (It's the programming stuff that I drool over.)

But I haven't been writing lately, either. I've been reading books, because I haven't had time to read books lately, and that's what made me feel the worst. Also, when I'm reading books, the back of my brain is usually secretly sorting something out. But I'm not accomplishing anything while I read books, so I feel bad about that...

I've spent years doing what I was supposed to do. Maybe not to the same extent that other people do, but I've been doing it, being jerked around by it. I'm frustrated with doing what I'm supposed to do, but I don't know that I could ever succeed at doing what I want to do (especially with as mixed up as I am now).

Good severance package...good severance package...no whammies...no whammies...

*I was going to type "pump my nads" but I realized that's not what it was...this seemed to be both parallel and accurate.

Recipe: Notes on Quiche

2009-09-07T19:16:00.002-06:00

This turned out to be delicious, so I better write it down. I intend to try the croissant crust on a fruit pie - quite tasty, and very convenient.

1 can refrigerated croissant rolls
1 bunch of spinach (or 1 10-oz package of frozen spinach), rinsed and chopped
4 green onions, chopped
olive oil
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 eggs
1/3 c cream
1/2 pkg (4 oz) cream cheese, at room temperature
about 3/4 c finely grated cheese, pressed (that is, not completely fluffed up. about like brown sugar, if you know what I mean) - I used about 1/3 smoked cheddar and 2/3 parmesan
salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 425F. Line a 9-inch pie pan with the croissant dough, squishing to seal the seams. The dough will get pretty dark around the edges; you may want to cover with foil. Don't cover the middle of the quiche with foil, regardless, or you'll prevent tasty browning.

Saute the garlic, green onions, and spinach in olive oil for a few minutes over medium-high heat, until the spinach has turned dark green and has released some of its water. Remove from heat.

Beat the cream cheese in a blender, adding the eggs and cream, until all the cream cheese is blended in. Be sure to scrape the sides of the beating bowl.

Mix the spinach mixture, cheese, and salt and pepper into the egg mixture. Pour into the pie pan, set on a cookie sheet, and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the center of the quiche is just set, plus about 2-3 minutes. Let the quiche cool for 10 minutes to finish setting. The center should be thick but just a bit moist.

Something new.

2009-08-13T05:53:00.002-06:00

So I've started studying for A+.

Yesterday I had a moment of complete zzzt, which ended up with me begging for Lee to hold me and let me blubber. Going into computers--which is the plan--is something completely new.

I'm not worried about the test. Tests. Pfft.

I'm worried about being able to fix people's computers. Which makes it sound more noble than it is; I'm worried about failing more than I'm worried about people having expensive paperweights.

Lee told me not to worry; I'm very smart. I told myself not to worry; the worst thing I can do is make an ass of myself, and I survive that on a daily basis.

No, it's just fear of the unknown. I haven't done anything really new to myself for several years, which is part of the reason I'm ready to get out of pure tech editing. A risk: what if I have to change? --Self, you will have to change. You're doing this in order to change.

The logical brain, unable to anticipate what new logics it will have to use, panics. What if other people are better at computers than I am? --Self, you better hope so, because you're going to need help.

Writerly ramble: Current status of the toolbox.

2009-07-26T08:57:00.005-06:00

So I'm working on revising the Short Story that Wouldn't Die, the Thing in the Box story, which has survived 13 rejections (and one acceptance/'zine tank) to date. (The name started out as "Things You Don't Want but Have to Take" and changed to "Fragile" when I thought it would sell better that way and has now gone back to the original name, but it is, essentially, a Thing in the Box story.)

I'm not very good at short stories. This was the one I liked the most so far - but it's still hasn't been published. But I have another short story drafted that I like, and I have another one rumbling around in the back of my head...and I really, really like short stories. Horror shorts, mostly.

I promised myself I could get this one revised and sent out before I got back to Alien Blue, both so I could feel a sense of accomplishment and so I could have more time to ruminate on AB issues before I went back down in the weeds.

Revise, revise, revise. I curse myself for not being able to know whether I'm writing brilliantly or with great sucktitude. Suddenly, this morning, I think, "Why not use my novel writing tools on it and see what I get?"

Hrm...

What are my current novel-writing tools? What ARE novel-writing tools? Versus other writing tools?

Well, writing tools in general are anything that help you write. Improv exercises, character sheets, programs that highlight adverbs, etc.

What I think of as my novel-writing tools are the quick checks I've been making before I start something difficult in a novel--either drafting or revising, even just revising a specific scene, to make sure I'm heading where I intend to go (rightly or wrongly).

Here's the current list, which I can get through in a half-hour when I'm in the middle of a project, longer if I'm trying to work something out:

Log line. A short (25-word or less) description of the story, in the format of Main character [adverb + verb] tries to ________. Notes: Between the adverb and verb, one of the two must change before the end of the story. Also, the attempted action must reflect the focus of the story--not the ending. Don't reveal the twist at the end. (Via general PPWC goodness.)
Character web. Write the names of the characters on a piece of paper and draw lines to show the relationships between them, checking for any missing relationships or characters. Yours truly, writing about mysterious things (although not necessarily mysteries) often finds hidden connections or parallels between characters this way. (My own invention.)
GMC. Goal, motivation, conflict. Take the main characters and write at least their main goal, their motivation for the goal, and the conflict that stops them from immediately achieving their goal. You can do two versions, one for their internal goal, and one for an external goal. (Got this from Pam McCutcheon.)
Plot as Joke. Write the ending down. Working backwards, include all the steps needed to set it up. Make sure each unit (story as a whole, each chapter) includes a beginning that sets up the end, all of and only the necessary steps to set up the end, and only the ending necessary. (For some reason, this usually breaks into 4-part sections: Beginning, Thing 1, Thing 2, End-which-leads-to-new-beginning.) (From Daniel Abraham. My hero.)
The Clue grid. With any mystery, there are red herrings. Make a grid like the game Clue: Character, Method, Opportunity--add a column for motive. Do this for each mystery (subplot). You may want to set up a Joke plot for each red herring, too--Plot A looks like Mrs. White did it in the Conservatory with the lead pipe; Plot B looks like Professor Plum did it in the Library with the Revolver. If you've seen the movie Clue, you'll know what I mean. (Adapted, obviously, from Clue.)
So what? The most nebulous tool. What was it you had in mind when you sat down to write this particular story? What was the point? "A rollicking good time" is so vague as to be meaningless. (I pulled this out of the general "how to write a story" ether.)

Here's AB:

Log line: An ornery barkeep tries to save his town from alien invasion using a mysterious blue beer.
Character web: In progress, actually--I'm working out where the Good Doctor fits in, and how everyone has different relationships at the end of the story. Different types of relationships.
GMC: Goal--Bill Trout wants to save his town from alien invasion. Motivation--A failed ex-cop, Bill wants to keep people safe and prevent his best friend, Jack Stout, from making a fatal mistake. Conflict--Jack's too !@#$%^& smart for his own good.
Plot: Not going to give it away here!
Clue grid: Have to rework this again, re: Good Doctor.
So what? AB's about what makes stories--and, by extension, memory--important. I also wanted to mess around with the question of what makes a monster.

So here's my trying this stuff on the Thing in the Box story (spoilers):

Log line: Defeated housewife tries to hide a long-lost monster from her lonely husband.
Character web (as close to the picture as I can get): Madeline (wife)--->David (husband) (relationship: cold, proper, a "good marriage"). Madeline---->Doreen (relationship: sucking the lifeblood, rules, expectations) (phone survey note - adding insult to injury). Joe (delivery man)--->no relationship to anybody, but reminds Madeline of an ex-boyfriend (parallel). Monster--->Madeline. The curiosity that killed the cat. M thinks the monster came because of "who she is really." Old BF--->Madeline (relationship memory, he found out who she was and left).
GMC: Madeline G: Hide the monster. M: Husband will leave if he finds out. C: Monster won't stay hidden. David G: Find out what's going on. M: Tired of the excuses. C: Hurting Madeline. Monster G: Keep Madeline as she is (i.e., tied to the monster). M: Only way of existing, as parasite. C: Madeline betrayal (punish?).
Plot as Joke: 1) M tries to hide monster from D but fails. 2) D tries to destroy monster alone. 3) M comes clean to D. 4) M & D face monster together. --Ah, I was missing 3, and 1 needs to be refocused.
Clue grid: One of the few stories I've written that doesn't need one, although I did write down the clues (what is the monster?) and decided to remove one, because the story (see below) is about something that means I need to keep the monster purposely vague.
So what? The story is about living with something you can't live with (but is at least somewhat your own fault), and how you cope. M has coped poorly, hiding the truth and even her personality in order to keep things under control, not asking for or accepting help from outside sources in the fear she'll be pushed away totally (again). The story shows how that breaks down and what she does about it. People have given me fascinating comments, trying to find out what the monster "really" is. I don't want to lose that.

Results...well, I'm going to have to read it again tomorrow, but I think I might have it. We shall see.

Recipe: Pesto.

2009-07-25T19:51:00.003-06:00

Among other things, summertime is about eating yourself stupid on fresh vegetables and fruit from the farmer's market.

And basil.

Pesto

1 large bunch basil
4 cloves garlic
1/3 c (pre-grating) freshly-grated, extra-good Parmesan or Romano
1/3-1/2 c. pine nuts
High-quality extra-virgin olive oil
Red wine vinegar (optional)

I like rougher pesto; the smooth stuff just doesn't do it for me.

So here's what you do: go to Sam's Club, Costco, or what have you, and buy a block of Parmegiano-Reggiano and a package of pine nuts. Don't bother buying this stuff at a grocery store; you'd be stingy with it, and that would be sad.

(Do you really need the pine nuts or cheese? Well, no, you could make pesto without them, but it wouldn't be sublimely yummy; it would be chopped basil - you would be better off just snipping basil leaves into your dish at the last second, to save time and sparkly basil freshness. Pesto is greater than the sum of its parts.)

Then go to the farmer's market and buy a bunch of basil, a big one that masses about as much as a bunch of leaf lettuce. Or two or three bunches of basil, if you want to freeze some pesto for winter (this works very well; see below). Get some fresh garlic, while you're at it. It should go without saying that if you can't use fresh garlic or basil, don't bother; get pre-made pesto in a jar instead.

Strip the basil leaves off the larger stems and wash the leaves thoroughly. Drain and drip dry.

Pull out your trusty nut chopper, the one with the springs and the W-shaped blade. Or a food processor, I guess. A blender is right out. Chop the leaves into largish flecks without pureeing them - standard crossword-puzzle box size or so. If you care whether your basil turns dark, I suppose you could chop it by hand - I'm too lazy.

Crush about 4 cloves of garlic through a garlic press and stir into the basil.

Grate (use a Microplane-style fine grater, if you have it) about 1/3 cup of Parmesan into the basil mixture.

Put about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of pine nuts in a dry saute pan, and toast the nuts over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they are brown. Chop the nuts and add.

Start adding the best extra-virgin olive oil you can find. Add enough oil so the basil clings together smoothly in a paste (think tomato paste, only not as stiff), about 1/4 cup. If you like, add a few tablespoons of red wine vinegar (I know, I know, it's not standard).

The flavor should be fairly mellow, except for the garlic. That's okay. The best way to bring out the full flavor of the pesto is with a gentle heat - add the pesto to hot dishes AFTER you pull them off the heat.

To freeze: fill an ice cube tray with pesto and freeze, then pop the block out and put them in a freezer bag, removing as much air as possible (to prevent freezer burn).

Angel hair with pesto and tomatoes

1 recipe of pesto (see above)
3-4 good-quality ugly tomatoes, chopped to bite-size and seeded
1 lb. angel-hair pasta
feta cheese
capers (optional)

Cook pasta al dente in WELL salted water and drain, reserving a little pasta water. While still hot, toss with pesto and tomatoes, adding a little pasta water if it's too dry. Top with feta and capers, if desired.

Sheer gluttony.

Do the Next Thing.

2009-07-22T17:16:00.004-06:00

I realized a couple of days ago that I'm good at my job.

Sad, isn't it?

I can sling commas with the best of them. I can argue quotation marks until I'm blue in the face. I can stand toe to toe with rocket scientists (well, engineers) and tell them they may not include metaphors in formal documentation. I can juggle a schedule, I can negotiate delays, I can determine whether requirements have been met and whether the reviewers are full of crap. I can make judgment calls and stand behind them later. I can back down even when I'm right (sometimes).

I found out someone was moving to a different job doing something similar, but with new things to learn - and I burned. Not right away, mind you. But an hour or two later, it hit me. I'm good at my job. I'm more than good enough at my job.

There are still more things to learn, but they mostly involve meta functions, like audits and process engineering and stuff like that. Nothing that I work on a daily basis.

I'm not bored yet - but I will be, soon.

My plan had been to work at this job until I could go freelance (not just fiction writing), but I don't think I can wait that long. I'm disruptive when I'm bored.

Bored now.

So now what? What's the next thing?

Well, I do know that I want to be some kind of guru. For me, TMI = state of bliss. I like meta functions, but as a whole job? I don't know. I did QA for a while, but someone else designed the program, I just ran with it. Something databasy? I like to design things, but I've never made serious money at it. Something Internetty? I don't want to get into food; there's not enough money in it, and I'd rather keep it as a hobby. I don't want to go back into health care, unless it's as some kind of geek. I keep coming back to doing something computerish. And I don't want to have to get another degree to start doing it - although some certs would be okay.

So I keep noodling around. I'll be surprised if I make any changes before a year goes by - and shocked if I do anything before the year is out. But there it is: I can't fit my brain back in the same box.

Tomorrow...

2009-07-17T21:54:00.002-06:00

I'm tired of waiting for my daughter to come home. --I was doing just fine until about half an hour ago, when I saw some pictures of her fishing with Grandpa & co. And now I am not doing fine.

Done being patient!

Independence Day.

2009-07-04T07:27:00.002-06:00

Happy Independence Day.

While a lot of people will be exhorting you to remember the sacrifices other people made to make this country what it is (usually so you will shut up and stop disagreeing with them for five minutes), I would like to exhort you to remember to be independent.

You are not your religion (or lack of it).

You are not a political party.

You are not a company or a job.

You are not even a family or a relationship. You aren't your parents - you aren't not your parents. Or your kids.

You aren't tallness, you aren't shortness, you aren't healthiness, you aren't illness, you aren't wealth, you aren't poverty, you aren't happiness, you aren't sadness.

You aren't a sexual orientation. You aren't manhood, womanhood, or anything in between.

You aren't an unhappy childhood. You aren't a privileged childhood.

You aren't where you live. Or where you grew up.

You aren't failure. You aren't success.

People try to tell other people they are these things, that they should do things based on who they are. "You're a ____. You should do _____." I, for one, find myself doing it all time (e.g., "You're a conservative. CONSERVE.")

But it's exactly that kind of thinking that leads to the ends justifying the means - Christians killing abortionists, gay people making fun of "breeders," out-of-work fathers killing their kids so they don't grow up hungry (and never grow up at all), environmental activists supporting biofuels that cause farmers to chop down rainforests, Libertarians who sell their liberty to corporations (to keep Liberty away from the Government), people who let their families fall apart because they can't walk away from the jobs they took to support their families.

So take a step back from your ideals and ambitions today to smile more often, listen more, laugh at jokes, and do what you love (and not what you should do). Don't put your nose to the grindstone. Don't make sacrifices. Don't be noble.

Taking it all with a grain of salt is also part of what makes this country great.

Growing like a weed.

2009-06-25T18:17:00.003-06:00

Ray's getting older. For better or worse, she's grown away from the sugar sweet innocence of babyhood. She isn't sour, but she's tarter - wittier - able to stand just the tiniest bit back from the events happening around her and see them from her own perspective, not just her parents' or friends'. It's still hard for her to keep that eye of distance on her friends, but that's as it is.

She's getting to the point where she wishes things were different (i.e., perfect). If only our yard were like everyone else's, full of grass and flowers and a swimming pool and...

Honestly, it's a little discouraging.

But I have to stand just a little bit back and see things from my own perspective, too. I spent two summers pulling gravel out of the back yard to get even this far. Today, I spent a couple of hours pulling weeds out of the yard - first, I watered and admired the strawberry patch - and under the big clumps of weeds are patches of tiny, silken grass shoots. My patch of dill and basil is starting to sprout, even after the heat we've had the last few days. My next project is to put bird netting over the strawberries - which may or may not do anything about the squirrel that runs across the top of the fence next to the patch. I put some old leaf mulch between the rows of strawberries today. I didn't plan it - I just ran across a pile of rotten leaves and was inspired. "Perfect," I said. "Nothing's growing in it."

I'm finally able to stand back from the sweltering gravel pit of imperfection that is my back yard and go, "Ah. That part's nice."

It's not a big part. But it's nice.

Part of me is an editor, a perfectionist, a rules lawyer, a perpetual teenager whining about how things aren't fair. And if I didn't have that part of me, I wouldn't have a job, and I certainly wouldn't have pulled weeds tonight for two hours. But that part of me can't appreciate anything I've accomplished. It tangles me up: don't bother starting if it isn't going to be perfect.

Part of me is a daydreamer, a living non sequiteur. If I didn't daydream, I wouldn't be worth being around. I wouldn't be able to understand other people, let alone give a crap about them - I wouldn't be able to put myself in their shoes. But that part of me will start a million projects and never finish anything. It always gives up.

But when they work together - when I just leave them alone to do what they do best - it's better. I don't give up - but I occasionally stand back and admire my work.

Maybe I can get a kiddie pool this year, if I put it where the worst of the weeds are instead of where the baby grass is growing. The pool will have to be rigid plastic, of course, or the gravel will tear it up.

A surprise for when Ray comes back from South Dakota, in July, from visiting her grandparents. Unless she reads it on the blog first - she does that sometimes.

On the one hand, you want your kid to be well-adjusted. Well-rounded. Happy. Perfect.

On the other hand, it's the little pieces of craziness that both give your kid individuality and talent. Who would I be if I hadn't obsessed about books and words my entire childhood? Or if I hadn't spent so many years tearing myself up about how things weren't fair? I wouldn't be me, had all my wrinkles been smoothed out too soon.

So here's to my daughter - growing like a weed - in a protected corner of our garden, where I won't trim her too much, until she can find the place where she isn't a weed anymore. Hopefully, she'll come back and visit after she uproots herself.

Bad Jokes.

2009-06-22T18:19:00.002-06:00

So this kid tells his father a bad joke. And his father tells me. And I, admittedly not the best joke teller (or rememberer; I only have two long jokes and two short ones at hand most of the time) in the world, tell my daughter.

Here's the joke:

"An actor wants to get a part as a pirate, so he cuts his leg off. But he doesn't get the job. Know why? He cut off the wrong leg!"

She's sitting in the back seat of Lee's Jeep. She looks at me like I'm an idiot.

Okay, okay, I'm a bad joke teller. Fair enough, I'm thinking.

She says, "Mom, everyone knows you have to cut off this leg [points to right leg] if you're going to be a pirate."

Duh.

Later, she says, "Mom, do you want to hear a joke? My friend [friend's name redacted] told it to me."

"Okay," I say.

"A boy, it's his first day of school, his very first day, his teacher asks, 'What is your name?' and he says, 'Buttcheeks.' And the teacher says, 'If you say that one more time, I'm going to send you to the principal's office. Now what is your name? And the boy says, 'Buttcheeks!' [Giggles]

"The teacher sends him to the principal's office and the principal says, 'What is your name?' and the boys says [more giggles] 'Buttcheeks!' And the principal says, 'If you say that one more time, I'm going to send you to the cop, and he will shoot you dead. Now, what is your name?' And the boy says, 'My name is Buttcheeks!'

"The principal sends him to the cop and the cop says, 'What is your name?' and the boy says [she has to stop to catch her breath] 'My name is Buttcheeks!' and the cop says, 'If you say that one more time, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Now what is your name?' And the boy says, 'Buttcheeks!' So the cop shoots him dead.

"The boy's mother comes to the police station and says to the cop, 'Oh my poor Buttcheeks!' And the cops says, 'You can sit down if you want.' But the woman says, 'Buttcheeks was the name of my son!'"

[Complete loss of cool. Apparently, that's the end of the joke.]

Nobody believes kids, you know. It's a shame.

Burnout, slow recovery.

2009-06-21T06:16:00.003-06:00

The last few weeks have been rough - too many projects going on, too many possibilities. Too much editing.

So instead of trying to accomplish it all as fast as I can, so I can fit more in (my usual mode of operation), I've been trying to (face it; something in the back corner of my brain has been forcing me to) slow down and take things one step at a time: I worked on a strawberry patch instead of trying to fix my entire back yard (it needs it). I've been working on my murder mystery game, instead of my game and my novel rewrites, and a short story I have in my head, and doing research, and volunteering for Pikes Peak Writers, and coming up with RPG material, and writing blog entries, and and and. I took a few evenings off to just read or hang out with my family.

Part of me is gnashing my teeth. I didn't get enough done! But part of me is saying, "What you did do, was valuable." The thing is, I get down when I'm not accomplishing something, and I'm afraid of wrapping myself up in the idea that I have all the time in the world to do what I want to do. What if I forget something important? What if I spend too much time doing nothing?

Rachael at Nosh.

2009-06-16T17:30:00.003-06:00

I took a floating holiday on Wednesday. That morning, I tried to do edits, but realized I still didn't have a plan on how exactly to fix something, so I used the morning working that out. I hate rebuilding plans during editing time - it works much better to brainstorm during meetings. But I couldn't move ahead without it, so there you go.

Ray and I left for Nosh about eleven.

On the one hand, eating at restaurants really isn't important. It's all calories. On the other hand, it's vital - humans aren't built to eat the same thing, day after day. And we are what we eat, both in our choices of what to eat and how our choices affect us, physically and otherwise.

Nosh is a good place. High-quality ingredients prepared simply but well, in reasonable portions and proportions. Good ambiance, with the far side of the main dining room lit by skylight, the walls covered with giant koi, and the floors made of bamboo.

Friendly, foodie staff. Reasonable prices. An eye for world cuisine and twists on familiar flavors. Not the best food I've ever had - but that was a conjunction of excellent good, ambiance, and company not to be often recreated or surpassed.

We arrived early, so we got a little carton of sweet potato fries, dressed with salt and pepper and served with a sweet sauce with red peppers, maybe.

The waitress asked how the fries were and got a thumb's up.

Ray scanned the menu. I said, "You should have the calamari."

"What's that?"

"Squid."

"That's what I'm having."

And she did. She wandered the restaurant and decided the giant goldfish wallpaper was a good thing. She chatted up the waitresses and figured out our table number.

I ordered the tomato bisque and crabcakes with mango-cilantro salsa.

It all arrived quickly, perfectly prepared.

I don't like going to restaurants that serve food that I can cook better than they can. I'm pretty sure I can make everything on the Nosh menu without too much hassle. I just can't pull it off as well.

So we sat, and talked, and ate, and laughed, and it was good. And that's something I would like to have be a part of my daughter's life.

Then we went to Fernando Botero at the Fine Arts Center. And after that, the park: everybody looked weird: too thin...

Book Reviews.

2009-05-31T08:48:00.002-06:00

A Betrayal in Winter, by Daniel Abraham.
The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson, edited by Richard Dalby.
So far on the Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle...

---

My only complaint with A Betrayal in Winter was the fact that most of the action (all but the epilogue) occurred in SUMMER. SUMMER. I think this is a valid complaint.

The second book in the high fantasy The Long Price Quartet, I find the book not quite as striking as the first - the first book introduces the idea that a poet might physically lock an idea into place, after all. And the characters' choices weren't as wrenching as in the first book - I'm sure other readers would argue with me, but I just couldn't empathize with the choice in this book. I kept thinking, "What you call for will come," and sure enough, it did.

But. I enjoyed reading this book more. The storylines were stronger, less disorienting. I actually liked some of the characters, instead of standing back and admiring them from a distance. The book may be a little further away from brilliance, but closer to clarity.

I recommend the series for anybody who remembers liking high fantasy but can't pick up the typical, mass-market high fantasy books (e.g., Robert Jordan) anymore. Mature, sophisticated - the kind of books that only in retrospect you recognize as being a retelling of the "chosen one saves the world" story.

---

E.F. Benson is one of my favorite old-school horror writers. "The Room in the Tower," "Mrs. Amsworth," and "Caterpillars" will stick with me until I die.

This collection of his short stories, however, shows his weaknesses rather than his strengths. By collecting pretty much every ghost story Benson ever wrote, I saw the repetitive nature of a lot of his stories - themes that never evolved, characters that never changed, horrors that lost their insidiousness due to their humdrum recurrence.

I really didn't read anything that met the level of the stories I'd read already, sad to say.

---

My project in reading the 12-book Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle (which starts with The Shadow of the Torturer) continues. May was The Urth of the New Sun.

TUotNS was a coda to the first four books, The Book of the New Sun, apparently written to clear up the mysteries of the first four books, at least to the extent that Wolfe was willing to clear them up. Ahhhh, says I. TUotNS made for easier reading than the first four books (I only have about 50 vocabulary words to look up for TUotNS, instead of 250 or so for each of the others), but it was less satisfying. Too clear? Too many mysteries revealed? Too easy, the way breaking into the local bank is too easy after you've successfully ripped off Fort Knox?

Nightside of the Long Sun is next.

Restaurant Review: Curry Leaf

2009-05-31T08:15:00.002-06:00

The Curry Leaf restaurant in Colorado Springs is tiny, but it's good. Sri Lankan comfort food turns out to be a cross between Indian and some colonial European influences, and it was comfort-food yummy. A lot of curries with rice - and pastries and flan for desert. The coconut sambol (a salad) was too spicy to gulp down, but I wanted to. Otherwise, the dishes weren't terribly spicy.

It's hard to imagine the tens of thousands of people supposedly killed in the class between the Sri Lankan Government and the Tamil Tigers - in a country a quarter the size of Colorado, but there you go.

Pueblo trip - weekend of May 23

2009-05-31T07:34:00.002-06:00

I can't recommend going to Pueblo, although I had a good time, which says more about me and my capability for amusement than it does about Pueblo. And more about how much more easily Ray and Lee get along, how they cope with changes in the routine. The trip was a belated birthday present: there's a limit to how much I can cope with being spoiled, okay?

The Sangre de Cristo Art Museum is an odd construct - an arts complex in which more enjoyment and attention is devoted to the kids' museum than the one for adults. The kids' museum wasn't as fun as the one in Santa Fe, but the one in Pueblo was still very nice.

The Pueblo kids' museum focuses on art, naturally enough; the focus both defines and limits the place. For example, there was a free kids' pottery class over in the adults' building, an area filled with blocks to make mazes out of, little tables with exercises in color, shading, etc. - but no 'what ifs.' What if you take a square frame and try to blow a giant bubble with it? Will it be round or square? What if you have a pendulum with a marker on it, and you shake the paper underneath it? Art without some science always comes across as a little dry. Frivolous. (The reverse seems tragic.)

My favorite part of the museums was a kinetic sculpture with heavy balls (like pool balls), a heavy-gauge wire track, a motor to pull the balls back to the top, and various doodads to spin and dance when the balls hit them.

The museum for adults was well-built but small, and the art inside not really compelling. (Something I've had to learn lately in writing is the difference between "interesting" and "compelling." The art in the adult side was "interesting.") The art tended to modern art of the stuff-hanging-on-a-wall or sitting-on-a-pedestal type. Being modern art, this was no excuse - the best modern art pieces are stuff-you-might-play-with, not overbred dalmatians waiting to have their pictures taken. Modern (and following) art should have a quality of eliciting, much the way fluffy clouds on a sunny day do, but with more emotional and intellectual impact.

All of which is to say, I found some things I liked, but nothing I loved.

Afterward, we drove around, looking for the Pueblo Riverwalk (we must have passed it four times before we found it). The river itself sits past the railroad tracks and is quite restrained and unlovely, although I squealed with delight when I first saw it, because the cement embankment that separates the railyards from the river was painted with gigantic murals, graffiti higher than a house, and all of it a bit mad. Pictures of saints, pictures of weird cosmologies. Across the river was some kind of historical district filled with the most depressingly derelict houses - good houses gone multi-unit, unmown, unloved.

We recrossed the river after being harassed by a number of one-way streets and stopped at a reassuring shop filled with Southwestern-style furniture, tin-framed mirrors, ceramic crosses and lizards, and wall tiles with the motto "Mi casa es su casa." The owner revealed the riverwalk was only a block away - and that, due to the thickness, in the fifteen years he'd owned the store, there had never been a problems with any of the sandstone tables.

The riverwalk is a tame section of stream (a rivulet of the river) along which one may promenade. Part of the walk was blocked off for a wedding, but otherwise we walked the whole damned thing. I was hoping for rain - it was perfect weather for it, warm and still.

The riverwalk was almost, but not quite: not enough people for a gorgeous Saturday night, not enough boutiques (i.e., none), not enough goofy art, not enough vendors with irresistibly greasy street food, not enough length: tame.

Downtown was odd. For one, it's a huge area, all filled with brick buildings. And no section has been "fixed" or set up as a place for people to wander about and spend money and see things that are nice to look at while one eats snacks and drinks coffee. I don't remember seeing a single Starbucks downtown - and a downtown without a Starbucks, nowadays, is a remarkable thing. The only coffee shop we passed was closed, on a Saturday afternoon.

We ate at Fifteen twenty-one, a small restaurant built into what looked like the only consecutive row of open shops in the entire downtown area. The ambiance was simple and unobtrusive. The food was superb. How to crust a leg of lamb in herbs and salt without the salt becoming overwhelming - the crust wasn't removed - I will have to consider. Lee had escargot. "Gorgonzola was the right way to go," he said. But the place was almost abandoned - us and one other couple. The owners should have picked a different location - or else they should be getting free rent.

Afterward, we went to Tinseltown and saw Star Trek. I cheered at the end.

The next morning I sat in the breakfast area of a chain motel, watching people in t-shirts request omelets from the complementary chef. A chef. In a motel. But only for breakfast.

From a steel town of no attraction for years and years (or so I've heard) to some half-assed effort to acquire a predictable type of appeal, failing in its lack of (like wine) terroir. If only I could pick up that restaurant and bring it back to the Springs with me.

More Alien Blue photo refs.

2009-05-27T20:06:00.003-06:00

Dr. Heckenleibel.

Janey, years later. During.

Smart Bart.

Hooray!

2009-05-23T07:03:00.002-06:00

Hooray! It is raining and too wet to do anything with the front yard!
Hooray! I'm eating the last of the cereal!
Hooray! I'm going to Pueblo today with Lee and Ray and there will be pretty food and tasty pictures!
Hooray! Yoga will be over soon!
Hooray! I have an extra day to get caught up on edits this weekend, especially if it keeps raining!
Hooray! No rejections in my inbox this morning!
Hooray! I put down a book yesterday that I don't want to finish, because life is too short to read books that are no fun! Even when I paid for them!
Hooray! I didn't pick up Ray's clothes and stuff all over the house! So she's going to have to!
Hooray! I have an artichoke in the fridge the size of my daughter's head! It's going down, baby!
Hooray! I'm almost done with my book! In the larger scope of things anyway!
Hooray! What a good song!
Hooray! I had a great time with my family back in South Dakota! Thank you for letting me screw up on Rock Band! I sing in the car more now!
Hooray! Doyce told me I had to watch My First Mister, and it was good! The girl reminds me of me (chewing the fingernails) and my sister Betsy (who is even more sarcastic than I). Hey stupid girl! Carol Kane is your mother! Get over it!
Hooray! I'm going to stop avoiding my edits now! Later!

Recipe: Aji Verde

2009-05-15T10:33:00.003-06:00

Behold! The wonderful power of something good to do with the leftover bunch of cilantro before it goes bad! This is a South American-type condiment.

Aji Verde (Green Garlic Sauce)

1 c chopped washed cilantro, with stems
1 clove of garlic, peeled and crushed
1/4 c sour cream
2 T lime juice
1/2 anaheim pepper
1 T chimayo chili powder or similar (not a spice mix so much as a ground-up, dried chili)
Salt to taste

Smoosh the whole bit in the blender and whirl everything into the consistency of a dip (i.e., more or less smooth). However, this is more of a condiment than a dip, unless you really like cilantro.

If you find the flavor is just not quiiiiite lovely, add more sour cream before you add more salt or lime juice. If using jalapenos, skip the chili powder. If using chili powder, allow the sauce to sit for a few hours before adding a significant amount of additional powder, as it takes a while to come to full potency.

Poem: Spring Blossoms

2009-05-15T06:28:00.002-06:00

Experimente...

Crabapple trees go pink in spring
and you forget how annoying they
get in the fall, with the fruit.

This year the buds died on the branch
after a dry, warm winter and a suddenly
icy spring. Dry on the branch

I crush them between my fingers.
The tree keeps growing. New leaves
set in. And I say look,

If you had just kept going, there
would have been water in time,
warmth in time. I see other trees,

down the street, in bloom. You
kept going, sure. But you could have done
what you were planted to do.

But maybe, this year, it didn't want fruit.

Science Fair.

2009-05-14T19:55:00.002-06:00

First, line up with the parents and the strollers outside the doors, wondering what's going on. A mass of parents is milling because none of them know what to do about the sign in sheets. Sign in to show your support as well as your perspicacity. Then sign up for the Star Lab, because your daughter is bouncing off the walls to go (she went once already during the school day).

Then walk around the exhibits for a while. Your daughter will show you her class's exhibit, which is about water: animals need it. Small fish swim in tiny plastic containers, and millipedes and pillbugs rest on dirt and moss.

Start to count volcano exhibits, and naked egg exhibits, and crystal formation exhibits, and give up.

Stop at the Oreo exhibit, about how Oreos love milk. The girl contacted Nabisco to find out whether a special ingredient was added; there wasn't. The girl tested four types of milk (whole, 2-percent, soy, and almond) to determine best absorption. More fat meant more absorption (although the whole milk, she decided, was a bit much). Tell the girl how much you liked her exhibit when she walks by, bragging about her awesome exhibit.

Your daughter is engrossed in the salamander and frog exhibit run by two dissimilar-looking brothers. But it's time to go, so start walking while you look for your tickets. You hate tickets; you always lose them.

Stand in line for the Star Lab. You have to put booties on over your shoes so you don't scratch the canvas over the floor. Get down on your knees and crawl into the womb of the sky, a canvas hemisphere tent onto which a volunteer projects the stars with a twenty-five-dollar lightbulb the size of a grain of millet. Your eyes take a long time to adjust, and you begrudge every second of it while the stars spread over you in a way you haven't been able to feel for years. You cannot see the Milky Way, and you miss it.

The top of the tent is flat, because the ceiling isn't high enough, but you don't mind as the ex-teacher volunteer talks about how much everything costs. You see stars and Greek myths marching across the bubble of the sky and a projection of the world, with the Arctic Circle cut off at almost exactly the right latitude.

You crawl out again, in order, despite the protests of little boys who want to Go First, and edge your way out of groups and groups and groups of people standing in line, hoping to get to see the stars, even without a ticket.

You go upstairs to the older kids' exhibits. One of the exhibits is a fake; it's a bogus experiment off the Internet copied right down to screen shots from YouTube videos. You were disappointed the experiment was a fake when you found out; it seemed perfect for your daughter's birthday party.

More volcanoes, more eggs, more salt.

Most of the exhibits are hand-lettered, showing either understanding or a lack of understanding of what a hypothesis is, but not professional or parental. You are proud of that, even the girls who have written their hypotheses with circles and hearts and stars for the dots of their is.

You hang around the salamander/frog boys with your daughter, who is hoping to touch the animals again. Another little girl, apparently a teacher's daughter, tries to scare the frogs out of their cage, and you have to tell her to knock it off several times before her mother shows up, oblivious to how much of a jerk her daughter is being to the boys and the animals. You want to tell the mother to spank her daughter, but you know she will say, "For what?" even as she watches it. But the girl leaves with her mother, both whining, and you chase your daughter off so the boys and their mother can go home.

People are sweeping the floor fifteen minutes before closing time and your stomach is rumbling. You go home and think about what you would like to do for a science project, if you were in school again. Something, you think, having to do with cooking. Your daughter tells you she wants to do a science experiment about animals. She just doesn't know what yet.

Mother's Day.

2009-05-10T21:21:00.002-06:00

6:45 a.m. Made cup of tea, grabbed two muffins and a slather of butter. Disappeared into office (!!!) to write.

7:30 a.m. Made second cup of tea. Snagged some Sun Chips that Lee had purchased yesterday to go with the raspberry-chipotle ribs, because I mentioned that I really like them a few weeks ago. Checked on daughter, who had stayed up late playing Plants versus Zombies game (very cute). She was curled up on the couch with the cat sitting on her hip. Kissed daughter on cheek, which was cold, so I brought her another blanket. She complained about cat, which I removed. And removed again.

7:45 a.m. Ray got up. Had to quiet her several times so she didn't wake Lee up as she played in her room. I kept catching brief bits of the story she's telling as she plays with her toys. 1) Princess. 2) Some guy. 3) In danger. 4) Kissing. Briefly think about how mothers are supposed to get breakfast in bed on Mother's Day. Laugh out loud.

9:00 a.m. Done editing for the morning. Rewrites going well. Lee's up. Take shower. Ray interrupts shower to announce that she's much taller today; she's standing on a kitchen chair and waving her hand over the top of the shower curtain. Lee interrupts shower to ask what I want to do today. I tell him I already told him what I wanted to do today so don't even pretend to forget. He says gaming won't take all day. I acknowledge this and say I need to get some shopping done before the trip to South Dakota for my youngest sister's graduation. He needs to pick up some things, too. He wants to go clothes shopping. Ross's is the approved clothing-shopping place, which is good, because I need to replace the mattress pad. I mindlessly stuffed it in the dryer on full heat and the cheapass piece of crap melted. We leave the house, agreeing that eating out is not in the plan today, because Mother's Day is the worst of all possible easting-out days per Waiter Rant, etc.

10:00 a.m. or so. Actually leave house. Head to World Market to look for part of youngest sister's graduation gift. End up with 1) smartass graduation card, 2) chipotle chocolate bar for Lee, and 3) required gift component.

11:00 or so. SuperTarget. Pick up groceries unable (or impractical) to obtain at Whole Foods yesterday after brutal, "strength-building" yoga class. Lee is in charge of redecorating the bathroom, because he has a wild hair to do so. The shower curtain currently en route to El Casa KK is blood red with clear silhouettes (if you can imagine such a thing) depicting a man with a knife aimed towards to disembodied hands that appear to be sliding down the curtain. Our current towels, mainly light purple, obviously aren't going to match. We consider mattress pads, sheets, and dark gray towels, as well as an ice cream maker, but do not purchase any of these items. Ray picks out a movie, because I owe her allowance money. It's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which she's seen before.

12:00 p.m. or so. Decide we'll risk a restaurant: whiny and irritable and annoying, all around. Strangely, Lee, who becomes green (HULK SMASH) when afflicted with low blood sugar, is the most stable of us all. Unfortunately, even the late churches have let out by now. Drive by Mimi's, our usual choice on the Powers strip. Mimi's is packed. Switch to backup plan, Rock Bottom Brewery. We've never been there before, but people at Lee's work keep recommending it. Rock Bottom is not packed. Aha! I knew living in a religious-image town would have its benefits: you can't take your mother to a brewery for Mother's Day, it's sacrilegious! Lee's driving, so I have a cherry wheat (okay, but filtered and smooth, and I like the chewy wheats) and we both have this gorgonzola-bourbon sauce burger concoction, which is excellent. The beef isn't as good as King's Chef Diner, but is still okay.

1 p.m. Remember the whole point of the shopping expedition was to go to Ross's. Find mattress pad (better quality this time) and some excellent sheets. No towels selected. Lee buys a dress shirt and two pairs of pants, neither of which is black. I try on three bras and two swimsuits while Ray ogles herself in the mirror and manages to try on 1 dress and 1 pair of capris in a different changing room; for Ray, remarkable efficiency. None of the bras fit: big surprise there. The suits fit, but I'd be happier with something with back support to help with the boobs, so I decide to order the same brand online. Ray eventually picks out a dress.

2:30 p.m. Home. Nap. My feet still hurt from yoga class.

4:30 p.m. Wake up. Ray tells me my naps take too long. Eat some chocolate and drink a cup of tea. I've been drinking "Get a Grip" PMS tea from the Republic of Tea. I don't know if it's actually helping, but I feel like I'm enjoying my bitchiness more.

5:00 p.m. Awake and ready to game!

5:30 p.m. We finally get our butts in gear and roll dice on another episode of Faery's Tale from Firefly Games. I cannot recommend this RPG enough. Our characters ally with two goblins to save the forest from crystal spiders...or to doom it to a goblin spell. Well, that's a problem for another week. Pooh gets cow milk squirted in her eye and Homa does this:

Homa: I grab the web.
GM: It's stretchy. [Makes boinging noises.] But you can't pull your hand off.
Pooh: I grab around her tummy and pull.
GM: It takes both of you, but you manage to get Homa unstuck.
Pooh: Homa, don't grab that stuff with your hands again!
Homa: Okay, I use my foot.
[Laughter ensues.]

Guess who's who.

6:30 p.m. Break for leftover mini-pizza (Ray), ribs (Lee), and cheesecake (De). I never do eat any "real food" for supper.

7:45 p.m. Done gaming. Ray scrambles to get a few more levels of Plants versus Zombies in, so she can stay ahead of her dad. I get to see the almost-final version of the playhouse Lee's going to work on this summer. It's very cool. You will like it.

8:00 p.m. Bedtime. I get a footrub from Lee while Ray reads us stories out of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

8:30 p.m. I announce that I'm going to take a bath. I proceed to accidentally fill the bath with bubbles and cold water, then attempt to make the water warm without letting out some of the cold water first. The water heater laughs at me, and I am floating in tepid water when Lee comes in with more tea. I drink a lot of @#$%^&* tea. Lee and I talk. Soon, the tub becomes too cold to be even remotely enjoyable. I get out, shivering, and Lee makes fun of me because I'm too cold to put my robe on, because to do so requires drying off, which requires unwrapping the towel, i.e., the only thing that's keeping me warm. I realize later I could have just put the robe over the towel and then dropped the towel: it's a terrycloth robe. You know what towels are made of? Terrycloth.

9:30 p.m. This has been my best Mother's Day ever, so I blogged about it. I think we're finally starting to get the hang of this, but I'm probably wrong. Time for bed in bed with new sheets and the usual husband. Hugs and kisses to all the mothers out there. Keep this in mind for the bad days: if Dads get kudos just for showing up, you do too. Good night.

More editing...

2009-05-10T07:32:00.002-06:00

Working on:

Integrating Richard's comments (writer group).
Not giving away suspense for free.
Removing wordy "intros" to sections (Eric's comments, writer group).
Rewriting Dr. Heck.

I just finished clarifying some motives, both Bill's and Jack's.

Favorite line so far: "Julian came back with another pitcher. Dinah looked up at him. I looked up at him, too. It was like looking up at a fur coat wearing a Phantom Tollbooth t-shirt."

Writerly ramble: Faces.

2009-05-09T17:46:00.005-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about faces lately, not so much physical faces as the "faces" we wear. Not a new theme, I think, but something I ran into a lot lately, between the writer's conference and looking up people online afterwards--the difference between the face one presents to other people, in person, versus the face one presents online.

While I was at the conference, I ran into some people who had distinctly different personas:

One woman lacked confidence in person--but had survived a terrible personal tragedy with grace.

One man laughed constantly--but had been recently divorced and dwelled on it constantly and humorlessly online.

One woman presented herself as needy and impatient in person--but was a kind of guru on the Internet.

At first I thought, "Ah, these people are more likely to be honest in person than they are online." Then I had to reconsider. I mean, I don't know any of them well. Maybe they're more honest online than they are in person. Or maybe they aren't honest at all. Or--in some way--both sides are honest.

Why not? I am both funny and shy. I love both horror* and uplifting love stories. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what tied the stories together for me was pain and how we have to hide it in certain situations but still need to have somewhere to express it.

Maybe the trick is to pull all the faces together.

Anyway, how do these faces affect characters in books?

The two-faced character is proverbially a bad egg, someone who gains the main character's trust and then stabs her in the back. But a two-faced character can also be a character in disguise: a hero with a secret identity. Westley in Princess Bride.** Or a two-faced character can be a bad character who acquires (or rediscovers) a heart.

So making a character two-faced might not be an entirely bad thing: you end up with a more rounded character. Even a traitor has to have something good in them...or they'd never be able to act trustworthy enough to screw the main character over.

*Not so fond of the terror.
**Speaking of two-faced characters--in the features for Princess Bride, the actors reveal that Andre the Giant had put his back out and couldn't lift anything, had practically lost his strength. The stunts were done with ropes.

Restaurant Review: The King's Chef Diner

2009-05-02T16:35:00.002-06:00

What do you want in a diner?

A place to eat, and decent (if heavy) food to eat. Hm...decent service?

Pfft. I didn't ask, "What's reasonable in a diner?" What do you really want?

Fine. I want basic comfort food so good it puts most restaurants to shame. Plus some weird stuff. I want to laugh when I read the menu. I want atmo that ain't flair, flair, flair. I want service that takes one look at me and finds exactly what I want on the menu, orders it for me, and brings it out just as my ass hits the chair. I want good coffee, dammit, and keep it coming. I want a diner run by @#$%^& geeks, man. I WANT COMIC BOOKS.

Okay.

Tip: Just order the side of green chili. The waitress saved my life and didn't let me order a whole bowl of the stuff. I have a burn on the side of my mouth from where it touched the outside of my lips. OMFG it was so worth it, though.

We went to the diner on Bijou. The service wasn't quite that fast, but it was pretty close. If I love you, I will take you here next time you're in town.

Some photo references for Alien Blue.

2009-04-26T22:10:00.002-06:00

One of the speakers at PPWC was talking about using photo references for facial expressions.

Just for fun, I've found some for Alien Blue:

Martie Washington.

Caveman exterior (but without a basement or steps up).

The look on Bill's face after Nina comes in.

Nina, when she smiles. When she doesn't.

Back from PPWC...

2009-04-26T16:08:00.002-06:00

So on Friday I'm in a read-and-critique session, one where a reader reads the first page and three people give their first impressions. I have Ginger Clark, Jeffrey Deaver, and Rose Hilliard (editor at St. Martin's).

I have (yet again) rewritten the first page, based on Miss Snark's First Victims Secret Agent first page contest (I didn't enter; I just read all the pages).

The reader stumbles over one sentence three times. I resolve to rewrite it.

Rose Hilliard says, "Intriguing." She likes the title. SF isn't her specialty.

Jeffrey Deaver says it starts out very concretely and advises me to ground the situation quickly - are we on a spaceship? (No. Crap.) The story comes across as a detective/thriller; he advises me to be careful about mixing genres.

Ginger Clarks says, "I would keep reading" and says I have evocative descriptions.

My pitch session on Saturday is with Ginger Clark. She's sick, and her ears are out. I give her the log line: Barkeep tries to save town from alien invasion using mysterious blue beer.

She says, "Wait. I've heard this one. This is the girl that walks into the bar."

"Yeah," I say. When you say it like that, I feel like there ought to be a punchline.

"What did I say about it?"

"I don't remember. I was too ecstatic. It was nice things, though." (I wrote them down at the time, though, luckily, so I have the crits.)

"Okay. I'm paranoid I'm going to run into someone whose stuff I didn't like. Send me fifty pages."

I glow, even though I know she'd probably ask for pages as long as it wasn't something completely awful or out of her range of representation. I ask her a few questions.

The entire time, her expression is very guarded, frozen onto her face. Her lips are a little oval on what looks like a wide mouth. I wonder whether I've seen her smile: on Friday, I tracked her down to be a Geeky Fangirl and tell her I loved Patricia Wrede's Sorcery and Cecilia books.* She didn't smile at that, just asked whether I knew about PW's new book, Thirteenth Child. I didn't. (I look up the book later: Old West School-of-Magic fantasy WITH STEAM DRAGONS. It's mine. I don't care if I have enough unread books to last me a year. It's mine.)

What I really want to ask her is whether she's a bitch. Because I don't want to work with someone who's going to be nice to me. I don't know I got it across, but she told me she'd let me know if she thought anything was wrong with the manuscript - and pointed out that I should be more worried about an agent's track record. Fair enough.

Will she work with small press, if that's the best option? Yes. (I love Subterranean Press.)

Is she completely adverse to something with a more literary quality about it? [Cautiously] No. But in the RNC session, she joked about literary fiction as being "anything that won't sell." Well, Alien Blue is what it is, and I think one of the reasons SF hasn't been doing as well lately is that all the wonder and love has been sucked out by ideas and facts and plots and messages. Greg Egan is brilliant...but where is Zelazny? Corey Doctorow is inspiring...but where is Sturgeon? Exactly. I can help.

I tell her I have YA drafts I'm working on, too, so I need a good YA/adult SF/F agent. As miserable as she is, she lets her mouth go wide - not exactly a smile - at that. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's an open-mouth-insert-foot moment. I'm okay with that.

To sum up my first impressions of Ginger Clark, professional literary agent for Big New York Agency: an introvert dropped naked into poison ivy and then put onstage at Broadway. The best you can do is not scratch until you bleed, at least until you get off stage. I know that feeling.

About four minutes left in an eight-minute pitch session. I tell her thanks, and I'll get out of her hair.

She tries to look earnest: her eyebrows go up. "But we're doing this for you."

I say, "You wanted fifty pages. I asked my questions. I got what I wanted. Have some free time."

She dives into her purse (ollie ollie oxen free!) for her Crackberry: "I'll get caught up on some e-mail." Her lips crush themselves into a smile that only goes wide and curly at the corners, and she blinks several times. Has she not blinked this entire time? I can't remember.

She's gone. I leave the room, find the first person I recognize, and do the squirrel dance, which is both arms up in the air, loose in the knees, and jiggling like an electrocuted scarecrow. I have no pride.

I find out later Ginger used the time to request a full from a buddy of mine. So dear Powers that Be: I got some karma coming, all right? Yeah? Yeah?

*With Carolyn Stevermeyer.

Mama Told Me not to Come, mock interview.

2009-04-26T15:32:00.002-06:00

PPWC Thursday, we performed mock interviews for our current book projects. Margaret Brettschneider's interview, for her true-life account of taking a 29-year-old virgin around Europe decades ago, called Mama Told Me not to Come, had tears running out of my eyes.

True love and slapstick comedy.

Word of the Day.

2009-04-24T07:33:00.000-06:00

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

borborygmus

MEANING:

noun: A rumbling noise caused by the movement of gas through the intestines.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek borborygmos (intestinal rumbling), an onomatopoeiac word to describe the sound.

NOTES:

Borborygmi are usually harmless, they are simply a result of gas movement around the stomach. And the rumbling sound doesn't mean one is hungry either. We can't really do anything about the sound of a stomach growling, but we can take comfort in the fact that at least we know a fancy word to describe it.

USAGE:

"And the piece de resistance:
'He was woken early by borborygmus as his insides fermented and his intestines ballooned with gas beyond their capacity.'"
Ruth Dudley Edwards; Book Review / Straying Into A Dark, Ugly And Sick World; The Independent (London, UK); Sep 21, 1994.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. -Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)

Alien Blue Log Line.

2009-04-24T07:31:00.002-06:00

This might be it:

A barkeep tries to save his town from alien invasion using a mysterious blue beer.

I talked to someone at the conference about it yesterday. She was a very good listener - I don't say that often.

PPWC: Thursday.

2009-04-23T18:09:00.003-06:00

This is the first year of Thursday add-on material for PPWC. I chose Track 3: Giving it Wings (Publicity, Promotion, Marketing).

I have mixed feelings about the day.

The track itself, I think, was good, sound stuff. We even wrote trial press releases and gave interviews. But I talked myself into listening to the wrong stuff later in the afternoon, so I didn't get everything I wanted. Lesson learned.

The Basics of Marketing:

One of the speakers, Sue Mitchell, kept telling us, "Become your own cottage industry."

In traditional publishing, the publishing house coordinated all PR efforts, including marketing, advertising, and coop projects between authors in bookstores. Alas, most authors don't get to go the traditional publishing route. However, nowdays, the publishing house handles just the editing, the cover, and distribution - the rest of it is up to the author.

It's important to start early with publishing and marketing, so you can assure potential agents you know where you want to take your book and how. Your initial marketing materials should include a press kit with your log line, a 1-page synopsis, and a 5-page (i.e., more detailed) synopsis. Keep your press kit available at all times. Also helpful are a publicity photo and review copies (when you get them).

Then it's time to start considering where you want to start marketing. One way is to find an author you like or who writes the same things you do, then use the same marketing techniques. Another is to research what markets are available locally, and spread out from there. Advertising can be coordinated with other authors.

Types of marketing:

Interviews - Practice in the mirror or on a camcorder. You should sound relaxed, informed, and competent even in the face of attacks, incompetence, and lack of preparation. Also, make eye contact with the camera, not the interviewer.
TV - Various news programs are always looking for content. Public access is an option.
Print - Newspapers (including independents), magazines.
Radio - More talk radio is on air than ever before (including on the internet).
Internet - Try mailing lists to register people for updates, promotions, and giveaways. Use blogs, vlogs to build a following and fan base before your book ever comes out.

The key is to find out what kind of author you want to be. Do you want to be an overnight bestseller or earn out your first printing and get a second? Your goals should drive your marketing efforts.

The basic elements of a marketing plan:

Your press kit (see above) is your marketing overview. Your marketing plan should also contain:

A description of your next project. To help establish yourself as an emerging artist with a promising career, know what you're going to work on next and be able to describe it and where you are on it.
Your author bio. Include anything that will help an agent or editor decide what to do with your book (which line of a publishing house, which editors, etc.), anything that makes you more credible and interesting as the author of that book. Example: If you're writing a military history and you used to be in the military, mention that. Include publishing credits.
Your customers and audience. Being able to narrow your potential audience down to a core will save the publishing house's marketing group time. Saying, "My audience is men, women, and - in fact - children of all ages" tells them nothing.
Your competition. Sue said, "If you have no competition, you have no product."
An action plan. Include your objectives (goals, like pre-sales and additional print runs), strategies (author positioning, book positioning, establishing yourself as an authority on the subject), and tactics (press releases, author tours, reviews, volunteering, etc.).

Press Releases

A press release should have an angle, a purpose, and a goal or result and should not be a simple cry for attention. Press releases have a specific format that you customize to fit your needs. There are a lot of good examples of press releases online. For example. you can use PRWeb to search for and track response to press releases.

Press releases should contain:

Contact Information:

Your name/firm.
Phone number, e-mail, and website contact information.

HEADLINE (the most important part of a press release).

The date, the date of the event, or the date until which to hold the release (or "For immediate release").
The location of the event, if applicable.
The headline should be pithy, short, active, and capture all important information.
Being a headline, it should be in noun + verb format (e.g., "Local Author Makes Good" vs. "Booksigning").

Copy:

The lead sentence should include the who/what/when/where/why/how information.
Next section of the copy should expound on or explain the lead sentence and include any quotes (keep in mind, the quotes will probably get cut if the press release is published).

Boilerplate:
Standard information about the author, history, organization, etc.

End the press release with "-30-" or "###" to indicate no more pages follow. If another page does follow (but probably shouldn't; the release should be short), start the page with "(Add1)" and end it with "-30-" or "###".

Press releases should be customized for each release.

We wrote practice press releases for (fictional) events. I now want a book signing/reading at a brewery, with a special on blue beer. I bet some of the local breweries would at least consider it, especially if it was during a First Friday, which is a local arts/culture walk downtown, in Old Colorado City, and Manitou Springs.

Internet

The internet has a plethora of marketing possibilities. Here are some:

Youtube. Book trailers, vlogs, interviews (remember to get rights to post any TV interviews you do).
Podcasts and web radio.
Newspaper A&E editors with blogs.
Blogs. Use free software from Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, OpenSource, SourceForge, Joomla!, Drupal, b2Evolution, TypePad, etc.

Make sure you're not giving away your first rights to your writing projects for free - unless you're doing it on purpose. Posting something on the internet can count as "first rights," so don't post anything you plan to publish elsewhere.

That being said, if you're going to have a website, you're going to need content. While you can publish very small portions of your work (personally, I go by the guidelines for fair use), most of your content should be material relates to but isn't the work itself.

Deb Courtney noted that once you post something on the internet, you cannot simply "take it down." Any number of websites record every page on the internet...regularly (for example, see the Wayback Machine).

Several people asked how to drive traffic to their websites. The answer was there's no easy answer; you have to 1) network and 2) hustle. Ron Heimbecher noted he was using a group of websites to act as "rabbit holes" for his current project.

Marketing for Pitchers

At this point, we split into two groups, "marketing for pitchers" and "marketing for those with published books."

Sue Mitchell recommended pitchers put together what she calls a "Pitch One Sheet," a one-page sheet with all the information you need during a pitch session.

Title.
Log line (a one-line summary of the book).
A one-paragraph explanation of what the book's about.
Your ideas about market (customer, audience, genre, what authors/books this is like, etc.).
Bio, including why you're the best person to write the book, writing credits, professional associations, and what else you're working on.

The rest of the session turned into a Q&A about pitching, which was disappointing - I'd just gone to the April Write Brain on Tuesday (about pitching). I wish I'd joined the other group, but I kept hoping we'd get back on track, and I was too embarrassed (I mean, no published book to market) to get up and switch. However, Ron Heimbecher was talking to the other group, and I'm confident that I can contact him with any questions I have.

Other interesting points covered:

If you're asked about the ending, just tell it - don't tell the editor or agent to buy the book!
The type of marketing help you can get from your publishers is sometimes determined by the size of the press. Large presses have more resources - which they use on big-name authors. Small presses have fewer resources - but more attention to give. Just make sure your press can register an ISBN for you (thus allowing you to distribute the book in other places than the press's website).
Talk to your agent about your marketing plan to help set your timelines.
Review copies often must be sent 90 days or more ahead of the desired date in order for reviewers to meet their publication deadlines. If you're not sure how to submit a review copy, send a query first.
If you have an agent, talk to them about short stories you intend to submit - they may know of markets and editors who are looking for what you're writing.

I will try to post links to the interviews, which went really well - informative, confident, calm under fire (at times), and sometimes even funny.

More conference tomorrow...

Poem: Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House

2009-04-22T05:57:00.002-06:00

By Billy Collins.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking...

Allllmost. But again, no.

2009-04-21T16:14:00.002-06:00

DeAnna--

Thanks very much for sending "Fragile," my way. My assistant editor and I both enjoyed the narrative voice, but overall, the piece isn't quite what we're seeking for Farrago's Wainscot, so we're going to pass.

Best,

Darin Bradley
Fiction Editor

Such is the life. However, I will happily take the compliments where I can get them.

Secret Agent!

2009-04-21T05:54:00.002-06:00

Kate over at KT Literary reviewed 50 first pages over at Miss Snark - it starts here.

Here's what I learned:

So far, I see I give people about four-five sentences before I’m bored.
Grammar issues are grating.
I hate running into a plethora of weird names.
Irony is good.
I want to start off with character + action, not just action.
NO MORE EYES. (Eyes rolling, etc.)
After a series of pages without action, a page that handles action well is a breath of fresh air.
People who talk down to MG audiences make my teeth grate (Hello? Remember fourth grade? You were SMARTER than that).
I want to say I just don’t care for women’s fiction, but it’s not true–but I know that’s not true–but the women’s fiction barely gets a sentence or two before I’m tired of it.
Fiction vs. the moral of the story = give me fiction!

Control Issues and No Pet is Worth All This! are the two I hope get published, so I can read the rest.

Also, I don't want Kate's job.

Query update.

2009-04-19T16:38:00.003-06:00

I sent my updated query off to Query Shark. Blood! Blood in the water! Blood everywhere!

Dear Query Shark,

An hour's drive from Roswell, New Mexico, is a wide spot in the road named Haley. Haley's famous for two things--Haley Hospital, the best in the state, and a dive called the Caveman Bar and Grill.

Bill Trout, big-mouthed owner of the Caveman, is enjoying running the bar, coming up with new kinds of weird beer, and settling back into a bachelor's life when Mayor Jack Stout, his best friend, decides to hide an interstellar fugitive in town. Jack's a good guy, but his common sense isn't a strong point.

Bill, who has been walking the fine line between "jerk" and "responsible adult" for many years, tries to trick the alien, Anam, into leaving, but when the aliens attack at the bar, he promises to let Anam stay if Anam will help kill them. Not that Bill intends to keep his promise.

Will Jack get off his high horse and help Bill get rid of the local alien before his pursuers find them again and kill them all? Will the local alien-conspiracy cult that runs the hospital find Anam and before he can save humanity from invasion? Will a town full of perfectly ordinary people turn crazy from the New Mexico summer heat?* It all depends on an old man built like an orangutan, a stranger with a familiar face, and Bill's latest brew, a blue beer he calls "Alien Blue."

Alien Blue is an 85,000-word contemporary science fiction novel that fits somewhere between Spider Robinson and Kurt Vonnegut. Alien Blue stands alone, but I'd like the chance to develop a sequel.

I'm a technical writer and editor for the Air Force, but my clearance isn't high enough to know anything about what happened in the New Mexico desert in 1947. Or so I tell people. I've published short-short stories (at Toasted Cheese, Verbiage, and Clever Magazine, all online), poetry (in Darkwaves and Larkwings, Vol. 1; and iMPS iN THe iNKWeLL, from a gleeful press!), murder mystery party games (the best of which are at Freeform Games, online). I volunteer for the Pikes Peak Writers as a reporter and Published Writer Liaison. I have a blog at secret-hideout.blogspot.com (shh).

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

DeAnna Knippling

[contact info]

*Probably not. It's a dry heat.

Thanks to everybody with comments from last time.

Today I found over used words...

2009-04-15T18:49:00.006-06:00

...and @#$%^ the @#$% out of them.

Today I removed the phrase "rolled his eyes" or similar from Alien Blue seventeen times.

I left references to that monstrous dice game twice:

Miss Dewey scooted the chair back toward the computer. She poked the power button on the monitor, but not fast enough, so I was able to read a few lines: And then Jack said it was an undercover group. The BFI? I asked. But he said no, it was worse, it was the MacTeagues. Well, what does that mean? I asked. He rolled his eyes at me, if he does that one more time, I'm going to-- Then the screen went blank.

...

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall. "Yup," I said. "I know exactly how you feel. So what the hell are you wearing a black shirt and jeans for?"

"I wanted to look cool," she said. "For my first day at the dig. I mean, my first day that I'm not actually trespassing."

I rolled my eyes.

It's like using exclamation points. Did I do the right thing? Should I have cut it?

Which reminds me...oh, shit. TWO HUNDRED EXCLAMATION POINTS.

And then I almost used another one.

First cut: down to forty-four. Sigh. Second pass: seventeen. Third pass: Nine. Good enough.

Yell: fifty-three uses. Down to six.

Shout: eighteen uses. Down to nine.

Bill cusses a lot.

F-bombs: sixty uses. Down to eleven.

Shit: forty-seven uses. Down to ten.

Damn: one hundred ten uses. Down to twenty.

Hell: seventy-six uses. Down to...oh, forget it.

To be continued.

Yet another Alien Blue log line...

2009-04-14T19:27:00.002-06:00

I don't know if it's perfect, but this one actually rings true:

Loud-mouthed bar owner must convince mayor to ditch an alien fugitive before invaders come to exterminate him and all "contaminated" humans. And there's beer.

I couldn't get it down to Twitter-level (140 characters) without taking out the beer. To hell with it.

Easter.

2009-04-13T19:19:00.002-06:00

Another iteration of celebrating a holiday for something you don't believe in, but you do, but you don't, but who wants to miss out on everything, you know? Is it just for the kids or not?

I got the existential; I just ain't got the angst.

We cheerfully dyed eggs on Friday night. I like getting new kinds of egg dye as they come out; we invested in egg-dye stamps this year. I liked them, but they were a little tricky. The stamps were very spongy, and you had to roll them around a bit to get the whole stamp to show up. Honestly, I think Lee and Ray had more fun just painting dye on the eggs with the little brush.

On Saturday, I went shopping for food stuff. There was this cake at Rancho Liborio that I have been eyeing for quite some time, so I picked one up. The cake had chocolate icing and was shaped like a torte, with glazed strawberries and whatnot on top. Just...pretty. I asked the lady at the counter for one, and suddenly she goes, "You want that in a box, right?" with a panicked look on her face. The ensuing 10 minutes of looking for a box, not finding a box, sawing a big box in half, taping it together, retaping it together, figuring out that closing the box will squash the stuff on top...it gave me time to watch one of the pastry chefs assembling another cake. He had big squares of what looked like sponge cake, which he shook before dipping in some kind of liquid and slapping onto a cake board. A good half-inch of icing, then another layer of cake, and the whole mess was carried, just pouring liquid onto the floor, onto a cart to drip dry or something. Wow.

Lee and I stayed up late the night before to sow eggs (sow the egg...reap the deviled egg!) and candy. I fluffed up a pile of shredded colored paper (which, sadly, I had to buy, since the shredder at work is approved for classified documents, and the pieces end up looking like really ugly snow) and put out treats. To bed by midnight.

Awake by seven; Ray was searching our room for eggs. I asked her to wait until we're awake; she had trouble but managed to limit her search to our room while she waited.

Later, we did the treasure hunt, which was five riddles long. When she solved one, Lee presented her with a kids' movie. We spent most of the rest of the day watching movies, because Ray was sick with a cold (still from last week) and was pretty pooped. The movies were: Igor (meh), Barbie's Thumbelina (shoot me), the Tinker Bell Movie (surprisingly, a movie to inspire girls to be engineers), Bolt (pretty good), and Treasure Planet. We didn't get to Treasure Planet. I hadn't seen this many movies in one day since never or maybe-college-but-I-doubt-it.

Breakfast was peeps and hardboiled eggs. I've never seen anyone so enthusiastic for oversalted hardboiled eggs. I cooked the last of the baby artichokes, because that's what I like to eat with salt (and butter and lemon). And then I had cereal.

Lunch was Kraft macaroni and cheese.Ray's seven. So sue me; it's what she wanted.

Ray took a nap with me, which meant she really wasn't feeling well. She's had this cold since last week. This cold's a doozy. Personally, it's settled into my ears, which for some reason means I have to cough all night.

The cake was good but not more-than-normally moist; the frosting tasted, as Ray noted, "like chocolate ice cream."

Supper was potstickers and salt-and-pepper shrimp and mangoes and pineapple. I did not make the potstickers by hand; I knew she'd rather have me snuggle and eat popcorn than eat homemade. Which may be some kind of lesson about motherhood. A lesson for me, anyway--do less work; have more fun.

We wrapped her up and Made Her Brush Her TEETH and go to bed.

She was still sick today, so sick she stayed home from swimming lessons. But not so sick she couldn't eat little lemon cakelets and drink tea and watch Treasure Planet, apparently.

A gluttonous day: laying around all day, watching movies, eating what she liked, and being petted over to her heart's content. She's a good kid who probably enjoyed the last, best.

Which witch is which?

2009-04-13T18:05:00.002-06:00

Is it "wild hare" or "wild hair"?

Even the experts aren't sure.

But I, being of the Bugs Bunny tribe, go with "wild hare" every time.

Writely Update:

2009-04-13T17:25:00.002-06:00

This has to be my what, seven millionth time rewriting the prologue of Alien Blue?

This week: a huge stack of AB edits that I should have addressed already. I pulled them off into their own little pile and saw the first chapter comments for the new book, which I now want to work on, at least to get it from longhand onto the computer.

Also, a longish list of murder mystery edits.

Next week reporting on Tuesday for PPW April Write Brain; Thursday is the start of the conference. Time to get a move on!

Good news: I get to go to South Dakota in May for my sister's graduation! I'm going to stop at Zandbroz and see whether they have any good SD history books for the new book. Something clicked the other day, and I realized Wounded Knee was in 1890, which would (tragically) put it at the exact right time for H. to have set it in motion when he arrived stateside from Mother Russia. Granted, wrong location, but not by that much.

Back to work!

Bill, tall and grim and as gangly as a wind-stripped scarecrow--a real cowboy--was out on the floor, telling jokes, passing out beer, and trying not to step on folks' toes when the young woman came in.

She stopped just inside the doorway just like most people did, first time they walked into the bar, because the first thing anybody saw was the dusty old diorama of a papier-mache caveman, dragging his woman with one hand and fending off a saber-toothed tiger with the other.

Bill lurched over to the door; if anything, his bad leg seemed to add speed in wobbling across the cracked linoleum and around the battered wood tables. He smiled down at the woman. "'Lo there, missy. You're letting out all my cold air, you know."

Recipes: Perfect beer batter; lavender gin

2009-04-10T21:09:00.002-06:00

I perfected the beer batter recipe tonight.

Batter:
1 c all-purpose flour
2 T cornstarch
1 t baking powder
1 T salt
1 egg
1c beer

--I just adjusted the salt. Make sure to dredge the stuff in flour first; the batter seems to stick better.

Fried: Button mushrooms, tilapia, white onions (sliced very thin to offset their stronger flavor), pickle slices. I love the pickle slices.

Dipping sauce: 1/4c mayo, 2 T capers, 1 t ground chipotle powder.

I deep-fried some capers, too; the flavors in the admittedly-overused oil overwhelmed it. Not recommended.

Lavender Gin

1 oz. good gin
2 T raw sugar (stir the first two)
6 oz dry lavender soda, if you find it

I wanted some fresh rosemary to muddle up with it, but I didn't have any. Mint would also have been nice. I like "dry" flavors, but the soda was too dry. I could have made some simple syrup, but this did just as well.

Tea arrival.

2009-04-09T17:15:00.002-06:00

I ordered some tea from Stash tea.

Of all days, it arrived today, when I cannot truly appreciate anything other than the taste of salt and vitamins. (I had a six-fruits-in-every-bottle! white people juice with vitamins in it and all I could taste was the vitamins.)

I had ordered pu-erh tea and some other stuff.

I was very excited about this pu-erh tea.

I'd had some at World Market. It was delicious.

I opened the vacuum package, knowing I wouldn't be able to smell anything.

But I did smell something. Dirt.

Lee said, "That smells like marijuana."

"Really?"

"Yep."

I brewed some.

Tasted it.

Dirt.

But...tasty dirt.

Having been subjected to many of Lee's taste experiments, I ran over to him and shoved the mug in his face. Classic Lee face. That Look he gets when Y.T. does something completely goofy and expects praise for it, like a two-year-old proudly presenting her first poop art in the bathroom.

"I think it tastes like dirt," I said. "But I think I like it."

"I know how you could save a lot of money on tea. Just send Rachael outside for it..."

"But it would have dog poop in it. Or cat poop, probably," I said.

He gave me That Look again.

"Does it taste like marijuana tea?"

He stopped giving me That Look to think about it for a few seconds. "I don't know," he said, finally. "I've never had marijuana tea."

So, if there's anyone who's ever had marijuana tea, let me know if it tastes like dirt, because if this package just has marijuana with dirt on it, I'm going to send it back, damn it, for the sheer principal of the thing.

Mexican Grocery Store: Fruiteria Guadalajara

2009-04-08T14:10:00.002-06:00

We have a hard time remembering how to say "fruiteria" ("fruitereria? fruitorama? fruitarena?") so we ended up calling the place "Fruitopia." Which turned out to be exactly the case.

So last Saturday it's bad out, the kind of gray snowishness that promises to work its way between the cracks of your house and freeze you in your sleep. Also, I'm sick, green-bullet sick.* In fact, these two items are probably not unrelated. Lee says, "Make sure you take it easy today, okay?"

Perfect day to go grocery shopping!

We all bundle up and get in the car and go to...Sam's Club (looking for trash cans and eating pass-out snacks). And then Home Depot. And then, after a couple of hours of wandering around and using up what little strength and/or patience I had, we go to Fruiteria Guadalajara.

Perfect plan for going grocery shopping!

Hey, I'm not blaming anybody but myself. I always think I can fit more into any given hour than 60 paltry minutes would indicate, doubly so when I'm sick.

Also, we left at 10 a.m., didn't really eat anything first, and figured we'd get home before we were really hungry.

Trifecta of good planning!

The result was that I didn't keep track of as much as I had planned.

The F.G. is a tiny orange store on South Academy and Airport Street. The most delicious smell comes from outside the building, where a man is doing something with a grill that makes me want to cry. Did I pick anything up to eat? Pfft. No. Next to him is a little, sheltered, year-round kiosk that sells Mexican polka music, which is probably called something else, but it has accordions and sounds very oom-pah, so that's what I've called it since we moved here, almost 10 years ago.

The first thing inside the door is an international phone card dispenser and a freezer case filled with what looks like limes stuffed with ice cream. The glass is fogged up, so I'm not sure. Also did not get any, because I'm an idiot.

Unless you were looking for fruit, the selection was sadly limited (say, mostly convenience-store level). However, fruit was almost all top-notch and the selection pretty much overwhelmed anyplace else I've been:

limes - two types
papayas
melons - two types
mangoes - two types
oranges
clementines
coconuts
papaya
guavas
bananas - five types
peaches
nectarines
plums
grapes - three types
pears - four types
apples - seven types
no lemons (unusual)
grapefruit - poor quality
kiwis
pluots
chirimoya [sic]
avocados - two types, all perfectly ripe
and a bunch of stuff whose label had not been dilligently applied and I have no freaking clue what they were.

Oddly, no berries that I can remember. And no apricots, which I had thought were ubiquitous to any Mexican grocery store worth the name. Also of note: 15 types of fresh peppers, 11 types of beans, 12 types of dried chilis (bulk), and a cast of thousands of small-package dried chilis.

I didn't have much on my shopping list, but I was unable to obtain most of it. For example, prepared salsa (as in chunky) was unavailable, although multiple types of hot sauce were. No matches, toothpaste, leeks, whole chicken, tomato soup, ramen, or Velveeta (for bjork, a.k.a queso dip). There were 9 types of cheese available, of which only one was not a traditional Mexican style (i.e., fresh mozzarella). None of the cheeses appeared to be aged.

There was a meat counter, but it didn't have much (although it did have tripe, which is fascinating but personally intimidating). There was an eating area with 4-5 small tables. With the grill outside, the indoor area seemed to sell only fruit cups the size of a large soda (with or without chili pepper, looked like), juice, and ice cream (including birthday cake flavor).

The fruits and vegetables were indeed stacked above my eye level on displays, or chest level in crates. Open bulk containers had dry items: rainbow-colored jimmies, dried shrimp (complete with pitch-black eyeballs), flaked coconut.

The place was clean but for what people were tracking in, but worn. The place only opened after we moved to our house, so it hasn't been open for more than 2.5 years, so go figure. The staff offered to help me a couple of times, but only when I ran into them.

Of all things, there was a plastic box full of dried crickets (unmarked, unpriced) next to the cash register.

I picked up a few things, including a chirimoya, which I haven't eaten yet. It feels like a non-bristly kiwi fruit. Lee picked out a box of chocolate cookies with pink coconut marshmallows on top. Nom nom nom.

There were no organic, whole-grain, or "top-shelf" items (i.e., only one brand was available of almost everything).

After that, we went to Rancho Liborio, which is a supermarket-style store, and failed to find either Velveeta or matches but were otherwise able to obtain the necessaries. I didn't keep track of R.L. as I was about ready to sit down and not get up again by the time we left.

The next day, I went to Target to stock up on Easter supplies for Ray, because I couldn't find any at either store. In retrospect, that seems very odd.

All in all, it was what it was: a fruit shop, with extras. I would stop there for good-quality fruit and some vegetables, if that's what I was looking for. I will also stop there again to try the grilled whatsits and frozen limes. But a pain, as far as checking items off a list of weekly supplies.

Also, if I had any sense, I wouldn't go out in bleah weather. I was sick all weekend, dragged myself feverishly and giddily in to work on Monday, and had to crash Tuesday and most of today. I finally woke up about 1:30 going, "Okay, I can bend over without endangering myself." I'm not that graceful at the best of times, and I kept turning around too quickly and running into walls.

*If you have to ask, you've never seen a kid with a really bad head cold sneeze.

House full of sick people.

2009-04-07T08:13:00.001-06:00

Send us your vitamin-rich thoughts.

Fwhooooo!

2009-04-05T18:41:00.000-06:00

Taught Ray how to elicit toots from a bottle today.

As always, the experience of successfully teaching something comes to me as a miracle: I say stuff, and suddenly the light goes on, but the connection between the two isn't as straight a line as the ego would like.

She did the work. I just babbled about blowing straight across, like the top of a drum, to make echoes that are smooth and run together. It was only the doing that made it make sense.

Here she comes with the bottle again :)

My hands shook a little...

2009-04-05T18:04:00.002-06:00

Lee has spent a considerable (and considerate) amount of time setting up the computer IN MY OFFICE for me.

AHAHAHAHAHA!

I can't tell you how good this feels, how nerve-wrackingly good.

I had been trying to pick out the perfect desk, but I abandoned that plan in favor of a cheap-ass-but-for-all-practical-purposes-perfect desk. The room is filled with that je ne sais quoi, that new office chair smell, full of chlorofluorocarbons, burnt rubber, and promise.

I tell you, I love plowing into the unpredictability that is hustling for freelance jobs, even the parts where you go, "I'm never doing that again" and mean it. I love trying to figure what the hell keeps going wrong with the beginning of Alien Blue. I love struggling to find the time to edit the short story I wrote. My life is full of love and teeth filed to sharp points at all the possibilities.

Writing updates:

I sent off the draft characters for the murder mystery expansion pack, Hollywood Lies. Editor said, "Great! I'm off for Easter break. I'll get back to you." I feel like I got a free snow day, only it'll probably go on until 13 April. Cast size: 23-33 people. I'm scared to try to run this.
I've been considering the updates for Alien Blue, and rereading Nancy Kress's Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Why don't I care for her writing as much as I like her advice? Why am I getting so much more from reading the book this time around? I rewrote the prologue, adding more to the beginning. "Why doesn't the beginning make sense?" "Because you didn't set it up." I'm a guy out in the middle of a corn field hearing the voices say, "If you set it up, they will read it." Just have faith, Martha. I know it seems crazy...
Considering a change to the middle, with the Good Doctor. Because I know he needs to be there; I know why he needs to be there; I just don't know how the hell to make that make sense. In a story where various people are trying to figure out what "human" is, exactly, it helps to have a monster to compare and contrast. Also, when you scrape down the plot to the actual story, he's a linchpin. Again, how to set that up? Er...
I'm going to take Richard's advice on the ending. Even though I'm planning for another book (Blue Spirits, maybe?), his suggestion will make the climax more effective. Things fall apart, but before they do, a last stand should be taken.
No updates on the Greece story.
Haven't finished editing writer group stuff. Shit shit shit. I will take it with to Ray's swimming lessons. It's amazing what you can accomplish when your sense of duty says "SIT STILL."
April Write Brain is 21 April. Planning to go and practice pitching.
Going to PPWC this year, April 23-26. I'm taking the extra-day option, with the advanced class, on marketing. I think: WHAT IF THEY SEE THROUGH THE FACADE? I'm not advanced! But I already sat through the Write Brains related to the middle-level class. Damn it, I will take the advanced class! I will be advanced! The PayPal bill has already been paid!
The book is getting pitched at the conference and sent out shortly afterwards to a short list of agents. I'm also going to send the query to Query Shark, which I have been reading with little exclamation points in my eyes.
After that, I'm going to consider myself having graduated from the beginners class, finally and aboslutely. 1) I write and edit for a living. 2) I make a profit freelancing (including the new office setup). 3) Alien Blue doesn't suck. 4) I HAVE AN OFFICE!!11!!
The next steps have yet to be specifically determined, but will include figuring out a business model, getting word out, and hustling my ass off. And figuring out what I can do for people besides stroke my own ego. I've always felt that what I write is to try to say things that need to be heard, but can't be said directly without ruining them, like "We are all in this together" and "You're stronger than you think." But is that right? Is that entirely right? Is that all of it, or is there something else?

Okay, time to pretend to be human, or at least make sure I can access the music files across the network.

The Mexican Grocery Store Project.

2009-04-04T08:57:00.003-06:00

First of all, I've been trying to figure out whether I should call this the "Hispanic" or "Mexican" grocery store project. It would be more PC but less accurate to call it "Hispanic," as the grocery stores to not appear to cater to wider, pan-Hispanic tastes.

Here's the deal. During January-February, I worked on getting rid of the excessive stocks in my freezer, pantry, squirreled around the house, etc. I didn't spend more than $50 a week on food; I didn't buy chocolate; I didn't buy tea; I didn't go to Sam's or Costco.

The project was a partial success.

Freezer: I didn't get the freezer entirely free of crap, but I think I'm down to the last few meals and can throw out the freezie pops and frozen egg whites. I DON'T USE EGG WHITES. Lesson learned. Next time I make a custard, I will find a recipe that requires the whole egg...or just dump the whites down the sink. When frugality is counter-productive...I could have used that space, damn it, for something tasty. And I wouldn't have used so many freezer bags.

Pantry: A flop. Shelves still stuffed with crap I've had around for years. I finally threw away a jar of pineapple with a 2006 expiration date. Time to check expy dates and donate, I think.

Chocolate: most of the holiday chocolate is gone. I would have succeeded, but Lee bought an excessive amount of chocolate for Valentine's Day (yum).

Tea: I'm drinking the next-to-last serving, but for: 1 can iced-tea mix, 1 pint of loose-leaf tai iced tea leaves, and about half a box of Korean barley tea. They're tasty, but I decided from the get-go that these didn't count. Mostly because I knew I wouldn't finish them in time, but also because I didn't want to commit to getting rid of them just before I'd enjoy them most, i.e., during warm weather.

I took the month of March off from overarching food projects and promptly spent too much money at Costco. But I NEEDED that gallon of green olives, damn it.*

April will be...MEXICAN GROCERY STORE MONTH.

I will purchase groceries from Mexican grocery stores only, unless something insurmountable comes up, like Ray wants something specific for Easter (Ray Day) that I can't get there. Spoiling a family member should take precedence over hair-brained projects every time.

Why Mexican grocery stores?

We have a lot of them in Colorado Springs. Lots of little ones with specific functions. "Fruteria" "Carneceria" etc.
I like going to non-normal places to buy food.
To try different foods. One sub-goal is to make fresh baby octopus, for Ray.
To see what they have, instead of what I expect.
To find out differences, in specific items and prices and in patterns.
To explore the area.
To assure people that non-normal places to buy food are not scary. I know a surprising number of people who are afraid to walk into non-U.S.-standard grocery stores, because it's too much to handle.

I've been to several Mexican grocery stores nearby over the last few years. Here are some things I've noticed causally but will take a closer look at:

Most starches are refined; I don't remember ever seeing anything "whole grain."
Plain yogurt is apparently an anathema.
The cheese selection is very limited.
The fruits and vegetables are plentiful and cheap.
The vegetables are more diverse than the fruits, which are mostly apples, citrus, and a few pears.
You can always get perfect avocados.
You can easily get cheap meat, if you don't mind cheap cuts of meat.
Seafood is almost as important as beef, pork, and chicken combined; it gets slightly more shelf space than any two but not all three.
The seafood selection is waaaaaay wider than you'll see at a standard U.S.-style grocery store.
You will almost always see an area with food served to eat and tables at which to eat it. I do know one place that doesn't (or didn't; I haven't been there for a while).
The amount of exo-culture foods are limited (the biggest Italian foods area is generally a smaller ratio of shelf space than U.S.-style stores; Italian is usually it).
The illusion is of abundance over variety. Shipping crates are often stuffed with false bottoms, then piled above eye level with products - but at the expense of having two kinds of something.

Some other areas to explore:

Meat/Protein: What types are available? How much do they cost? How much space do they take up? Frozen vs. fresh? Organic, locally-raised? Vegetarian alternatives? The subject of beans is probably a whole different experiment. Wow.
Dairy/Fats: Cheese, milk, yogurt types? Cost? Space? (Add'l research: do Mexican people tend to be lactose intolerant or not?) What other types of fats are available, in what proportions (e.g., lots of shelf space for oil, little shelf space for butter)?
Starch: What are the main types of starch? What is there, but less often? What types of primary types (uh...flour? The minimal amount of processing, uncooked, etc. as commonly available?) of starch are available? Cost? Space? Are they located in a central area or dispersed around? Are there any whole grains anywhere? Are there more starch products in a primary state or a prepared state? Are there a lot of breakfast cereals?
Fruits/Vegetables: What types are available?
Sweets/junk food: What proportion of sweets are mass-produced vs. in-house prep? What are the types of sweets and junk food? How much shelf space do they get?
Convenience foods: Are foods interim foods (e.g., tortillas) or final products (e.g., burritos)? Frozen vs. canned?
Marketing: How much is directed towards kids? Is "abundance" a typical ploy? Are the stores agressively, assertively, or passively Mexican?
Service: Cleanliness, helpfulness, ease of use, ability to communicate with/attitude towards yours truly, etc.

Clearly, biting off more than I can chew.

April 1st: Purchased 2 tamales, #1.94/ea., delicious. 1 gallon whole milk, 2.49, from a rack of at least 50 identical gallons (next to 50 gallons of 2%, etc.). 1 pear, .76, anjou, but marked as "pear." 1 pint rice pudding, 1.99, delicious, but with a drink lid with a hole on top, pain in the ass. Customer ahead of me in line drops gallon of what looks like pickled pig rinds. Manager at front in under 30 seconds, and cashier has already drafted a helper to guard the spill, and another to replace disgusting-looking jar of bleah. Must be coming down with a cold; doesn't smell like anything. They all speak in Spanish but switch to clear English when it's my turn.

April 3rd: Yep. A cold.

*BWAHAHAHAHA! I will RULE the WORLD!

Iowa Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage.

2009-04-04T08:26:00.002-06:00

I send hugs to the gay couples I knew in Iowa. Hopefully this helps with the adoption situation, too.

A couple I knew had started proceedings to adopt a little boy they had fostered, but he was taken away when the social agency found out they were gay and wanted to adopt instead of just feed, clothe, and care for him. Years later, they carried around his picture. He was an ugly pug of a baby, dressed in a diaper and angel wings. Every time J--- saw me, she would show me his picture and kiss it.

I didn't dare tell her he was an ugly baby, you know?

ABNA reviews up!

2009-04-02T19:56:00.002-06:00

I had two readers for Alien Blue in the ABNA contest. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to semi-finals, but I did get these two reviews back, see? And while semi-finals were announced March 15th, the reviews just came back today. Understandable; the staff needed to sleep for two weeks, and April 1st would have been too cruel a day to receive anonymous reviews.

Reviewer 1:

I like the title. Alien Blue has a nice ring to it, and it was fun to find out that it was a type of beer.

So far the story is a bit confusing. 20- something Nina Nesbitt is in town to meet her biological father. For some reason, she is led to a special booth at the local bar, The Caveman. The proprietor of the bar is Bill, who serves the foul tasting brew called Alien Blue to the young woman, before presenting with decent food and drink, along with a story of his life. A tall man with a shaved head who wears torn and bloody cargo pants is also at the bar, though there is some disagreement between Bill and his waitress as to whether the guy should be permitted to stay. Then some mysterious men in suits show up and harass the pint sized town mayor. But wait- this appears to be a flashback. This all happens close to the Roswell, New Mexico.

Characters seem interesting, if somewhat eclectic. It's rather disjointed, though the promise of a good story lingers just below the surface. I think this could be a good yarn, if reworked a bit.

Reviewer 2:

I have mixed feelings about this story. It is original in concept and seems to be going somewhere. I found after the initial pages read that I was somewhat interested in reading further, but not strongly so. The circumstances are strange and a bit bizarre, and I wanted to find out exactly what was going on.

But mixed feelings. Why? Because the author's prose gets in the way of his (or her) story. The author almost trips over himself trying to be verbally clever with constant crass colloquialisms, slang, and cutesy similes, metaphors, exaggerations, and other figures of speech. What this does is that it gets annoying. The reader, who just wants an interesting story, has to constantly deal with or interpret these language excesses. Occasionally the author's efforts to impress are enjoyable but most of the time they make reading laborious. Also, The author's attitude, as expressed in his narrator's voice as flippant, irreverent and crass.

So here is a story that has some potential, written by an author with ability and potential, but the language excesses get in the way.

I really don't know what to do about the reviews. Think about them for a few days, at least. As to the first reviewer, I'm having trouble with the beginning, true - I don't remember how many beginnings I've tried out. It is disjointed. Some creative criticism would have been nice - okay, but how might I fix it?

The second review was just frustrating. Maybe it's just not the story for that reader. I've been told many times that you shouldn't confuse the author with the narrator, so that sets me off, and I had a hard time taking the review seriously. Also - does the reader just want an interesting story? Really? And the language and the smartass narrator are features, not bugs. I feel like the reviewer didn't even want me to try to write the book I wanted to write. "Not appropriate!"

But I don't feel like I was robbed or anything; fair dinkum. I'll probably do it again, barring instant-overnight-how-long-have-I-been-doing-this?!? stardom.

Huh.

2009-04-02T19:53:00.001-06:00

Now I have to wonder if "The Princess and the Pea" is about kids with allergies.

Ray tooth update:

2009-04-01T18:17:00.001-06:00

Make that three times I've been pranked today.

I'd forgotten which of Ray's baby teeth had come out and which hadn't; the tooth I thought was a chipped baby tooth was an adult tooth coming in at an off-kilter but perfectly acceptable angle.

Silly me; she chipped a different tooth while trying to pry a binder clip open with her teeth. Luckily, that chip wasn't big, and the dentist said she won't need to have anything done for it if she keeps it clean. We'll reassess during her checkup in July.

Yes, we discussed: if you can't open a binder clip with your fingers, it's a bad clip, so just junk it and get a new one! She continues to chew on everything, though. Teething. Go figure.

April Fool's!

2009-04-01T18:10:00.002-06:00

After years of running with a perfect April Fool's Day record, I have been caught TWICE today. TWICE!

Fuligin invented.

2009-04-01T07:30:00.001-06:00

Scientists have created a black that is blacker than black.

Enormous fish-women swim closer through the stars.

Alinea NOT at home!

2009-04-01T07:12:00.001-06:00

Carol at Alinea at Home GOT HIRED BY GRANT ACHATZ! To work at Alinea!

How cool is that? Food blogger makes good :)

Thoughts on e-readers and the self-publishing revolution.

2009-03-31T19:45:00.003-06:00

I finally finished watching Iron Man today. Not bad.

But my brain jumped a few links and ended up here: the publishing revolution will depend on better batteries.

I've been reading Doyce's links and ponderings about the future of the publishing industry. Most self-publishers, no matter what that crowd self-reports, currently come across like a bunch of punks who play three chords REALLY LOUD and wear razors dangling from their ears from paper clips. Okay, edgy, sure, and clearly a group that's destined to be recorded in history as forerunners of whatever comes next, but movers of the hearts and minds of humanity as a whole? No.

The revolution currently depends on getting people to read for entertainment on their computers, because the best traditionally-formatted self-published books can aspire to be is...books. And sitting in front of a computer gets old. I get my RDA of repetitive stress injuries at work, thanks. And Kindles are so meh.

It's not that the book format is the ultimate format, but until the alternatives are better for me, why bother with meh?

The mighty book:

Does not require a power source except in instances where humans require power sources anyway (i.e., lighting, the ability to move).
Can be replaced cheaply if damaged (usually); thus, can be read in the bathtub.
Can be explored rather than searched for.
Can be interacted with physically (smelled, touched, listened to, riffled).
Can be collected.
Can be illustrated in color.
Can be loaned.
Can be borrowed.
Can be entrusted to a baby (board books, rubber books).
Can be produced in different sizes (comic books).
Can have a "total package" for marketing purposes - in fact, have covers for just this purpose.
Are reliable.

There are probably lots more, and a lot of these things e-readers might bypass pretty easily.

I would have to agree with Doyce in that the next thing in literary-type entertainment is community, and it's hard to have a community with just a book. So: the revolution needs the Internet. And e-readers might be the bridge between the community of the Internet and the freedom of a book.

But right now, a Kindle is just another piece of crap you have to babysit. A second cell phone or MP3 player or micro laptop or GPS or whatever. What does a Kindle do that a cell phone can't do?

It's bigger, easier to read (or so I hear), and it saves batteries.

Meh.

Flexible laptop screens are in development. But batteries? ZOMG a laptop batter that lasts more than 3 hours!!11! I don't know how long cell phones last as I don't use them, but I'm always hearing people bitch about dead batteries, so probably not all that much longer.

I'm prepared to buy a cell phone when it's my:

cell phone
laptop
e-reader (and can display graphic-novel-level illustrations)
music and video player
and I can throw it in my backpack for a month-long expedition into the desert, with a few stretches in the ocean, and not have to worry about how I'm going to charge the thing.

I can carry around a book indefinitely.

The people, the people are ready for a revolution. But the batteries, the batteries aren't ready.

Improv Writing: Not supposed to be.

2009-03-31T16:25:00.002-06:00

There's blood on the floor, and there's not supposed to be. It's only one drop of a nosebleed, but there it is, still mahogany-red on the tiles.

There's blankets on the couch, and there's not supposed to be. But it's lonesome back in her bedroom, and she can listen to the sounds of us breathing, if need be.

There's a glassiness in her smile, and there's not supposed to be. I see it in her pictures, trying to recapture the way people smiled back at her when she was a baby. Did she become less precious? Why don't people notice her the way they used to?

There's a way she tells you about her dreams, the way the ends of her sentences fade out, because she can't say it right, and I remember she could run long before she would talk. And she can make me laugh, but it'll be a long time before she can tell jokes.

Success!

2009-03-29T20:18:00.002-06:00

We played Faery's Tale from Firefly Games tonight with Ray, her first RPG. Lee GM'd.

Game review:

Good setting for kids: faeries vs. goblins.
The rules were easy enough for Ray to understand (at 7.5 years old).
The rules and character creation were not so oversimplified that I was frustrated.
There are options for different types of and more complex characters, which we didn't use.
Gorgeous book art.
Have to buy book not through Firefly Games but through Green Ronin press. Faery dice did not arrive as ordered; haven't been able to contact customer support through ordinary channels.

Lee had a lot of fun GMing, I think. (He had a lot of props on hand, too.) And Ray had some fine ideas for getting out of binds, once she calmed down from the thrill of Something Horrible Has Just Happened to Your Character, Now What? Seriously - she was so excited, she spent about a quarter of the game running in circles around the couch.

Squee!

2009-03-29T09:49:00.001-06:00

HBO is doing a series for The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Agency, and the first episode is tonight.

Recipe: Angeled Eggs.

2009-03-28T20:24:00.002-06:00

Easter is going to be a Ray Day, which works out pretty well, since it's right around the half-birthday mark. We will spoil her rotten, favorite foods, treats, an Easter-egg hunt...the works. One day a year to spoil someone you love is not enough, you know? Special request: a silly-string fight.

So we were discussing what she wanted to eat, and I told her I'd be making deviled eggs with the Easter eggs, since I liked deviled eggs so much. She wanted to know what was in them, so I told her: she loves hard-boiled eggs, but doesn't care for mustard.

"Well, can you make them with no mustard?" she asked.

"How about we make angeled eggs?" I asked.

"What's that?"

"I don't know..." I said. "We will have to invent it."

Ray was more concerned with the visuals. "How will we put a halo on it? And wings?"

"I'm just going to figure out the flavors for now," I told her.

Here's what we did:

Slice 4 hardboiled eggs in half lengthwise and pop out the yolks.
Mix with about 1/4c. mayo, 1t lemon juice, and 2t sugar.
Fill the whites with about 1T of filling.
Sprinkle with fleur de sel.

You wouldn't think they'd be good with the sweetness. But you'd be wrong. We also tried them with sugar sprinkled on top, but it wasn't quite as good.

Now: how the heck am I going to get halos on those eggs?

Snow Eve.

2009-03-26T20:09:00.003-06:00

So I left work at noon-thirty today, because I'd finished everything except stuff I could work from home. It's supposed to snow all night tonight, and part of the day tomorrow, and I doubt I'll be heading in to work before noon tomorrow.

Before I left, I put all the food I had at my desk and set it out with a note: Emergency Stash! A number of people were planning to stay overnight if the snow got bad enough to close the base. A case of breakfast bars, two cans of soup, and some hot sauce. I told a couple of people, but everyone seems to have brought piles of food. For some reason, one guy brought in a case of eggs.

The weather wasn't bad when I left, but by the time I got home, I was glad I'd left when I did. The entire drive home, I was thinking, "More snow! More snow!" and remembering Blizzards I Have Known.

At day care, Ray wanted to walk out the door with her hood off and her jacket unzipped. Maybe I should have let her. If she were nine or ten I would have let her, but not today. I bit back telling her to be careful, and she slipped down the grassy hill. I had to laugh. "It's a blizzard!" she said. "The worst blizzard ever!" I told her of course it wasn't and then regretted it. It was a thrill running through the wind with the snow crawling inside my clothes. Ray said, "It's a blizzard!" all the way home.

At home, the first thing I did was go out to Bunnita's cage. She was sitting on top of her hut, out of the wet on the concrete. I opened the lid to the cage, and she ran to her litter box. When she intends not to get caught, she settles into an open corner, so she has multiple escape options. The litter box is easy to reach into, and she can be boxed in. I picked her up as she was making a half-hearted run for it; she burrowed into my jacket as I brought her into the house.

I took off my coat and started untying my shoes, then noticed the shed door was halfway open. I'd dragged out the hose a few days ago and let Ray run around with it, watering plants, bushes, and apple trees. I have one apple tree that's taken off; it's gone from under chest high to beyond reach over the last two years; the other tree hasn't done anything. The yard has turned into a slab of gravel again, despite all the gravel I pulled out last year. The snow felt colder, but then I wasn't buttoned up as well as I had been earlier.

I called Lee from the house and told him the roads were starting to freeze, then called the girls at work: nobody answered, for which I was grateful. I left a message with the most recalcitrant of the bunch. Go home. The roads are bad. Because I didn't really believe she'd left, only ignored the phone because she was tired of people nagging her to get out while she could.

The bathtub was still draining and foul-smelling from last night. I can't find any drain cleaner. It's probably something too difficult and expensive for home repair, anyway. At least the shower's fine. I questioned Ray, both dreading and hoping for a positive response: "I need you to tell me the truth. Even if it's weird. You didn't put anything down the drain last night, did you?" But no.

I screwed around online for awhile. My fingers got cold, then colder, so I got up. You know how you're cold and you get up and check the temperature on the thermostat, and it's what it ought to be? I got up to check the thermostat and the wind had blown the door open. I locked the door.

Ray and I played a half-dozen games of "animal rummy." She's at the right age for it, finally. I kicked her butt up and down, all through the town. She came close a couple of times. I cut her off when she started to get red in the face. I still haven't picked up a chess set for us yet. She said, "I haven't been able to play a lot of card games," so I must not have made her too mad.

The cat was wandering around with a wad of hair in his mouth. His winter coat is shedding. I brushed him while visibility faded in and out. He's getting old: his coat wasn't full of the knots and small pieces of grass he used to have, and he purred instead of trying to bite me out of revenge for all the static the brush kicked up. I end up with a good fistful of gray fur. At least that won't end up underfoot, wet and hideous, at 5:30 a.m.

Ray and I playinged "Wizards 101," a free online MMORPG for kids. I love one of the games on there; I ended up playing it to the point where Ray abandoned me for other things. I both enjoyed playing it and wished I hadn't started. Once again, I remind myself that I should never gamble, shouldn't play poker for money. It isn't the MMOs that get me - It's the stupid side games.

It took Lee an hour to drive half a mile, then another half-hour to drive the rest of the way home. He said he felt sorry for some people heading the other direction, who were spinning their tires on a 25-degree hill.

I long for a hot bath in a room that doesn't smell foul. I'll probably take a shower anyway.

It's turned into the kind of do-nothing evening that gets under my skin and leaves me depressed, so I turned off the computer game and started writing this blog entry, because I want a tangible result for the day. I wrap up in a blanket, and the evening becomes less oppressive: the heater's fighting to keep up with the wind, and I realize I've been cold for hours. I'm bad at cold. It was heaven when I started college: the dorm rooms were baking hot all winter long.

I wrapped a blanket around Ray. She ditched it, then pulled her arms inside her shirt. I wrapped her up again, and she put her head in my lap. I leaned down to kiss her ear and got a mouthful of static electricity. It's not snowing.

More snow! More snow!

Which comes first...

2009-03-25T22:02:00.002-06:00

The egg or the Smashing Creme Egg accordian band?

This clip has one of the best rube goldberg devices ever. Evah!

Short-short: Escape from Kindergarten

2009-03-25T18:29:00.002-06:00

I wrote this about a year ago now, when Ray was in kindergarten.*

---

They said it couldn't be done. But I am Juan. And Ella remembered the toothpaste.

Miss Breegan poured my orange juice and when she didn't look I squeezed and squeezed and Ella said "take the cap off stoopid" and Miss Breegan said "Ella hush" but she wasn't looking, so I did and it all went blllllllllup into the cup and I stirred the orange juice with my lucky crayon and drank toothpaste orange juice but it wasn't gross enough so I stuck a finger all the way down on my tongue and wiggled it until I puked brown bubbles and Ella said, "Miss Breegan, Juan blew chunks all over my uuuuuuunicorn" and Jasmine screamed and Miss Breegan said "Oh Juan" and walked me to the nurse's office but at the last second I escaped and ran outside and grabbed my jetpack from the bushes and I flew to my dad's house and made him go to mom's house and say sorry and she said sorry back.

They said it couldn't be done. But I am Juan. And I can do anything.

*About a month ago, two little boys in first grade ran away from school. They had a plan and everything. Ray was unable to report why they did it, though.

Recipe: Fish Tacos.

2009-03-22T20:43:00.002-06:00

So the plan was to make fish tacos. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to pick up beer and cabbage. I decided to walk to the Mexican grocery store and get the cabbage, then stop at the liquor store on the way back.

On the way to the grocery store, which was about a mile away, all told, I started making plans to get all my April groceries from there, walking, as an experiment. Carrying a six pack on the same day one has done all kinds of exhausting things to one's muscles is not such a good idea, especially when the last block is up a hill, and by the time I had arrived back home I had abandoned my plan, at least the walking part.

The beer was New Belgium's seasonal pale ale, Mighty Arrow. It's about as bitter as coffee. I usually don't like pale ales, but I loved this one. Is there a beer New Belgium can make that I don't love? Oh, yeah. I wasn't too fond of Skinny Dip, and I usually can't cope with IPAs. Well, I shall have to find out.

This is, to date, my favorite frying batter. I am going to leave the oil on the stove until I have a chance to fry up some mushrooms with it. While I had the oil hot, I coated a few pieces of cheddar with flour and batter and fried them, too - total success. The opposite of fail, although they do like to puff up and turn into cheese balloons instead of staying in nice cubes. About a half-inch square seemed about right. Too small, you get balloons. Too big, the inside doesn't get gooey, just warm.

I also tried frying very thin slices of lime. I had lemon-jalapeno slices at Nosh when I ate there, and they were excellent. I think I cut the slices too thin, and the batter is different. I had better luck just frying the slices in flour than flour-and-batter. I was thinking the batter was just panko, but panko burn so quickly and the slices brown so slowly that I suspect panko is not the answer. Anyway, the slices were incredibly, additively bitter from the whites, but the fruit and peel were chewy and delicious. What to do, what to do.

The thing about fish tacos is that they're aren't Mexican. They're Southern Californian. So don't think of the cabbage-white sauce combination as crazy, think of it as spicy coleslaw to go with your fancy fish sticks.

I love catsup and mayo with my fish sticks, but I love capers even more, so I was won over by the spicy tartar sauce.

Fish Tacos (adapted from Allrecipes).

1/2 cabbage, shredded
1 quart oil for frying
1 pound mild white fish fillets, cut into finger-sized pieces diagonally across flesh (we used tilapia, cod is traditional)
soft corn tortillas (we used taco shells, which turned out to be inferior!)

White sauce:
1/2 c plain yogurt (used sour cream; it tasted too strongly of sour cream)
1/2 c mayonnaise
1 lime, juiced
about 1/4 of a jalapeno pepper, minced
1 t minced capers
1/2 t dried oregano
1/2 t ground cumin
1/2 t dried dill weed
1 t chipotle powder (or cayenne)

Batter:
1 c all-purpose flour
2 T cornstarch
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt (this was not enough salt)
1 egg
1c beer

Mix ingredients and set aside to let the flavors meld.

Chop 1/2 cabbage and fish. Make sure the fish are fully thawed, if frozen, before frying.

Heat 1 quart of oil to frying temperature, which is 375 degrees or the point at which you can drop a droplet of batter in and have it turn golden in about 30 seconds.

Mix the dry ingredients for the batter. Mix the egg and beer and add to the dry ingredients.
Don't do this ahead of time; you want to keep the baking powder in the batter right at the point where it's still reacting to the beer, which will make the fried batter more delicate.

Put about 1/2 c. flour in dish one and the batter in dish two. Cover 5-6 fish pieces with flour, shaking off excess, then dip in batter and drop in oil. Fry until golden-brown and drain on paper towels.

Pan-fry the corn tortillas in a couple of tablespoons of oil, a few seconds on each side. Put cabbage, a couple of pieces of fish, and white sauce in tortilla and eat!

Weekend in Review.

2009-03-22T19:17:00.002-06:00

Friday. Worked on a freelance murder mystery expansion pack for Freeform Games. Gave up on it; it felt like pulling teeth, trying to write out character sheets for my ten characters. It seemed like such a good idea, too: motive, method, opportunity; participation in major pre-existing plots; goals; bonuses; loves, hates, knows. Sucked the life out of making up the characters, I tell you.

So I read the entirety of A Shadow in Summer in the bathtub while the water got cold and I had to pee. There's a compliment for you: not, "It was so good I stayed up all night" but "It was so good I forgot to pee."

Saturday. I went to a free yoga class in the morning. This was significant for two reasons. One, when you're done with a yoga class, you feel like you've accomplished something. The next day, you know you've accomplished something. My heart center is closed; I have no balance. Two, the class was out at the Air Force Academy. I coolly flashed my badge and drove through the gates and promptly got lost. I did find the place in time for class, though, when I remembered I hadn't turned off the main way until after the big planes on the side of the road. Pain level: 1 acetaminophen, and only today. I was gently interrupted during class by an older black woman who told me she was so flexible she was about to put her foot in my face, could I please scoot down on my mat? Sure enough, while I was at about a 45-degree angle, she had her foot on the floor over my head. She apologized profusely afterwards. I just wanted to pinch her cheeks she was so cute and nice; I want to be her when I grow up.

I went grocery shopping afterwards and ate all kinds of snacks at Whole Foods, Costco, World Market, and Target. (I also considered stopping at El Liborio, but I was tired of shopping, and Mexican grocery stores do not serve snacks. IMO, the only real drawback.) I also stopped at PetCo but did not eat any of the snacks (doggie biscuits), even though they smelled good.

I tried some pu-erh tea at World Market. Yummy. All the reviews of it call it an "earthy" tea, but I'd have to say it was more like non-bitter black tea with green-tea umami flavor. However, fifteen baglets for ten dollars is not going to fly at my house, so I snooped around online for places that carried it. It turns out Stash has more kinds of tea than you dare shake a stick at. I like their stuff whenever I get it, so I'm going to eschew smaller companies with esoteric names and order from them. However, as I have set a goal of drinking up the tea in my cuboard before I get any more, I will wait. I have about thirty bags left, plus about a pint of loose-leaf thai coconut tea and some Korean barley (?) tea from Kate. I'm not going to hold myself to drinking the last two, though. There's just too much of the thai tea, and I don't crave either regularly.

I was wondering if I'll ever get to shop at a Trader Joe's. Probably not in Colorado until the state allows food stores to sell alcohol.

I made myself a salad (Lee and Ray had gorged themselves on McDonald's earlier in the day) and took a nap. When I woke up, I decided that Saturday was not a writing day but a Day of Food Experimente and made fish tacos. Lee declared that it was another one of those dishes he doesn't like unless I make it. [Glow.] I also made the cheese bread recipe out of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. The bread turned out not to be terribly cheesy but easily my favorite recipe to date. I think it's the oil in the cheese - the bread was much softer. But the cheese did add an element of umami, sheer deliciousness, even though the sharp cheddar bite didn't come through at all.

I watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with Ray and slept with her in bed, as Lee had declared earlier in the evening that he was going to play Fallout 3 until late.

He says he ended up killing one of the NPCs as an experiment and intending to reload to a save point afterwards, but forgot - and ended up saving over his last save game. Start over? O noes!

I'm so glad I still get good snuggle time with Ray. Everybody warned me there would come a time when she would no longer do want to do so, but it hasn't come yet. We always end up having sleepover-talks when we sleep, usually about how to deal with nightmares. I tell her they're normal, that having a lot of nightmares seems to be tied to having a very creative brain, and it's a way for her brain to complain about things it doesn't like in the waking world, like being frustrated and scared and overwhelmed. We talked about why it's hard for her to fall asleep; she says it's because she keeps thinking too much. We talked about counting sheep and how one way to fall asleep is to trick your thinking-too-much brain into getting frustrated with all the stupid things you're thinking and give up. "One sheep, baaa. Two sheep, baaa. One hundred and fifty sheep, baa. O SHUT UP! OK OK OK I GIVE UP! AAAAHHHHH!" As I type this, I realize that most meditation techniques are the three-year-old brain forcing the adult brain to break down in tears. I told Ray saying OMMM was kind of the same thing. So she tried to say it under her breath, but I told her she had to say it out loud, because when you do it makes the bottom of your brain vibrate, which your thinking-too-much brain finds annoying.

Ray: OMMMM - hee hee hee - OMMMM - ZZZ.

I couldn't believe how fast she was out. Quick, even for her.

Sunday. I woke up early and decided to get up and write. I messed around on the computer, realized I wasn't getting anywhere, gathered all the character sheets for the main-pack characters, and ran a bath. I felt guilty about it, like I'd started drinking. I worked on a few more characters, but it was pulling teeth again. And Ray was chewing on her shirt again (she's been chewing on every @#$%^&* thing she can fit in her mouth lately with teething; the second pair of teeth on the bottom are loose; she chipped one of them but isn't in pain. I have to call the dentist on Monday to see if we should just have it pulled) so I was in and out of the tub what with the exile to the room/freedom.

Eventually, I gave up and got out. I sat down in front of the computer and just started writing the actual character sheet (instead of just the stats, as it were), and it went really well, and I said, "Why was I making such a big deal out of this?" By the end of the third character, I was worn out, though. So many things to check for consistency, you know, before you start writing, or else you're just going to have to start all over again, when you've already set the character in your mind. Ugh.

As always when I write at the computer, part of the time that my brain has its little hourglass icon up, I mess around with playlists on various sites. The December 2008 playlist, for example, had a lot of the songs I listened to throughout Alien Blue. The February 2009 playlist has a lot of songs I listened to while writing the last short story, about food and death. The March 2009 playlist is very jazzy and 50's (the murder mystery is called Hollywood Lies). Lost of Pink Martini, Cardigans, and some Madeleine Peyroux, who sounds just like frikkin' Billie Holliday. She's a white girl, though. Who knew? Robbie Williams does an excellent version of Beyond the Sea.

I took another nap and some pain meds when I woke up. Damn, yoga classes are hard.

Lee put up the pot rack for me today! I must say, it looks very sexy with the pans hanging proudly. They may not have copper bottoms, but I love their curves regardless. Also, after several months of on-and-off discussion, the damn thing is hung so sturdily that Lee was able to hang from the rack without making it budge, so I'm safe. We even discussed how to prevent anything coming loose if I should bonk my head on the pots, which made me feel better. I have this fear that my clutziness will cause significant damage to myself and others; I used to panic every time I came next to a balcony when Ray was a baby, out of fear that I would accidentally fling her over the edge somehow.

Wow. There's a morbid image with which to end a blog post. Oh yeah, for supper I tried implementing the baby-artichoke plan that Margie came up with, which was to saute the crap out of quartered chokes and braise them with wine. Only I used lemon juice and water, not being an oenophile. Report: even though they are baby chokes, they must be trimmed, outer leaves peeled, and tops cut off. Otherwise it went smashingly. I got some fleur de sel this weekend, so I sprinkled some of that on top. Smashing - it isn't the taste that's different, just the texture, a non-crunchy salt explosion. Using fine salt, you end up with overall saltiness; using kosher salt, you end up with annoying salt crunchies stuck in your teeth. Fleur de sel is like the dessicated salt we used to get in the bottom of the pan of softened water we kept on the woodstove to humidfy the farmhouse, back in the day. Quite tasty.

Next week should suck, between OT and racing to meet my Hollywood Lies deadline. Oh well.

Book Review: A Shadow in Summer

2009-03-22T08:23:00.002-06:00

by Daniel Abraham.

If you're the kind of person who likes Gene Wolf or Umberto Eco but is left wondering whether you really understood what was going on, don't read the rest of this description, just read the book. It's be more fun to be surprised.

A Shadow in Summer is a fantasy about...hm...let's say it's about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It's set in an alternate (or future?) India-type city in which the Western world is being dominated by an empire. A few cities have achieve a kind of independence through the power of their poets, who capture the embodiments of ideas and trap them in human form (called "andat"), with incredible powers. The problems are that 1) re-trapping an idea is harder every time and 2) each poet can only hold one such idea in his or her head at a time.

The story revolves around the current poet and his andat, Seedless, who ensures the city's prominence by removing cotton seeds from bales of picked cotton. Big deal, eh? But Seedless also deals in the sad trade, or abortion, when required, and could drop the next generation of the empire's children in a heartbeat, if he so desired. The poet, in a moment of self-loathing and doubt, created Seedless, and is now forced to carry his own nemesis with him: Seedless is conspiring to destroy the city and the poet himself.

That's not what the story's about. As for that, go find out for yourself.

A master-level book. This is the first part of a quartet: where the hell will it go from here, only reading the rest of the series can say.

Food fad: Salad

2009-03-21T13:27:00.002-06:00

It seems like, every season or so, I gravitate to one easy-to-make dish and eat the heck out of it. This winter it was canned tomato soup. Last summer and into fall it was ramen with peanut butter and the kitchen sink. Last spring it was sushi.

Now, it is the SALAD.

I buy a box of pre-washed spring mix or baby spinach, and I'm good to go. I think the important revelation, for me, was buying a bottle of good sherry wine vinegar: it goes with almost everything, if you're short on ideas. And the second most important revelation was that hot meat + sherry + olive oil + cool salad = bliss.

Here are some of the more successful combinations of late:

Premixed Thai peanut sauce, blood oranges, red onions, lime juice
Grilled beef, blue cheese, pecans, red onions, grilled asparagus, sherry vinaigrette
Pears, pecans, romano, red onion, pomegranate-balsamic vinaigrette
Fried vegetarian mushroom ham (the perfect consistency for frying, and o mushroom deliciousness), black sesame seeds, shao xing wine, garlic, thai peanut sauce, lime juice

I am particularly fond of fruit + cheese + red onion salads.

A good box.

2009-03-19T21:18:00.003-06:00

In the mail I got a box. In the box was another copy of Repo! The Genetic Opera, Beirut's Lon Gisland EP, and a book of Russian fairy tales. A very good box.

Improv Writing: Questionable.

2009-03-19T21:05:00.002-06:00

Warning--->don't read this if you don't like embarrassing bits of information about yours truly. Mom. Not that's it's horrible or anything.

"The erotic instinct is something questionable." -- Carl Jung.

Ice cream; elephant trunks; stroking a ukelele; riffling the pages of a book; walking through crowds before a concert; ceiling fans; the sound of a keyboard clicking, pausing, clicking; melted chocolate on the fingers; nipples of course; green tea; the smell of bacon; fresh-washed hair; quiet snows; loud rain, long rain, any kind of rain at all; the smell of rain, but thunder and lightning must have been involved; fresh-ground pepper; harmony; anything that makes me laugh wickedly; solid (grain) wood; pine soap; Murphy's wood oil soap (which also reminds me of church); a new recipe, which I do not follow; beards; bones in the spine, which are never perfectly aligned; phallic objects, even if they make other people laugh; flower petals on the skin; letting go of the hard feeling between my eyes; faith, love, joy; as if one really were hungry; modern art, which is more due to my skill than that of cleverer illusionists; nudes (Why not more male nudes? Because if only men are visual, why do women look at them at all?); dancing, but only in grocery stores, or anywhere else I can get away with being noticeable but not stared at; couches that make embarrassing noises when you sit on them (leather); being surrounded; collapsing; mastering; sitting like a queen on a throne and feeling like the devil herself from The 9th Gate; Bolero, my first erotic song; vibrators, ones with funny shapes; the life-sized, crucified chocolate Jesus.

Improv Writing: Empowered!

2009-03-19T20:46:00.002-06:00

From yesterday.

If I were truly empowered, I would run away from home and never come back. No, I could come back with a gun. No, I would come back with a run and flamingo-pink high heels, because I am empowered. To find myself. To say any outrageous--to do any outrageous thing whatsoever, without regret, or conscience.

See, that's the bad part, thought Suzy. Regret--who needs it? Just say "better luck next time" and move on. But to be without conscience?

To be truly empowered, then, was to deserve to be shot down like a dog. And what about envy? If being fully empowered means you never feel envy, you can shove it up your ass and garnish it with a tomato-skin rose.

"I want to be someone else," Suzy said as she looked in the mirror. "Not fully empowered. Just a little more powered." Then she pinched the fat roll around her waist and decided to go on a diet.

Empowered people can deprive themselves, she thought. They have that power too.

Book Reviews

2009-03-19T19:27:00.002-06:00

Eden Moore books, by Cherie Priest.

Flora Segunda, by Ysabeau Wilce.

---

There's dark fantasy all over the place. Vampires! Werewolves! Tattoos! Sex! Did I Mention the Vampires?!?

Cherie Priest's Eden Moore books aren't dark fantasy. They're ghost stories. I love ghost stories, which may or may not contain ghosts but at least contain something 1) spooky that 2) must be faced, if only because it's in the same house.

So Eden. She's a southern girl. The American South is as full of ghosts as Great Britain, you know. They have Wuthering Heights. We have Gone with the Wind.* They have haunted castles. We have Graceland.

Eden can see ghosts. At first the ghosts are from her family, who are trying to protect her, because other people are trying to kill her, also from her family. It gets complicated. That's Four and Twenty Blackbirds, which I read half a year ago.

I just finished Wings to the Kingdom. Now, the ghosts are not from her family, but from the Chickamauga battlefield in Tennessee.

The first book started out so strong - threats to her life, backstory so strong you actually wanted to read it for its own sake, good characters, believable conflicts (i.e., a real mess all around) - that I was disappointed with Wings at first. Eh, the writing is good, but why bother? There aren't any threats to Eden herself, she's dealing with people because she's obligated to not because she has any internal motivation, she doesn't see much point in getting involved in anything actually interesting.

But if the first book's about Eden deciding she has a right to live, the second book's about her deciding what to do with her life, and the plot reflects that. A conundrum. Writing an honest story about finding a place in life doesn't start out with knowing it already - you go in false directions, you piss people off, you whine a lot. But then Eden gets her shit together. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to the third book in the series, and other things she's written, like Dreadful Skin, which is about werewolves and lapsed nuns.

---

Flora Segunda, Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog is a YA Fantasy set in an alternate California populated by magicians and mad scientists. Check out the website - it's fun in and of itself.

Flora is the daughter of a military genius and her insane husband, and she's supposed to grow up to be a soldier. Instead, she wants to become a ranger, a magician-assassin-spy, a woman of many hats and talents. So when the opportunity comes to have an ill-considered adventure with her friend, a real fop, of course she goes for it. What could go wrong?

A lot. I won't say what. But it's fun. If you're looking for a lurid adventure novel about a girl who isn't a fantastic fighter, or a super magician, or preternaturally intelligent, or never gives up...yup, you will find a good novel to read in bed with your head under the covers and a flashlight. If you're an adult, ignore your Significant Other saying, "Why don't you just turn the light on?" Because IT'S NOT THE SAME, YOU FOOL!**

*Tell me there's no ghost. Go on, tell me. It's the entire Antebellum South! Notice the nose on your face much? Shyaa.
**No, Lee didn't say this. But then, I thought of it just now, so I will have to do that when I read the sequel, which is sitting on my shelf as I type.

Neil Gaiman vs. "Bombadil" Colbert!

2009-03-19T19:05:00.000-06:00

Fight!

Improv Writing.

2009-03-17T21:22:00.002-06:00

So here's improv writing:

No critiquing (especially in read-aloud situations).
No censoring anything on paper. If necessary, say "bleep" when reading out loud.
The prompts are just prompts, not binding.

First prompt: The door wouldn't open.

The door wouldn't open. The window wouldn't close. The cat wouldn't scratch. The snatch had been stolen. And we were all sitting around the table at Marbury's place waiting for the missus to come home. Boy, were we in trouble, Sammie and me.

But Fred wasn't in trouble. He was dead, poor sod. He got killt out in the getaway car, even before we knowed it had started to go wrong. The cops din't find us, the bank manager din't find us, the investors were insured and didn't give a shit, shit, shit.

I wanted to hear the alarm bells ringing, but it was quiet, because people more afraid of gettin shot than they are of gettin robbed, people so crazy nowdays. But Freddie was the one who got shot, and a stranger wore his hat [and took the money and run off].

And the door we locked won't come unlocked, and without the money, the missus gonna kill us. And the window is so high.

Second prompt: My first thought was that he lied in every word. (The one I read aloud. It hit me about halfway through the POV was the mom from my current project.)

My first thought was that he lied in every word. But I was fond of him, regardless, that son of mine. What mother wouldn't die for her son? Well, most of them, I think, if they had a son like mine. But he reminded me of Henry. The heartbreak of Henry, the "mad passion" you only find in romance novels. And I was fond of Henry, even then. Even as I felt my face falling and my heart turning to ashes, I was fond.

"Glenn," I said. "Of course I will follow you to the fairy woods. But your brother is gone. No matter what I do--if I let you bleed me--"

He interrupted me. "Mother! Don't talk like that. We don't need to find David that badly. I just--I want to go. I want you to see what's happened."

I felt old then. No, ashamed. Glenn was no Henry. Never would be. He'd never ask me to lay down my life. And not for some selfish, ill-considered purpose.

I cried.

But not until he had gone, and I was drunk.

---

A good experience, even if my envy is aflame...

Of course, Stephen's King's use of the "My first thought" prompt is waaaaay better than everyone else's, so I can feel a little better about it.

The Tower.

2009-03-17T21:06:00.002-06:00

Today was a good day, but a hard one.

It started out with not making the first cut on the ABNA award, which is never an easy way to start the day, being impersonally notified of your not-brilliance.

But then it did a quick segue into being accused of something I didn't do, but would have done if I had been around to do so - getting caught in the middle of someone working herself up to quit, in my supe's words. It was unexpected. I felt like a stranger instead of an ally.

And I ground my way dully through the day until I got someone else's project dumped in my lap, to be finished COB. Work doesn't always magically end after eight hours, does it?

And then I went to Write Brain, on improv writing, and listened to other people be brilliant when I was only good.

My tarot card of the day is The Tower.

Chaos ----- Sudden change ----- Impact ----- Hard times
Crisis ----- Revelation ----- Disruption ----- Realizing the truth
Disillusion ----- Crash ----- Burst ----- Uncomfortable experience
Downfall ----- Ruin ----- Ego blow ----- Explosive transformation

Tomorrow, The Star.

Fool!

2009-03-16T21:43:00.001-06:00

There will be no ABNA news for you tonight! HAHAHAHA!

Still no news yet...

Update: I didn't make it to the quarterfinals (500), but I got to the 2000 that had excerpts reviewed. The reviews haven't been sent out yet, though.

So what comes before pulp?

2009-03-15T21:19:00.002-06:00

I'm trying to put a finger on the fiction writing period from about 1900-1914. It's difficult. I'm not a historian, so please don't take all this as intended as authoritative, just throwing ideas around. And granted, there were pulp magazines at this time (Argosy started in 1896), but this just wasn't the Great Age of Pulps.

There seems to be a logical splitting point at the turn of the century - 1865-1900 - Late Victorian. 1900-1914 - Edwardian/Belle Epoque. High literature was still obsessed with Realism. Modernism was inventing itself but hadn't become popular (post-WWI).

But eh, I'm not really concerned with high literature. Something I'm finding is that popular and children's literature was becoming more fantastic (Oz, Burroughs, Dunsany, Chesterton). This was the start of the great era of ghost stories (MR James, EF Benson).

A common theme seems be that there are two worlds, a normal world and a secret one.

Spiritualism advanced the theory of the world of the dead as a scientific fact. Psychology (Freud and Jung) advanced theories that our minds weren't entirely aware of themselves, that much was hidden (in synchronicity, the Titanic sank in 1912 in a conflict between Science and That which Lies Beneath).

Socialists were becoming impatient with their alliances inside their national governments (the Russian revolutions started in 1914) at the same time that national governments were seeing the peak of nationalism (as WWI started in 1914). Inside the national pride were ethnic movements, threatening to split nations apart (e.g., Austria-Hungary). The British Empire had its last heyday; it was falling apart by the time WWI was over. But - for the time being - war was far away, in the dark corners of the world.

Science introduced the paradoxes of relativity.

The occult was prominent, with theosophy, OTO, and Golden Dawn either beginning or continuing strongly. The Third Great Awakening was still running its course among American Christians. The Pentecostal movement was setting tongues on fire.

It's like writers are warning, "You can only pretend to hold to the status quo for so long before it will all fall apart. 'Normal' will only take you so far." But that could just be hindsight from my perspective.

Selected works from the period:
The Wizard of Oz books (note: L. Frank Baum spent the end of the 19th century in Aberdeen, SD, which is probably the basis for "Kansas.") - Theosophist
Edgar Rice Burroughs - SF/F themes. Tarzan, Mars, Barsoom...
GK Chesterton - Christian allegorist. The Man who Was Thursday.
Lord Dunsany - Fantasy. The Book of Wonder.
JM Barrie - Peter Pan.
Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Secret Garden.
Rudyard Kipling - Just-so Stories.
Arthur Conan Doyle - Lost World books. (He became a Spiritualist, but that was later.)
Jack London - Call of the Wild. His mother was a Spiritualist.
Kenneth Grahame - Wind in the Willows
MR James - Ghost stories
EF Benson - Ghost stories
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
Baroness Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel
Maurice LeBlanc - Arsene Lupin, criminal mastermind.
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness.

Punchline of the Day:

2009-03-13T15:55:00.001-06:00

The joke itself wasn't funny, just the punchline:

"...banging that woman like a screen door in a tornado."

Musical Interlude: Pink Martini

2009-03-12T20:56:00.002-06:00

Meetings are good for me. I get a lot of brainstorming done, a lot of networking.

Like the other day. I was in a meeting and sat next to someone I don't talk to much. We spent the meeting passing notes back and forth making fun of the people on the other side of the teleconference, and now I have a friend for life. Very productive.

Anyway, I also like to brainstorm ideas while in meetings. The latest story idea started in a meeting. The person two chairs down was was talking about April Fool's Day, and the person next to him thought he said "paper fool's day" instead. "Paper Fools." How can you pass up a title like that?

Shortly afterwards, I got in a discussion about mass murderers, and why people wig out and kill their entire family. (The interesting answer we found was that the killers are so egotistical, they don't know where they stop and their families begin; to them, it's a thorough and responsible way to commit suicide, leaving no limbs behind.)

And then after that, I started to wonder, if some states legalize gay marriage and others don't, whether the states that do would see a lower level of domestic violence and lost-job-came-home-and-killed-wife-and-kids. (I saw a study that suggested gay relationships, not having to deal with sex roles as much as straight relationships do, were, on average, happier. If legalizing gay marriage makes straight marriage less valid as it is currently interpreted and people stop living out sex roles and reserving their true nature for their friends, then possibly couples would be happier and less likely to hurt each other. Possibly.)

And then I borrowed a Pink Martini CD.

Here's their version of Que Sera Sera. Creepy and campy at the same time, as atmospheric as the bubble clouds you get before a tornado.

Here's the lighter (but similarly-themed) Hang on Little Tomato, which strikes me as a Dave or Kate song, all swing clarinets. An LA Story song.

Here's Je Ne Veux Pas Travailler, the perfect theme song to not-doing housework. A Margie song if there ever was one; I think I'm going to try to memorize it, even though I'm going to have to look up a lot of the words.

And, finally, here's a salsa Bolero, with slightly (very slightly) NSFW still pictures (title of clip: "Lez movie's"). Alas, the only version I could find with a good soundtrack. I'm sure you're all devastated.

In the middle of all this is something. I just don't know what yet.

Insert witty Mark Twain quote here.

2009-03-12T20:55:00.003-06:00

Blogging is easy when you're supposed to be working from home.

Curtain time!

2009-03-12T19:47:00.003-06:00

I used to have dreams about showing up at high school naked, but they never really bothered me. Pfft. Those idiots were nothing compared to junior high. Or fifth grade, for that matter.

The dreams that would bother me were the ones where I would show up somewhere and someone would say, "You're late! You're supposed to be on stage right now! Don't you know your lines?"

Of course I wouldn't. And I'd stand in front of the crowd (naked or not) and be unable to move.

As I got older, I would think, "I'll make something up." But I never did.

I quit having the dreams eventually--during the last few, I'd just walk away from the stage--but I've always wanted to have a better solution, one where I'd sound all polished and stuff, even though I was just making up my lines. Right at that moment. Because I am just that suave.

But get me in front of a group of people, and my wit dries up like superglue between the teeth.

Pikes Peak Writers is holding their March Write Brain on the 17th, on Improv Writing. Yeah, I'm going. Yeah, I'm going to put my foot in my mouth. Yeah, I'm gutsy like that.

Two great tastes that taste great together: Yoga and RPGs

2009-03-10T21:09:00.003-06:00

Yeah, I'm a nerd: I'm doing some yoga and thinking about my chakras (the solar plexus is bothering me lately, all wound up in knots and acid, but less so than in the past) and looking forward to taking a day off to play Warhammer when I realize RPG character classes fit with the chakras.

Oh, is nothing sacred? But the beauty of a good system of ideas is that you can fit other ideas on top of them, whether either system likes it or not. I've been using "leveling" instead of "crossing the gateless gate" for years, so I suspect I was bound to put these ideas together eventually.

Root (security, survival; earth) - Tank chakra - Protect others
Belly/sacral (sex, creativity; water) - DPS chakra - Use discipline to respond to the unexpected in unexpected ways
Solar plexus (power, growth; fire) - Blaster chakra - Raw power to control the situation
Heart (relationships, love; air) - Healer chakra - Restoring wholeness
Throat (expression, truth; sound) - Mage chakra - Can't stop the signal
Brow (insight; vision) - Rogue chakra - How does that lock work?
Crown (universality; aura) - Necromancer/Demon summoner chakra - Thinking along Stephen Brust lines here, crossing dimensions

I have doubts about Throat and Brow, but the rest seem pretty solid.

I watched the Watchmen!

2009-03-10T16:17:00.002-06:00

Because, hey, the whole point of the movie was to answer that quasi-eternal question, by a technicality.

Lee and I saw the movie a la Consortium, arriving slightly later than we "should" have for the 7 p.m. IMAX showing. We moved directly to front-and-center seats, which was to produce amusing consequences but not neck cramps; the seats were very nice. The others sat in a more reasonable spot, the bastidges.

While awaiting the start of the movie, I overheard the young couple next to me saying:

HER: So what's this movie about anyway?
HIM: It's like Twilight for boys.
Yours Truly: You've got to be kidding me.
HIM: I mean, it's an adaptation of a book or something.
YT: Yeah, no.

The Harry Potter trailer, which was the only one we saw, looked better than expected. It's the same director as from HP and the Order of the Phoenix, but it looks like he leveled while he was out. I want to watch OOTP again; I keep mixing parts of it up with The Goblet of Fire, which disappointed me, so I'm probably think the OOTP was worse than it is.

Watchmen: I liked the movie. Good job, you know? I agree with onereviewer (I forget who) who went off about how Zack Snyder wasn't visionary (Alan Moore=visionary; someone copying Alan Moore's vision=not visionary), but good job. I don't need to really get into details--other people will do it better, see ***Dave's review, linked above--but every level was handled well, although not necessarily in synch with other people's expectations.

(For example, when I talked to people at work about the movie today, "It was too slow" came up a lot.*)

So what I have to say is just a few observations, places where I seem to have drifted from the norm. Spoilers follow:

I think ZS was making a point about Batman. Now, I don't think AM intended the Nite Owl II character to be a Batman knockoff (***Dave knew the original knockoffs but I'd never heard of them), but the connection has been posed many times since then. I think ZS took the recent Nolan Batman movies and picked out a few traits from Bale's portrayal and split them up between Nite Owl (techy goodness) and Rorschach (madness and strategy). The point? Batman is both; he isn't "crazy"--he's crazy. I feel the Nolan movies missed that (I liked them; they just weren't real Batman to me).
Dr. Manhattan gets progressively undressed throughout the comic and the movie--but it wasn't until I saw the movie that I made a connection between wearing clothes and feeling a connection with other humans. Duh.
The movie had the most naked level of violence I've ever seen in a movie, horror movies and Sin City not excepted. I flinched at the damage people had to have been taking from beginning to end. The violence wasn't glorified--in fact, the blunt disregard for humanity these characters had (even the "good" Nite Owl II) was never hidden.
The ending of the movie diverges from the comic. While there were small divergences during the main part of the movie, the main split came, appropriately, after the point where Dr. Manhattan can no longer see the future (paralleling the fact that neither can those of us who have read the comic). I can't remember why, but I always thought of that point as the place where Doc and Bubastis get fried. I didn't like the new ending better, but I loved that it was unexpected.
I missed Dr. Manhattan walking off to start a new universe in so many words.
Various people have commented on the sex--how graphic it was, how long it took, that they weren't sure the intercourse was faked. You know what? It was graphic, gratuitous sex that was used by the characters to cover up deeper emotions. --Dr. Manhatten gets multiple-kinky with Silk Spectre II to try to patch up their doomed relationship and complains he doesn't know what stimulates her any more. Silk Spectre and Nite Owl II get it on because they're turned on by being superheroes (as real people, they can't do it) and they don't know how else to handle it. Comedian tries to rape Silk Spectre I because he's so addicted to violence he thinks that's what she wants. Nobody in the Watchmen pretends "this is the way sex is supposed to be." Also? A movie filled with probably a solid hour's worth of violence, you can stand five minutes of watching people getting it on. I'm just saying.
By the end of the movie, I was done freaking out about Dr. Manhattan's nudity. Naked guy. Okay. Seeing a naked guy while other people are also looking at a naked guy. Awkward. Another one of life's ironies, that naked men are more shocking than seeing seeing someone hacksaw someone's arms off. Although that was pretty shocking.
Alan Moore isn't my favorite comics writer, but I usually like his stuff.** I like his older stuff better; it seems like he achieved enlightenment somewhere along the way and has decided the rest of us need to come with him, willy nilly. I've been thinking about this lately and realized a major theme in horror movies is about how enlightenment, in its various forms, is BAD. One example--Freddy Kreuger--is about how Bad Things Happen when Kids Find out about Sex. Heck, Frankenstein is about how Bad Things Happen when Kids Find out about Reanimation. However, AM doesn't handle enlightenment well as a plot element; transcendence is a beast to pull off, and shouldn't be brought in as a deus ex machina. See Promethea and The Black Dossier. Lame endings: and then they lived happily ever after. Reminds me of late Heinlein.
I finally figured out why Rorschach eats the beans cold during the first part of the movie. Dan offers to warm them up, and he says (I think) "Fine that way." Then, at the end of the movie, he refuses to put on a heavier coat, because he's "fine that way." Cold human beans :)

*And "Wow. That was a big blue penis." But did they see the movie in the front row of an IMAX? No. That was a big blue penis.
**Yes, I liked Lost Girls. I thought it was very sweet. I also liked the art.

Please:

2009-03-03T21:53:00.002-07:00

Somebody please tell me that Prince Charming Publishers want my book right now, no questions asked, because I am done writing this @#$%^&* summary.

Rejection 13!

2009-03-01T08:54:00.003-07:00

Weird Tales rejected "Fragile" - the dreaded rejection 13.

Sniff!

That's okay. The editor said I could send them more stuff, and I have more stuff to send when submissions open again on March 31st, a short story about Greek food and strange appetites, called "Winterfruit." I feel about this story the way some women feel about their shoe closets: take that, o my enemies!

Update:

Rejection haiku.

Weird Tales kindness:
No demons overtook us
Try again next time

Margie Gras haiku.

2009-02-28T19:31:00.002-07:00

"Pink" reminds me of
Breast cancer fundraising shirts
Like "Save Second Base."

Wander haiku.

2009-02-26T19:43:00.001-07:00

Pussy willow twig
and mysterious culvert:
a path through the woods

Ann's Haiku

2009-02-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

Fried pickles daily
Clearly Slayton's needs a new
Schriever location

Ah, so.

Carrie Newcomer concert in town last night.

2009-02-20T18:17:00.002-07:00

1) One need not get worked up before a Carrie concert. It's Carrie. What could go wrong? Like a true believer in the face of death.

2) Slayton's pickle chips of deliciousness. Who knew?

3) The High Plains Unitarian Universalist Church did, indeed, take over "the old miniature golf course," which may be why the ceiling is padded and sky blue. Or not.

4) A concoction for Margie Gras may have to be called, "The Unitarian Universalist Exploding Pink Dolphin" in honor of their logo.

5) The smell of FIRE I thought I smelled this morning was only Lee's hair, post BBQ.

Unrelated: I wonder if anyone actually twitters with 100% haikus. If not, I may have to sign up for an account.

On genres.

2009-02-18T17:53:00.001-07:00

In an era that believes in a scientific explanation for spirits, ghost stories aren't fantasy - they're science fiction.

Writer's Toolbox: Revising Chapters

2009-02-11T17:36:00.003-07:00

I'm brainstorming an idea I want to try to explain to a member of my writer's group. As always, as I explain something, I get better at actually doing it myself.

Okay, you have a first draft. You know what your story is about. You know your characters, conflicts, settings, etc. But your chapters aren't as exciting as they could be (perhaps not even the first chapter).

What's wrong?!?

Well, it could be one of a number of things. You might be putting too much extraneous scaffolding in the story (internal monologue, backstory, etc.). Your style might be so sloppy that people are turned off before they get to the good stuff. The details (or the premise) of your story might be so cheesy that people roll their eyes.

Let's say it's not that - it's that the chapters just don't suck you in. They don't flow. All the drama and information you need are presented in the chapter, but the events aren't ordered in a way that captures the reader's attention.

Example:

The main character is happy.
Then the main character thinks about an upcoming event and worries about it.
Something random but bad (which will matter later) happens to the main character.
The character blows it off and goes shopping.
The character stops at Starbucks.
The character is manhandled into confronting her fears of the upcoming event.
The character receives an ominous warning.
Something random but bad (not the same as the first time, still something that will matter later) happens to the main character.

Now, this is how first drafts go - like life, all over the place. But the idea of writing a story is that you take something that is kind of like life and put a layer of magic over it - the sense that everything that happens is meaningful (even if its meaning is to stress that life has no ultimate meaning).

What is that layer of magic? How can you make sure that everything in your story has a meaning?

First, figure out what it is you mean. (Writers often miss the obvious, have you ever noticed? Well, maybe not.)

Second, order the events and information in your story in such a way that 1) one event causes the next and 2) the information your readers need is revealed through events or in a way that ties into the events (e.g., through a specific character).

Events

To order your events, first write them down, as they actually occur in the chapter (see the example above).

Then decide what your chapter is about - this can be an action, like "introduce the main character" or "establish conflict," but it's more interesting to come up with a plot hook. For me, the best (most entertaining) way to do this is with unreasonably long chapter titles, for example, "Chapter 1. In Which Our Heroine Tries to Keep Her Hopes up but Fails Miserably."

Next, reorder the events in the chapter to reflect the title. In the example, we have to first show our heroine trying to keep her hopes up, and then explain why she fails miserably.

Here's one way to do that:

Something bad happens to the main character.
She's upset; nevertheless, she forces herself to go out on the town.
In so doing, she gets talked into doing something she doesn't want to do (confronting a fear). (Come on! It'll be fun!)
The fear confronts her back, giving her a warning of worse things to come.
The warning comes to pass, and the main character despairs.

You may want to cut off the chapter just as the last event happens - but make sure to give the character's reaction to the cliffhanger in the next chapter (or the next chapter she's in, if you have multiple POVs).

Remember to make sure:

The beginning foreshadows or sets up the end.
Each step connects to the previous step.
The events all relate to what your chapter is about.

Note: Almost as if by magic, the first event in the ordered example is more interesting than the first event in the unordered example. If it isn't, go back and think about the point of the chapter. If the point of the chapter is interesting, and the beginning of the chapter hooks into the point of the chapter, the beginning of the chapter should be interesting - in fact, each step should automatically be interesting.

Information

But what about all the information that isn't directly related to the point of the chapter?

Like backstory? Or description? Or setting up a plot point for a future chapter?

Hellooooo?!?

First, try to work the information into the plot ("show not tell"). Many a dramatic moment has been killed by trying to sum up something. As a rule of thumb, if conflict is implied, consider writing a scene either showing it or using the information in real-time (i.e., instead of telling the reader the heroine cheated on her ex, either show the scene or have the ex's mother confront her about it, in front of the hero).

Keep in mind, the information may not belong in the current chapter. For example, your story has a romantic scene in which the two characters are embarrassed by how attracted they are to each other and in which you decide to mention the tragic death of the heroine's mother, because it just happens to come up in conversation. Move the backstory about the mother to the chapter where the hero finds out something truly embarrassing about the heroine, and she tries to make him feel sorry for her (by telling him about her mother and what a terrible childhood she had), and he pushes her away for getting all defensive and prickly. Again, it helps if you know what each chapter is about. (Or change the point of the original chapter to account for the revelation - change from "romantic scene" to "the heroine ruins a perfectly good romantic scene.")

Second, turn the information into something that comes specifically from one character's point of view - into character development. Don't just say your hero is good-looking; have your sardonic, culturally-hip heroine note the hero looks like Bruce Willis. Better yet, have her friend say, "He looks like Bruce Willis," and have the character say, "Yeah. But not Die Hard. First season Moonlighting, at best."*

If nothing else, you can develop a character for your narrator, which is much less boring than a boring narrator.

Third, imply the information. If you were writing a mystery, you would want your clues to be out in the open, but not obvious. You want your reader to be paying attention, right? Don't start out your chapter with "I knew it was going to be a hot day" unless you're not saying something, like "I got up before dawn and killed Melanie, because I knew it was going to be a hot day." Instead (and even better), start out your chapter with clues: "I fell asleep around dawn, just when it started to cool off. But by then it was too late."

Now your story reads, if not like Shakespeare, then at least like the bestsellers that you know you can write better than. "So what if she can plot? I can plot AND I can write chapters that grab your interest and keep it. AND I can write prose that doesn't make your eyes water."

Moral superiority will soon be yours. Guaranteed.

*"But I liked the first season of Moonlighting."
"You would."

Musical Interlude: Banana Man

2009-02-07T18:05:00.002-07:00

(Pleeeeeeease play this for KK.)

Tally Hall - Banana Man

Ladies and Gentlemen, curl PT Chester with boys are proud to present Bumbo Chumbo and the Zimbabwe Songbirds!

Do you see banana man
Hopping over on the white hot sand
Here he come with some for me
Freshly taken from banana tree
(1,2,3,4)
Banana man me want a tan
Give me double on the bonus one
Give me more for all me friends
Dis banana flow never end

Do you want a banana?
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana?
Dis banana for you

Tonight we dance around the flame
Then we get to play the spirit game
Spirit names we shout out loud
Shake the thunder from the spirit cloud
Morning songbirds in the tree
Chant a tune to let the spirits free
Then we see them in the night
Spirits jumpin by the fire light

Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
Dis banana for you
( oh ho ho) (ahhh)

Look you you're too uptight you know
You can laugh and kick it back and go (weee)
But without a rhythm or a rhyme
You do not banana all the time
Fly away from city on the run
Try to make a little fun
(ah huh ah huh ah huh ah huh ah huh ah huh ah huh)

Look you come to the bungalow
Africans you tell me don't you so
Don't you love the pumping of the drum
Make you shake until the bum go numb
Let the bongo play you till you drop
Dis banana never stop (never stop, never stop)

Forget all your troubles and go with the flow
Forget about whatever you may never know
Like whether whatever you are doing is whatever you should
And whether anything you do is every really any good
And then Forget about banana when it sticks in your throat
And when they make you wanna bellow but your stuck in a choke
And you forget about the yell from the colorful men that'll make you take another
And make a mock of your plan

Bungalay Bungalow make up your mind and tell me no ummmm shhh

Well its nine o'clock and its getting dark
and the sun is falling from the sky
I've never left so early and you may wonder why
*whistle*

(talking in the background)

Tomorrow morning on the plane
No banana make you go insane
Floating back to busy town
No banana make you want to frown

Do you want a banana? (Do you want a banana)
Peel it down and go mm mm mm mm
Do you want a banana?
Dis banana for you

(via Andy)

Neat!

2009-02-03T19:05:00.001-07:00

Andy posted a clip of Tally Hall for me. It's freakin' brilliant! And they have a whole website of this stuff!

Quote of the Day.

2009-02-02T17:46:00.002-07:00

John Updike:

"The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end."

Writerly Update: Submitted, anyway.

2009-02-01T22:25:00.001-07:00

Alien Blue is in for the 2009 ABNA. Next update March 16th (quarterfinals).

Writerly Update: Done?

2009-01-31T19:21:00.003-07:00

Er...I might be done with Alien Blue?

The penultimate chapter was such a bitch, I was so torn up about it that the last chapter is kind of a let-down. Is it supposed to be like that? A little bit of hope, is that enough?

I think I'll wait and see what everybody else says.

Oh, I'm sad now. Tomorrow's a last run-through and spell-check and making sure I have everything else ready for ABNA, and sending out copies to people who want to read it.

Durrrr....