Small Town Hermit

Mastering the art of leek and potato soup

2012-02-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

One of the items which did not get cleaned out of the refrigerator when I made my fabulous vegetable soup was a pair of leeks. I forget if I bought them with a purpose, or if I just had vague notions of satisfying my craving for leek and potato soup, but in the end the plan became leek and potato soup.

Now, I already knew that this soup is as basic as it gets -- leeks, potatoes, water and salt. Puree if you like. Add cream if you like. And that's pretty much it. What I was not sure of was the proportions involved, so I went looking for a recipe to tell me.

I started with my monstrous Gourmet cookbook. With over a thousand pages, I thought I would find what I needed for sure. There is even a quote from Ruth Reichl, the editor, on the back cover professing "Our goal was to give you a book with every recip you would ever want." I looked in the index under leek, potato and soup. Nothing. More than a thousand pages, and I strik out the very first time I try to use it. Yet another example of bigger not always being better, I suppose.

My next stop was at splendidtable.org to see what my pal Lynne Rosetto Kasper had to say on the matter. She had what I was looking for, but she admitted that Julia was her source, specifically Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, so rather than write down or pritn out a recipe from the internet, I decided that it would be just as easy to go straight to the source. And there it was, the very first recipe, under the heading Primal Soups. I didn't even need to use the index!!

Given the simplicity of the recipe, I am curious to see if it shows up in Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. One part leeks, one part potatoes, two parts water and salt to season. Bring to a boil and then simmer, partially covered, for twenty to thirty minutes or until vegetables are tender. Adjust seasoning as needed and serve as is or pureed, with cream on top or whisked in.

I had a little more than two cups of leeks once I chopped them up. (Don't forget to rinse thoroughly and use white and light green parts only, composting the dark green bits.) I chopped up a little more than two cups of potatoes. Julia calls for "baking" potatoes. I have red potatoes because that is what I love -- for baking, boiling, frying and mashing -- and I refuse to peel, so after a scrub and a chop, in they went. I added four cups of water and half a cup of pinot blanc because I seem to use wine almost as often as magic cheese these days -- Valley of the Moon Pinot Blanc 2010 to be specific in this case.

I think that I could have done with less liquid -- maybe cook uncovered rather than partially covered. I wanted creamy soup, so I pureed in half a container, about four ounces, of mascarpone cheese. The soup was still a little thinner than I would have liked, but it tasted pretty darn good. The second cup was almost buttery, which kind of made me wonder what a splash of lemon juice might have done for it. I wasn't brave enough to try this time.

Following the success of this recipe, I have begun reading Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, and once again, Julia is brilliant. If you are intimidated by Mastering the Art of French Cooking, try Julia's Kitchen Wisdom. It's a diminutive volume, but every page is packed with recipes broken down into their building blocks -- a distillation of forty years of cooking adventures.

I have learned that "rather than using a butter-and-flour roux for thickening, you simmer rice in the soup base until very tender. When it is turned into a very fine puree in the electric blender, you have a deliciously creamy, literally fat-free cream soup." Brilliant! And gluten free for those who are concerned about such things. She did not specify what kind of rice to use, but I wonder if the naturally creamy arborio rice I have been using for risotto would be as delicious as I imagine.

Thanks to this little book, I am no longer intimidated by fish chowder and am excited to make my own. Hollandaise sauce, on the other hand, while very clearly explained, is still kind of scary.

I am only eighteen pages in, but I have already marked half a dozen examples of Julia's trademark humor and turn of phrase. I would quote more extensively, but I think that they would lose something when taken out of context, so you will just have to go get your own copy and read to see what I am talking about. Go on. You know you want to.

When meat loaf is stuffed in a pepper or a squash rather than a pan

2012-01-28T17:36:00.001-05:00

Stuffed red and green peppers
and zucchini and yellow squash

To quote a movie I have watched entirely too many times, "I read somewhere that it's bad form to say yum while you are eating, but yum!"

When you can easily (okay, so my definition of easy cooking might be different than a lot of other people's, but bear with me just for fun) make food this good on your own, why on Earth would you eat processed crap?

I made the stuffed peppers and squash pictured to the left, and wow are they tasty. Depending on your preferences, they could have possibly done with a bit more seasoning, but I am going to stick with wow and yum.

One large egg, one small onion (finely chopped), one shallot (finely chopped), one rib of celery (finely chopped), three to four cloves of garlic (minced), three tablespoons of ketchup, and about one quarter cup fresh parsley (chopped) were all whisked together in a large bowl. (As a side note, I purchased a set of Duralex bowls not too long ago, and I love them. They are lighter than my trusty Pyrex, but I think just as sturdy, and come in many more sizes.) Salt and pepper were added to season. (I didn't use much of either.) Next a generous handful each of Panko bread crumbs and magic cheese (blend of Romano, Asiago and Parmesan) were mixed in. (If you want to measure, go with 1/4 cup.) Into the mixture was folded a pound of ground turkey. Oh, and the innards scraped out of the squash. (Another side note: a butter knife is excellent for scraping out said squash.)

Peppers (cut in half cross ways with seeds and ribs removed) and squash (sliced lengthwise and hollowed out) were stuffed with turkey mixture, placed in oiled baking dish. Marinara was spooned over the top, about a tablespoon per pepper or squash half. The lot was baked for 45 minutes at 400 degrees and then removed from oven and baking pan onto platter where they were sprinkled with a bit more cheese. More marinara sauce could be added to taste, but these were plenty moist as is.

For me, they make a fine meal on their own, but some rice or cous cous or pilaf on the side might not be a bad idea. Or maybe a salad and some garlic bread.

Overall, pretty low fat and low sodium -- certainly lower fat than regular meat loaf, which the stuffing ends up resembling once cooked -- except for the cheese, but you could reduce or omit that. Oats could be substituted for bread crumbs. I use oats most of the time when I make meat loaf. The ketchup might be evil (despite Reagan's classification of it as a vegetable ... although aren't tomatoes fruit?) in terms of sodium, but with only three tablespoons in the whole recipe, it works out to something like a teaspoon or teaspoon and a half per serving. Nevertheless a bit of Worcestershire sauce (which is probably equally evil, if not more so) or balsamic vinegar could be a decent replacement, as could a bit of homemade marinara sauce -- just something to give it a little more flavor and something else besides the egg to bind it all together. Oh yes, the egg. Well, again, one egg in the entire recipe, but the corresponding dose of egg substitute ought to work as well. Otherwise it has no business being called egg substitute. It should be more like egg approximation.

All in all, an excellent, lower fat meat loaf alternative. (Once more, I say yum!)

Rainy day cooking

2012-01-27T18:16:00.000-05:00

Today was one of those perfect, cold, gray, rainy days just made for cooking, so after I spent a surprisingly short amount of time at the DMV renewing my driver's license, I picked up a loaf of sourdough bread and some sour cream and went home to make soup, which is not only an excellent activity for a rainy wintry afternoon, but also a great way to clean out the refrigerator (provided that anything fuzzy or out of date does not actually make it into the pot).

I chopped up a large red onion, a shallot, three stalks of celery, a small bunch of slightly wilted carrots, at least half a dozen cloves of garlic, half a small head of cabbage, two small zucchini, one small yellow squash, one broccoli crown, and about eight medium-sized white mushrooms.

The onion, shallot, garlic, celery, and carrots went into my larger enameled cast iron pot (like Le Creuset but not) with enough oil to coat and seasoned with sea salt and fresh ground pepper. (I have a nice blend of peppercorns.) They were cooked, covered, over medium low heat for about fifteen minutes, stirred frequently to keep them from sticking and burning.

Seasonings went in next -- dried basil and paprika (two teaspoons each) and tomato paste (two heaping tablespoons -- and the lot was stirred together and cooked at a higher temperature for a couple of minutes. I always find that the vegetables get a bit dry at this point, in danger of burning, so I add half a cup of wine to keep everything moist and yet still hot. This time it was Grappa La Court red wine.

Then the rest of the chopped vegetables were added, along with a couple of handfuls of spinach, which I did not chop, another one and a half cups of wine and six cups of vegetable broth. I think I chopped up a bit more cabbage and threw that in as well.

I simmered the lot for about twenty minutes and then started tasting. Yum! The wine is rather strong, and fairly tannic, so the broth was a shade bitter. I ground in a little more sea salt and some herbs (a blend which came packaged in their own little grinder), and simmered a bit longer. Even more yum!

A hefty slice of sourdough bread, and lunch was served.

One of the main reasons I make a version of this soup fairly often is that it freezes really well and is therefore great to take to work for lunch, so I am set for lunches next week.

Mushroom and Pappardelle Soup with Gremolata

2012-01-22T14:59:00.000-05:00

Vegetarian Times January/February 2012, page 30 http://www.vegetariantimes.com/recipes/11828

I still don't know what pappardelle noodles are, although I am sure that a small amount of research would remedy the situation, and they could perhaps be a project for my fancy new pasta maker. Given that there are no instructions for cooking the noodles ahead of time, I am guessing that they must be pretty close to fresh in order to be cooked after simmering in soup broth for about 6 minutes. I used medium shells instead and boiled them while preparing the rest of the soup.

I did not cover the pot while bringing the soup to a boil and can't help wondering if that omission on my part accounts for the relative thinness of the broth.

I used white mushroom rather than cremini and threw in a few baby bellas for good measure because I do so love the portabellas, and rather than one large onion, I diced a large shallot, a small yellow onion, and a small red onion.

Produced by Vina La Fortuna
S.A. Sagrada Familia, Chile

As usual, I substituted part of the broth for wine. In this case, 7 cups of broth became 5 cups of broth and 2 cups of my favorite sauvignon blanc. Culpeo sauvignon blanc from the Curico Valley in Chile is wonderful for both drinking and cooking -- lighter and a bit more accessible or friendly than what I generally think of when I think of sauvignon blanc.

I did not drag out the food processor for 1/3 cup of parsley, 1 clove of garlic and 2 teaspoons of grated lemon zest. I chopped up the lot and used the mortar and pestle instead, which worked just fine as far as I can tell.

Is it just me, or is grating zest a pain? Relatively speaking, a lot of effort for not a lot of return. It also seems a bit wasteful to buy an entire fruit and only use a very thin outer layer of the peel, but then it is not exactly difficult to find a use for the rest of the lemon. I'll have to investigate the possibility of acquiring packaged zest since the lack of same will often deter me from trying a recipe.

I added more noodles to the leftovers. If the recipe were made as a thicker, alfredo sort of sauce, it would go nicely over fettuccine or baked chicken -- anything that likes cream sauce really. Peas would be a nice complement to the beans and mushrooms as well.

Starting the long weekend off with a bang (of sorts)

2011-11-23T08:05:00.000-05:00

Harvey Wallbanger Cake from the kitchen of Ann Harwood Bryce
Cake
1 package 2-layer size orange cake mix
1 3¾-ounce package instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
½ cup orange juice
2 tbsp vodka
½ cup cooking oil
½ cup Galliano

Glaze
1 cup sifted powdered sugar
1 tbsp orange juice
1 tbsp Galliano
1 tbsp vodka

In large mixing bowl, combine cake mix and pudding mix. Add eggs, oil, juice, Galliano and vodka. Beat on low speed for 30 seconds. Beat on medium speed for 5 minutes, scraping bowl frequently. Pour into greased and floured 10-inch tube pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, or pour into 2 greased and floured 9-inch round pans and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Cool in pan for ten minutes. Remove to rack and pour on glaze while cake is warm.

The naming of cookbooks

2011-11-21T14:56:00.002-05:00

The cookbook officially has a name -- Cook Until Done: A Collection of Recipes and Stories from Family and Friends.

This sage and elucidative advice was given to me by my father when I called him the first time I decided to make meat loaf on my own. At least I am pretty sure that it was meat loaf. It could have been bread. But it is usually meat loaf when I tell the story, so I am going to stick with meat loaf.

I have come across the same and similar direction in quite a few of the recipes I am collecting. "Bake in moderate oven." "Bake at 375" (with no indication of length of time). Or sometimes the temperature is left out. "Bake one hour." There is the occasional admonishment of not overcooking or undercooking, but generally there is an assumed level of kitchen sense.

The more I cook and experiment, the more I understand these vague directions -- you get a feel for how things look and smell at various stages -- but I still understand the wish and need for specifics when approaching a recipe for the first time, so as I write and revise I am attempting to fill in the details and come up with descriptions for what "done" might mean, as well as the methods for achieving it.

I just hope I can do it without testing every single recipe.

Today's find: Orange Muffins

2011-11-19T22:31:00.004-05:00

Because I thought that this recipe was more fun than the banana bread recipe which did not have bananas in the ingredient list.

Orange Muffins from the kitchen of M. Corbitt, from the recipe file of Ann Harwood Bryce

Makes 3 dozen small muffins

1 cup butter or margaine
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
Grated rind of 2 oranges
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
1 cup buttermilk
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
Juice of 2 oranges

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs. Beat until well mixed. Dissolve the baking soda in buttermilk and add it, alternating with the flour, to the egg mixture. Add orange rind. Fill well-buttered muffin tins 2/3 full. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Mix orange juice and brown sugar. Spoon over muffins and remove them from tins immediately.

Omelette w/ portabella mushrooms, red onion and medium cheddar cheese

2011-11-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

3 eggs, well beaten with a splash of milk
Handful chopped baby portabella mushrooms
Handful finely chopped red onion
4 slices medium cheddar cheese**

Over medium heat, saute onion and mushrooms in a bit of butter and olive oil until soft -- 3 or 4 minutes. (I read somewhere recently that adding olive oil keeps the butter from burning. Very handy tip.) Add a little pepper if you like. Salt is not necessary. There is plenty of salt in the butter and cheese. Scrape into small bowl and set aside. Return pan to heat. Add a little more butter. (You can use non-stick spray if butter is not your friend.) When butter has melted, pour in the beaten eggs. Cook, without flipping, until eggs are almost set. Spread onions and mushrooms over one half of the eggs. Layer cheese over mushrooms and onions. Fold eggs up over mushroom, onion, cheese mixture so that you have a sort of half moon of egg with the goodies in the middle. Lower heat slightly to prevent burning. Once you think that everything will hold together, gently flip the omelette. Use a spatula rather than the courage of your convictions. After another minute, turn off heat. Serve omelette on warmed plate. (It may seem like a minor detail, but a warmed plate makes a big difference. Run it under warm water. Set it on the stove while cooking if it won't be in the way. Or pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so.)

**Swiss would be better, but cheddar is what I had in the fridge.

For your next Kentucky Derby Day -- you know, to go with the hat

2011-11-17T21:46:00.000-05:00

Kentucky Bourbon Chicken from the kitchen of Ann Harwood Bryce

8 chicken breasts

Flour

Salt & Pepper & Paprika to taste

½ cup butter

1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced

2 ounces bourbon

2 10-ounce cans cream of chicken soup

¾ tsp curry powder

Parsley and almonds for garnish

Dust chicken with flour, salt, pepper, paprika. Saute in hot butter. Brown and place in casserole. Saute mushrooms, and add to chicken. Add bourbon to skillet to deglaze. Stir in soup and curry. Stir until smooth and thick. Pour over chicken. Sprinkle parsley and slivered almonds over top. Bake at 350 degrees for 2 hours.

(I can’t help thinking that the garnish of parsley and almonds should be added either late in the baking or just before serving.)

Risotto redux

2011-11-15T22:20:00.000-05:00

It's never a good idea to go to the grocery store when hungry and without a list, but I haven't been grocery shopping in a while, wasn't enthusiastic about anything that is in the freezer, and was pretty much out of symbiotic ingredients, so I decided to risk it.

I came home with some cheese (of course), zucchini, breaded whitefish from the seafood counter, a bag of risotto, red onions and baby portabella mushrooms. There were a few other things, too, but they didn't go into dinner.

I chopped up a cup of the portabellas and sauteed them for a couple of minutes in a bit of butter and olive oil in a spacious frying pan. (As Julia says, don't crowd the mushrooms or they won't brown. Same goes for meat, I have noticed.) I moved the pan off the heat, got out a sauce pan and sauted half a red onion (chopped) and two cloves of garlic (also chopped) in a bit of oil.

I have discovered that all you really need is enough oil or fat to coat whatever you are cooking. The big puddles called for in a lot of recipes are completely unnecessary, especially when working with a food with fairly high moisture content (i.e. mushrooms or zucchini). The moisture released by the food keeps everything moving around and not sticking, but a little oil still gives it that yumminess.

A cup of risotto joined the onion and garlic, followed shortly by a cup of vegetable stock. Again with the stirring until absorbed noted in the previous recipe. Then a cup of a Riesling which wasn't too impressive on its own but turned out to do very good things for risotto. Then another cup of stock. And a bit more wine for good measure. The mushrooms when in right near the end of all of the adding and stirring of the liquid.

I cubed up a bit of muenster cheese and added that over the top when I served the rice. The mostly steamed zucchini was a nice complement. The fish was a bit nondescript, but not bad given that I bought it pre-breaded. But the risotto was the star.

All in all, not bad for an improvised Tuesday night dinner. Not bad at all.

Expanding culinary horizons

2011-11-14T13:21:00.003-05:00

There is a magical, mystical dessert popular in New England called a Whoopee Pie. Through the magic of Facebook, and East Coast friend introduced a Midwestern friend to this tasty treat, so I thought I would post a recipe. The below recipe comes from my mother-in-law and is quite famous at least within family circles (and I would guess that they were popular with the neighborhood kids as well as her sons).

This little dessert is often a choice for variation on flavors of both cake and filling, but I prefer the classic.

A photograph of the actual recipe

Whoopee Pies from the kitchen of Joyce Poole

Cakes

2 3/4 cups sifted flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

1/2 cup sour milk

1/2 cup hot water

1/2 cup cocoa

Add hot water to cocoa. Cream shortening and sugar. Mix dry ingredients. Add eggs and vanilla to shortening and sugar mixture. Add dry ingredient mixture with milk, alternating in steps. Add cocoa paste and mix until smooth. Drop by tablespoons [on greased baking sheet]. Bake at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes.

Filling

2 1/2 Tbsp flour

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup sugar

Pinch of salt

1 tsp vanilla

Cook milk and flour until smooth. Cool. It will be very thick. Cream sugar and shortening. Add milk and flour paste and whip until smooth.

Assembly instructions (not included in the recipe): Let cakes cool. Take one, spread with a thick layer of filling and top with a second cake.

The daily recipe

2011-11-12T10:39:00.000-05:00

More than a third of the way through the first stage of my cookbook project is probably a bit late to come up with the idea of posting a recipe a day, but I am going to do it anyway. And I may post more than one a day because, well, sharing is fun.

I have moved on to recipes from my mother's side of the family, and even though I have no idea who Jane might be, I thought these cookies sounded like fun. (Remember, at the outset I am typing up recipes pretty much as they are written, so the directions might be a little ... informal and assume that the cook knows more than he or she does. After all, if these recipes were familiar to the people I got them from, they probably didn't need a lot of detail. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of general cooking and baking skills being more common in the days before Lean Cuisine.)

Ranger Cookies from the kitchen of Jane

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup shortening

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

2 cups quick oatmeal

2 cups cereal, such as Rice Krispies or bran

1 cup coconut

1 cup chocolate chips

1 cup raisins

1 cup chopped nuts

Cream shortening and sugars. Add vanilla, salt and eggs. Sift together flour, soda and baking powder and add to creamed mixture. Add oatmeal, cereal, etc. Mix well and form into balls. Bake 12 minutes at 350 degrees. These cookies will be soft, but will harden later when cool. Makes about 7 to 8 dozen.

An Ode to Risotto

2011-11-09T21:03:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I don't write odes, but the risotto I just made is definitely poetic. Yum!

1 cup risotto
2 chopped shallots
1 chopped clove garlic
2 Tbsp salted butter
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
2 cups vegetable stock
1 cup Savuignon Blanc
1 1/2 cups chopped fresh broccoli

Saute shallots and garlic in butter and oil for about 3 minutes -- fragrant with a little color, but not too brown.

Add risotto and cook for 2 minutes.

Add one cup of stock. Cook until liquid is absorbed, stirring somewhere between often and continuously to keep the risotto from sticking.

Add the other cup of stock. Keep going with the cooking and stirring.

When mostly absorbed, add the broccoli and mix in well.

Add the wine, and go repeat the cooking and stirring process until most of the liquid is gone.

Turn off the heat -- but don't remove from burner -- cover and let rest for 5-10 minutes to let the broccoli cook a bit more.

I didn't add any salt or pepper because the butter and stock had salt in them, and I don't care for pepper, but you certainly could.

Goat cheese crumbles would have been a good garnish, but I didn't have any, so I ate it as is.

Yum!

I think that it would be excellent with roasted or grilled chicken. You could use beef or chicken stock instead of vegetable. I had notions of mixing in pesto, but in the end I didn't. I might with the leftovers, though.

When was the last time you saw a recipe which called for suet?

2011-11-09T13:39:00.001-05:00

Well, here's one in case you decided you were missing out.

Green Tomato Mincemeat from the kitchen of Helen Hoffman Babione

1 peck green tomatoes, chopped fine. Drain off juice and measure. Take same amount of hot water [as drained off tomato juice, I think]. (Throw juice away.) Add 2 tbsp salt. Boil a few minutes. Drain. Do this three times. [By "this" I think she means add hot water and salt, boil and drain.] Drain well, and then add following:

1 peck chopped apples

5 pounds brown sugar

1 cup vinegar

1 cup suet (ground)

2 tsp each nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves.

1 pound seeded raisins

1 pound seedless raisins

Boil together until thick. Care while hot.

(Then what?? Put it in a pie? Pour it over the intruders storming the castle? Eat it right out of the pot with the biggest spoon you can find? And can you even buy seeded grapes any more? Or apples measured in pecks? Or a five pound bag of brown sugar? A lot of these recipes are definitely about stocking up. Suet isn't hard to come by. The woodpeckers and squirrels that live -- or at least eat -- in the backyard love it.)

Aristocratic Pickles

2011-11-08T14:10:00.000-05:00

Having decided to turn NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) into CkBkWriMo (Cookbook Writing Month), I am madly writing about various food experiences and typing up family recipes. I had to get to the third recipe before I got more than one line of directions, and it's a doozy. Enjoy.

Aristocratic Pickles (based on the handwriting, from the kitchen of Helen Hoffman Babione)

One gallon medium size pickles sliced thin, put in brine to float an egg for six days. Stir once a day. Then drain. Boil in water to cover pickles with alum (?) size of an egg for ten minutes. Then drain. And cover pickles with 2 tbsp (word I can't read) of ginger for 10 min. Then drain and boil in the following until transparent

1 quart vinegar and 1 pint water
3 pounds granulated sugar and 1 tbsp celery seed
1 tbsp whole cloves
1 tbsp allspice
1 stick cinnamon

Put spices in bag except celery seed

Add slightly more vinegar and water syrup is very close

(I think that this might be my favorite use of eggs ever -- as brine density barometer and unit of measure.)

The morning's cooking adventure

2011-11-06T12:26:00.000-05:00

I am most of the way through reading and savoring The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper by Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift, diligently marking recipes to try with one color of sticky note and advice with another. I was rather impressed with my accomplishment until I discovered that there is a sequel/companion: The Splendid Table's How to Eat Weekends.

As a side note, if you don't listen to the weekly radio program on your local npr station or online, and you love preparing and eating food, you are missing out. I have developed a tradition of listening to the Turkey Confidential episode of the show as I prepare the Thanksgiving meal, and it enhances the holiday wonderfully. The host's approach to food and cooking has the alchemical and experimental qualities which appeal to me.

I love vegetable soup and lentil soup, but I have trouble making the broth come out as thick and hearty as I would like, and if I want the taste to be truly savory, I usually have to add meat. No more. Thanks to Lynne Rosetto Kasper, I have found the recipe for soup that tastes just right. I think that the keys to the yumminess are tomato paste, paprika, wine and portobello mushrooms. I have made two batches so far. Bliss. I don't even have to put cheese on top. That's how good it is.

But soup is not the day's cooking adventure. Eggs are.

I love eggs. They are one of those foods with elemental versatility. They go into dishes to help bind things together, they add depth to salads, and they provide a stage for showcasing all manner of foods in the form of omelettes and quiches. They get a bad rap because of the cholesterol, but they are a wonderful source of protein, so if you are worried about cholesterol, just don't eat a million of them. Apply appropriate moderation. Or make an omelette with one whole egg and two parts eggs beaters or whites or substitute or whatever. (Though between you and me, I would wonder what and egg substitute has in place of the cholesterol that might be just as bad, if not worse.)

Every once in a while, I like a plain, hard boiled egg, still warm from the pan, sliced in half and sprinkled with just a hint of sea salt. No fancy combinations or processes or ingredients. Just the egg.

Among the recipes in How to Eat Supper which intrigued me are two involving hard boiled eggs. One is sauteed deviled eggs and the other is for sauteed hard boiled eggs. I had some eggs in the refrigerator which were reaching a dubious age, so I boiled them yesterday. I ate two as a snack and the other three went back into the fridge until I decided what I wanted to do with them.

This morning, as I was casting about for what to have for breakfast, I remembered the eggs and the recipe for sauteeing them. I decided to forgo the bread crumb and garlic topping, and I had to substitute basalmic vinegar for white wine vinegar, but the result was interesting in a good way.

Word to the wise (this is the adventure part): room temperature basalmic vinegar added to olive oil which is hotter than you think it is leads to a rather impressive flambe in a hurry. Luckily, the eggs were not yet in the pan, so I waited for things to settle down, washed and dried the pan, and started again with a lower flame and more attention.

A little olive oil, a little vinegar. Heat until vinegar bubbles. It doesn't take long, I promise. Cut hard boiled eggs in half and slide into pan, cut side down. Saute for a few minutes and then turn over. The eggs will have a nice glaze to them. The eggs adopted the sweetness of the basalmic vinegar nicely, and I ate them with sauteed zucchini and mashed potatoes. The resulting flavor medley on the fork was surprisingly savory, causing me to ponder other possible saute baths for hard boiled eggs.

Score another one for the incredible, edible egg.

The Springsteen post

2011-08-08T23:30:00.006-04:00

This post is in a continuous state of flux as I discover and rediscover reasons that the music and lyrics of this man speak to me so clearly and on so many levels, but earlier tonight I found myself once again speaking from heart and soul and decided it was time to make one more pass, one more revision, and then set it free, at least for a while.

I begin with a few words not my own. Set the scene. Offer a bit of context. Or at least prove that it's not just me.

Excerpted transcript from the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors presentation/celebration:

Jon Stewart: "I am not a music critic. Nor historian. Nor archivist. I cannot tell you where Bruce Springsteen falls in the pantheon of the American songbook. I cannot illuminate the context of his work or its roots in the folk and oral history traditions of our great nation. But I am from New Jersey. And so I can tell you what I believe, and what I believe is this: I believe that Bob Dylan and James Brown had a baby. Yes. And they abandoned this child -- as you can imagine at the time, interracial same sex relationships being what they were -- they abandoned this child at the side of the road, between the exit interchanges of 8A and 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike. That child is Bruce Springsteen.

I didn't understand his music for a long time ... until I began to yearn ... until I began to question the things that I was making and doing in my own life ... until I realized that it wasn't just about they joyful parade on stage and the theatrics. It was about stories of lives that could be changed. I was working in a bar in New Jersey as you would imagine, in central Jersey right off route 1, and every night when I closed the bar, I would get in my car, and I was driving at the time a 1976, off brown Gremlin. The Gremlin was a car that was invented for two reasons: one, birth control for young males, and two, it was invented so that the Pinto wouldn't feel so bad about itself. But I would get in my car every night, and I would put in the music of Bruce Springsteen, and everything changed. And I never again felt like a loser. When you listen to Bruce's music, you aren't a loser. You are a character in an epic poem ... about losers. But that is not the power of Bruce Springsteen. It is that whenever I see Bruce Springsteen do anything, he empties the tank. Every time. And the beautiful thing about this man is he empties that tank for his family. He empties that tank for his art. He empties that tank for his audience. And he empties it for his country. And we on the receiving end of that gift are ourselves rejuvenated, if not redeemed. And I thank you."

I remember hearing of Bruce Springsteen when I was younger. I remember the popularity of Born in the U.S.A., but, having grown up in a house where the soundtrack was classical, jazz and a bit of folk, popular, rock 'n' roll music was a mostly foreign language to me. I listened to what was easily accessible on the radio and mostly just goggled at the "alternative," cutting edge music that my friends listened to because I couldn't understand most of the lyrics, and it generally sounded like noise to me. I just figured that I wasn't cool enough to get it.

I remember being something of a fan by the time Human Touch and Lucky Town arrived on the scene -- the title track of each are two of my favorite songs to this day -- and those two recordings formed the foundation of the relationship, but it wasn't until I was well into college that I became a truly devoted follower. And it happened at a very specific moment.

While I don't remember the specific cause(s) of that day's stress, the overall level was through the roof. I needed escape. I needed out of my own head. I detached the speakers from my little boombox and set them on the floor facing each other. I lay down between them, closed my eyes and listened to The Ghost of Time Joad from beginning to end, letting the music and the lyrics just flow into my ears and through the rest of my body.

From that moment on, Bruce Springsteen (with or without the E Street Band) has been my refuge, my haven, my muse, my perspective, my drug of choice. Whatever was happening, whatever I was going through -- good or bad -- there was Bruce ... and eventually Patti, Nils and Soozie in their own rights. In fact, Patti has had almost as much of an impact on me as her husband has.

My first live Springsteen experience was in 1999, in Boston. I paid an obscene amount of money (given my income level at the time) for two tickets, and the experience was worth every penny. I don't have too many isolated, specific memories from that concert other the feeling of the music and the words rising up through the soles of my feet, and the tears which sprang to my eyes during "Thunder Road." I left the arena thinking that either no one should have that much fun doing his job, or everyone should.

It was amazing, but it is the second concert that I attended which is my next specific, vivid memory, taking place almost exactly ten years later, also in Boston.

Part of the Magic tour -- I attended by myself -- and it was one of the best nights of my life. I hadn't been sleeping well. Work was extremely stressful. There were various kinds of chaos in my world, much of it self inflicted. I couldn't really afford to go, but I missed the Rising tour, and it was one of those times when I decided I needed to do something about actually living my life rather than just getting through it.

People expressed concern that I would venture into Boston at night on my own and tried to convince me that I should take someone with me. All of their concern made me a little nervous about my little adventure, but my relationship with Bruce was very personal and intimate. I wasn't much interested in sharing. This was something I was doing for me.

So I scalped a ticket, got brave, drove to the Sullivan Square station and hopped on the T. My seat was high, but I had a clear view of the stage. Every light went out in the place, and I was barely even able to register just how dark it was when the question "Is there anybody alive out there?" snarled through the sound system and shivered through me from the soles of my boots to the roots of my hair. The subsequent opening chords of "Radio Nowhere" assured me that I was indeed alive, more so than I had been in quite a while. In the next breath I surrendered completely to the music, letting it swallow me whole.

I only got a few hours of sleep that night, but I slept like the dead and awoke refreshed and rejuvenated, still feeling alive.

I hadn't listened to Magic beyond "Radio Nowhere" (which had been released as a single prior to the release of the entire album), so I wasn't sure if not knowing all of the words to all of the songs would be a detriment, but I appreciate it more having heard some of the songs for the first time live. The concert was a fantastic introduction.

My only regret was that I didn't pony up for a ticket for the second night. I didn't make that mistake again. On the Working on a Dream tour, I attended two concerts in Boston, one in Hartford and one in Mansfield. I even braved the insanity of Gillette stadium in Foxboro. Not sure if I will ever do that again, not even for Bruce. The new stuff grows on me -- especially Magic -- but it is hard to top "Jungleland" in concert or the full rock band version of "Ghost of Tom Joad" or the electricity of Nils' solo in "Youngstown." That man knows how to make a guitar scream poetry.

Right about the same time I attended the Boston Magic tour concert, I picked up Patti Scialfa's most recent release (probably as a result of same), and I have come to love her music almost as much as I do her husband's. She's got some lyrics which speak to me strongly. From there I have branched out into Soozie Tyrell and Nils Lofgren as well, but I always return to Bruce and Patti.

Because of the way that Bruce channels music, is music while onstage, especially with the band, my preference is for live performances, or recordings thereof ... with one notable exception. The Seeger Sessions surprised me. It was a revelation. They weren't playing music. They were making music. I love it more than the concerts I have heard from the Sessions tour.

Now, with the passing of first Dan Federici and more recently Clarence Clemons, the recordings -- whether of a live concert or a studio session -- take on yet another level of meaning. They have become a memorial, a monument and a legacy to a relationship bonded by the music and the lyrics which told their "New Jersey fairy tale." The final sentence of Clarence's introduction to his book Big Man and Tall Tales is "Without Scooter there is no Big Man." While the loss of Phantom Dan was certainly painful, I can't help but wonder what might be next for Scooter without the Big Man, but I will be watching and listening to find out.

Dinner - where the whole is so often greater than the sum of the parts

2011-08-02T19:11:00.001-04:00

You didn't really eat lunch, even though you took a lunch break, so you make sure to leave work on time and hurry home to prepare a real meal, even though you aren't really sure what might be sufficiently edible in the house.

Open the fridge and take out a zucchini, a summer squash and a red bell pepper. That's a good start. Next take some homemade pesto out of the freezer. You keep it in ice cube trays for easy portioning. One tray is still about half full. Set it on the counter to thaw. If it is too much, you will have leftovers. Open the cabinet to decide on pasta and discover a jar of marinated artichoke hearts and a can of salmon. You decide on thin spaghetti and put a pot of water on to boil. Toss in a bit of sea salt, but no olive oil.

After you chop up the squash and red pepper, combine it in a bowl. Put half a stick of butter in your favorite little copper sauce pan to melt and press three cloves of garlic into it.

When the water boils, drop in the pasta. Thaw the pesto the rest of the way in the microwave and stir in some magic cheese.

Open the can of salmon, drain and place in a bowl. Chop up some artichoke hearts.

When the garlic butter is ready, spread it on two slices of asiago bread and top with local baby Swiss cheese made from raw milk. Then toast.

Mix cooked pasta with pesto, adding a bit of the artichoke marinade. Drizzle a bit of olive oil into the still hot pasta saucepan and throw in a few handfuls of the squash pepper mix and saute for just a few minutes, grinding in a bit of sea salted dried garlic.

You assemble the meal -- pesto pasta first, then sauteed vegetables, then chopped artichoke hearts, then chunks of salmon, then crumbled Moody Blue cheese for a bit of bite. Take the garlic toast out of the toaster. Finally, you pour a glass of chilled white wine --Riesling perhaps, but Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio if you must -- sit down, and enjoy.

Bon appetit!

Taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance ... and the rest of the government?

2011-06-26T10:34:00.000-04:00

I am not religiously opinionated enough to have much of a preference as to whether we are one nation (ha!) under God or just under the flag, but I am a fan of consistency (as well as an observer of irony and hypocrisy -- my own and others').

Ever since I first saw an American flag inside a Catholic church, I have laughed at the notion of a separation between church and state in this country.

I am not so much concerned about whether there is a separation or not (though I do think that it is a lovely idea). Partiots can be religious, and religious folks can be patriotic. My issue is with the saying of one thing and doing the opposite.

If there is no God in the pledge, then there should be no "God Bless America," and certainly no swearing in of witnesses, supreme court justices or presidents of the United States with their hands on a Bible. While I don't know the oaths by heart, I am sure that God is mentioned in each and every one of them. And given that the Bible is the religious book used for these ceremonies, it is a very specific Christian God (who, I might mention, is the same God as Yahweh and Allah, but that is a whole other suject) we are talking about here in a land where the law guarantees the right to worship who and how you choose -- a God who requires absolute loyalty. It is not enough to believe in Him, worship Him, follow Him in your own life. You must also insist on the impossibility of the existence and validity of any other deity. Anyone who believes anything else is not only wrong but, unless converted, doomed to a torturous eternal afterlife (in which he or she probably don't even believe, which I have always found to be a bit of a stretch).

We can't have God in school (which also means that teaching creationism is out), but he is allowed in every court in the land? All of those judges and lawyers (and probably quite a few of the witnesses, defendants and plaintiffs) in those courts have spent a major portion of their lives in school (and possibly in a church of some sort as well), where religion and God apparently don't belong, but then they go to work and have to invoke God every day.

Is whoever is insisting on this particular edit really thinking the situation all the way through? Or is the expectation that one instance will not have any ripple effect? Help me out here.

Being a bit reactionary

2011-06-25T19:41:00.001-04:00

Someone sent me this link: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/06/guest-post-girl-cooties-a-personal-history-by-judith-tarr/

which led me here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/06/mind-meld-whats-the-importance-of-the-russ-pledge-for-science-fiction-today/

Initially my reaction went into a reply e-mail, but I think I will go ahead and post it here.

I tend to have issues with this sort of thing. [Edit to add: By "this sort of thing," I mean discussions of feminism in pretty much any sense of the word.] Or at least a different point of view.

It's not that I think that gender inequity isn't a problem in pretty much any arena, but I am not sure how much good it does to point out such things over and over and over.

I'm not saying this well.

I mean, it's important to recognize that there is an issue, but there is a risk of just ending up whining, "It's not fair!"

Sure, people are idiots and chauvinists and bigots. And a lot of those idiots and chauvinists and bigots are probably men. Do women (and a few enlightened men) really think that they are going to change men just by pointing out to them over and over again that they are wrong in the name of educating them? It's the same core issue I have with the war between the species. As long as women insist on trying to change men, they aren't really going to get anywhere. They might get superficial change. But if you make him give up beer and cigars and red meat, he is either going to end up resenting you or consuming those things on the sly and lying to you about it, or both.

(And really that philosophy applies to trying to change anyone who doesn't want to change or be changed, no matter the gender. Ultimately, you can only educate people who are willing and open minded enough to learn, even if they don't agree.)

The same applies in various professional arenas. Quit whining about how hard it is to be respected or get ahead or make your mark or be taken seriously because you are a woman. Sure, being a woman puts you at a disadvantage in a lot of situations, but, as my mother used to say (much to my unending frustration and consternation) "You can look at this two ways ..." You can whine and cry and bemoan your situation, or you can buck up, be positive and make the best of it and get the job done. Take ownership. Take action. Make a positive difference.

Don't be a great female science fiction writer. Be a great science fiction writer. Hell, just be a great writer. Bring to the table whatever it is that makes you truly unique, and do what you have to do to get where you want to go. Isn't that what a man would do? Prove that he is better than everyone else? Or maybe prove that he has the right connections or enough money so that he doesn't have to be better than everyone else?

You have to be a bit sneaky, er, creative to compensate for misperceptions and preconceived notions. If you think that your scifi isn't selling because you are woman, then write under a male pseudonym. If you refuse to compromise in any way and insist that the world must accept you as is in all of your female glory, just remember that you are asking a lot of other people to change the way that they think -- which is likely to be seen as a compromise from their perspective -- without changing anything about the way you think. You gotta give to get, honey. Doesn't matter if you are right or not. Everyone else is entitled to the same freedom of expression and opinion that you are demanding.

If you think wearing a short skirt and a low cut blouse to a meeting with a publisher or agent with get you the deal, then go for it. Okay, there was probably a better way to put that last suggestion, but the point is to play to your strengths. Find your angle. Find your way to work the system to your advantage. Learn the game and the rules from the inside out, and then figure out how to break them without getting caught. Level the playing field. It's what the men do. Not that women should become men because that would be boring and defeat the point of struggling to shine in the first place. But I do think that they should learn from them. Take a page from their book, revise it and make it better. That's what writers do.

Sink or Swim -- a ramble

2011-06-08T23:13:00.001-04:00

Writing Assignment

Arabella Hicks - The Fiction Class

This is an exercise in learning how to write a climactic scene.

A boat sinks during a storm, and only ten of its passengers make it onto a lifeboat. One by one the survivors are knocked off until, after a month at sea, only two survivors are left. There is not enough food for both of them, and one of them is going to have to get rid of the other. One of them is a teenage girl who is very strong for her age, but she is blind. The other is a musician from a successful boys' band. He is twenty-six years old and smaller than the girl. Who will survive? Write the final scene.

(The Fiction Class by Sara Breen page 73)

******

Initial reaction: Seriously? A life boat with enough food for a month? Not to mention water. A blind girl and a boy band singer? Who freakin' cares? After a month starving at sea and offing eight other people, they are both insane. They struggle and both fall overboard to drown. I see no other way out unless they figure out how to work together. If they have not been found yet, they aren't going to be in this modern age. The shipwreck would be known. The area would be searched. I'm all for imagination, but this is just insane. No thank you. I just can't get past the month in a lifeboat idea.

... Or maybe I can. But they still both die. they don't fight for one to win over the other. They fight because one wants to give up, and the other wants to survive. One tries to stop the other from capsizing the boat, and they both go over. Or they make a murder suicide pact, and the suicide can't go through with it. Or the murderer commits suicide instead, leaving the other to starve. Except that a murderer needs a weapon. Unless we're back to just a battle of sheer strength, and one drowns.

Shipwrecks are hard to come by these days. What kind of boat were they on to begin with? Something big enough to have a lifeboat, rather than just life preservers. And big enough to have enough food for ten people for a month, if one person dies every few days. I'm back to thinking that a boat that big can't go down without someone knowing about it because there would be radio contact of some sort. Until the storm or the ice berg or whatever hit, and all of the electronics drowned.

Did all of the electronics really drown? If there was time to gather food and this is a modern story (based on the successful boy band singer -- not that there weren't successful boy bands before the age of gps and cell phones and whatnot because back in the day, when they were all young, the Beatles and the Stones and the E Street Band were all bands made up of boys), are you telling me that no one figured out a way to bring a cell phone of some sort? Of course, it may not work, and the battery will eventually die. But wouldn't it be worth trying to get some sort of signal and some sort of bearing on land and then work together to try to move the boat and that direction, gauging according to the path of the sun once the battery/signal gives out?

And over the course of the month, if they are truly out on open water, everyone hasn't died of exposure? Or in another storm? And throwing a body, or eight, overboard hasn't attracted some sort of carnivorous sea creature?

I mean, how does this work?

"Okay, we're on a boat. There are ten of us. We've got a bunch of food, but clearly not enough for the long term, so we're going to have to start pushing people over. Or you can always fall in on your own. Who wants to go first?"

And it would seem to me that whoever pushes the first person over would be the obvious second victim. Then the seeds of suspicion are sown. Who is the next pusher? The next pushee? Madness won't be too far behind suspicion.

Why are the two kids left? How did they outlast the grownups?

Okay. Let's see. Where were we? Oh yes. Billy and Jane are the last ones in the lifeboat. They sit on opposite ends staring at each other. Well, Jane is blind, so her stare is kind of directionless, but Billy stares at her intently, watching every move as intently as she listens for him to make even the smallest sound of movement.

Each one knows that there is no way out. They have been on this lifeboat for a month with no sign of rescue. The food and water are almost gone, along with hope. But hope survives on belief rather than food and water, so it is more tenacious. As long as they keep hoping, there is a chance, right? You read about miraculous, impossible stories all the time. People survive car crashes, being lost in the woods or on a mountain, animal attacks and storms. It happens. If it can happen to those people, why can't it happen to me?

Billy and Jane have the same thought at the same time. "I can survive this. I'm going to be the one who makes it."

"I have been blind since birth. Look at everything I have had to overcome. I have had to deal with a major handicap every single day. That makes me strong and resourceful."

"I was just a poor kid from a town no one had ever heard of. I left home at sixteen and headed to Hollywood. I worked all sorts of horrible, demeaning jobs and sang and danced every chance I got because that is what I was meant to do. I started with nothing, and now I am part of one of the most popular bands ever! That makes me strong and resourceful."

Then they have another thought at the same time: "But am I strong enough and resourceful enough to kill another person? And what if I succeed and get the last of the food? Then what?"

Jane: "I'll be all alone in a boat on open water in the middle of nowhere. If I win, I'll live a little longer, but how much longer?"

Billy: "If I can beat her in a fight, then I will be really alone. Will someone really find me? What's the use of being the last man standing if I still end up as fish food?"

*****

Nope. It's not sparking anything for me. If there is no reason to think that either one will survive, what is the point of having one outlast the other?

Any ideas out there?

Lunch in Paris

2011-06-07T23:04:00.000-04:00

Writing Assignment

Arabella Hicks - The Fiction Class

Think of a person from history who intrigues you. Napoleon? Cleopatra? Martin Luther King?

Write a two- to three-page description of that person eating a meal. What would s/he eat? How would s/he eat? What would s/he be thinking about as s/he ate? Would someone be sharing the meal with him or her? What would they talk about?

Remember: Bring Your Character to Life!

(The Fiction Class by Susan Breen, page 41)

******

I wonder if I could have two famous people eating together. Would they have to be from the same era? Yes. My little fantasy lunch could work. (Note: I know very little about the two characters in this little scene but am somewhat in the process of researching them both, especially the lady, given my ongoing fascination with things Parisian. The only information I confirmed was the possibility/accuracy of the date as it related to each character's life and career.)

The year is 1925.

Paris in the spring.

Ernest Hemingway is working on The Sun Also Rises. Most of the time he is hanging out on the Left Bank, but today he is taking a break and finds himself strolling through a more upscale part of town. His untucked shirt, open collar, rolled up sleeves and wrinkled trousers earn him a few sidelong glances, but the young writer is lost in thought and pays them no heed. He soaks up the warmth of the spring sunshine, letting it burn off his hangover.

As he passes a cafe, his attention is arrested by a striking woman sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette and sipping a cafe au lait. As he watches, a waiter brings her a plate of fruit, cheese and bread. She nods her thanks, a faint smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. Large sunglasses and an elegant hat hide the rest of her expression -- the rest of her face, in fact.

She sets down her coffee cup, puts out her cigarette, and as she turns her attention to the food in front of her, she says, "Would you care to join me, or do you prefer to just stand there and gape?"

Her English is accented but fluent, and her voice hints at velvety smolder underneath her elegant attire.

"Even a Frenchman would not be so rude ... or so sloppily dressed. You must be American."

Not easily discomfitted, our hero is startled into at least standing up a little straighter, but he smiles rakishly and accepts the invitation, accepting a seat across from his enchantress, glad to have permission as well as the opportunity to study her a little more closely. Beneath the hat and glasses is a delicately made up face, a single strand of pearls and a distinctive, square-cut but tailored jacket which is becoming the lady's trademark.

While the rude, sloppily dressed American is trying to determine the lady's age, the waiter appeared at his elbow.

"Monsieur?"

"I don't suppose you have whiskey in this place."

"Non, monsieur." The waiter's disdain is evident.

"Fine. A bottle of wine and whatever the lady is having."

"Bien sur." The waiter bows slightly and disappeared.

The author turns back to his companion to see that smile again -- subtle, beautiful, mysterious.

"Only an American would be drinking so early in the day, right?"

"Only something so vile as whiskey, yes. But wine with lunch is perfectly French."

"Bien sur," he grins.

At that, she actually laughs -- a light, musical sound which only deepens his enchantment.

"Gabrielle Chanel," she introduces herself, extending a hand which he stares at for an instant before he decides to try to take it and graze the knuckles with a kiss as he had seen Frenchmen do when they were trying to seduce some innocent young thing traveling abroad. The clumsy gesture earns him another smile.

"Ernest Hemingway."

"Charmed."

"Gabrielle ... that's a lovely name."

"Friends -- and some admirers -- call me Coco."

He thinks about that for a minute. "I prefer Gabrielle, if you don't mind. Or should it be Madame Chanel to this ill-mannered, sloppily dressed American?"

"Gabrielle suits me just fine, Monsieur Hemingway."

He smiles at the sound of his name translated into her accent -- Em-een-gway. "Ernest, please. Speaking of suits, that's a sharp one you're wearing."

"Merci. It is one of my favorite designs."

"Your design? You're a fashion designer?"

"Oui, monsieur. Indeed I am, although I wouldn't expect someone like you to take notice of such things."

He is almost offended until he sees her smiling again.

"Just because a man looks as if he can barely dress himself doesn't mean that he can't appreciate a beautiful woman, and I'd wager that is the entire point of your designs."

"One of the points, but certainly not the only one."

The waiter returns with the food and wine, as well as another cafe au lait. Hemingway downs half a glass of wine in one gulp and ignores the food.

"Not the only one?"

"Non. Of course not. A woman should dress first and foremost for herself. If she does that and knows what she likes and what flatters her body and her style -- perhaps even her mood -- then the appreciation of others will follow naturally. If she doesn't appreciate herself, there is no reason that anyone else should either. If she does, natural though it may be, the appreciation of others isn't even necessary."

As he listens, Hemingway takes a large bite of cheese and bread, washing it down with the rest of the wine in his glass.

"But," Chanel smiles again, a little mischievously this time, "a little appreciation ... stopping a man in his tracks, for example, never hurts."

Had she not been wearing the sunglasses she might have looked demure, even fluttered her eyelashes, but behind those dark lenses it was impossible to tell. Hemingway laughs.

"No, I suppose it doesn't, though I would think that a ragamuffin American like me would be easy prety. Are you telling me that this works on my more cultured, sophisticated French counterparts?"

"Bien sur! But be careful in assuming that all Frenchmen are sophisticated."

"Fair enough."

she selects a cigarette from a monogrammed silver case, and he lights it for her. They sit in companionable silence, and he drinks another glass of wine -- a little more slowly this time, clearly enjoying the taste and soaking up his surroundings.

Cigarette finished, his companion rises.

"It has been a pleasure, Monsieur Hemingway, but I must get to an appointment. I do hope we meet again."

He stands as she does. "The pleasure was mine, Madame Chanel."

He watches her walk away, as she no doubt intends him to do, and returns to his lunch to find that the waiter has so kindly left him the check to pay.

Raising a glass to new beginnings

2011-06-06T21:51:00.002-04:00

I keep complaining (mostly internally) about not getting enough writing done, and about not writing consistently. This past weekend, I typed over 7500 words. The problem, if it is really a problem, is that everything was written for an audience of one. Audience of two might be more accurate sinceI keep rereading what I wrote. Over the course of today, I wrote another thousand words which will likely never be read by anyone but me. (In this case, that's a good thing.)

7500 is a lot of words for a not quite forty-eight hour period. Respectable at any rate.

Somewhere in either a NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy conversation, I read about wasting one's word count on writing other than the project at hand -- chatting, e-mailing, posting to various social networking sites, sending text messages -- and I realized that when I really get going, either due to concentration or because I get really emotionally fired up about something, word count isn't the problem. The problem is where I channel it and how I use it.

Some things can't really be helped. Those probably fifty e-mails I send every day at work, for example.

Other things shouldn't be helped. Writing in my journal is cathartic for me. It helps me figure things out and work through problems and deal with various emotional crises and conundrums (conundra?). I have set up a private blog or two in the past where the posts can only be viewed by select, invited individuals. I think that kind of writing is good, too. It tends to be the most creative writing I do that someone else sees. That particular audience has disappeared, however.

The time has come to broaden my writing horizons, and my audience. I'm not much of a social butterfly. I'm a nerdy little hermit who tends to worry about being noticed by strangers, but even in my tiny little corner of the world, I know that there are a few people listening, so maybe it is time that I speak up and let my voice carry just a little farther, and maybe a few other people will hear me and think that what I have to say is interesting.

Or not. But I definitely won't know if I don't try.

There are certainly plenty of opportunities and possibilities out there. I have heard rumors of Camp NaNoWriMo. And I have a Script Frenzy screenplay I have never finished. As well as the first nanowrimo novel. I could finally figure out how to write rpg characters, maybe even become a dungeon master if I decide that I like it.

A good bit of what I write might still stay hidden for a while, but in the meantime, I am going to take another shot at blogging.

After all, as Julie Powell says in Julie and Julia, "I could write a blog. I have thoughts."

Connections and Discoveries

2011-02-26T11:50:00.000-05:00

There was a time when I read pretty much nothing but books about books -- novels about books, to be more specific. I am pretty sure that it started with The Little Country by Charles de Lint and went from there. Every once in a while I would mix it up with a non-fiction sort of book about books, such as So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson. I found novels and mysteries and fantasy and chick lit. I have read a pile of such books, and there are still plenty on my "to read" list. The novel I started writing the first time I participated in National Novel Writing Month involves books.

Phases like this are extremely common for me. I find something that I like -- a genre, a game, a hobby, a musician, a style of clothing, a food, a television show or movie, a historical period, even a person -- and become, well, obsessed. I immerse myself in the subject until I am practically drowning or until something else comes along and attracts my attention. I keep wandering through my various interests with varying degrees of enthusiasm, adding new ones along the way. Eventually I might even become fairly well versed in a subject.

Some time after I had read a bunch of books about books, I encountered the title Alligators, Old Mink and New Money, and I was off learning about vintage fashion. Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown followed, along with a few others. Last year's reading list saw a reappearance of vintage fashion with A Vintage Affair and Dreaming of Dior, and since books/stories about fashion which are not art/coffee table books more focused on the photos than the text, I have been on the lookout for another "vintage" read.

Today's trip to the bookstore introduced me to The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean, and it turns out that I have encountered Ms. McKean before. She is the founder of worknik.com, of which I am a fan, and the author of the blog dressaday.com, which I came across at some point after reading Dreaming of Dior. It was like seeing a familiar face in a crowded room or learning something completely new about a longtime acquaintance. It's fun.

The first twenty pages or so have me interested in reading more, especially since the protagonist adores vintage clothes but feels out of place trying to wear them, even when they fit and suit her, and ends up reverting to her t-shirts, comfortable jeans and sneakers. I feel the same way. I love fabulous, stylish, couture and vintage clothing and shoes, but the view always seems better from the outside than when I look in the mirror.

The day's other discovery is that Dame Judi Dench has written a memoir. I'm generally not much for the stories of famous people I don't know, but I can't imagine that Dame Judi doesn't have some fantastically witty and insightful observations about life. She has performed on stage, screen and television and done everything from Shakespeare to Fleming (as in Bond, whom she takes delight in referring to as "a sexist, misogynistic dinosaur" -- yay!). In the process, she has won every award given for such performances. She clearly loves her work (even if she doesn't love everything she does), and I am excited to find out what she has to say.

Chronicles of Narnia, part 1 (and 2)

2011-01-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

There are spoilers in here for those who have not read the books or seen any of the film productions.

So far so good. At first I was wary of this whole "reading order" idea, but as soon as I read The Magician's Nephew, which is about the creation of Narnia, I understood. (The religious themes and undertones which have always eluded me are much clearer as well.) I finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe last night and am about to start The Horse and His Boy.

Now that I look at it, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe should probably be The Wardrobe, the Witch and the Lion as Lucy discovers the wardrobe first, then Edmund meets the witch, and only when they are all in Narnia do they (and the reader) meet Aslan the lion.

The first time I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I was in second grade, and I remember the book being incredibly beautiful and magical and heartbreaking. I wanted to have tea with Lucy and Mr. Tumnus. I despised Edumund for his allegiance to the witch and wasn't nearly as willing to forgive him as his siblings were. And my heart broke when the witch killed Aslan. I remember seeing it all so clearly in my imagination.

This time around, however, I had to work harder to conjur the images. The story seemed so much simpler (not to mention shorter). I can't decide if it is a factor of growing up (or at least getting older) or a result of knowing the story fairly well already.

Further bulletins after I read more chronicles.

(And I haven't forgotten about Rostropovich.)

Howl's Moving Castle (first the book)

2011-01-10T22:57:00.001-05:00

As part of my anime education, I received a dvd of Howl's Moving Castle as a Christmas gift.

Reading the credits on the back of the box informed me that the Hayao Miyazaki film is based on the novel Howl's Moving Castle by Daina Wynne Jones. I had heard of the film, and I had heard of the author, but I had not heard of the novel. As I have wanted to read something by Ms. Jones for some time but had simply not made a selection, I decided that this was my chance, and picked up a copy from my favorite haunt.

By the time I had made it through chapter two, I was convinced that this was yet another instance of finding and reading the right book at the right time. The literary stars aligned, and knowing better than to ignore the signs, off I went on a delightful adventure.

(It turns out that there are two other "Howl" books -- Castle in the Air and The House of Many Ways. My local library had both of them, so I can continue my exploration when the time comes, but I decided to begin at the beginning.)

Sophie Hatter is the eldest of three sisters, and she is left to work for her step mother (who is by no means wicked, although perhaps a bit self-centered and exploitive) in her father's hat shop after her father passes away, and her sisters are sent off to apprentice, one to a witch and the other to a bakery.

Despite a gift for trimming hats, Sophie's life is frightfully dull and sheltered until one day she displeases the Witch of the Waste, who turns Sophie into an old woman as punishment for her honesty. (She tells the vain witch that a particular hat to which she has taken a fancy does not suit her at all.)

Afraid to face her family and tell them what has happened, Sophie strikes out on her own. On her way out of town, she rescues a dog who is tangled in a hedge and rights a fallen and somewhat dilapidated scarecrow. (Pay attention. These things become important later on in the story.) When night falls and she finds herself out in the cold, Sophie takes refuge in the moving castle of the wizard Howl, who has a reputation for eating the hearts or stealing the souls (the stories are never quite clear) of innocent young girls, a fact which would have terrified Sophie as the young woman she had been but does nothing to deter her as an old crone as she seeks out a comfortable seat beside a warm fire. Besides, in addition to the comfortable seat beside a warm fire, Howl might be able to lift the witch's curse.

Once inside the castle, which turns out to be far less impressive on the inside, she talks her way past Howl's apprentice, Michael, and befriends -- well, strikes a bargain with -- Calcifer, the fire demon who is bound to Howl and living in his fireplace.

Yes, I understand. It sounds a bit far fetched -- an old woman striking out on her own and preferring to take her chances with wizards and demons than stay with her own family, but Jones infuses Sophie with a great sense of purpose and determination, even if she is not entirely sure of her direction or destiny, that you can't help but be on her side both to support her on her journey and to follow her to see where it leads.

Besides, that is just the beginning. There are kings and princes and other wizards and lady loves, and it turns out that the same witch who put the spell on Sophie (who can't tell anyone about it, by the way) is after Howl as well, which is why Calcifer has to keep the castle on the move in the first place.

The elements of an entertaining story are all here -- a varied and engaging cast of characters, complete with mistaken and confused identities, and a plot rife with plans (good and evil), accidents, mishaps, magic, mayhem, and a bit of romance. There is even a visit or two to a mythical place called Wales, where people travel by loud horseless carriages and children entertain themselves with magical boxes plugged into walls.

The ending itself works out well, even if the final approach to it becomes more than a little convoluted. I had trouble keeping track of characters' goals and motivations, especially the hidden ones which I got the feeling I was somehow expected to figure out before the final revelations, but I have never been good at that sort of thing. The solutions to mysteries are often a surprise to me, but then I don't put a lot of time and effort trying to get to the end before I, well, get to the end. I read to be told a story, not to second guess one or write it myself.

The next bit of fun will be to see what Miyazaki's film adaptation has to offer. Stay tuned.

Culinary alchemy

2011-01-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

What the recipe said:
1/2 c red wine vinegar
1 1/2 to 2 tsp sea salt (or to taste)
1/2 tsp white or black pepper
1 1/2 c extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp French Dijon or yellow prepared mustard
1/2 tsp thyme
1Tbsp honey

Combine ingredients, whisking or blending together well.

What I did:
3/8 c red wine vinegar
sea salt (did not measure)
white pepper (did not measure)
1 c extra virgin olive oil
4 or 5 tsp prepared Irish Stout mustard
A little bit of honey (maybe 1/2 tsp)
A few shakes of a Mrs. Dash onion/garlic/spice mixture

The way more mustard was to balance the entirely too much vinegar. My first taste test made my eyes water. The little bit of honey was a test to see if sweetness would balance the vinegar a bit more quickly than the mustard. And the Mrs. Dash was because the first recipe called for some herbs, and I thought "Onions and garlic go well with mustard, so in we go!"

I reduced the oil and vinegar because I didn't want to make too much (as I tend to do when following a recipe), especially if it didn't turn out.

The reason for the experiment in the first place was a general lack of salad dressing in the house. A fantastic side benefit was that the dressing was fairly thick and was delightful over asparagus -- a reasonable substitute for or alternative to the trickier to make hollandaise sauce.

My first attempt at homemade salad dressing was definitely a success ... and I discovered that a lot of the same experimental principles of cooking apply. Choose your own salad dressing adventure!

A bit more depth and breadth to go with the previous post

2011-01-01T17:24:00.005-05:00

Things I want to do or finish this year, from general to specific, and in no particular order. I am not big on New Year's Resolutions, but it can't hurt to have some sort of plan.

Read LOTR. Yes, I am a geek and a nerd, and no, I have never readLOTR. I made three attempts to read The Hobbit. I tried to watch the Peter Jackson films, and couldn't make it through the first one, but I am learning about role playing games (specifically Dungeons & Dragons), and the references and influence are everywhere. I think that it is time that I find out and understand what people are talking about.
Read The Chronicles of Narnia. I read two or three of them a long time ago, but never finished the entire series. Watching the new Disney films makes me want to go back, reread and finish, in part to compare to the film offerings and in part to simply enjoy the stories. (I am not particularly interested in the religious themes, perceived or otherwise.)
Learn about anime (and manga). It's a fascinating art form which has eluded my interest for some time, but then someone introduced me toCowboy Bebop, and I became intrigued. It's not nearly as isolated an art form as I thought it would be, although I am not sure why I am surprised. References I have come across mean thatNeuromancer by William Gibson and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (in graphic novel, novel and film form) have moved further up the reading list. I have discovered anime based on Shakespeare and Dumas and Kurasawa, and I discovered that Howl's Moving Castle was first a book by Diana Wynne Jones before Hayao Miyazaki filmed it.
PMP certification -- at least the training. I am not as sure about taking the exam and completing the certification because I am not sure if it is something that I really want to do and/or maintain and because I am not certain the the work I have been doing for the last four years really qualifies as project management. (The online course I am going to take should help in that respect.)
Possibly find a new job. Depends on how number 4 goes.
Read x number of the fabulous cookbooks I have on my cookbook shelves and try y number of recipes from each. X and y need to turn into actual numbers, but I am making this list somewhat off the cuff, and the cookbook library is not nearby, so this item will require future expansion and clarification. I received a lovely book about soups as a Christmas gift, and books by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid and by David Tanis have been beckoning for a while. Making flatbread on unglazed kitchen tiles definitely needs to be on the list. I think that one new recipe a week might be a reasonable goal. Also, I have a lovely collection of recipes from family and friends which I have begun compiling in a cookbook so that they are easier to find, use and share than they are on recipe cards and photocopies and in folders. I want to finish the cookbook this year. (I am using blurb.com if anyone is interested and thus far am quite impressed with the application.)
Clean out the storage unit. I am down to the hard part as most everything in there is stuff I want to keep, but don't really have space for in the house. It has been two years, however, and I wanted to get it done in one year. Actually, I wanted to get it done in six months, but I knew even at the time that that idea was just plain silly. Some tough love is definitely called for. As a corollary, but I don't think quite deserving of its own item, I need to get the stuff off the porch and organize the whole upstairs better.
Largely due to a buy one, get one free sale (and a few other coupons/deals), I went on a bit of a graphic novel buying binge, so I have a nice, healthy stack. I should get those read. I might even try to go back and finish reading Batman: Hush, which I put down after a shocking revelation and have never picked up since.
Use the Wii. I finally got my own little tv, and a bunch of games for Christmas, so I should play with my fancy, expensive little toy.
Write. I did better last year with the blog than I think I ever have, so I need to keep the progress moving forward. One of last year's quasi-goals was to write something about every book I read and every film I saw. It only sort of worked, but it makes for a good starting point. April can be Script Frenzy, and November is National Novel Writing Month. There is an unfinished screenplay which needs work, and the beginnings of two novels which could do with some serious attention. The web site writers.com offers a number of courses which intrigue me, and that might be a good summer project, depending on their schedule.
Read. Related to 1, 2 and eight, not to mention the reading challenges I have signed up for, but my basic goal of a book a week remains the same.
Knit. I started several projects intended as Christmas gifts, and only one got finished. I need to finish the others. I also want to finish the fabulous sweater coat which I started ages ago. My mother has received two scarves thus far, and likes them so much that she wants an afghan. I don't think that is a realistic 2011 project for a number of reasons, but I'll put it on the radar just for fun.

Twelve months in a year, and twelve projects/goals. Not exactly a one for one sort of setup, but a bit of symmetry or balance. Sounds like a good start to me. Time will tell how it goes.

New year, new list, new plan, new post

2011-01-01T11:05:00.000-05:00

Well, here it is, January 1st once again.

I am not big on New Year's as a holiday, but it is a delightfully convenient benchmark.

A new year means that it is time to start a new reading list. Since I have yet to achieve it (although I did get closer last year with thirty-four), I think that I am going to stick with the same goal of a book a week. I am going to mix it up just a bit -- or perhaps give the plan just a bit more focus -- by participating in at least one reading challenge.

While I have never been much of a horror fan (although I think that more of what I read qualifies as horror than I think), I have become a definite fan of urban fantasy. Last year saw me reading quite a bit of urban fantasy written for young adults and finding it at least as sophisticated and engaging as anything I have pulled off the main science fiction and fantasy bookshelves, so I see no reason not to continue the trend. Therefore I am joining Book Chick City's Horror and Urban Fantasy Reading Challenge 2011.

She also has a Mystery and Suspense challenge that I am going to join because I used to read quite a few mysteries but got away from doing so as I discovered various sub-genres of science fiction and fantasy (i.e. steampunk and urban fantasy). I think that it will be a challenge to get back to it, and it will also be interesting to find titles which qualify for both challenges.

Even if none of the titles cross over, 24 urban fantasies and 12 mysteries sets a goal of 36 books total, which is 2 more than my 2010 achievement and thus a good starting point.

I also think that it will be just as much fun to see what books from other genres distract me from these two challenges.

There are plenty of other book challenges out there, if urban fantasy and suspense aren't your thing. Start here: http://novelchallenges.blogspot.com/ or do a web search for reading challenges. Or start your own. It will be fun.

Enough blogging. Time to start reading.

Vintage recipes - the good, the bad and the ugly

2010-12-11T23:23:00.000-05:00

A number of years ago as a Christmas gift, my mother gave me folders full of family recipes. (And by family I mean chosen family as well as blood relatives.)

Some are typed. Some are rewritten (as in copied out by hand). Some are photocopies of the recipe cards which still live in recipe boxes.

It's a wonderful collection, just not very organized, so I decided in this age of modern technology and self-published that I would collect them all into a cookbook to share among family and friends.

I have just finished typing one stack which comes from the family of a dear friend who passed away almost five years ago. (I think it has been that long. My mother can correct my faulty memory.) Even in this relatively small collection of 19 recipes, there is impressive variety, even though most are dessert related.

Some, like the Turtle Cookies, inspire me to make them right away even though I am no good at baking cookies.

Others, like Elsie Rich's "Good Salad," make me blink in wonder as my stomach gurgles in protest.

I share them below for your fun and amusement. Enjoy!

Turtle Cookies
1/2 c packed brown sugar
1/2 c margarine or butter, softened
2 Tbsp water
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 c all purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
pecan halves
8 caramels, each cut into fourths

Cookies
Mix brown sugar, margarine, water and vanilla. Stir in flour and salt until dough holds together. (If it is too dry, stir in 1-2 tsp water.)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. For each cookie, group 3-5 pecal halves (split if necessary) on ungreased cookie sheet. Shape dough by teaspoonfuls around caramel quarters. Press firmly onto center of each group of nuts. Bake until set but not brown, about 12-15 minutes. Cool. Dip tops of cookies into chocolate glaze.

Chocolate glaze
1 c powdered sugar
1 Tbsp water
1 oz melted (cooled) unsweetened chocolate
1 tsp vanilla

Beat ingredients until smooth, adding 1 tsp of water at a time if necessary.

Makes 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

Elsie Rich's "Good Salad"
6 oz pkg of raspberry Jell-O (or strawberry or cherry)
1 1/2 c water
1 can whole cranberry sauce
1 c cottage cheese
1/2 c nuts
1/2 c chopped celery (Chef's note: "Not part of the original recipe.")
8 oz carton of Cool Whip

Dissolve Jell-O in part of the water which is boiling hot.
Add the rest of the water as ice water.
Add all other ingredients (except the Cool Whip).
Stir well.
Put in fridge until it starts to Jell. (Love the spelling.)
Fold in the Cool Whip.

A bit of perspective

2010-12-09T15:09:00.002-05:00

Kill one man and you are a murderer.
Kill millions and you are a conquerer.
Kill everyone and you are a god.
-- Jean Rostand

Quote of the Day

2010-11-21T13:47:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of the inimitable Julia Child, from a letter to Avis DeVoto on January 19, 1953:

"All this chef-hostess stuff is my particular interest ... but it does take practice and experience, so the stuff is really hot, but not over-done, etc. When we get into 'recipes for dishes,' we plan always to have 'make ahead' notes for everything, including veg. (I also think the young hostess should be advised never to say anything about what she serves, in the way of 'Oh, I don't know how to cook, and this may be awful,' or 'poor little me,' or 'this didn't turn out' ... etc. etc. It is so dreadful to have to reassure one's hostess the everything is delicious, whether or not it is. I make it a rule, no mater what happens, never to say one word, thought it kills me. Maybe the cat has fallen in the stew, or I have put the lettuce out the window and it has frozen, or the meat is not quite done ... Grits one's teeth and smile.)"

Source: Page 46 of As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, Food Friendship and the Making of a Masterpiece, edited by Joan Reardon

I have only just started but am enjoying this collection immensely, even if I am having a bit of trouble deciding if I am eavesdropping on a private conversation between these two charming women or have been granted the opportunity to be a silent participant in same.

Which quote is the quote?

2010-11-16T09:02:00.000-05:00

"If we have multiiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces. That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan."
— General Tommy Franks, in "American Soldier"

"If we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces. That's an important lesson learned from Afghanistan."
— George W. Bush, in "Decision Points"

No, I have not read both books. I have not read either book. I am not even 100% sure that this is not the stuff of urban legend (after all, pages are not cited). I snagged these two quotes from http://www.doonesbury.com/, and while the entries under the "Say What?" heading usually amuse me, sometimes they are taken too far out of context to understand or to interpret any way other than incorrectly, so I continue to be a bit suspicious.

(Besides, doesn't the site's webmaster know that book titles belong in italics or underlined and not in quotes??)

Maybe they had the same ghost writer. Maybe Tommy Franks is George W. Bush's ghost writer. Maybe the laughable part is the idea that anyone with significant political or military power in this country has actually learned anything from the military operations in Afghanistan.

Draw your own conclusions as you will.

Jealous much?

2010-11-13T09:37:00.004-05:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-gresko/national-novel-writing-mo_b_781313.html

Not everyone thinks that writing should be a torturous experience, although I understand that for some people it is. I would like to be so bold as to suggest that if it is really that terrible, then don't do it.

As observed in the comments at the end of the article, Mr. Gresko has missed the point. The point isn't great literature (although that is not ruled out as a possibility) but writing. NaNoWriMo (I do not have the same aversion to the abbreviation that a writer who chooses to use a particularly erudite word like "hooey" in his headline) participants don't sit down and *try* to write crap. They sit down and write. The result might be terrible. It might be good. It might even be brilliant in spots.

The point is that the only way to write is to sit down and do it. Writing is writing. Preparing to write is not writing. Thinking about writing is not writing. Researching what you are going to write about is not writing. Reading is not writing. Talking about writing is not writing. Writing is writing.

The goal is not to be bitter and complaining about how many years have gone by since the novel was started. The goal is to put together fifty thousand words of prose fiction in thirty days. I would even be willing to go so far as to say that the goal is to learn something in the process (even if the word count at the end of the month is less than fifty thousand) and a feeling of accomplishment when it is all over.

This is my second year taking the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I learned quite a bit last year (although I have not touched that heap of writing since), and I am learning more this year. One might even go so far as to say that I am building on last year's experience, and learning more about my writing means that I can improve it.

My suggestion to Mr. Gresko is that he stop wasting word count complaining about an activity enjoyed by thousands of people all over the world and get back to one of his unfinished novels.

That said, I am going to stop ironically expending word count on a blog post and get back to writing.

Voices of Dragons by Carrie Vaughn

2010-11-10T14:56:00.000-05:00

Since I read a lot of books in a similar vein with similar storylines, challenges, themes and characters, I am always looking for an author to surprise me and draw me in with a different twist or take on familiar elements.

Voices of Dragons is a little more serious and a little less whimsical than a lot of the teen urban fantasy type books I have read. It took some getting used to, but overall it was worth reading. A savvy metaphor for the contemporary state of the world.

The setting is completely contemporary and modern. The only thing that isn't "normal" is the fact that there are dragons in the world, which is a bit jarring. It takes some getting used to that there is only one thing "out of place," only one magical element -- as opposed to, say, having a character discover that there is an entire magical world.

The dragons are not so much considered magical as large, powerful, intelligent, virtually eternal creatures whose fire breathing capability enables them to have extremely destructive potential. They are relegated behind borders negotiated sixty years ago, after the dragons took issue with the disturbance caused by the testing and detonating of atomic bombs during World War II. Neither human nor dragon is allowed to cross the borders. There is no contact, no communication. It is forbidden and illegal. As a friend pointed out to me, it has a very Cold War feel to it.

One day, Kay accidentally crosses the border when she slips and falls into a river while cooling off after a hike. A dragon not only saves her life rather than letting her die or eating her himself but also asks her to come back again and visit. He wants to practice his English. He is curious. He wants to learn. And so does Kay.

As the fragile and unlikely friendship grows, the larger situation becomes more unstable. The military can't leave well enough alone and begins testing the border ... in order to test new weapons. As the situation escalates, Kay and her dragon friend must make some extremely difficult (and courageous) choices.

The lessons about choosing education, communication and cooperation over suspicion, hostility and provocation are well taught, as is the importance of doing something for the greater good and the longer term, rather than focusing on the moment and the individual.

Quote of the Day

2010-10-23T15:43:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Seanan McGuinn's _A Local Habitation_

"The hero's journey has suffered in modern times. Once we could've gotten a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue, pennants flying. These days you're lucky to get a battered changeling and her underage, half-trained assistant, and the princesses are confused technological wizards in towers of silicon and steel. Standards aren't what they used to be."

A few words in favor of ebooks

2010-10-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

I almost made the heading "A few words in defense of ebooks," but that seemed a bit harsh. I don't think they need defending. They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. Beyond the standard necessity for the first amendment, I don't think that they need too much in the way of protection.

My next choice was "A few words in praise of ebooks," but I don't know that I am really being laudatory. More like pointing out the somewhat obvious or a handy benefit of the versatility of ebooks. (Not sure that versatility is the right word there.)

Anyway, my point. I have one, I promise. I sat down with one, and I am going to get to it.

The other day I wondered "aloud" on my Facebook page what I should read next, and I got a recommendation from a somewhat surprising source. It turned out to be a rather good recommendation actually.

In the past, I would have made a late run to the bookstore, but instead I downloaded the book to Gertrude the nook and started reading almost at once. (It is rather amazing how slight a connection is required to download an ebook.) But that benefit/hazard is already pretty well known. In fact, it is a major component of most ereader advertising campaigns.

The next day I managed to leave Gertrude at work buried under some papers. Oh no!! My reading material for the evening was missing! What to do? I considered driving back to the office, but really wasn't excited about that prospect. I had plenty of reading material. Surely I could find something else. But I didn't want to find something else. I wanted to find out what happened next!

Then I thought to myself, "Well, I could turn on the computer and read the rest of the book that way, even though I am not much good at reading backlit screens full of text for hours on end." I sighed heavily. Such tragedy. To be without immediate, preferred access to my drug of choice. Woe was me.

But wait!! There was an alternative! I have downloaded the nook application not only to my PC and laptop but also to Saraswati the Droid phone (just as any overly-gadgeted geek would do), and the Droid screen can easily be dimmed within the nook application to make reading easier. Although it was a bit odd to be turning "pages" every few sentences, the smaller screen was actually less of a strain on the retinas, so I was able to finish reading the book from the comfort of the magic chair.

Not ideal circumstances, but I managed to survive the hardship with minimal trauma. Had I been reading the book the "old fashioned" way, I would have been completely out of luck and would have either had to be patient or find something completely else to read or do with my evening. Technology saves the day!! Or at least staves off a few hours of boredom.

Butcher Bird - a ruminative draft

2010-10-17T11:30:00.003-04:00

I am sure that I have mentioned being a big believer in and fan of reading the right book at the right time in the right state of mind, but I don't know who might be out there actually paying attention, so I am going to go ahead and mention it again.

The process works one of two ways. Sometimes I know what I am looking for, and I find the book. Sometimes I don't know what I am looking for, and the book finds me.

After I read Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey, I immediately wanted more and procured a copy of Butcher Bird. I started it almost right away but then somehow got distracted by other shiny things. Probably comics -- Sirens of Gotham City, a four-issue Sam & Twitch series, Haunt, and Marvel: 1602. Somewhere in there I finally finished reading Shadowglass, which kind of made me think that I should read something a little more wholesome. So I read the Fablehaven series next. Once I finished that marathon, I cast about for the next read, unsure of whether I wanted a more "serious" or "literary" (the quotes being included to indicate the vaguery of those notions when applied to fiction) novel or to return to the realm of non-fiction (Appetite for Life is the latest addition to the "in progress" list) or if wanted to stay in a realm of magic and fantasy, potentially dark and urban respectively.

In the end, I picked up Butcher Bird again, and the narrative power was akin to the proverbial train wreck one cannot stop watching. I'm still trying to decide if that comparison is suitably complimentary. There were indeed parts -- descriptions mostly, as opposed to actions -- I wanted to look away from and not read, but I didn't want to miss a single gorgeously warped and twisted thing, so I managed a happy medium of reading by not allowing my mind too much freedom to conjure graphic, detailed imagery.

Spyder Lee is just a guy running a tattoo parlor (are they still called parlors?) with his friend Lulu who does the piercing. Then one night, out behind his hole-in-the-wall bar of choice, he is attacked by a demon and saved by a mysterious woman known as Shrike, and his whole world changes. He wakes up the next morning cursed with the vision of realization that the world has more layers than most people ever see or even realize are possible.

With realization comes responsibility. There are demonic creatures claiming his best friend and business partner piece by piece, and intervening on her behalf puts Spyder in their ledger of people from whom they can collect unpleasant, if not impossible, things. The two friends join Shrike on a quest. Well, Spyder joins, and he brings LuLu along for her own protection and with the hope of finding a way to release her metaphysical bindings. The quest leads them, and a few other misfits who join them along the way, quite literally into Hell.

There is magic. There is mystery. There is treachery. And loyalty is found in unlikely places. One of my favorite parts, because it is so well rendered, is the, for lack of a better way to put it, humanity of Lucifer. Sure he's a con man and a trickster looking out for himself, but time and again it is clear that he only works with what humanity gives him, although I suppose for most people it is easier to simply write him (or any other "enemy") off as evil rather than recognizing the same potential which lies in each of us. Man created God. Not the other way around. Even so, He/She (in whatever form or religion you choose to believe) is real ... as real as faith and hope and love. A more accurate way to put it might be that each created the other, and in that creation, man discovered God. I like that. God created this spark of life or separated the light and the darkness, sent the universe on its merry way and then sat back and waited for someone to realize what had happened. Upon that realization, the stories began.

Religious riffs aside, it's not uncommon for book endings disappoint me. After all of the action and drama and conflict and torment and the moment of truth when everything is explained, endings tend to be kind of a letdown. Some things aren't explained. Or the author is at a loss of what to do with his characters once the primary conflict is resolved. Sometimes there are plot holes or too many loose ends.

Not so with Butcher Bird. The ending is ... real. It makes sense for the characters and the story. It winds down rather than lets down. It's not happily ever after, but there is closure as well as possibility for the future (and I am not talking about a sequel). After all, good endings should have the potential to be beginnings of something new.

What makes you pick up a book ... and what makes you keep reading?

2010-10-05T19:47:00.003-04:00

The infamous "they" says not to judge a book by its cover, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Before you start calling anyone Ishmael or can nod knowingly that it was in fact the best and worst of times, there has to be a reason that you picked up the book in the first place. Perhaps it is an intriguing title, a favorite author, or a glowing review that catches your eye, and most likely once it does, rather than start reading right away, you flip the book over or turn to the jacket flap for more information, more reasons to keep going.

Just as it is unrealistic for someone to say, "Check out the intelligence of that girl," based on a glance across a crowded room, a potential reader can't spot a strong hero up on a shelf.

Personally I am as much of a sucker for the feel of a book as I am the sight. I test the weight in my hand. I fan the pages to get a feel for how they will turn. I finger the pages to decide if the quality of the paper appeals to me. I run my hand over the cover. (I tend to prefer soft, matte covers to those which are shiny and embossed.) But I still have to be enticed close enough to the book to pick it up in the first place.

Sure there are recommendations from friends and reviewers. ("She's got a *great* personality!") Maybe these friends know your tastes well, and maybe you are familiar with the reviewers, but it is still you who must make the final decision of whether to start reading.

Which has more weight? An endorsing quote or a summarizing blurb? Is a few sentences enough to pique your interest, or does the entire back cover need to be filled? If it is the latest book in the series featuring familiar and beloved characters, do you even want a hint as to the next adventure, or are you willing to take a leap of faith and be surprised?

I recently read the Fablehaven series in quick succession, and after the second book, I found myself avoiding any mention of the events to come in subsequent books. I wanted to immerse myself in the story, watching as the plot unfolded and the characters grew.

Once your initial criteria are met, and the book has been in your hands for a moment or two, what happens? Do you stand or sit in the store (assuming that you are not shopping online, of course, which presents an entirely different scenario) and read the first paragraph? First page? First chapter? How long does it take to convince you that you want to get to knows the characters and find out what happens to them?

A common recommendation to writers is to start the story in the middle of the action. Grab the reader's attention and hold on for dear life. Somewhere out there is a quote to the effect of telling the author to "grab the reader by the throat and sink your thumbs into his windpipe." Or maybe it is the jugular vein. Either action ought to get someone's attention and hold it at least until the person passes out. If a writer can hold a reader's attention even after the reader has relinquished consciousness, so much the better.

There are probably as many recommendations to begin a story at the beginning. Once upon a time and all that.

I like it when things are already hoppin', as long as the author doesn't leave me in the dark for too long about the basic backstory of how the characters got to where they were when I joined the fray.

The author's style and vocabulary are major factors for me, too.

I can be hooked by a sentence, a paragraph, or a page, but I try to get through at least a chapter before passing initial judgement.

Then the real work begins for the author. Once he or she has your attention, the job becomes keeping that attention all the way to the final page (and beyond if there is a sequel or two or six).

For me, it is all about the characters. Yes, characters need to have something to do, but if I don't make some sort of connection with or have some sort of strong positive reaction to the characters, I don't make it through to the end, no matter how intriguing the plot. On the flip side of the character coin, if I have too strong of a negative reaction to a character -- even if the character is supposed to be the despised villain -- I'll stop. (Jean-Claude in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, series is one example. I get that vampires are evil. I'm all over it. But he doesn't even have the stones to be truly, sexily evil. He's just one more manipulative jerk pressuring a woman into a relationship she doesn't want. It's not sexy. It's not attractive. And once Anita caved, I was pretty much done. I think I made it through one more book after that. I think I stopped after book four. The series is now up to something like twenty. It's too bad. I really liked Anita.) That scenario is a little less common, especially if I am really pulling for the hero. On the edge between the two sides is when a character I like does something which is completely and unbelievably out of character (and I am not talking about outright deception but rather something to fit a formula or as a plot device) or which derails the plot (which is not the same as a plot twist or surprise). Usually it happens when romantic/sexual relationships between characters end up being conveniently inevitable without really adding depth to either the story or helping the individual characters grow. (That subject could be a whole separate rant all its own.)

Balance between plot and character is key to the successful telling of any story, and tilting too far in either direction throws off that balance, but I still look for characters first -- people or creatures who inspire an emotional reaction or connection so that I want to find out what happens to them and how they cope with and adapt to their circumstances. A compelling or intricate plot will not keep me reading if I do not have a vested interest in the characters, but interest in a fascinating character will keep me reading through a less than riveting plot. I get entirely too wrapped up in the lives of imaginary people and thoroughly enjoy doing it.

Now you know (some of the reasons) why I read and what makes me keep reading. What starts and keeps you reading? Plot? Characters? Language? Bragging rights?

Banned Books Week

2010-10-02T12:48:00.003-04:00

As today is the last day of Banned Books Week, I am a bit late with this post but decided to go ahead and write it anyway.

Plenty of famous, classic books have been banned. You have all heard of them and hopefully read at least some of them, perhaps without even knowing that they were banned, so instead I am going to post a link to banned graphic novels.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-library-association/banned-books-2010-graphic-novels_b_740726.html#s145730

I can't say that I am surprised that any of these books have been banned or deemed objectionable. What makes me wonder, even if it does not outright surprise me, is the grounds listed for the objection. Almost all of the objections listed in this particular article are related to sex and/or nudity.

It continues to fascinate me that the standard objection to "objectionable" material is sex and nudity. Sex and "smut" are going to stunt and warp our children, but violence is not? Is that how it works? Take Batman, for example. Even as the hero of our story, he's pretty dark and violent, nevermind his various nemeses. There is some serious violence and emotional torment and trauma running through those story lines, but the objection comes from the sexual content? I don't think that I will ever understand why naked people are scandalous.

Is the conservative readership really that shallow? Is it really the sex and nudity that is the problem? Or is it the idea of literature in various forms that challenges the accepted norm (why it is accepted and how it is deemed normal is a whole other discussion) and sex is just an easy out so that the objectors don't have to think and come up with a thoughtful, reasoned argument. After all, they apparently don't want others to think.

In my world, it comes down to personal responsibility and choice. There is plenty of writing out there to which I object, and I am perfectly within my rights to do so. Simply because I object to it or even find it offensive, however, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be written or published or read. Therefore I make the choice to not read it. There are plenty of books I read which many would find objectionable, and I try to be sensitive to the fact that my tastes may not even appeal to friends with whom I discuss and share books. Some things I keep entirely to myself. Others I share only in limited circles. Still others I feel safe sharing or recommending far and wide, but even from within that feeling of safety, I expect anyone who might take me up on my recommendation to make the final choice for themselves. If I recommend a book to kids, I expect parents to be paying attention to what their kids are reading.

If you read something you don't like or find offensive or makes you uncomfortable, by all means close the book. Put it down. Walk away. Voice your opinion. Speak up about what you don't like about it and why. Just please don't close your mind at the same time.

And the world spins madly on

2010-09-23T00:11:00.004-04:00

This blog isn't really supposed to be about me. It is supposed to be about books and music and movies and the occasional observation or bit of commentary (or even sociopolitical rant) when I just can't contain myself.

Well, I have had a pretty rotten day which means I need to take few steps back and get a bit of perspective, remember what's really important, and doing so has inspired a bit of personal introspection. Ready or not, here it comes.

A bit more than thirty years ago I was simultaneously part of something horrible and something wonderful.

Shortly before my fourth birthday, I was diagnosed with a rare presentation of a cancer called Rhabdomyosarcoma (say that three times fast if you dare). That -- along with the subsequent radiation and chemotherapy -- was the horrible part.

My brush with celebrity at the ribbon cutting in 1980.

A little more than a year later, I stood on the porch of a big, friendly house -- the house that love built I do believe they call it -- while the mayor cut a ribbon to dedicate the city's first Ronald McDonald House, a place for parents from out of town to stay while their children were being treated at local hospitals. There was a big, sunny turret in one of the bedrooms, a player piano in the dining room, video games in the living room, and a huge tree mural painted on the basement wall where a bunch of us kids made handprints for leaves.

My parents -- especially my mother -- were a big part of making RMH a reality. They were a big part of a lot of people's lives during a very difficult time. A vital part in the face of a lot of sickness and sadness.

I remember being sick. I remember being stuck with enormous needles. (I remember having to be strapped to a board with sheets of velcro so that I could be stuck with enormous needles.) I remember radiation treatments. I remember carrying around a peanut butter pail because of the nausea that went with treatment. I remember enormous vile tasting pills. I remember the horrible smell of the hospital parking lot elevator. I remember my mother attending multiple funerals in a single week.

I also remember a nurse named Sandy with the most fantastic long red hair. I remember a doctor so tall he had to stand me up on the table and still bend over. I remember another doctor introducing me to her lab rats. I remember IV pole races in the halls. I remember arguing with my mother about eating "funny" brownies. I remember a Halloween party with another patient's mother dressed in a shiny green spandex frog costume with the frog mask tucked under her arm as she spoke to a scared new parent.

Somehow in the face of so much illness and even despair, there was at least as much love and courage and support. Too often the illness prevailed, but even so, hope remained.

Heroes bring hope, and I believe that more often than not, heroes are the people of quiet strength whom you meet every day. People who, no matter what hardship, trouble or difficulty they are facing in their own lives still have enough hope and strength to share with others. People who offer the support and encouragement to help make the dreams of others -- even complete strangers -- come true.

That strength and encouragement is what builds houses of love, and hope is what should remind you that no matter how bad it seems in the momnet, the day, the week or even the year, it is still possible to do something different, somthing else, something better, something more. Even if it is only a small step forward, don't let the fear that there might not be a step after that stop you. Take the step anyway. Take the chance and see what happens.

And the fan girl goes "SQUEEEEEE!!!"

2010-09-01T08:59:00.000-04:00

http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html

That is all.

Gadgetry Part 2 - Giving in to temptation

2010-07-03T13:54:00.002-04:00

While I have faced one temptation head on and walked away unscathed, I have succumbed to another.

The other day I was out shopping for a protective housing for Scheherazade the iPod, preferably something not terribly expensive or sparkly (since I come from a world in which drawing attention to something is a good way to have it stolen). I also wanted something simple -- no clips or buckles or moving parts, thank you very much. The silicone housing which protects Saraswati the Droid does a fabulous job, so I was hoping to find something similar.

Just for kicks, I decided to start at the source. I didn't expect much in the way of reasonable pricing, but as Scheherazade is an iPod classic (rather than the more popular and widely marketed touch and nano), I thought that I might have better luck with selection. As it turns out, not so much. (I did find something quite functional and reasonably priced at another establishment, so all is well.)

As I was in the apple store on a Wednesday morning, however, the store was not nearly as crowded as it had been on previous visits, so I had the opportunity to play with an iPad at my leisure.

It's cute. It's fun. It's a shiny new toy. (And according to the current window display at the Apple store, it is the way to read ebooks.) The touch screen is responsive, and all selections and commands are made though those handy little pictograms known as icons. (Yes, I am implying that you don't necessarily need to know how to read [English or most any other language] to be able to use it.) The virtual keyboard is, of course, much larger than anything you might find on a smartphone, but I didn't find it to be all that much more user friendly for the touch typist, and when held lengthwise, the device is too big to accommodate thumb typing comfortably. (I will admit, however, that I did not try reorienting the device.) There is space for the commonly used non-letter keys, but you still have to touch the 123 button to take you to a separate screen. I would imagine that the goal is to emulate the aforementioned smartphone keyboards rather than the more traditional computer keyboards.

The screen is bright, and the resolution is impressively sharp. I can see it being a lovely device for portable movie watching. I did not immediately see icons for more practical applications such as a spreadsheet or word processor, and I did not investigate or inquire. Most of the offerings were social in nature, including some applications geared toward personal organization, or else portals to various entertainment media -- music, videos, the web.

For all of the fun and flash and clarity, I was not nearly as enchanted as I expected to be.

For someone who spends a lot of time on social networking sites and watching videos, possibly even reading ebooks (more about that subject in a minute) and does not already have a smartphone and/or some sort of portable computer, it is just the thing. For someone who already has one or more of those things, it is utterly redundant.

As I already have a netbook and a smartphone with which I am extremely satisfied, I was happy to learn that I have no use whatsoever for an iPad, or any other tablet PC for that matter. Phew.

On the other hand, what I did decide not to live without is a nook. I gave in about a week ago, and I dare say that I am officially happy with my extravagant new toy, whose name is Gertrude(as in Stein, as in Hamlet's mother, and even as in Jekyll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Jekyll) because Marion Ravenwood is spelled differently than Marian the librarian and Maid Marian, and I don't know that I could choose. Marian the librarian is, of course, the most appropriate, but I much prefer Ms. Ravenwood's spelling.

I'm still not quite sure about the size and weight and the feel in my hands. The device might weigh about as much as a standard trade paperback book, but it is quite a bit thinner and therefore denser. The corners are curved, but the taper from back to front creates a bit of an edge, which I hope to soften with a silicone cover, at least until I decide to invest in (splurge on) a leather cover of some sort.

The device is responsive, but does require just a bit of patience. I can see so called "mad clickers" (those who will pound on the enter key or punish the left mouse button when a command is not instantaneously and obviously executed) becoming frustrated, and navigating with a combination of physical page turning buttons and the touch screen is a bit odd, but like anything, once I learn the quirks and the rhythm, I am sure that it will be fine.

Unlike the netbook, and even the Droid to some extent, even after being on for a couple of hours, there is virtually no heat output as far as I can tell. The sleep and screen saver settings can be easily adjusted. The WiFi, and to a lesser extent the 3G, connection will drain the battery in a hurry, but in "airplane mode" with all network connections disabled, a full battery charge easily lasts for days.

I have wandered around and downloaded a bunch of free content, and I am looking forward to reading blogs and trying out magazines and perhaps even newspapers. The magazine selection is limited -- thirteen offerings at the moment -- but the New Yorker is really the only one I am interested in anyway, so I am set there. I can purchase a single issue or opt for a monthly subscription, and either option is significantly less expensive than the paper variety. There are twenty newspapers, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I am not much for newspapers personally, but it makes me think of my mother who likes to read them online.

While I did set up bookmarks for all of the blogs I (would like to) read on a regular basis, I haven't spent much time with that particular feature just yet. When web surfing, the text which appears on the color touch screen is highlighted by a black box on the main reading screen. It's distracting enough that it is almost easier to read the tiny navigation screen, and I wrote to nook support and said so. The web browser is still a beta product, so there is reason to hope for the future. It is also possible that as I get used to it, the black box will not be quite as distracting.

As far as the actual reading part goes, the screen really is wonderfully soft and gentle on the eyes. No glare, no eye strain. It truly is nothing like staring at a computer screen. I spent hours with the device a couple of nights ago as I went through one of my "read a book in a day" binges and felt no ill effects whatsoever. In fact, with the adjustable type size, I would even go so far as to say that it is easier on the eyes than even print on paper. The blinking between screen changes and page turns is only minimally distracting, although, again, a tiny bit of patience is required.

The 3G connection in and around the house seems to be decent -- I have downloaded a few free samples and complete ebooks -- but I had to return to the mother ship (or at least have a wifi connection) for my firmware update. Of course, spending time at a b&n to update my nook isn't much of a hardship for me.

Like all good drug dealers, they offer temptations of all sorts of free stuff, although I think that the "read in store" capability might be a little more limited than I had originally thought and hoped. It only works for an hour per visit. There are free articles and ebooks and samples of ebooks and coupons for paper books and even the cafe. And there are plenty of offerings which are almost free. Temptation at every click of a button.

The free samples of ebooks are a bit disappointing in that the first three or four pages are taken up by title pages and copyright information. I do not know if publishers require that information to be included or if someone just isn't quite paying attention, but when an eight-page sample turns out to be only three pages of actual text from the story, it is a bit disappointing. (I wrote to nook support about that issue as well.)

As one might imagine, new releases are much easier to come by than backlist titles, so if you are looking to consolidate your library onto an ereader of any kind the way that you can consolidate your cd collection onto an mp3 player, you will likely be disappointed. On the other hand, a lot of those classics that you think that you ought to read at some point (or at least a lot of the classics which I think that I ought to and would like to read at some point) are readily available at very reasonable prices. Many fall into that "almost free" category mentioned above. Will having a library of classics at my fingertips make me more likely to read them? If Anna Karenina doesn't weight three pounds, am I more likely to carry it around until I finally get it read? I'm not sure, but I think it might be possible. I wonder the same thing about short story collections.

Just as having the Droid means that I can e-mail and chat without having to be sitting at or with a "real" computer, the nook means that I am carrying around an entire bookstore, which for someone like me is a fabulously wonderful and extremely dangerous thing. It's a bit mind boggling -- Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble everywhere I go, for research, for reading, for whatever -- but I think that there are grand adventures to be had.

When in doubt, write.

2010-06-19T14:05:00.002-04:00

When I started out the day, I had big plans. Well, maybe not big plans, but I had at least three blog entry ideas in my head, and even a few vague aspirations toward working on the screenplay. Once I sat down and logged in, however, I ended up wandering.

I read my morning comic strips and checked my e-mail. I responded to a few messages, and followed enticing links in one which led to the downloading of free ebooks. The further I wandered, the less inclined I became to write, despite an attempt at an entry about Dreaming of Dior and being an aspiring but somewhat reluctant fashionista.

In the midst of the wandering, there has been reading. Of an actual paper and ink book. Having started last night, I am thirteen chapters and eighty-seven pages into WWW:Wake by Robert J. Sawyer.

The story begins with a fifteen year-old American girl living in Canada who has been blind since birth traveling with her mother to Japan to receive a high tech implant behind her left eye. The implant is supposed to essentially unscramble the mixed signals her brain is getting from her retina. There is a much more comprehensive and surprisingly not confusing explanation in the book. Or maybe it makes sense to me because I know a thing or two about dysfunctional eyes.

Meanwhile, a Chinese doctor is faced with the horrifying decisions involved in containing an outbreak of a new strain of bird flu easily transmitted between people so that it does not become a pandemic.

The action taken, while necessary, is potentially an international public relations nightmare, so the Chinese government blocks all communication to and from the outside world ... inspiring a few determined hackers to try to find the reasons and a way through the firewall. (We're up to three storylines if anyone is counting.)

In chapter thirteen, the author hops the reader across the globe again to California to witness a web cam chat between a chimpanzee in San Diego and an orangutan in Miami.

Laced through these seemingly unconnected narratives is the not quite story of some sort of entity, some sort of being, struggling toward consciousness for the very first time.

While I am certainly intrigued, I am becoming concerned that if there are any more threads to follow, I will end up with a knot rather than finely woven fabric.

Gadgetry

2010-06-17T19:44:00.002-04:00

There is no television reception in my house. There used to be one of those big antennas (antennae?) on the roof, but while it seemed to work okay during the winter, once spring came and the trees leafed out, there was a noticeable decline in clarity. So when the new roof was put on, the roofers were kind enough to take down the antenna.

I had a pair of not terribly old rabbit ears and even gamely bought one of those digital converter boxes, which was not so much helpful.

While I realize that you are paying for the service and the equipment more than the programming, I cannot bring myself to pay -- what is it these days? fifty? seventy-five? a hundred dollars? a month to have advertising piped into my house.

Besides, the longer I am away from it, the less I miss it. What am I really missing anyway? Depressing news? Celebrity gossip? Reality television shows about teen pregnancy? (Although I have to say, I took myself out to lunch today, and got to watch an episode of Julia Child and Friends on the cooking channel, which I very much enjoyed.) These days, even when I sit down to watch a movie or a television show on dvd, about all I can think about is all of the other things I probably could and should be doing.

Some of those things are practical -- cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking a real meal and making sure that I have leftovers to take to work for lunch -- but many of the things are alternative recreational activities which make me happy and which even make my brain work from time to time -- reading, writing, knitting.

Even though I might not get much use out of the television and about the only time I listen to the radio is when it wakes me up in the morning, I do have a host of other technological gadgets of which I am rather fond ... so fond, in fact, that they all have names.

Kristos (because a young Greek man named Kristos does not count as Greek homework) the netbook travels with me most everywhere I go. Scheherezade the iPod (so named because she was originally acquired for the purpose of listening to audio books -- a pastime which never really panned out) provides an extensive and varied soundtrack for my commute and when I feel the need to drown out ambient noise.

Someone was even generous enough to give me one of those snazzy pens that records sound as you write as well as an image of your handwriting. Amat-Mamu now comes with me to meetings on a regular basis. The software which converts the image of writing into text is a bit dodgy (or else I need better and more consistent penmanship), but overall, she is an extremely handy contraption.

There is a bright red wireless mouse who travels with Kristos but does not have a name -- Templeton, perhaps, even though he was a rat -- but there are tiny 4Gb flash drives -- Ceridwen and Belisama -- who do.

Saraswati the Droid is probably my favorite electronic friend (but shhh ... don't tell the others). She keeps me in touch with the world via phone, text, instant message and e-mail -- the internet in the palm of my hand. Amazingly, her presence in my life means that I spend a little less time in front of a computer screen. She can play games, do any number and variety of calculations, tell me which movies are playing where (and show me previews), show me the stars and provide a weather report. I recently figured out how to employ her as a modem when local WiFi is on the fritz. I have even heard tell that I could use her to read books, but while sharp, her screen is just not quite big enough to be conducive to reading for long periods of time, and her stature is just a bit too diminutive to hold comfortably in a reading position.

Besides, I still can't quite bring myself to need electricity in some form to read a book. Or not be able to loan or give a book to a friend once I have read it.

But I might be getting closer.

I have seen a few Kindles from afar, but have never played with one. The nook almost had me with fancy advertising prior to its release, and the promise of a fifty-dollar gift card with purchase makes my ears perk up every time I hear it. Still I resist because I stare at a computer screen for a living, and no matter how closely it might imitate ink and paper, an electronic screen is still an electronic screen.

There is the appeal of being able to carry a pile of books -- it is not uncommon that I carry three or four for various reasons -- in a slim device. I am also trying to teach myself more about various computer programs, and I tend to prefer to do it the old fashioned way -- by reading a manual or using it as a reference. A lot of these manuals are available at a discount or even free in electronic form, but it is difficult to read a manual on the same screen that I am running the program I am trying to learn.

There was also the nice gentleman I chatted with about the nook he was using who told me that it was easy to use and handy to have.

Then today I discovered that one of my Goodreads friends is actually an author. Research told me that neither of his books was available in any of the local purveyors of printed words, but that I could download the Kindle version to my PC almost instantly for ninety-nine cents.

Wow. Ninety-nine cents. For a fifteen dollar book. It's not even too much of an investment to keep me from purchasing a paper copy should I get far enough into the electronic version to decide that I want to read the whole thing but not on a computer screen. There were plenty of other offerings at the same price point or a bit higher, but I dared not browse too far lest I get carried away and end up with a whole library.

The thing is that the ebook is only available for the Kindle (or for Kindle software downloaded to a PC or other compatible device). So if I had a nook, I would have been out of luck. I would be willing to guess that there are nook friendly ebooks not available for the Kindle. I can, however, download both Kindle ereader software and Barnes & Noble ereader software to my PC for free, so both formats are readily accessible.

As a result, I am starting to dream of a tablet PC ... specifically a tablet PC which runs the Android operating system. No Microsquash (I wonder if that name can get me sued for slander) and even no Mac. (Although I did have a brief opportunity to play with an iPad not long ago and wouldn't turn my nose up at it if someone gave me one.) The success of the Droid phones makes me think that the Android operating system is on its way to widespread, mainstream acceptance.

I don't need it to have all of the talents of Kristos, or even Saraswati for that matter. It probably doesn't even need an internet connection, WiFi or 3G, although if it did, I would probably be more inspired to read blogs and online magazines. (Okay, okay, I don't need it at all, but this is my daydream, so keep quiet.) I'm thinking more along the lines of a handheld digital document reader for ebooks, pdfs and the like.

I can see it now -- relaxing on the patio or lounging by the pool, dozens, if not hundreds, of books at my fingertips to satisfy every literary (or not so literary) whim. And the more I think about it, the more appealing access to online reading on such a device is becoming. Reading in the bathtub is probably out though, wouldn't you say?

Margarita Chemistry

2010-06-12T18:45:00.004-04:00

Last year, a family friend sent a marvelous pitcher from Estes Park Glass Works, and it was almost immediately dubbed the margarita pitcher.

As a result, I started making margaritas.

The first batch was basic and according to a recipe in a book called High Spirits: 1 1/2 ounces tequila, 1/2 an ounce of triple sec, juice from half of a lime and salt for the glass. I put the liquor, lime juice and a bunch of ice in the blender and hit the button labeled "liquify."

Yum.

A bit strong, and someone decided to add sugar, but I thought it was just the thing for a Memorial Day barbecue.

One of the leftovers from said barbecue was most of a twelve pack of Minute Maid pink lemonade, so the first experiment was the above recipe, doubled and with a can of pink lemonade.

Even more yum. And a bit more dangerous as the pink lemonade disguised the taste of the liquor quite effectively.

As spring has been masquerading as summer from time to time this year, the margarita experimentation began a bit earlier.

The first variation attempted this year was substituting the can of lemonade for close to a pound of fresh, rinsed strawberries and a bit of sugar. (I didn't measure, but it couldn't have been more than about a tablespoon.) The yum continued.

Next up were peaches. Not as much of a success, but I think that the real problem was a lack of lime juice. I think that lime juice is the key to this particular concoction.

Today I tried a can of green tea ginger ale. This time I had lime juice, and I was back to yum, although I think that it would have turned out better had the ginger ale been thoroughly chilled. I will have to note that for next time.

Well, the next time I make green tea ginger ale margaritas.

The next experiment is going to involve the sorbet in the freezer. I have lemon, and I have mango tangerine (I think -- some kind of citrus at any rate). Sorbet really could do with a bit of liquor to spice things up, wouldn't you agree?

(You'll notice that none of these drinks contain "margarita mix." Do I even want to know what is in "margarita mix"? Other than sugar or high fructose corn syrup or some other close relative, probably not.)

I recommend that margaritas be consumed from a chilled glass and through a bendy straw.

7-3-10 Edit to add: The mango tangerine sorbet margarita experiment was conducted yesterday with great success.

Sight to see

2010-06-06T11:26:00.002-04:00

There is the cutest little blonde girl in a pink checked sundress sitting a few tables away.

Actually, she is kneeling on the chair, so that she can reach the tabletop where a gentleman I am going to assume is her grandfather has sliced up a small, decadent chocolate Bundt cake, which she happily began eating with her fingers until a woman I am going to assume is grandmother insisted on a fork.

Now there is a whipped cream topped chocolately looking beverage to accompany the cake.

I just hope that there are big plans for running between the days rain drops and jumping in puddles to burn off all the inevitable, impending sugar rush.

Frenzied scripting

2010-05-01T14:17:00.002-04:00

Much as November was spent writing fifty thousand words of a novel, so April was spent writing one hundred pages of a script -- in my case a screenplay adaptation of a novel.

When I officially crossed the goal line, a much more cinematically inclined and educated friend of mine asked me what I took from the overall experience, and after he and I had nattered back and forth at each other online for a while, I decided that I should natter a bit more comprehensively and coherently on the subject.

First and foremost, much like November's novel, the script is not finished. Not even close. Not even the first draft. I've got the beginning and the middle, and the climax and ending are fast approaching, but they only exist in my head at this point, and even there they are vague. So that means I need to keep working, and if possible, keep up the momentum.

Second, the screenplay writing process was not nearly as exhausting as the novel writing process. I'm not quite sure why. The time span was still thirty days, but according to my stats chart, I only actually worked on the screenplay on fourteen of those days.

It could be that after fifteen hundred to two thousand words a day, three or four pages which are more white space than text thanks to screenplay formatting requirements were not nearly as intimidating. It could be that since I was doing an adaptation, I had source material right in front of me, so it was a matter of deciding which parts to use as opposed to having to come up with all of the parts on my own. In fact, there were times it almost felt like cheating. I picked a novel which is not terribly long (just over two hundred and fifty pages) and not terribly complicated. The main characters each have their own stories, but they are extremely closely connected.

Now what I really need to do is finish roughing out the rest of the scenes and then go back and really look at the whole thing, almost to the point of starting over. I'll kill a tree or two and print the entire document so that I can scribble all over it -- my preferred method of revision.

One of the major challenges for me was to try to write and visualize in movie terms.framework at the same time. It's not enough to just see the scene in my head. I have to think about the mechanics -- what the set needs to look like, what the characters are wearing and doing, and how the shot is achieved. I have no yet spent nearly enough time describing the settings, or at least specific salient details, or telling my characters what they should be doing while they are speaking.

Transitions are also difficult. I need to watch movies and pay attention to the transitions while I watch. In a novel or a short story, you can often just start a new paragraph or chapter.

I also need to watch more films which weave two stories together. For a while, I thought about The Lake House because the otherworldly romantic component figured prominently in the story I am telling, but that film has an ongoing correspondence which ties the characters and their stories closely together, so I am not sure that it quite fits my criteria.

Gladiator is another contender. All of the primary characters are together at the beginning, and relationships and even mutual histories are established early on. Then they follow separate paths for a while, and then those paths collide again. They are parallel stories rather than a main plot and a subplot.

The most important thing I take from the experience is the reminder/realization that the best way to learn to write is to write. And after you have learned to write by writing for a while, you learn more about writing by revising. You can read books and take classes if you want, and I am sure that they help, but they don't actually do the writing for you, and they can't give you your voice. That is something which you have to find on your own.

Script writing was a foreign concept, a foreign language even, on April 1. While I don't have any plans to relocate to Hollywood or New York City just yet, I know for certain that I learned more about writing a screenplay by wading right in and writing it (with the considerable aid of a fabulous script writing program which eliminated all of my formatting worries) than I ever would have by just reading a book or even taking a class.

I still have plenty to learn -- more than can be covered in a single lifetime, I am sure -- but I plan to learn it by finishing the first draft of this project and then going back to the beginning, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. My next goal is to get it to the point that I am willing to let somebody read it. After the second or third round, perhaps.

The morning's writing dilemma

2010-04-03T11:51:00.002-04:00

Somewhere along the line, I need to figure out where the exposition about the parallel world fits into the screenplay I am writing.

I can't think like a novelist. I can't even think like a short story writer, even though some of the same rules of economy apply. I have to think like a screenwriter.

I love novels because they can provide so much detail about characters and places. You really get to know them as their reader. When watching a film, you are barely introduced before you get swept up into the storm of activity. It's the story, the plot and the action which captivate you (possibly aided by a pretty face or two and even majestic, beautiful or intricate scenery, because eye candy never hurts). You might care about what happens to the characters, but you don't really know them.

With those thoughts in mind, how do I go about turning thirty-five pages of essentially conversational exposition into a scene or two of informative backstory so that I don't lose my viewers in lengthy conversations?

Do I write scenes that I know I am not going to use? Will it help me write other scenes, especially those I have to create from scratch? Will it be helpful just to get them down on paper (or up on the screen) and therefore out of my head? Or is it a frivolous use of valuable writing time?

It would be practice if nothing else, and practice is almost never a frivolous use of valuable writing time.

With the novel writing exercise of last November, the keys to the kingdom were most certainly found in quantity over quality. In comparison to fifty thousand words, one hundred pages formatted to favor white space on the page seems like a molehill, and quality and quantity might just be able to switch places on the priority list ... or at least sit a bit closer together.

One hundred pages I can do. It's having a distinct beginning, middle and end happening to interesting characters in an interesting setting crammed into those hundred pages which is the real challenge.

Reading that inspires research

2010-04-03T09:55:00.001-04:00

[Author's note: This partially written blog post has been sitting in the Drafts folder of my e-mail program for ages. I am hoping that sending it out into the world as an unprotected draft will be more encouragement to finish it. So, as usual, my readers, you are in on the ground floor of an experiment. Take careful notes.]

The Swan Thieves sent me in search of my copies of The Story of Art and The Impressionists: A Survey so that I could read about Impresionism, but my recently recovered mythology books are coming in handy as well as because there is a reference to Leda, mother of Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra. For some reason it comes as a surprise to me that Helen is immortal.

I also came across the reference to Eris which my brain has been trying to unearth since I heard the name. Eris is the goddess of discord. Not sure if that is the reference intended by the Google Olympians (Googlenauts?) at HTC -- manufacturers of my beloved Droid Eris, Saraswati -- or not. They do like to be upstarts, after all.

References and research aside, The Swan Thieves is an absorbing story of art, unconventional love, and the madness which so often shadows them both.

Perhaps it is simply that in all of my reading of science fiction and fantasy and food memoirs, I haven't read a "real" novel in quite some time, but Elizabeth Kostova's use of language is enchanting. So much so that I finally understand the hype which surrounded her first novel The Historian. Well, I potentially understand it since I only have a copy which I have not yet read, but if the style and the language are similar, I expect equal absorption and enchantment.

Coffee, cheese and the dangers of grocery shopping without a list

2010-03-28T12:20:00.003-04:00

About a week ago, I received a small cash bonus at work. Not enough to radically change my life, send me on vacation or buy a new car, but enough to make me want to do something specific with it rather than simply tossing it into the bank account with the rest. I debated responsible versus frivolous and consumable versus collectible.

In the end, it came down to a wish to experiment with coffee and ended up with breaking the rules of pragmatic grocery shopping and a rather expensive piece of cheese.

First the coffee.

I have never been much of a coffee drinker. My caffeine fix has always come from Coca Cola (affectionately known as the Red Can of Death in my world). Somewhat amazingly, I gave it up about three weeks ago. It might even be three weeks ago today now that I think about it.

I have known for quite a while that this particular bad habit had to go, especially since I now sit for a living and three hundred or so extra empty calories just can't be good for a person, no matter how good they taste or what sort of energy boost they offer. Even though I strongly suspected that I was at least as addicted to the sugar as the caffeine, if not more so, I have read enough about the horrible things that caffeine can do to a person's bones to realize that it had to go as well.

The key was always going to be finding a reasonable alternative, and no, caffeine free diet Coke is not a reasonable alternative. It's just trading one set of bad chemicals for another, and I can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners. Plain water was also not a reasonable alternative. It might be good for me, but it's just not satisfying.

When someone introduced me to sparkling water with fruit essence, I was suspicious at first, but it has turned out to be a fairly convincing decoy. Water, CO2 and fruit essence. No calories and no artificial sweeteners. When chilled, it almost tastes like soda, and if it goes flat, it's just slightly flavored water, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Other caffeinated and sugar-laden vices lurk in the shadows, however. The grande mocha frappuccino with whipped cream is a not uncommon indulgence, and I have developed something of a taste for hazelnut coffee with a dash of Jameson's and a swirl of whipped cream. Between those two items and driving past what looks to be a lovely new little coffee house in town yesterday morning I got to thinking about the possibilities of decaffeinated coffee. After doing some research into taste and method, I decided that part of my small financial windfall would fund an experiment in decaffeinated hazelnut coffee (giving me the opportunity to use the long neglected French press coffee pot in my possession).

Off I went to the grocery store with thoughts of coming home with coffee and a gallon of milk (and possibly a dvd or two from the rental shop next to the grocery store).

At this point, the trouble started. I was hungry, and I had no shopping list to stick to. I definitely came home with coffee (three different kinds even though only two were decaffeinated) and a gallon of milk, but it seemed that everywhere I looked, there were tempting things which made my stomach grumble, so I soon had a shopping basket laden with two everything bagels, crusty Italian bread, a medley of olives (why just Kalamata, I thought, when I could try all of these others), a few mozzarella balls, a bag of Sun chips, raw almonds, frozen chicken strips and crinkly fries, toasted ravioli (which turned out to be quite tasty despite coming from the freezer section, a small jar of black olive tapenade (which I have wanted to try but never got around to), and a rather expensive wedge of cheese.

This wedge of cheese can be blamed for the purchase of the olive medley and the tapenade because the sign claimed that the cheese flavor would be complemented with olives. (The sign turned out to be quite right. A bit of cheese on a dab of tapenade on a hunk of crusty Italian bread is a grand and glorious thing indeed.)

I'm usually a mild or medium cheddar sort of a girl, with mozzarella (especially if fresh), occasionally Swiss, muenster, Havarti and Brie, and a nice blend of the harder cheeses like Parmesan, Asiago and Romano thrown in for good measure. (Please excuse the seemingly random capitalization if it is incorrect. I decided to trust this program's spell checker.) Lately, however, what with the more cooking and reading about food -- especially food in France where they make all sorts of wonderful cheese and even have shops devoted entirely to the sale of cheese, which I imagine to be expanded versions of the cheese counter at the small Italian I remember frequently as a child with my mother -- I have felt the inclination to broaden my horizons, and decided that this was the opportunity to do so. As a result, I decided to try Manchego, a Spanish cheese which is somewhat crumbly and has a tang similar to Asiago, though perhaps a bit sharper. Delicious!

Meanwhile, I am so taken with the black olive tapenade that I am inclined to try to make my own. But not today. Today I am making creamy leek potato soup with crispy leek rings to ward off the spring chill.

As a somewhat related aside, while I do love to cook, one distinct challenge I have found is dealing with the cravings. I don't just get hungry; I crave. Sometimes it is a particular taste -- salty, sweet, chocolatey -- and sometimes it is a particular food or dish -- lasagna, hummus, potato chips, fried rice, potato leek soup. When a craving for ravioli kicks in, I certainly could make them myself, but it is so tantalizingly easy to just pick up a package at the grocery store which is two minutes away from the house, especially now that more gourmet fresh varieties are as easy to come by as frozen standards and taste so much better.

Since I know that what I make usually tastes better than what I buy in the store (and I am a lot more aware of what is in it), the trick becomes finding those extra hours in the day for cooking and sensible grocery shopping.

Wendy Werris' Alphabetical Life

2010-03-14T09:20:00.003-04:00

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books by Wendy Werris was interesting enough to hold my attention because it is fun to read about the book business -- and a part of the book business beyond the retail world with which I am familiar -- but more than once, the author's style was off putting enough to make me want to put the book down and not pick it up again. She is a bit of a drama queen and comes across as rather self absorbed and narcissistic even for a memoir, which is by nature pretty much I, I, I from beginning to end.

Once I reached chapter five in which the author chronicles the heartbreaking story of her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure, however, I felt better about devoting time to reading this woman's story.

Chapter five is brilliant, but until that point the rest read like a gossipy, name dropping, guilty confession in which the author doesn't get around to confessing her most egregious sins, even though she is clearly dying to talk about them -- most notably her substance abuse, which gets mentioned and referred to but not detailed because -- as her editor or agent probably told her, or as she told herself, this is a memoir about the book business rather than dependence on one or more psychotropic substances.

There are moments when she sounds like an egomaniacal loon (to the point that it makes me wonder if she might have been high or stoned while she was writing the book).

She makes all sorts of references which I don't understand, so I am not sure if they are literary or cultural or both. Some of them don't even register as references until I am well into the next paragraph, or at all. Is it just another form of name dropping or trying to prove her depth of knowledge of ... I'm not sure what since I don't understand the references in the first place and don't don't find them intriguing enough to research. It's tempting to have somone else or even several someone elses read the book for me and tell me what I am missing and whether or not it adds anything to the story she is telling or the picture she is trying to paint.

Perhaps because of these references, I found myself wishing for clearer cultural, social and historical context, but instead she assumes that her readers were there too and have a lot of the same shared context that she does. The problem with that situation is that if I lived her life in her time, I might not have any interest in reading her story.

She mentions smoking pot several times, and maybe I am naive in letting myself think that meant that the smoking was also occasional, rather than an ingrained and regular habit -- like the smoking of tobacco cigaretts as everyone in the book seems to do. When she finds the Book of Mormon in the drawer of her night stand in search of a place to stash her pot, I found the drug reference almost superfluous, as if she felt the need to work it in somewhere, when I didn't think that she needed to mention it at all in the midst of her discussion of religious ambivalence in a Salt Lake City hotel.

Her mention of a "fondness" for cocaine was surprising, almost startling, but again it's at most a passing reference used to explain why she was able to bond with a co-worker who had participated in an addiction recovery program. She doens't go anywhere with it or do anything with it. It doesn't provide context or add to the story. She just brings up this major issue in her life and then drops it. She would have been better off to say something along the lines of "We bonded over mutual addiction recovery stories."

She has a reverence for books -- don't use dust jackets as book marks, don't put the book face down -- and a flagrant disregard for the treatment of her own body.

All that is missing is for her to tell me what books she read and what literary luminaries she met at Betty Ford or whatever rehab center or program she chose.

By contrast, the story about her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure didn't have any more to do with her career or the book business, but it was treated in depth and added to the overall story. She's brilliant when she isn't talking about herself.

She doesn't seem interested in telling a whole lot of success stories about herself. The embarrassments and humiliations and self doubts, meanwhile, are chronicled in excruciating detail. She barely gives herself any credit for being a success in a male dominated industry when they were all male dominated.

"I didn't see the sense in hating men and never would. ... I could deal with the 'chauvinism' of those early days in my career, perhaps because I had the good fortune to not take it personally. ... So I acquiesced to all of these gender-specific regulations, be they innuendos or direct instructions, and rarely felt that by doing so I was chipping away at my own soul. It was fairly easy for me to distinguish between what was business and what wasn't." (Page 99)

On the one hand, I love her self assurance, but on the other, I wanted her to recognize more clearly that she was helping shatter glass ceilings in her own way.

She has so many potentially fascinating things to say and stories to tell, and she keeps talking about drugs and alcohol (and cigarettes). I know. First I complained that she didn't talk about the drugs and alcohol enough, and now I am saying that it is too much. That's my point -- all or nothing. Pick what you really want to talk about, what story you really want to tell, and write it. Don't keep jumping around and telling parts and pieces of different stories.

The book lacks a central theme or cohesive timeline. If it had one or the other, I could forgive or understand the otherwise fractured nature of the memoir. Realizing that it is a story built on memory, however, I wonder how realistic an expectation is cohesion. Life, after all, tends to not happen in an orderly fashion, no matter how organized the participants, and recalling events from memory only encourages the chaos.

If the book becomes a bit less coherent towards the end as far as choice of material, it becomes better as far as the quality of writing and story telling. She writes about her parents, her move toward representing (I can't bring myself to take seriously a word like "repping" which she insists on using as her job description.) university presses rather than more mainstream publishing houses. Her story about the publication and promotion of The World According to Garp makes me want to read it. Her profiles of the booksellers she worked with and got to know personally over the years make me want to meet these people.

"We never know what may happen when we pick up a book to read. The turning of a page might actually change the course of our existence. There is something miraculous about this. Truth strikes at the very heart of books and the readers who turn themselves over with great trust to finding the essence of themselves." (Page 237-238)

Amen, sister.

Schizophrenic Knitting

2010-03-02T12:25:00.002-05:00

My knitting is in danger of becoming as schizophrenic as my reading.

Although I have tried to become a bit more disciplined in recent years, I have a tendency to start reading a book only to be distracted by the possibilities offered by another book, and I simply can't wait to finish one before starting another. I might repeat the process several times before settling down and making it all the way through a book. I also have a tendency to decide that I need something new to read long before I have finished reading the titles on my To Read and my To Read Soon lists and shelves.

Unless I am doing research on a specific subject, my reading is far more emotionally and circumstantially motivated than methodical and organized.

So it seems to be with my knitting projects these days.

Several months ago, I fell in love with the fabulous sweater coat on the cover of the fall issue of Interweave Knits. Purchasing the fabulous yarn practically put me in the poor house, but I was so excited about the project that I didn't care. After I worked on it for a while, I decided that I needed a smaller project for those times when I didn't want to knit lengthy rows of stitches.

I became obsessed with lace patterns for scarves for a while, but none of them really took, so for a while the only project I had on needles was the sweater. I have knitted some simple scarves with funky yarn, but those are done and were given away as Christmas gifts.

Projects get started and the yarn doesn't behave the way I expected, or I don't have enough, or I have too much, or the needles aren't the right size, and I end up ripping it out and rolling the yarn back up and putting it away.

The other day I decided that legwarmers were just the thing to make, so I found a free pattern that I liked online, and on my way home from work, I stopped at a local yarn shop and selected yarn and needles. Given that the project calls for fine gauge yarn and is knitted on fairly small needles, getting the project started was a bit frustrating. My hope that a small project wouldn't require quite so much concentration as the larger project dissipated quickly. It's also slightly discouraging because one of the reasons I wanted to learn to knit in the first place was so that I could make my own socks, and the process is similar to that of making leg warmers.

It is quite possible that all I really need is practice to get the hang of working with fine yarn on small needles, but in the meantime, I am in danger of being distracted by the Jellyfish Bag. Doesn't that look like fun?

I know. I know. I need to stick with the legwarmers. And I will. Perhaps the bag project can be my reward for completing the snuggly legwarmers. That sounds like a reasonable plan, don't you think?

*****

Author's Note: In case there is anyone out there reading who might take issue with my capricious use of "schizophrenic," while it may be unfortunate for you, these scribblings are my own which you may choose to read or not in an equally capricious manner as you see fit. The workings of my mind are certainly not for everyone.

Everyday writing

2010-02-28T20:14:00.001-05:00

In trying to put together or maybe even throw together a blog post or two about the last couple of books I have read, I remembered why it is important to write every day -- practice.

I do a lot of personal writing and stream of consciousness writing. I take lots of notes as I read books, scribbling thoughts, ideas and observations down as they pop into my head.

While these activities are reasonably good writing practice because they keeps the words flowing, I don't have to worry about pesky things like coherence and sentence structure, or even proper punctuation and spelling.

I occasionally forget that in order to turn the personal writing and the notes into something more fit for public consumption, actual, serious revision needs to be involved. Now, revision is much more of a welcome companion than it used to be, but that doesn't necessarily make it any less challenging or time consuming.

So, in the face of this reminder, posts about An Alphabetical Live and The Swan Thieves will have to wait a bit longer before they see the light of day on the blog.

Just so you know

2010-02-20T16:35:00.002-05:00

Because my tiny little world should know, and because he would never admit to it, I just have to say that I know the COOLEST geek on the PLANET!!

So there.

And, no, he will not help you with your geek-related quandries.

Sorry, but you're on your own.

A few notes on cooking and the joy of leftovers

2010-02-07T15:05:00.002-05:00

Cooking is such a rewarding activity, which is a grand and glorious thing because I keep hoping that it is rewarding enough to get me away from eating a lot of processed and junk food, although I am sure that I will retain a few vices, such as potato chips and Coca Cola, no matter what tasty creations I manage to come up with in the kitchen.

Yes, I understand that cooking can be time consuming, and it's hard to fit in around a busy schedule of jobs and lives and kids and kids' lives. Yes, I know that it can be difficult to find the energy after a long day at work to prepare a meal when it's so much easier to toss a frozen pizza in the oven, microwave a frozen dinner of some sort or order take out. I won't even suggest turning off the television, walking away from the computer and making the kids put down the video game controllers and cell phones to help you.

I get it. There are all sorts of reasons not to invest the time and effort in cooking, even if you do worry about what sort of additives and preservatives you might be putting into your body and the bodies of your family members. But if you can only cook every now and then, at least think about the possibility of making enough at once -- either many portions of a single meal or even multiple meals -- to have enough left over to, well, have leftovers, a surprisingly rewarding by product of cooking.

Some people love leftovers. Some people can't stand them but begrudgingly eat them rather than letting the food to to waste (or because their parents make them eat them). Some people refuse to eat them under any circumstances.

Me? I have learned to cook with the intent of leftovers. Of course, that achievement is really not too difficult because I am generally cooking to feed one or two people, and most recipes claim to result in four or six or eight servings. I suppose that I could do crazy things like halve the recipes, but for some reason I like to start with the proportions in the recipe. Well, sort of. Sometimes I actually end up with more because I don't have alternate plans for leftover ingredients, so it just makes more sense to throw them in, rather than risk letting them go to waste.

I make big pots of soup and freeze most of it so that I don't eat potato chips and Little Debbie snack cakes for lunch, or so that I don't go out for lunch and either spend money I don't really have or end up eating inexpensive but deadly fast food.

I love soups and stews because the portions are easy to freeze, as opposed to, say, steak and potatoes and green beans, and because the have a whole bunch of yummy ingredients cooked right in -- zucchini and potatoes and onions and beans and possibly some sort of meat -- and all of the ingredients happily melded together mean that very little seasoning, especially salt, is required.

Leftovers also offer proof that it wasn't my imagination that a recipe turned out well, and a little positive reinforcement never hurts.

Today, for example, I had another helping of the winter minestrone for lunch, sprinkled a bit of magic cheese (my term for a blend of parmesan, romano, asiago and I think one other cheese -- I buy giant containers of the stuff at a wholesale club, freeze smaller portions in ziplock bags, and put it in just about everything) over the top, and once again, yum!

Another sign that this cooking real food deal is becoming more of a regular, normal, natural part of my life is that I am getting better at keeping staples in the house, even if I did discover a lack of parsley while I was making the minestrones.

Someone brought us over a couple of nice steaks the other day. One has already been grilled and consumed, but I decided that the other one needed some sort of wine sauce with mushrooms, so over to the cookbook shelves I went and found a lovely recipe for flank steak with red wine sauce. (Yes, I know that the link takes you to a recipe for flat iron steak rather than flank steak, but I haven't a clue what the difference might be, and the sauce part of the recipe looks the same as the one I am going to use out of the book Giada's Family Dinners.) No mushrooms in this particular recipe (although I found a recipe for a roast with porcini mushrooms which I would like to try the next time I feel the inclination to cook a large piece of beef), and I have not yet decided if I might add some anyway, but the really nifty part is that I have all of the ingredients, including a can of tomato paste.

My next challenge is to find a way to either use up an entire can of tomato paste or to store it in some useful way so that I don't end up with open, molding cans of tomato paste in my refrigerator. Why is it that recipes call for so much less tomato paste than is in the can? And it's not as if tomato paste comes in giant cans. Well, maybe it does, but I only ever buy the little six ounce cans, and still most of it goes to waste. Gotta work on that.

I still need to start a compost heap somehow, but for the moment I am opting for the delusion that biodegradable matter in landfills somehow helps aid the process of breaking down those things which really aren't biodegradable at all.

Ingredients only and minimal waste. Those are the goals.

Edit to add: Maybe I was too enthusiastic. Maybe I was on too much of a roll. Maybe it's the stress of having to return to work tomorrow. Maybe it is simply that preparing steak is not my thing.

The zucchini was nicely steamed, but the mashed potatoes were too salty, the steak was overdone in some spots and underdone in others and tough all the way around. I forgot that preparing a steak in a pan requires WAY less oil than the recipe ever calls for.

The sauce that was supposed to go on top of the meat just tasted like red wine. I had a lot of trouble getting it to reduce for some reason. It ended up going down the drain.

Eventually I seemed to find a way to make the meal edible, but I was quite glad that I was only cooking for me.

I hope that the chicken in the crock pot turns out better.

Maybe another reason to enjoy making soup is that there is so much time to take corrective action as needed.

Whip It, good -- The Ugly Truth, not worth hearing

2010-02-06T20:09:00.001-05:00

In addition to going to the theatre to see Edge of Darkness, I rented two movies: Whip It, which was good fun, if a bit predictable, and The Ugly Truth, the stars of which are far too pretty for it to be ugly.

Whip It is a coming of age story in the context of southern beauty pageants and roller derby -- what's not to like?

Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavendar with the same open honesty that she played Juno, except that this time she (or the character) is not quite so self assured.

Her mother, played by the marvelous Marcia Gay Harden, is convinced that the only way out of the tiny Texas town of Bodeen is through beauty pageants. Not surprisingly, Bliss is less convinced, but she is looking for a way out, for a life different than that of her parents.

On a shopping trip to Austin to purchase unladylike combat boots -- an endeavor her mother actually endorses until she realizes that they are in a head shop -- Bliss is completely captivated by some roller derby girls who roll into the shop to drop off some flyers and then roll out.

Thus a secretive teenage rebellion is born.

There is the usual angst and conflict, but everyone ends up on the same page in the end. What makes Whip It different than so many other similar stories is that Bliss actually has friends to tell her that her rebellion is selfish and that she really should think about the consequences of hurting her parents by trampling their good intentions. So often the parents, especially the mothers, are cast as repressive ogres when really they mean well and are just trying to make up for mistakes made and chances not taken in their own lives.

In the opposite corner, what's not to like is The Ugly Truth, starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler.

Now, I have been a fan of Gerard Butler since Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, and Katherine Heigl is funny and charming as the neurotic Izzy in Grey's Anatomy and on the big screen in 27 Dresses.

Admittedly, I stopped watching after the first forty-five minutes, so maybe I didn't give the film enough of a chance, but I'm not going back.

The problem was not that I had a hard time accepting the "truth" (because I agreed with quite a bit of it, especially the point Butler's character, Mike Chadway, makes about a woman needing to be both the librarian and the stripper) but rather because I couldn't believe the lovely, professionally successful, chicly dressed Abby as someone in need of a makeover. There was not a chipped nail in sight, a hair out of place, or an article of clothing askew. She was not a shrinking violet with a confidence problem. She has her own house -- not an apartment or a room in her parents' house. She does treat her love/social life like another job, which can be intimidating, but her only real issue is an insistence on believing in an imaginary man (which isn't much of an issue in my world as long as you recognize that he is, in fact, imaginary, and the reality will never completely match the fantasy, especially if it is an enduring one).

Heigl's character takes a lot of the same approach as I do -- "What's wrong with comfort and efficiency?" she asks when Butler's character complains about her wardrobe -- but I had trouble being sympathetic to the slim, leggy blonde whose definition of comfort and efficiency is still far more fashionable and feminine than mine.

I'm not trying to imply that gorgeous people have it made when it comes to love just by virtue of their georgeousness, but they are a few steps ahead of the rest of us when it comes to making that all important first impression on those extremely visual male creatures. As Chadway, points out, "He doesn't fall in love with your personality at first sight."

I don't know how it turns out -- if she ends up with the orthopedic surgeon from next door who appears to be everything Abby has ever wanted or the crass loudmouth whose advice she is only taking to get him to quit ruining the morning news show she produces -- but there wasn't enough potential for transformation or growth by any of the characters to make me care enough about their "problems" to find out.

Feel free to watch the entire film on your own and let me know how wrong I am.

The Swan Thieves

2010-02-05T22:22:00.002-05:00

I am in love with this book. If The Historian is written in the same captivating, lyrical style, why have I waited so long to read it? Hype, most likely. Too much hype, and I either lose interest or have to wait until the furor has died down. That is what happened with the Harry Potter books, and that is what I am waiting for with the Twilight series.

Fifteen chapters and ninety-two pages into Kostova's second book, and I am having trouble deciding how much later I can stay up reading or if it is time to take a shower and turn in for the night.

So far, it is riveting and brilliant and all of those other superlatives that you are always afraid to believe when you read them in reviews.

I love the characters and the story and the hints at a related, possibly parallel, story from the past.

Rave, rave, rave.

I'm not quite brave enough to find out if all of the artists and paintings mentioned in the book are real, but I am going to try to dig out my art books tomorrow to read up a little bit on the artists and periods I do recognize. You know, for context. Because I am that kind of nerd.

From books and movies to food

2010-02-05T15:03:00.003-05:00

In the last few days I have written about movies and books (one of my goals for the year being to write about each book I read and film I watch), so I think that it is time for a food post.

Several days ago, when there wasn't much in the way of dinner suitable food in the house, I made a late night pilgrimage to the grocery store in search of sustenance. I wasn't much interested in cooking, so I was considering a terribly wholesome meal along the lines of Robust Russet Cape Cod potato chips and medium cheddar cheese, but as I made the short drive to the local supermarket, I remembered that the store has prepared meal offerings which might be a somewhat more nutritious and satsifying alternative.

I still came home with the cheese and potato chips, which will most likely be staples of my diet for the rest of my life no matter what health questions they may raise, but there was also a container of vegetarian minestrone (which I have heard might be a bit of a redundant term) in my handy dandy reusable grocery bag.

As with most prepared meals, the vegetables in the soup had been cooked to the point of dissolution into the broth, so I rummaged in the refrigerator's vegetable bin and came up with a slightly wilted carrot and stalk of celery as well as a presentable zucchini to chop up and add to the ready made concoction. A few minutes of simmering, and I had a tasty meal, with enough left over for lunch the following day.

Thus minestrone became my next cooking quest. The Italian cookbooks on my shelf didn't offer any recipes which made me say to myself, "This is it! I simply must prepare this recipe," so I wandered into cyberspace to see if I could find a more inspiring alternative.

My minimal exposure to the Food Network has made me a fan of Giada de Laurentiis, so I started with a Google search for Giada and minestrone.

The first result in the list was Winter Minestrone, and the second was Fish Minestrone with Herb Sauce.

Neither recipe was terribly complicated, and each sounded tasty, so I ended up trying them both.

Not surprisingly, I made a few substitutions and adjustments based on what I already had on hand. I used homemade turkey stock rather than beef broth or chicken broth. The winter minestrone got a half a cup or so of Merlot that I wanted to use up, and the fish minestrone got a about a cup of Riesling because I think that I have decided that most any non cream-based soup needs a bit of wine. It makes all of the flavors meld so nicely.

I had bacon, so I used that for the winter minestrone rather than buying pancetta, and ended up reducing the amount of olive oil while I was at it.

Snapper was not readily available for the fish minestrone, so I went with haddock, and I didn't have the fresh ingredients for the herb sauce, so I made a bit of paste with the dried counterparts and stirred it into the whole pot rather than doling it out with individual servings.

One substitution I did not make because I wanted to make the soup the same day that I bought the ingredients was dry beans for canned beans. I generally prefer dry beans even though they require soaking and cooking because I don't like the extra stuff in the can with the beans. The garbanzos for the fish minestrone weren't to bad, but the white kidney beans for the winter minestrone had a rather unpleasant slime on them from. Luckily a good portion of it insisted on sticking resolutely to the bottom of the can, so rinsing wasn't too much of an ordeal. Still. Ick. Dry beans and planning ahead hence forth.

Canned bean slime aside, the end result was two satisfying soups to chase away the winter chill.

Less successful, however, was the second attempt at the chocolate cake described near the beginning of The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.

The first attempt was on Christmas Eve. I dutifully followed the directions of baking for 35 minutes because of the added directive "Do not overbake." Everything looked fine when I took it out of the over ... and twenty minutes later, I had a crater which crumbled to dust when touched.

This time around, I baked the cake for about fifty minutes. It was still not nearly long enough, but at least the thing is edible this time.

Third time's the charm, right? Perhaps for Easter. Or the next time we have guinea pigs, er, guests. In the meantime, I think I shall continue to focus on cooking rather than baking, except perhaps for bread, which I seem to be able to produce with reasonable consistency.

State of Grace

2010-02-05T12:48:00.003-05:00

On the cover of The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint is a quote from Alice Hoffman: "No one does it better."

I am inclined to agree.

The setting this time around is the desert southwest rather than the now familiar Newford, so the flow isn't quite as smooth, but the story is still beautifully told, and the characters still draw you into their world and their lives.

I love the ease with which de Lint's characters come to accept the extraordinary. Sometimes it takes a while, but I find myself starting to believe as the characters do, and before I know it, everything makes perfect sense.

After all, the basic premise in all of his stories is the possibility (or even likelihood) that the world is simply not only as it appears, not only what you can see with your own eyes and what you have known and believed all of your life -- there is more to the mystery that is life. All you have to do is open your mind to the wonder of possibility.

Grace is adrift in her life after the death of her grandfather. He was the only family member to who she was really close, and he was the one to introduce her to the love of her life -- cars. Specifically vintage cars in need of restoration. She is still trying to regain focus and motivation when her own life is cut tragically short by a junkie trying to rob her neighborhood corner store.

Because she lived in an apartment building called the Alverson Arms, she doesn't end up in Heaven or Hell but rather an in between sort of Limbo centered around the apartment building and stretching outward for several blocks.

Everyone who is there died somewhere within the Alverson Arms' sphere of influence.

Once she accepts where she is and how she got there, Grace sets out to unravel the mystery of why with the help of some of her new neighbors and John, a man she meets on Halloween, one of the two nights of the year she is able to spend with the living.

John feels such a strong connection with Grace during the few hours they get to spend together before she disappears back to the alternate Alverson Arms world that he is determined to find her and see her again, and even finding out that she died a few weeks before they even met doesn't stop him.

Instead he learns as much as he can about her, what happened to her and what the possibilities might be so that on May Eve (Beltane) when she reappears, he is outside the corner store where she died, waiting for her with her restored '57 Ford Fairlane.

At that point, I was deeply involved enough in the story and the characters that when he was waiting for her with the car, I pretty much clapped my hands and cheered.

That's the magic and power of the storytelling of Charles de Lint. He brings you close enough to his characters that you can share their joy and their heartbreak, their hope and their confusion, and when you reach the end of the story, you wish them well on the next stage of their journey.

Of course, happily ever after isn't a realistic path for these two to follow, but you will have to read the book yourself to find out where their paths do lead.

The Mystery of Grace is a bewitching combination of old magic, new magic, tradition and good old fashioned faith, reminding the reader that, no matter what it is, you should have something you can believe in unconditionally.

Green (Arguably, this post contains spoilers.)

2010-02-05T11:34:00.001-05:00

Green by Jay Lake is an odd book.

I really wanted to like it, enjoy it, and lose myself in it, but while the protagonist resonated for me to some extent, I was never able to sink in as far as I wanted to.

As a small child, Green is sold ... not exactly into slavery, but into a life which she does not choose, and she spends the next ten years or so trying to maintain a connection to what little past she can remember and searching for a way back. When she is finally able to retrace her steps, she is not surprisingly disappointed, and discovers that she no longer belongs in this old life.

Once again adrift, she searches for purpose and meaning in her life. She wants to find a way to protect other children from suffering her fate. She wants to be independent and answer to no one. She does not want to belong to anyone or anything lest that person or organization be able to lay claim to her.

She wants to save the world, but only if she can do it without letting it lay any claim to her, so she travels and learns and drifts, but never really belongs and is unable to work within any particular structure or adhere to any particular set of rules for long.

As the years pass, she becomes a sailor, a cook, a lover, a friend, an assassin, a god killer, and a deity creator. She learns about independence and love and trust and betrayal. Fairly standard coming of age lessons.

Somehow and for some reason which is never really explained (at least as far as I was able to tell) she is a lynchpin and a catalyst to great religious and mythological change going on in the world around her, but no one, even those who would try to manipulate her to further their own ends, is sure what her role is really supposed to be.

As she journeys, Green does learn a great deal about herself and the world, bringing about important change in the process, but by the book's end, her journey is far from over.

I have not yet decided if I want to know more, but the ending of this particular chapter in Green's history is satisfying while leaving plenty of room for a sequel without creating a cliffhanger.

Walking the Edge

2010-02-03T15:40:00.001-05:00

Mel Gibson's latest film Edge of Darkness was not what I was expecting.

Since it is an action movie starring Mel Gibson, I was still expecting to see Mad Max or Martin Riggs. While they are definitely still in there, and time has been good to Mel, he is also definitely older and knows that every physical battle is going to take more of a toll than it used to. While Max and Riggs would just wade right in, Tom Craven watches a bit longer, plans a bit farther ahead, depends on the gun a bit more, and his accuracy has only improved with time and practice.

The silliness is gone as well. He's more serious, and any humor is more along the lines of sarcasm.

It looks good on him.

The plot follows a standard formula in that the bad guys take what matters most from the hero, but it is heartbreaking in a way and to a degree which I have never encountered in an action film. First his daughter dies a horribly violent death in his arms, and then throughout the rest of the film he hears her voice and sees her as a little girl, reliving his favorite father/daughter moments.

The special effects and stunts are there, of course, but they are not so over the top as to eclipse the plot or characters. Their relative subtlty allows for a greater degree of realism and makes the surprises more surprising when they happen, despite heavyhanded foreshadowing on the part of the musical score.

Ray Winstone is the only other actor I recognize, and he is brilliant as Darius Jedburgh, who adds an interesting subplot as he tries to decide which side he should be on. Everyone assumes him to be on the side of the bad guys, but he's not so sure, and he's not willing to just do their bidding without finding out for himself (or letting Craven find out) what the real story is. He adds a few more shades of grey in a genre dependent on black and white.

The bad guys would like to be as complicated as our hero and his potential accomplice, but it is only their protective web of lies which is complicated. The men themselves are simply about power. The fact that they could easily be real people -- a defense contractor and a senator -- who are part of our everyday existence makes them terrifying.

People in power think that it protects them, and to some degree they are correct, but if it insulates them too well and they depend on that protection, they can get complacent, or it can become isolating or even suffocating. They lose sight of what is going on in the world outside of their little sphere and either forget or refuse to acknowledge that there are consequences, and consequences don't apply only to other people.

The United States government wants its citizens (and as much of the rest of the world as possible) to be afraid of the terrorists, and maybe we should be, but the terrorists or hostile governments in other countries don't hate America because of its citizens. They hate it because of its government, which loves power just as much as they do. The U.S. government is just as capable of horrible things as any member of the so-called "Axis of Evil."

Edge of Darkness tells a story which could be unfolding right now, although the ending might not turn out quite the same. The first few minutes of the film eliminate the possibility of happily ever after, but there is closure and redemption, and, from a certain point of view, justice.

The Joy of Cooking (with Bacon Grease)

2010-01-31T00:45:00.002-05:00

In the film Julie & Julia, and in the original blog as well if I recall correctly, Julie Powell poses the question -- which I tended to assume was pretty much rhetorical -- "Is there anything better than butter?" Her clear implication is that there is absolutely nothing better than butter, and while I would love to agree so completely, I found myself answering to the contrary today.

"Bacon grease," I said with confidence.

The key difference, however, is that you can use large quantities of butter in recipes with relative ease. I can't imagine making pastry with bacon grease. But when it comes to such activities as frying an egg or a few potatoes or even sliced zucchini, bacon grease is decidedly the way to go.

I might even go so far as to credit bacon grease with the success of my almost omelette this morning. Eggs thoroughly whisked with a handful of feta cheese and poured into a hot greased frying pan. The flip wasn't a complete success, but it was much closer than I have managed in the past, and the feta melded into the eggs beautifully.

So little goes so far and generously gives whatever is cooked in it as rich, full, delicious flavor. A scant teaspoon coated an entire sliced zucchini in deliciousness. My mouth practically waters just thinking about it.

A bit of bacon, a bit of omelette and a bit of zucchini on my fork creates a delectable mouthful. (Somehow I have gone from being one of those people who eats every item on the plate separately to one who insists on combining as many of the foods as possible. I'm not quite sure how or when that change happened.)

Bacon isn't something that appears on the menu in my kitchen all that often, which may be part of the reason that it is so appreciated when it does. When I was cooking green beans for Thanksgiving, I decided to add a bit of bacon to them. I steamed the fresh snapped green beans for a few minutes, and while they were steaming I chopped up a few slices of raw bacon and threw them into a sauce pan. Once the bacon was mostly cooked, I drained off most of the fat and then threw the just steamed green beans into the pan.

At that point I realized how much easier it had been to cook the bacon in the sauce pan than it generally was to cook in a frying pan. There was less splattering. There was no need for flipping because all I had to do was stir the smaller pieces in the sauce pan. Chopped up and in a sauce pan is now how I cook bacon.

The one tiny drawback is that it can be deceptively easy to overcook the bacon using this method, but I have since learned to pay a little closer attention and all is well.

Of course, only a very little bacon grease can kill you if you don't combat the potential evil with exercise, but when I sit down and enjoy foodstuffs fried in bacon grease, I have a hard time believing that life could possibly get any better.

For the love of feline friends

2010-01-22T14:27:00.004-05:00

Cats have been a part of my life since the summer after my fourth birthday.

My mother came home from the local farmers’ market with two small fur balls who had the audacity to peer out at her from a laundry basket, and Mittens and Tinkerbell came into our lives.

Sadly, Tinkerbell the tortoiseshell had an unfortunate encounter with the large brown Boxer/Great Dane mix already in residence at the house on Westminster Place and was not with us long.

On the other hand, Mittens, the dapper gentleman in the gray and white tuxedo, was a member of the family for twenty-one years.

Since the arrival of those first two, many cats have passed through my life and the lives of my family and friends.

The current feline resident of my little house on Water Street is Minerva – a resplendent, although perhaps bordering on rotund, black longhair completely at peace with her surroundings and welcoming to anyone who might come to bask in her majestic cuteness. She’s only trying to look fierce in this picture.

In honor of furry family past and present, I feel compelled to share the following two postings. As a word of caution, the first is quite heartbreaking, and if you aren’t at least sniffling by the end, you are made of stern, inhuman stuff. On the bright side, the second link provides something of an antidote, so I invite you to read and enjoy and remember and perhaps hug your own furry friends a little closer.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/zoe.html

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/small-cat-story-and-tabs-to-close.html

Neil Gaiman and the New Yorker

2010-01-20T21:59:00.001-05:00

I seemed to be a bit obsessed with Neil Gaiman these days, and especially his relationship with Amanda Palmer. They're just so cute and in love and obviously crazy about each other. In a world of so much bad news, it's cheering to see. It doesn't hurt that Amanda Palmer is one of those crazy, smart, outgoing women I like to pretend that I could be.

I was thoroughly entertained by Neil Gaiman's most recent blog entry: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/01/roundup-of-hasty-strangeness.html

I especially liked the bit about Amanda Palmer and Guest, for a number of reasons. First of all, he is the "famous" one who actually got the invitation because of Coraline, and second because you can just tell that he absolutely loved being completely eclipsed by her.

Then there is their engagement photo: http://www.neilgaiman.com/extras/media/engagement.jpg

Finally, there is a New Yorker profile: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/25/100125fa_fact_goodyear

Someday I really am going to read Sandman in its entirety.

One Down, Fifty-one to Go

2010-01-16T22:15:00.002-05:00

I seem to have be having a love affair with France. I'm not quite sure where it started. I grew up watching Julia Child's television show The French Chef, but there wouldn't have been any reason to make a connection between Julia and Paris or France. It was about food and cooking, so perhaps what I really should be writing about is the love affair with food. How people cannot love and appreciate truly good food, carefully prepared and made with quality ingredients, is completely beyond me.

My choice of reading has a lot to do with it. There was A Pig in Provence and then The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, which actually took place in Paris. Then there was Julie & Julia, which was a lovely reminder of the wonder of Julia Child. I even read part of Julie Powells blog -- which led to the book and the movie -- and I should probably read the rest to see how the original turned out. I have not yet managed to read Appetite for Life and My Life in France, but they are, of course, on my list.

I have acquired a few volumes by M.F.K. Fisher and Judith Jones, and have even begun to read Secret Ingredients, the anthology of food writing from the New Yorker.

The animated film Ratatouille fits in here somehow, although I am not exactly sure how, and the film adaptation of Julie & Julia, which is also based on My Life in France, is truly delightful. I think that the film version of The Devil Wears Prada and the television series Highlander and The Raven have probably contributed to the Parisian infatuation as well.

I have even started off my reading new year with food and Paris.

I finally finished reading my first book of the year last Sunday, which is now dangerously close to a week ago, and I doubt that I am realistically close to finishing another in the next twenty-four hours or so to keep up the pace.

Not exactly a rip roaring start toward my annual goal of a book a week, but at least it's a start.

The book in question is The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious and Perplexing City by David Lebovitz.

The Sweet Life is part memoir, part travel guide, part cookbook, and I enjoyed all of it.

Fifty pages into it, and I fell in love with the city and the food all over again.

There is a deceptively simple recipe for chocolate cake which I have tried and failed at once, but I am prepared to try again.

Delicious recipes aside, I find the storage recommendations which Lebovitz includes at the end of his recipes to be the most thoughtful and helpful.

As one might have heard or expect, the French take food very seriously. "In France, calling yourself a chef carries a lot of responsibility. It's not just someone who tosses a piece of fish on the grill, drizzles it with olive oil, and tops it with a sprig of thyme. That makes one a cook, not a chef. A chef is someone who has the responsibility for composing menus, managing food costs, overseeing a staff, and most important, has usually risen through the ranks the hard way. Many begin scrubbing pots and pans in the dishroom when they can barely reach the sink, and no job is too menial." (pg. 245)

Lebovitz did not begin his career in food quite so early, but he has certainly paid his dues by working his way up and even overcoming a few of his fears.

If nothing else, I have discovered another reason to move to or at least spend some time in Paris -- if Lebovitz is to be believed, that is. Given the historic expatriate community of Hemingway and company, I am inclined to believe him when he says, "In a nation of readers, writers are revered in France lik pro gootball players are in America. And if you write about chocolate and ice cream [as he does] and make killer brownies, you're like the one who scored the winning field goal for the home team." (pg. 219)

Now all that remains for me to do is to write and publish something that the French care to read.

What I also think it might mean is that telling someone in France that writing is your occupation will be met with less skepticism and disdain than it often is in the United States, provided you can back up your claim, of course. All the more reason to keep practicing.

Sherlock Holmes

2010-01-14T17:55:00.004-05:00

I have long suspected that Sherlock Holmes is a scoundrel.

All I had to do was wait for Robert Downey, Jr. to come along and confirm my suspicions.

I have always wanted to believe that Holmes came by his knowledge through experience and experimentation rather than simply sitting in his study by the fire, wrapped in a smoking jacket, puffing on his pipe.

Downs’ Holmes is rumpled and frequently in desperate need of a shower and a shave. His rooms are clearly losing the entropy battle, although I am sure that there should be no doubt that their inhabitant knows where everything is. The dressing gown in which he shrouds himself is a thing of beauty – almost a character unto itself. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that it is being held together by duct tape.

Jude Law, on the other hand, is quite forgettable as Watson. A faithful and able sidekick to be sure, despite the smug, satisfied look glued onto his face, implying that he is actually the one who knows best, but it is the women who leave an indelible impression. (Perhaps it is their more colorful wardrobe, while Watson is forever wearing the same brown suit.) I believe that there is the suggestion of a limp in Law’s portrayal of the good doctor, but that may simply have been Law’s performance.

Lord Blackwood is a sinister enough villain, but it’s a little difficult to take seriously a man who insists on wearing a long black leather coat with wide lapels which makes him look like Count von Count from Sesame Street, a look accentuated by close cropped hair and protruding ears. Not being able to take this particular nemesis seriously doesn’t much matter, however, because it’s the man lurking in the shadows who actually deserves your interest.

The ladies round out the cast, nicely filling in the gaping holes left by the supporting men, and not solely by virtue of their fabulous wardrobes. Mary Reilly is brilliant in the minor role of Mary Morstan, Watson’s intended. She and the great detective get off to a bit of a shaky start, but once she realizes that the reservoir of Holmes’ emotion is as deep as her own, she no longer sees him as competition for her fiance’s affection.

Not having read all of Holmes’ adventures myself, Irene Adler is a woman I know almost exclusively by reputation, and Rachel McAdams does justice to that reputation. She is a delightful combination of ally and adversary. It’s not hard to see why they find their weakness in one another.

The plot moves along nicely, with sub plots and bits of back story to keep things interesting without overcomplicating them, but it’s all preparation. Consider Sherlock Holmes the setup for the main event. The boys of Baker Street are introducing themselves to pique your curiosity and whet your appetite. The next movie is where the real action is going to be, but it never hurts to have had a proper introduction.

There is some unconventional cinematography (perhaps meant to hearken back to a time when editing didn’t have the potential to be so seamless), and the soundtrack jangles to the point of being jarring. There is even a bit of a Keystone Cops feel to some of the fight scenes, but ultimately the film sticks to the tried and true formula of any Holmes story: the seemingly fantastic and impossible have a completely logical -- often ordinary and sometimes intricate -- explanation. All that needs to be done to solve the puzzle is for someone to be paying close attention to the facts rather than the distractions. Very close attention.

Martha, Martha, Martha

2010-01-10T19:14:00.002-05:00

Lots of people think that Martha Stewart is amazing, and they would like nothing more than to be her, or at least be able to all of the snazzy and creative things that she does.

Lots of other people think that Martha Stewart is evil, or at least can't stand her.

Either way, she inspires a lot of strong feelings and opinions.

I used to be closer to the latter line of thinking than the former. It wasn't so much that I thought she was evil as that so many of her ideas and projects struck me completely impractical. She elevated the rank of domestic goddess to absurdity.

Then a number of years ago, when there was still the faintest semblance of television reception in my household, I had a few opportunities to watch her show. It was about the same time that more of my reading started to be about food, and I realized that while a lot of her ideas and projects still definitely did not fit into my world in any way, a lot of what Martha is about is food because she is the domestic goddess and food is a necessary component to home making and entertaining. After all, at a dinner party, a fabulous meal can compensate for lackluster surroundings far better than fabulous surroundings can compensate for mediocre food. So I started paying closer attention.

She's no Julia Child, of course, but Martha has the advantage of appreciating and enjoying good food as well as being health conscious, and no matter how much I swear up and down that there are foods that I will never give up no matter how bad they might be for me, I ultimately would like to find a balance of food that is good for me (or at least not life threatening) while being the kind of delicious that stimulates the happy pleasure centers in my brain.

I bought one of her cookbooks. I started buying the Thanksgiving issue of Martha Stewart Living. Now -- due to, I must admit, collecting Coca Cola rewards points -- I am a subscriber to both Living and Everyday Food. (Every once in a while, one of my favorite vices finds a way to redeem itself.)

My first issue of Everyday Food only arrived the other day, and I have not yet had time to read it, but I have received three issues of Living so far, and I have devoured every single one.

The February issue has reminded me that making my own granola should be near the top of my cooking project list. The tempting recipes include Potato-Onion Frittata (which will amaze my mother since I used to refuse to eat onions) and Steamed Salmon with Avocado (which reminds me that I need to find out what fleur de sel is), and mushroom risotto. I want to try her Classic White Bread recipe (most likely the cinnamon raisin variation) just to see how it stacks up against other bread recipes I have tried.

The theme of the issue is, of course, Valentine's Day, which generally doesn't do much for me, but I find myself seduced by the Cloud Cupcake. It looks a bit deadly -- as in, even one might be too much -- and cupcakes are most definitely not my forte, but I am intrigued, curious and tempted all the same.

There is even a full page ad for Cabot cheese which has a ravioli recipe I want to try (because making my own ravioli is also on the cooking project list).

In somewhat the same vein, an article about remodeling a farmhouse has me wishing for the range (from http://www.wolf.com apparently), although not necessarily the extended version shown in the photograph.

Okay, if I am honest, the whole article has me wishing for a remodeled farmhouse of my own.

As with her show, and everything Martha, there are still plenty of her ideas which are beyond me, but they are fun to read about and look at, and occasionally I find something that I can actually use. What really keeps my interest is the recipes. I have to admit that I love the articles about food -- whether for simple meals or extravagant entertainment -- and the photographs have me devouring the recipes on the page.

There are those who may scoff, and there are those who may disagree with her methods, but I don't care what anyone says. The woman knows what she is talking about, and I intend to learn from her.

Musical note

2010-01-07T11:26:00.002-05:00

Every once in a while, a piece of music sneaks up and surprises me.

Today I was running a bit later than usual to work, so I got to hear a segment on the local classical music station called Keith's Classical Corner. (Keith in this case is Keith Lockhart, the current conductor of the Boston Pops.)

Today's featured composer was Pablo de Sarasate, who was also a violin virtuoso.

His Carmen Fantasy and Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) are his most famous works, but Keith (yes, we're on a first name basis -- isn't everyone?) selected Scottish Airs (which I can't seem to find online anywhere but which can be found on the cd Sarasate: Virtuoso Works for Violin).

The piece starts off fairly slow, and I found my mind wandering to other subjects, just sort of thinking about my day and trying to organize the chaos of my mind a bit. After a minute, this cheery little tune was filling my car, and I found myself happily smiling along.

It's a great way to start the day, especially if you aren't quite sure how it is going to go.

Because when I am not writing, I am knitting.

2010-01-06T20:00:00.001-05:00

I had to have a case of Coca Cola remind my that it is time for the winter Olympics. (Of course, being a bit of a Greek nerd, I still protest the games every two years. By definition an Olympiad is divisible by four. 2010 is not evenly divisible by 4. Therefore, 2010 is not an Olympiad. I'm sure that it's about money and whatever, and I don't even have television programming available in my house, so I really should be beyond caring and complaining.)

Then a co-worker and fellow knitter told me about the Ravelympics being held by the knitting networking site http://www.ravelry.com. In the Ravelympics, knitters cast on with the opening ceremonies and bind off for the closing ceremonies. Two weeks to complete an entire project.

The challenge for me would be two-fold -- complete the knitting project *and* keep up my commitment to writing, which means writing something new every day and revising something already written.

It has a bit of a NaNoWriMo feel to it. I just need to be careful about selecting a project I can realistically finish in two weeks. A fancy scarf should be doable. A sweater, not so much. It should be something challenging but fun.

Maybe it could even be something that I end up keeping. One of my favorite things about knitting is giving away the things that I make. People love hand knitted things. And they really love hand knitted things made specifically for them. It's the coolest thing. Even complete strangers love hand knitted things, hopefully as much as I love making them.

A friend of mine and I recently had a conversation about doing things for other people simply because it brings them pleasure and how the simple act of doing something pleasurable for someone else brings the doer pleasure. That's a lot of pleasure, don't you think?

More people really should try it, even and especially if it isn't a grand gesture. Who knows, you might even find something new to enjoy in the process.

I resolve to be resolute ... and focused.

2010-01-04T23:34:00.005-05:00

I'm generally not much for New Year's resolutions. I procrastinate enough as it is, so limiting myself to waiting for one particular day of the year to come around so that I can make positive changes in my life seems to me to be asking for trouble.

If you want to change, start right now, I say. Seize the day with a barbaric yawp and all that. And if it doesn't work out anywhere near as well as you planned, well, then start again tomorrow.

The last several months of last year really beat the snot out of me in a number of ways, however, so I am going to take this opportunity to pretend that a new year really does make a difference and start over, start fresh. As a friend of mine put it, not so much wiping the slate clean as putting it in the back of the garage and starting an entirely new one.

Who's with me?

I thought so.

I don't know what you all have planned, but I am going to be proactive, assertive and have a positive attitude, perhaps with a healthy dose of focus thrown in for good measure. I am going to embrace my role as the office ambassador in my place of employment as I work with clients and all of the different internal departments. I often have a pretty clear view from the middle, and I am going to see it as an asset rather than a liability and a source of stress and aggravation. I'm going to see if I can finally get my work and my life to get along, or at least come to an uneasy truce. I am going to balance my personal goals and aspirations with my responsibilities -- as soon as I figure out what my personal goals and aspirations are.

That's a nice, short list, right? Nothing challenging there. I think that I should add a reminder to go back and read the list at the beginning of every month, or whenever I recognize that I am drifting from my charted course.

While there is something to be said for job satisfaction, I suppose, I learned years ago that relying on something I truly love to earn my living makes me not love it so much anymore. Therefore if I am going to pay my bills and do things I love, I need to make space in my life for the things I love, the things that make me feel good, and the things that are good for me.

Right now, reading and writing and knitting and cooking are the things that make me really happy, and not just because they help me escape from everyday stress and responsibility.

Even if I have no plans to turn writing into a career, it is a passion of mine, and I need to take it more seriously and devote more time to it. NaNoWriMo taught me that lesson (and proved to me that I could do more than just scribble in a journal, occasionally post to a blog and let a web site languish). Starting a private blog for a friend of mine is reinforcing the lesson.

Revision is starting to have a place and a purpose in my world, and revision makes for better writing. I'm not revising the novel just yet, but it's definitely on the project list. In the meantime, smaller pieces are getting more attention.

After a while, maybe I can eventually stop being afraid of exposing my writing to the outside world and see what happens.

I have given up the web site I never really built because I ended up making the project so complicated in my head that it actually kept me from actually writing, either for it or for any other project I might want to work on or even start. Besides, why pay for a web site when I can blog for free? I may come back to the web site idea some day, but not until I have the material.

Therefore, with one failing project put out of it's misery, I need to come up with a new one, right?

One of the crazier notions I have had over the last few days is the Million Word March.

A million is a thousand thousand. At the rate of a thousand words a day, it would take me a thousand days to write a million words, which works out to approximately thirty-three months.

Those calculations got me thinking about how much writing I do and the kinds of writing I do -- for work and for pleasure -- and I started to wonder if I could write a million words in a year.

Success in this endeavor would require that I write two thousand seven hundred and forty words a day. Every single day. For an entire year.

I started looking around for a little perspective and point of comparison.

NaNoWriMo was all about word count. The goal was to write one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words a day every single day for a month to end up with a total of fifty thousand. I had trouble with the every single day part, but getting a thousand or so words down at a time turned out not to be as much of a challenge as I expected, especially when I was really on a roll and the creative juices were flowing. I tended to write madly on the weekends to make up for my lack of discipline during the week. I think that my biggest day was about seven thousand words. Maybe eight.

One of the coolest things about NaNoWriMo was that the closer I got -- probably about the time I hit the forty thousand word mark -- the more motivated I was to finish and the higher a priority the project became. It was the first time in a long time that I had any sort of real focus.

Also in the course of November I read a piece of advice which recommended writing three hours a day, six days a week. Not reading or researching or revising. Only writing. Strictly new content. Could I write almost three thousand words in three hours? Quite likely. Could I do it every day for a year? Not so sure about that one.

So am I going to write a million words this year? I doubt it. What I am going to do is write more, and not only quantity. I'm going to spend more time writing with focus and purpose and improve the quality as I go. Give myself little assignments and write multiple drafts. Then I might rewrite the whole scene from a different point of view. Begin exploring the realm of possibility.

Where will your possibilities take you this year?

Happy New Year! - Here's to starting again

2010-01-01T10:14:00.001-05:00

I have always found New Year's to be a rather arbitrary holiday, but I suppose that time ought to be marked in some fashion if we are ever going to manage to keep track of it, even though I am quite sure that it couldn't care less about being kept track of.

Also, it gives me an excuse to shamelessly steal a New Year's wish from Neil Gaimain and repost it here:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

The full entry, with references to previous entries, is here: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/wishes.html

And so, with the first decade of the 21st century out of the way, on to the next!

"Writing is writing."

2009-11-29T18:12:00.003-05:00

Last night I became a NaNoWriMo winner for the first time. For those of you not in the know, to accomplish this feat I had to write a fifty thousand word novel in thirty days.

At first glance, such a task might seem intimidating at the very least, and quite likely impossible, but only if you take the challenge too seriously. The focus is the fifty thousand words much more than the novel. The exercise is not about editing and quality. Those things can be dealt with on December first. November is all about writing.

It was definitely a challenge, but also definitely worth it. I highly recommend the experience, even and especially to people who think that they cannot possibly write a novel. If you have or ever have had a story to tell, you can write a novel. Lock up your internal editor and whatever naysaying little voices might be in your head and write. Scribble madly. Type with two fingers. You could probably even dictate it into some sort of recording device and then transcribe it later. Whatever method works best for you is the one you should use.

For me, the word count part wasn't too difficult -- five hundred or a thousand words at a time weren't difficult to come by, and I think that I might have my journaling habit to thank for that ability -- but the writing every day was definitely a challenge. My little progress chart shows big spikes on the weekends and pretty much flatlines during the week.

Now that I have passed the magical fifty thousand word mark, I would say that as a whole, the project is about half written, as in I am about halfway to a true rough draft. You see, another beautiful feature of NaNoWriMo is that goal is not necessarily to write a complete novel.

I have interesting characters, engaging conversation, lots of back story and what might be called extensive exposition -- I need to learn how to say just enough that the reader can draw his or her own conclusions without me spelling everything out on the page -- strung together in a not terribly coherent manner. The plot part of the project is decidedly lacking. Also, about halfway through, as I was struggling to get the plot to really take off and go somewhere, I realized that I had committed what is arguably one of the cardinal sins of fiction writing -- I didn't start in the middle of the action -- so the first big chunk of writing really needs to go all together. It's not a bad beginning. It's just boring and not very active. The material can even be used later in the story as a sort of flashback or memory, but it doesn't belong at the very beginning.

I like the first sentence, but it doesn't, to paraphrase a quotation which I cannot remember verbatim and which I cannot readily find online, grab the reader by the throat, sink its thumbs into the jugular and refuse to let go. (Somebody famous said something like that, but I cannot remember who.)

Lots of scenes are sketched out as ideas. There are lists of questions and options. There are notes about things to research for accuracy. I don't think that I have left any huge plot holes yet, but there will be plenty of time for such things I am sure.

Motivation for some of the characters is proving to be a bit tricky as well. I know what I want to have happen, but I need a reason for the characters to do what they are doing.

I think that I have an ending, but the climax needs development.

Some events and ideas are the products of unintentional influences (read: stolen from all of the books I have read in my lifetime) for sure, but I have at least one idea that I think is completely my own.

I'm going to try to get a few more scenes and ideas written down before the official deadline of midnight tomorrow, and then I need to figure out how to take it apart and revise it. In looking forward to that revision process, I am investigating some of the references to "novel writing software"I have seen on the NaNoWriMo forums. Silly me, I always thought that novel writing software was a word processing program.

It turns out that there are plenty of novel writing software packages out there, but I think that they might be more complicated than what I want. They seem to be more about breaking down a big document into smaller pieces so that you don't have to work on the whole thing at once. Some of them almost seem to inspire laziness or complacency (as so much of technology does -- I think I might know all of two or three phone numbers anymore thanks to the contact list in my mobile phone) by keeping track of characters and plotlines for you. Almost seems to defeat the purpose if you ask me, but I haven't really tried it yet.

Some of them are even recommended based on the sort of book you plan on writing. If you want to write a fantasy novel, try this package. If you want to write a mystery, then this one is the way to go. Call me crazy (and plenty of people do), but the way to learn how to write a mystery novel is to read lots and lots of mystery novels. Read good ones and bad ones. Read the classics and contemporary offerings. Decide which ones you like. Decide which ones work and which ones do not. Don't let a software program determine the structure of your book. You've got a brain that is perfectly capable of performing that function, I promise. I would even go so far as to say that it was designed to do your thinking for you.

All I really want is the feature of the truly antique versions of WordPerfect which used to ask every time if you wanted to save over the previous version of the document. I would like an easy way to preserve multiple drafts so that if I chop out big pieces that I decide might be useful or do extensive rearranging that I decide I don't like, I can go back to the previous version and start again.

I'll have to experiment and find a system that works.

In the meantime, more writing because, "Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." (E.L. Doctorow)

P.S. Reading books about plot devices and character development (not to mention all of the guides to finding an agent and getting published) is also not writing, so put them down and keep writing.

The purpose of libraries

2009-10-06T09:14:00.001-04:00

"Library collections don't imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life."

Read the rest: http://jaslarue.blogspot.com/2008/07/uncle-bobbys-wedding.html

Pink Hair for Hope

2009-10-01T22:24:00.002-04:00

While I am all in favor of finding a cure for breast cancer, I am not always so much a fan of the pink everything everywhere.

I saw a banner for this promotion on the sign of a local salon, and thought, "Now that is an awareness promotion that makes sense!!"

Cookies and pens and instant drink mix might not have much of a connection to the disease, but hair certainly does.

Having been a chemotherapy patient (about thirty years ago at this point and not for breast cancer), I was proud of my baldness. (Of course, I was four, so having my hair fall out wasn't particularly traumatic.) My mother even had t-shirts saying "Bald is Beautiful" made for family and friends.

I wasn't much for wigs or hats (again, I was four), and no one shaved their head in solidarity, but pink hair, or a pink hair substitute might have been fun.

So add a little flair to your hair!!

(I think I just might. I need a haircut anyway.)

Banned Books Week

2009-09-29T21:54:00.001-04:00

Apparently Banned Books Week is no longer necessary:http://tinyurl.com/ybzz277

Or is it? http://tinyurl.com/ydohgyo

Sex and violence (so prevalent in movies, music and, well, the daily news) top the list of reasons why a book is unsuitable: http://tinyurl.com/ybbfky5

Read a banned or challenged book this week. Find out what the fuss is all about. You might learn more than you bargained for.

A president armed for a battle of wits

2009-09-20T13:50:00.001-04:00

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_09/020025.php

What is wrong with people???

2009-09-20T10:12:00.001-04:00

http://dreamhaven.livejournal.com/97123.html

Times are tough pretty much all the way around these days, but wouldn't it make more sense for people to help one another out in any little way they can (sometimes it is the smallest gestures which are the most meaningful) rather than hurt one another?

Maybe it is supposed to be survival of the fittest (or the most devious? or the most desperate?), but mutual relationships benefit everyone.

Such is my naive hope for the day.

I want to go! I want to go!

2009-09-20T08:51:00.001-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/arts/design/20kenn.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimesbooks

Food for the masses

2009-09-13T23:08:00.001-04:00

Since I have moved into a real house with a real kitchen (though neither is terribly glamorous or state-of-the-art), I have been trying to eat less pre-prepared, processed food (though I still have a weakness for frozen pizza and potato chips) and do more of my own cooking. The effect that sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen for a living has had on my body in the last two and a half years also has me trying to eat less junk.

Having a madly tomato-ing (to the point that I have no idea what I would do if there were more than one), gargantuan tomato plant outside providing me with an abundance of wonderful, fresh tomatoes every day makes me want to grow more of my own food and patronize more local farmers.

In the various and sundry food reading I have done in the last year or so, I have been waiting for someone to summarize what I think really needs to be done to get people to really eat (and not just consume) food. I always knew that the trick was implementation. How to get good food, real food to everyone and not just those who can afford it. After all, I have what I consider to be a decent paying job, even living as I do in a part of the country with a dauntingly high cost of living, and I frequently feel as if *I* can't afford it.

Today, I read the following paragraph from Julie Powell's Julie/Julia Project blog, and she summed it up for me clearly and concisely with some lovely real world examples, so I thought I would share.

"It seems to me – and I've been thinking about this quite a bit – that any revolution in food and agricultural has to be two pronged. Yes, by all means, extol the virtues of the artisanal this and organic that, patronize the small farmers and the renegade cheese-makers, if you can afford it. But the goal is to make good food available toeveryone, isn't it? And that means doing more than opening a hoity-toity restaurant. That means lobbying and teaching and bringing the food to Mohammed, and otherwise getting your hands dirty. Get the peach to the inner city kids killing themselves with Krispy Kremes. Get the peach to the 22-year-old mother of three living off welfare checks, dependent on the Bargain Market in the strip mall. Do that – and I don't know how you do – and you've really got something. "

--Julie Powell in her blog about the Julie/Julia Project on March 18th, 2003. The complete entry is here if you care to read it.

I post this link exclusively for Yoda.

2009-09-03T12:29:00.000-04:00

http://www.thetoyzone.com/2009/blog/20-outstanding-examples-of-sci-fi-and-fantasy-origami/

In case there are any writers out there reading

2009-08-30T14:09:00.000-04:00

I have become rather enamored of the no-nonsense brilliance of Lilith Saintcrow.

http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal/2009/08/friday-five/

While I suppose that I should be embarrassed to admit that I have not in fact read any books by this woman (although there is at least one in my library waiting to be read), I feel the need to tell whoever might venture into my microscopic space in the blogosphere that I enjoy reading her blog immensely, for her style and for the information contained therein.

She talks quite a bit about the writing life and work, as writers tend to do, I suppose, and while she may not always be saying something new and previously unheard of, her perspective makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm not sure that it is a revolution, but I think that it's good news.

2009-08-29T09:07:00.001-04:00

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

The article addresses volume and variety rather than quality and technique, but the point about audience and tone is key.

"What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all."

A moment of sisterly solidarity

2009-08-18T16:03:00.001-04:00

http://ow.ly/ksrn

I know that it only scratches the surface as far as the mind boggling level of need in so many parts of the world (sometimes even including the United States), but you have to start somewhere, right?

Must one be a writer to catwax?

2009-08-18T15:03:00.001-04:00

http://catwaxing.blogspot.com/

Reading while riding in NYC

2009-08-18T12:54:00.002-04:00

http://ow.ly/krPV

There are a number of organizations out there with similar goals, but it always makes me happy to hear (read) about people finding ways to share books.

Today's writing advice

2009-08-14T12:30:00.001-04:00

Courtesy of Philip Pullman.

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/authorstudio.html

Julia

2009-08-09T20:10:00.006-04:00

This afternoon, after somehow wrangling a file cabinet upstairs from the porch where it has been patiently languishing since last December, I decided that it was a good day to go to the movies, so I took myself off to see Julie & Julia, a film about a woman who decides to cook her way through 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year and also about the woman who inspired the project (and co-wrote the revered cookbook).

Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci play Julia and Paul Child with enthusiasm, respect and fearlessness. Especially Meryl Streep. You can tell she just embraced Julia's larger than life, enthusiastic approach to everything and didn't worry about anything else. Amy Adams is delightful as Julie Powell. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who will wish for more Julia and less Julie, but I enjoyed the balance.

The film had all of the necessary elements of a good film. I was transported to another time and place for two hours, and in the process was made to think and feel -- the hallmark of good art.

I laughed at Julia's feet hanging off the end of a too short bed, the ill-fated hat making session, the determination which resulted in a mountain of chopped onions (and Paul's reaction), and, of course, the lobsters.

The scene where Julia gets the letter from Dorothy saying that she is pregnant was utterly heartbreaking and brought tears to my eyes.

I worried about their future as Paul is investigated by Senator McCarthy.

When the editor at Knopf discovers Beouf Bourginon, I could practically taste the delicious recipe, and I had a sudden inclination to rush home and prepare it myself.

Oh, and the film definitely made me want to live in Paris. And New York.

If there was any flaw it was that the movie had to be movie sized and could only hold so much detail.

When I moved into my little house on Water Street, one of my great sources of excitement was the kitchen -- a *real* kitchen, with counter space, a dishwasher and a gas stove. The presence of the gas stove especially went a long way to influencing the purchase of the house. For (I believe) six years prior, my cooking had to be done on an electric stove and in an electric oven ... and with zero actual counter space. Any preparation had to be done on a small cutting board on the stove top, on the ever-cluttered kitchen table, or on top of the washer. And by washer I mean clothes rather than dish.

I grew up in a kitchen with a gas stove, and it always seemed to me to be the only way to go. My general stance on most subjects of preference is "to each his own," but why anyone would actually want to cook on an electric stove is quite beyond my capacity to understand. (But then I tend to avoid using the microwave, so I'm sure that plenty of people would argue that I'm not quite right in the head myself.)

Lack of counter space + electric stove = not much in the way of serious cooking.

When I did cook, meals often didn't turn out quite right, and I was never quite sure whether to blame the electric stove and oven or my relative lack of practice under less than user friendly conditions. One notable exception was the Thanksgiving turkeys, which did tend to be a success, even if the stuffing was not. Perhaps I will have to see what Julia says about stuffing a turkey. (This year I have delusions of preparing a turducken, but I think that they may have to remain delusions a while longer.)

Many of my cookbooks were stashed away or scattered haphazardly about the apartment because I didn't have a proper, central location for them. In the house, I have cleared out a small bookcase, and it houses the cookbooks almost perfectly. It's in the living room rather than the kitchen, but at least they are close by, and it's not as if I generally need to use more than one at a time.

At about the same time that I was looking to buy a house, I started reading about food -- in fiction and non-fiction -- and one of the first books I read was Julie & Julia. Reading Julie Powell's various (mis)adventures in the kitchen with Julia encouraged me to keep reading about food and reminded me how much I loved Julia. I have fond memories of watching The French Chef on on Sunday afternoons, and I remember Mastering the Art of French Cooking sitting alongside my grandmother's recipe box in my parents' kitchen.

My parents no longer live in the house where I grew up, however, so when I asked my mother about the book -- technically books, I suppose, since it is a two-volume set -- I learned that it had been among the donations when they moved to what I still refer to as the "new house," even though they have lived there at least half a dozen years now ... maybe even as many as ten. (I could sit here and figure it out, but chasing after such details would only detract from my little story, and I think that the shaded ambiguity lends an air of mystery.)

Apparently, I was distressed enough by the knowledge that my parents no longer had Julia in their library that I blocked the information from my memory, causing me to repeat the question on at least one more occasion, and though it wasn't really meant as such, my mother took the hint and tracked down a nice copy of the fortieth anniversary edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and had it sent to me. It sits proudly on the shelf next to a rather battered (I would like to think well loved and used) copy of Simca's Cuisine.

I have not yet cooked my way through Julia's extensive offerings, but I do consult her advice from time to time.

I have been labeled as "adventurous" in the kitchen, and as I become more so -- which I think I shall be once I truly find the courage of my convictions to flip a potato pancake or an omelette in a frying pan -- I am sure that I will spend more time with Julia and Simca.

While the film is still fresh in my mind, however, I am sitting here with copies of Appetite for Life and My Life in France next to me on my desk, trying to decide which one to read first. I am likely to start with My Life in France because I would like to hear more from Julia in her own words. I know that the book was written with the help of Alex Prud'homme, who is her grand nephew, I believe, but based on her introduction, I am quite convinced that he was mostly the means for telling her story, almost as if he played the role of pen and paper, or perhaps typewriter. (Somehow I can't possibly see Julia sitting in front of a computer.)

Julie Powell did sit in front of a computer, however, so the Julie/Julia blog might be the real place to start, rather than rereading Julie & Julia as I had briefly conisdered doing.

I'll let you know how it goes. And perhaps once I have spent some more time with Julia, I will finally delve into the works of another venerable foodinista -- M.F.K. Fisher.

Edit to add:. In the end, I did decide to start with Julie's blog. If you share the inclination, start here.

Edit to add (on January 10, 2010): Now that Julie & Julia is available on dvd, I can watch the film almost any time I care to, and one of the times I cared to was this evening while I had the house to myself for a while. What I really love about the movie -- about the story of each of these women actually -- is the reminder that success doesn't come from talent so often as it does from hard work and perseverance. Find a way and the time to do what you love. Work at it and keep working at it, and success will follow. Maybe not millions of dollars and international fame, but success in the form of personal growth and satisfaction. Such is my wisdom on this particular Sunday evening.

Waiting to be convinced -- one way or the other

2009-07-28T11:12:00.002-04:00

In my mind, the “phenomenon” of the Kindle has become synonymous with a train wreck which I cannot help but watch. Any in depth article I read impresses me only for its indecisiveness.

Last night, Twitter took me to this article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker) from the New Yorker, and I reached the end of it completely baffled as to whether or not the author was in favor of the device or not.

Nicholson Baker lists plenty of reasons to either stick with the tried and true paper, ink and glue version or to choose another gadget, but in the end, he succumbs as the Kindle performs as advertised and “disappears.”

I already know that I will not be purchasing a Kindle. Nor will I add one to my Christmas list. I would like the opportunity to spend about a week playing with one (and such an experience might change my mind), but all I can think of is how many real books (especially used books) I could purchase with that much money and then sell to or share with others.

The list of books which are *not* available gives me pause. To quote Baker ‘There is no Amazon Kindle version of “The Jewel in the Crown.” There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no “Flaubert’s Parrot,” no “Remains of the Day,” no “Perfume,” by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s “In Country,” no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no “Swimming-Pool Library,” no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no “World According to Garp,” no “Catch-22,” no “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” no “Portnoy’s Complaint,” no “Henry and Clara,” no Lorrie Moore, no “Edwin Mullhouse,” no “Clockwork Orange.”’

The simple fact that it is electronic is also a significant deterrent, and not simply because I tend to be a Luddite at heart. I pay the phone company an extra five dollars a month essentially as insurance against myself. If I lose the phone, or drop it in a puddle, or step on it, or some other catastrophe befalls it, I will not have to pay to replace it. A Kindle living with me would be exposed to the same sort of risks, and it costs at least twice as much as my phone.

I just imagine the heartbreak of losing hundreds of books because something happened to the Kindle.

Paper books are much sturdier, heartier creatures and can withstand an impressive amount of abuse.

Maybe that is another part of my suspicion – I consider books (especially the ones I really enjoy) to be almost living creatures. They are my friends and companions who see me through the best and worst of times. Can an electronic device really inspire the same depth of feeling?

I highly doubt it, and for most of his article, Baker seems to agree. I can’t help but wonder what caused him to waiver in his judgment. It makes me curious to find out, but not for $300.

The supposed ease and accessibility – start reading an impulse purchase in under a minute – is tempting to be sure, but I can’t help thinking that this might be a case of something being too good to be true.

For the present, I shall retain my skepticism.

The Pillars of Creation by Terry Goodkind

2009-07-26T23:08:00.004-04:00

For some reason I thought that The Pillars of Creation was separate from the epic Sword of Truth saga, and arguably it is in the sense that the primary characters in the previous books play secondary, offstage roles for the majority of this installment. I have not read the previous six, and I am not planning to read the subsequent four, but I can't help wondering if this book is meant to be a sort of transition or intermission to give the author time to figure out what really comes next.

I'm not much for the epic fantasy sagas, and if this book is representative of the series as a whole or even the sub-genre, it is a good reminder of why.

It takes the author more than thirty pages to say that two characters escaped the palace. And it is not even a particularly hair-raising escape. The hard part -- getting out of the dungeon -- was already done.

Lots of repetition and lots of words to say not very much made the book an easy, if somewhat tedious, read.

On the bright side, the ending (the last three chapters or so) was quite satisfying, mostly because so much happened and came together in such a short period of time, in comparison to the previous seven hundred pages. If the rest of the story had been a little (okay, a lot) tighter, however, then the ending might have seemed a little too convenient and contrived.

I'm quite sure that it sets the stage nicely for the next book, but I have too much else to read to find out.

Why I love the Right Wing

2009-07-20T15:19:00.001-04:00

The entertainment value.

If I wanted to be a bit more accurate, I could make the heading, “Why I love loud public figures.” That phrasing would probably make more sense, but I am going to pick on the Right Wing because, as I recall, that is where Pat Buchanan hangs out.

Anyway, I came across the following quote:

"With regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops."
-- Pat Buchanan

Am I the only one who doesn’t see how this is the business of anyone but the Palin family (and possibly the readers of People magazine)? But then minding one’s own business isn’t any fun for loud public figures who spend an inordinate amount of time being concerned about whether or not anyone can hear them.

And then there is the heavy dose of irony in the statement. Terminating a pregnancy is terrible, sinful, should be illegal, etc., but drowning the kid who knocked up your daughter (or who was perhaps seduced by your daughter) is acceptable.

Killing is bad unless it is in the name of God or family honor?

Do I have that right?

Or have I grossly misinterpreted the statement so that I can twist it to strengthen my own ill-informed, misguided liberal bias?

Squishy green stuff

2009-07-20T11:53:00.002-04:00

Although I am generally not much of a fan of guacamole (to the point that I am not even entirely sure how to spell it properly), Martha’s recipe -- Mix juice 1 lime, 4t crushed garlic, 5 chop scallion, 1C chop cilantro, 1 mince jalapeño + 3 ripe avocado – intrigues me.

Perhaps garnished with tomato and black olives.

Nom nom nom. Now I’m hungry.

It's nice to know that I am not alone.

2009-07-19T21:38:00.002-04:00

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/07/17/entertainment/e031338D77.DTL

The titles listed here make for a fairly short list, and urban fantasy stretches far beyond vampires.

Take Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, for example, which was one of my first forays into the realm of urban fantasy, and while there are magical beasties aplenty, I don't recall vampires. I might even go so far as to say that cautious parents would deem it "safe" for teenaged girls to read, although I do have a hard time applying "safe" as a description to almost anything having to do with the printed word. I follow the fairly basic analogy that good art (in this particular context, good writing) should do two things: make you think and make you feel. Thoughts and feelings are dangerous and wonderful things at pretty much any age (and arguably more so in those treacherously formative teenage years).

I second the vote for Holly Black's stories.

I am also going to add Charles de Lint. Yes, he's a man, but given the wonderful female characters he writes to life (teenaged and adult), he deserves a vote of solidarity.

The article focuses mostly on the teen audience.

Once they have grown up a bit, I would suggest the adventures of Jaz Parks and Cat Crawfield. Perhaps even the first few installments of the tumultuous life and loves of Anita Blake.

There are more worth mentioning, I am sure, but I need some time to let them surface in my mind.

Fifteen books in fifteen minutes

2009-06-22T21:51:00.003-04:00

In response to http://ow.ly/fyck

1. The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

4. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

5. Agyar by Steven Brust

6. War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

7. Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

8. A River Runs through It by Norman Maclean

9. Taste of Power by Elaine Brown

10. The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

11. The Iliad by Homer

12. The Odyssey by Homer

13. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

14. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

15. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

The first four were easy, and I am willing to bet that if I make another list in ten years or five years or even one year, half of the books on the list will be different, depending where I am in my life. I am a big believer in finding and reading the right book at the right time. Sometimes it is something which complements events or my state of mind and even provides insight. Sometimes it is to escape into something completely different or to find a heroine who handles her problems the way that I would like to be able to handle mine.

Fifteen minutes after having completed my list, I find myself wishing that I could add more, but I can't decide what to replace.

I read The Power of One when I was seventeen and have never looked back. "Little beat big, if little smart. First with the head, and then with the heart." Words I try to live by each and every day. For years, a sterling silver charm of boxing gloves hung from a chain around my neck. Some days it still does, when I need a little something extra to face the world. I have given away no fewer than half a dozen copies, mostly to the men who have wandered in and out of my life. As far as I know, only one finished it. Maybe two. It's the book that says the most about me, from a philosophical perspective.

To Kill a Mockingbird became a part of my life even earlier. For some reason, I get a lot of comfort from this book, and I tend to read it when my life is chaotic. I have read it at least four times. Miss Maudie's house always burns down. Atticus always defends Tom Robinson. And Boo Radley always comes out. I know that you can make a similar case for any book -- every time you read it, the same things happen, but for some reason, it's only important in To Kill a Mockingbird.

When I was little, I wanted to be Fern in Charlotte's Web, Templeton the rat is one of my all time favorite characters, and "salutations" is a permanent resident of my vocabulary.

Sydney Carton's speech at the end of A Tale of Two Cities brings tears to my eyes every single time. I think that he is the first imaginary man with whom I fell in love.

Agyar was my first vampire novel -- the beginning of what will probably be a lifelong seduction. Now if I could just get around to reading Dracula.

War for the Oaks was one of my early forays into the world of urban fantasy. The power of the music and the way the author writes about it really spoke to me. It's a perfect example of finding and reading the right book at the right time. The specific circumstances escape me, but the book most certainly has not. The Little Country by Charles de Lint followed soon after, and I have been hooked on the genre ever since. It is unfortunate that Emma Bull has not written more novels on her own. Territory is also excellent. A magical retelling of the legend of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Autobiography of a Face was a memoir I almost could have written myself, although my own illness was far less obviously physically scarring.

"I am haunted by waters," says Norman Maclean in A River Runs through It, echoing my own kinship with the element. The pulse of the rivers runs in my veins, and my heart beats to the waves of the tide.

Elaine Brown's Taste of Power is the story of the Black Panther Party from a woman's perspective. Her story is harrowing and beautiful.

I have read all of Nicole Mones' novels, except for Cup of Light, which I have been somewhere in the middle of for several years. All of her heroines are stunningly gifted in one respect while being almost tragically flawed in another, and yet it is their flaw which enhances their gift. The Last Chinese Chef is the first book of hers I read, and even though it is fiction, it started me down a path of reading about food which has led me to such titles as Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper and The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry and A Pig in Provence.

The Iliad and The Odyssey were a central part of my education. I have read parts of each in their original Homeric Greek. The language is exquisite, and the stories are timeless. Greek and Latin are the keys to so much of the English language that even a passing acquaintance with either language can open up whole new worlds of understanding.

My best friend gave me a copy of The House of the Spirits one year for Christmas, with the inscription "This sounds like us." Even though she hadn't read the book herself at that point, it turned out that she was absolutely right. I promptly went on to devour Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, and The Infinite Plan. Many years later, I have resumed reading Allende's work, and having recently finished reading The Sum of Our Days, I feel inspired to read the rest -- fiction and non-fiction.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a powerful story in its own right, but for me it is another gateway book which has led me to seek out memoirs of women who write with insight about their own lives and are frequently in extraordinary situations where they change the lives of others for the better. The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo and Kabul Beauty School come immediately to mind.

All Creatures Great and Small set me on a path to veterinary medicine in the sixth grade. I never actually got there, but I have also never forgotten Herriot's stories.

There you have it -- my fifteen in fifteen.

Magical perspective

2009-06-17T16:40:00.000-04:00

I say that if you take magic literally and expect to be able to apply more, er, scientific laws of physics and perspective, you are missing the point.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/christopher_howse/blog/2009/06/16/sandman_meets_queen_mab

When you doubt the possibility of having it all ...

2009-06-07T12:21:00.001-04:00

... just take a look at the current residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07romance.html?em

Now, that's the way to lead by example! Care for a healthy dose of family values, Right Wing?

Apparently, Google is un-American

2009-06-06T14:24:00.001-04:00

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2009/06/06/d-day-anniversary-google-memorializes-tetris

As a shining example of techo-capitalism, what could be more American than Google?

Fan girl alert!!!

2009-05-23T14:45:00.001-04:00

Moments liks this are why I love, love, LOVE Bruce Springsteen!!!!!

There is no substitute, and there is nothing better.

To prevent readers and writers running out of source material

2009-04-27T20:44:00.002-04:00

In reading Neil Gaiman's journal today, I followed a link over to John Crowley's journal where he recommends a list of books to writers, especially writers of science fiction and fantasy.

I link to it here not only for the list itself, but for the ensuing discussion as well.

http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/38862.html