culinary misadventures

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

PETERMBALL Journal , , ,

Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep.

In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead.

I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave you that to ponder those possibilities, at least until the thought skeeves you out and the shuddering begins.

I find myself wishing my life was less sane and reasonable right now. I’m still trying to figure out how to achieve that without, you know, starving, but on the whole I’d be far less cranky and surly and other such dwarves if I were writing right now.

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There are days where I’m utterly amazed that anyone reads this journal, largely because some of the people who comment on it, by and large, tend to be much better writers that I am. I mean, go back to yesterday’s entry and read Thoraiya Dyer’s comment about autumn, which is far more eloquent than the post she’s responding too (you could also go and buy her book, if you wanted too, and I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t).

In totally unrelated news: apparently if you mention Fight Club on twitter, you get an automated reply from a twitter-bot channeling Tyler Durden. I imagine that’s one very busy twitter-bot, and it’s far more entertaining than the twitter bots that usually follow me, offering real estate deals and fitness programs and dire warning about the machinations of the Illuminati.

 

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , , , , , ,

A book, a book, a spokesbear, a bed

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish.

This doesn’t mean I don’t do it.

And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash.

I’d also point out that aspiring writers could do worse than ordering a copy of Stephen Dedman’s The Lady of Situations, which is the book I reach for when I contemplate short story collections and how they should be put together. The writer David Jauss once put together an essay, Standing Stones, on the various ways short story collections become a unified whole, a brilliant read in and of itself, and every single thing he identified is at work in The Lady of Situations; the hand-offs from one story and the next are beautifully coherent without being obvious, there are liaisons between the stories in the form of words and image being reworked from different angles, there are contrasts and mirrors and occasionally there are motifs rise to the surface without becoming heavy-handed. Stephen Dedman as a short story writer is brilliant – the story From Whom All Blessings Flow alone is testament to that – but the collection as a whole…

Well, as a whole, it’s something to aspire too. Reading Dedman’s collection with Jauss essay (available in the collection Alone with All That Could Happen) may have been one of the most educational things I ever did as a writer. If you’ve got the cash to purchase both and you’re interested in the short story collection as a form, I highly recommend it.

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As we amble towards my thirty-fourth birthday, I’m slowly discovering things I should no longer do.

Order prawns on a pizza, for example.

Stay up all night working on a story when I need to go to work at 8 AM the next day.

Guess which of these I did last night, and exactly how much I’m paying for it today? It would be nice to say I regret nothing, but mostly I regret the pizza.

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Over on twitter Tansy Rayner Roberts noted that the current explosion of Australian SF podcasts doesn’t actually include a podcast that interviews Australian writers, and the general consensus seems to be that everyone thinks this is a very good idea, but no-one really has the time to do it. Or they have the time, but lack the technical know-how.

It’s a good enough idea that I expect someone will break eventually. Had I an adequate microphone for the task of recording, a fiendish partner in crime, and the free time to edit audio files into listenable form, it probably would have been me.

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I’ve started reading the unabridged Moby Dick, mostly because of Jeff Smith’s Bone comics. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be, but mostly in a good way. Mostly, when I pick up copies of Moby Dick, I read the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale and read it aloud for the pleasure of reading it aloud and then put it away again.

I blame Bone for my tendency to do all these things, right down to the choice of chapter, for it’s mentioned (in the introduction, I think) of the same collected volume that contains the Great Cow Race, which is really the volume of Bone you want to own if you’re only going to own the one, if only so you can figure out why comic book people laugh at the phrase stupid, stupid rat creatures. And occasionally giggle at quiche.

Moby Dick is a stranger book than you’re expecting, if you’ve never picked it up before. It’s also intimidatingly large, should you find yourself pressed for reading time. I like it, though. It’s the product of a time when the concept of the novel wasn’t quite so formed, and it’s a massive  tangle of words, but it’s intriguing in its bizarreness.

Chaos, Chili-Carrot Cake, & The Twelve Day Deathmarch

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

On Friday I sat in the middle of messy apartment, contemplating the messy state of affairs, thinking a series of messy thoughts. And after a while I thought, well, enough of that then, it’s kind of a drag, and instituted a plan to cut through the chaos and get stuff done. I spent Saturday and today cleaning rooms, ordering bookshelves, and taking care of long-neglected tasks. Not enough that I’ve instituted order across the flat, but enough to give me a foothold. That was phase one.

Phase two requires me to finish the rewrites on Cold Cases*. I have twelve days. That’s a chapter’s worth of rewrites per day, about two-and-half to three thousand words. If I succeed, I will allow myself to have a guilt-free weekend of not-writing in May**. I’ve prepared for this task by making a weeks worth of meals in advance, stocking up on coffee, and dancing around the house to Goldfrapp***.

To aid me in this task****, I also baked a cake. Specifically, a chilli-carrot cake. It looks something like this:

Not an elegant looking cake, I’ll grant you that, but tasty. Tasty wins out over elegance in my world, especially since I’m the one who’ll be eating it. It also brings the sum total of cakes I know how to cook up to two (the other being a variant on Sri-Lankan Love Cake served with ginger cream, which I can no longer make because I no longer own a food processor and refuse to crush cashews by hand).

Since I twittered about it’s making and some people asked about it, I give you the recipe for the snack du-jour of this twelve-day rewriting death march.

Chili Carrot Cake

Stage One Ingredients
3/4 cup of vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 cups finely grated carrot (or something close to it; I generally use two largish carrots and figure that’ll be close enough)

Stage Two Ingredients
2 cups of flour (probably should be sifted, but I can rarely be arsed)
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
2 or 3 teaspoons of minced chili (this makes for a mildly spiced carrot cake; I’m tempted to go a little stronger next time)
1 or 2 teaspoons of minced ginger

Method
– Bung all the stage one ingredients in a bowl and beat them like they owe you money.
– Add all the stage two ingredients. Mix until the whole thing looks like cake batter.
– Pour into a cake tin
– Put the cake tin in an oven pre-heated to 180 c for about an hour

I tend to cut bread-sized slices off mine and butter them before serving, but I suppose you could dust it with caster sugar or something if you were so inclined (which is what was recommended for the recipe I adapted this from, but that cake used cinnamon and nutmeg where the chili goes, so your mileage may vary). My only real note to all that is this: if you’re going to hand-grate carrot, remembering that it’s a pain to clean off the grater afterwards.

* Also known as the project that’s causing me the most guilt because it’s not yet done.
**Well, probably not since I never allow myself a guilt-free weekend of not-writing, but I’ll try.
*** Dancing badly, but dancing.
**** Finishing Cold Cases, not dancing to Goldfrapp