Food

Let There Be Cake

PETERMBALL Journal , , , ,

I Can Haz Cake

Last night I felt like cake, so I climbed into the car and did up my seat-belt and drove out to the store to acquire cake. Then I proceeded to curl up on the couch with a coffee and a fan and the first season of Gilmore Girls on the DVD player.

I got to remember all sorts of things about the series I’d forgotten: the stilted way they initially delivered the dialogue, back before they got used to its rhythms; a really young Jared Padalecki in his pre-Supernatural incarnation, who is tall and not quite so filled out and in possession of the kind of haircut I look at and think “yes, children, the nineties really do deserve to be mocked like the eighties and the sixties for its fashion choices”; the little things that get retconned out, like Mrs Kim having a Mr Kim whose ostensibly around, even if he’s never seen, and Kirk showing up as someone who isn’t Kirk, and Kirk not knowing Miss Patty despite the fact he’s known her since childhood and been one of her star pupils.

The woman at the store was worried I’d picked up a cake with cracks in the icing. I convinced her it wasn’t a big deal, and the uncracked cakes should probably go to people who worried about such things.

I threw that bit in there for people who don’t watch the Gilmore Girls at all and thus have no idea what I’m talking about.

Just in case they’re weren’t satisfied with black-and-white camera-phone photographs of the cake, though I have no idea who wouldn’t be satisfied by that.

I mean…

Cake!

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There’s a getting to know angela slatter feature over on the Black Static website, an adjunct to the reviews of her *many* short story collections that appear in the latest issue. Allow me to lapse into my usual refrain at this point: Angela Slatter is awesome and you should totally go read what other people are saying about her, her work, and then you should even go read the work itself.

Go on, it’s okay. I’ll still be here when you get back.

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So according to the unionized troll laborer the Spokesbear hires to keep the back end of the website running, there are new readers of the blog floating about.

Possibly some of them are robots, which is fine, ’cause I like robots as much as the next guy.

Possibly some of them are not, which is also fine, ’cause writing for other flesh-and-blood people is kinda why people get into writing in the first place, and likely will remain so until such time as there’s a market for art selling to the AI crowd.

Still, if you are new, feel free to stop by the comments and say hello. Or nab my email or facebook details or twitter and say hello there, although it’s worth noting that I’m slow to respond to email due to well, just being bad with email really, and even slower to respond to facebook messages since I tend to log onto facebook with my phone and the keypad is teeny-tiny.

But the internet is made for talking to people, really, for all that we try to convince ourselves it’s made for computer games or silly cat pictures or porn.

And I do have all this cake leftover, should anyone want a slice.

It’s caramel swirl, and delicious.

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