Month: May 2013

More Semi-Mindless Cookery for Busy People

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This one is only truly mindless if you have access to a crockpot (which every hardworking freelancer should) and a food processor and a source of pre-made frozen meatballs.  Make the meatballs yourself from scratch when ground beef is on sale, or get the storebought ones when those are on sale — either way, they’re good to have in the freezer as meals-in-the-bank for nights when you can’t be bothered to cook anything requiring thought.

And when you’re not in the mood for meatball subs, or spaghetti and meatballs, you can make this:

Mexican Meatball Soup (Albondigas)

  •     2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced Ro-Tel tomatoes & chiles (Don’t try to substitute some other brand of tomatoes and chiles, and go for the original, not the mild, version.  Those of us who hail from Texas know that Ro-Tel makes the one true brand.)
  •     2  14-ounce cans beef broth
  •     2  14-ounce cans chicken broth (I use Better Than Bouillon stock base, and make up four cups of it using 2 teaspoons each of the beef and chicken bases.)
  •     1 box frozen cooked meatballs (or about a pound’s worth of homemade ditto)
  •     1 medium onion, chopped (I run the onion through the food processor on “chop” along with the cilantro, but if you want a coarser chop you can always do it by hand.  It’s not as mindless that way, though.)
  •     1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped (To be honest, I always just eyeball the fresh cilantro.  If you belong to the cilantro-tastes-like-soap portion of the population, this probably isn’t the recipe for you.)
  •     1/2 cup pastini pasta, uncooked
  •     2 teaspoons dried oregano
  •     1 can black beans
  •     salt and pepper, to taste
  •     sour cream, garnish (optional)
  •     shredded cheese, garnish (optional)

Chop onions and cilantro.

Combine all ingredients in a crock pot.

Cook for 4 hours on High or 8-9 hours on Low.

Ladle soup in bowls and garnish with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of shredded cheese.

On the line stretching from Convenience to Authenticity, this recipe is firmly pegged down at the Convenience end.†  But that, in this case, is the point.

†If you’re interested in moving a bit closer to Authenticity, the internet is full of recipes for making albondigas from scratch.

Elsewhere: In Praise of Good Sentences

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a blog post on memorable sentences.

The post, and the comments, have some good ones, though so far they seem to have missed James Thurber completely.  At one point in my life I not only could quote Thurber extensively, I would — under sufficient provocation — actually do so.  (How could I not admire a writer who could come up with lines like “He was six-feet-four and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was”?)

Anyhow — go over there and read the post and the comments.

Thought for the Day

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One of the many things I like about writing in the digital age: you can compose your text in any typeface you like, from Courier to Comic Sans — you can even write in Wingdings, if a wayward spirit so moves you — and then convert it for submission into whatever font it is that your publisher wants even if what your publisher wants is so butt-ugly you couldn’t write an original sentence in it to save your life.

I like to compose in single-spaced Courier New, then double-space it for editing and revisions.  Sometimes I’ll switch to Century or Times New Roman, just to change the physical layout of the words on the page, and their relationship to each other — it’s an easy way to get a fresh look at the text if it’s starting to get stale.  Double-spaced 12-point Courier New is good for doing printouts for readings, because you can get a good estimate of time that way:  One page with standard margins is roughly 250 words is roughly one minute if you’re reading it aloud.   But again, you can always get the estimate, then switch to some font you like better.  (Orator, as its name implies, is a good clear font for making reading printouts, though it does take up more paper than Courier or Times New Roman.)

Everybody has their typographical preferences, and in this age of electronic writing, we get to indulge them.  And it is good.

Tales from the Before Time: Springtime Surprise

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Today’s mail brought us the spring royalties on the Mageworlds e-books (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other e-book retailers.) The pleasant glow this cast over the morning brought to mind another springtime royalty period, some time ago — and thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

The first thing you need to know is that the book in question was an anthology of short stories, Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.  We’d contributed a story to the anthology — “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” — and had been paid a good rate-per-word for it; and that, we thought, was that.  Because the second thing you need to know is that most of the time, the on-acceptance payment for a short story, whether in a magazine or in an anthology, is the only money you’re going to see from it.  Every once in a while, though, a particular story will turn into one of its author’s good children, and continue generating revenue, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The next thing you need to know is that Book of Monsters came out at the peak of the early-nineties middle-grade and young adult horror boom, when the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark series were filling up the bookstores and selling like very scary hotcakes.  Not only that, it hit the shelves in October of that year, just in time for Halloween.  It also had some really good stories in it, which probably helped a little bit as well.  At any rate, the anthology not only sold, it sold in sufficiently large numbers that it earned back its advance in the first royalty period.  (This is a thing that never happens — except, of course, for the one time when it does.)

Fast-forward to the following May.  By that time, we’d forgotten all about the anthology and our short story in it.  The money we got for the story had gone to gasoline and groceries long before, and we knew better than to expect anything more from that direction.  Meanwhile, our elder son, whose birthday was coming up, had been agitating for some time for a mountain bike, and we in turn had been pointing to the bloodless turnip that was the family budget and saying, “Think again.”

Then an envelope arrived in the mail, and in that envelope was a royalty check for roughly ten times what we’d been paid for the short story in the  first place.  Our eyes bugged out like a Tex Avery ‘toon’s, and the next thing we did, after carefully replacing the check in the envelope, was call Bruce Coville and ask him if that royalty payment was for real — because, as we said to him, we’d hate to deposit it and then have it turn out that somebody in the publisher’s accounting department had slipped a decimal point.

Bruce assured us that the check was real; and we, in turn, said to our elder son, “Happy birthday — let’s go down to the bicycle shop.”

That story continued to be one of our good children.  The anthology generated royalties for some time thereafter; there was an audiobook edition, for which we got an additional payment; and we later expanded and reworked the short story into a middle-grades novel for Harcourt, which in turn had a French edition from Hachette.

The thing is, though (and I suppose that it’s the moral of this tale) — you never can tell in advance which of your stories is going to be the good child.  All you can do is give each one of them your best shot, and then wait to see what happens.

More Cooking for People who are Thinking about Other Things

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Sometimes it’s fun to tackle a complex recipe with many steps and lots of ingredients. Then there are the other times, when most of your brain’s processing power is tied up with something else, and you can only default to frozen pizza and take-out Chinese so often before the rest of the family — not to mention the family budget — start revolting.  At that point, you need something simple but tasty, like this:

Beef with Garlic and Three Peppers

  •   1 eye round of beef (about 2-3 pounds)
  •   about 5 cloves of garlic
  •   1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns
  •   several brisk grindings (coarse) of Tellicherry black pepper
  •   liberal pinch of cayenne pepper

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees F.

Peel the cloves of garlic and cut them lengthwise into slivers.

Heat the Szechuan peppercorns in a cast-iron pan with a scant  pinch of salt until the peppercorns go from grey-brown to brown-black and start smelling wonderful.  Then grind them in a mortar and pestle.

Take the eye round and put it on a rack in a large roasting pan.  Stab the roast repeatedly all over with a sharp knife (a Fairbairn commando dagger or a Gerber survival knife works best, because of the diamond-shaped cross-section, but any kitchen knife will do.)

Put a sliver of garlic into each stab wound, pressing down so that the beef closes over the garlic.  Meditate upon efficient weapons design.  (This is perhaps the only socially acceptable use of a commando dagger.)

Sprinkle the roast with the cayenne pepper, and then with the ground Szechuan pepper.  Then take the pepper grinder with the Tellicherry black pepper and grind it over the roast until the top looks crusty.

Cook, uncovered, until a meat thermometer at the thickest part reads 160 degrees F.  (About 30 minutes per pound, depending upon the roast and your oven.)

Take out of the oven, and let stand for about ten minutes while you make rice or instant potatoes or thick slices of toast or whatever your personal code of roastbeef says should round out the meal.  Slice thin, across the grain.

Serve.

Say a regretful goodbye to your plans for the leftover roast and tomorrow night’s supper.

I Meant to Do That!

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There are some things, as a writer, that you should only ever do on purpose.  A short and incomplete list:

  • Humor.  There’s nothing worse than making people snicker when you were hoping to tug on their heartstrings, unless it’s making them guffaw when you were aiming for elevated dignity.  Accidental humor is often fatally easy — all it needs, sometimes, is a random typo of the “united/untied” or “public/pubic” variety — while deliberate humor can be fiendishly hard even if you’re one of the rare few with the gift for it.  (And in the realm of bad things that can go wrong with deliberate humor — if the little voice in your head says, “Maybe this is a bit too edgy,” then for the love of all the Muses, listen. And remember, as always, John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)
  • Ambiguity.  Properly managed, a judicious amount of certain kinds of ambiguity can add depth and texture to your story.  Done badly, all it does is cover your story with an unnecessary layer of shadows and mud.  How can you tell if you’ve pulled it off?  You probably can’t — you’ve got privileged access to the inside of your own head, and can see the stuff you didn’t put down on paper or in pixels.  This is where trusted first readers come in.  If they say that something isn’t clear, don’t waste time explaining how they’ve missed it.  Fix the text so that they don’t miss it, instead.
  • Offense.  Sometimes it’s necessary for a writer to give offense because the target is, no kidding, offensive.  Other times . . . well, writers often have big feet as well as big mouths.  If you did decide to give offense on purpose, don’t bat your eyelashes afterward and claim that you didn’t. That’s tacky.  And if it truly was an accident, then apologize without groveling and try not to do it again, okay?
  • Conspicuous alliteration, internal rhyme, or recognizable meter.   Unless you’re very very good indeed, all of these verbal juggling tricks and somersaults can distract from the point of your story, rather than ornamenting it.  (The late Poul Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest, in which some of the characters speak in blank verse written out as prose, but Poul Anderson was good enough to get away with it.)  Accidental occurrences of things like this should be eliminated ruthlessly from the text.  As for doing it deliberately — if you’re a certain kind of word-mad writer, you’ll probably at some point end up trying out the technique.  Just remember, don’t attempt this feat without a net seek out a trusted first reader for help in determining whether or not you’ve carried it off.

There are plenty of other things that writers should only do on purpose, but the four above are biggies, and should do for a start.

Too Much of a Good Thing

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As I said in my previous post, there’s another big way in which description and scene-setting can go wrong, and that’s through a superabundance of detail.

You don’t want to describe too much of the scene, forcing your readers to tally up detail upon detail.  With no way to sort out the important details from the unimportant ones, the readers get swamped, unable to build a convincing mental picture out of the material supplied.  A handful of judiciously-chosen details, on the other hand, will give your reader the seed crystals from which they can grow their own settings and scenery.

A version of the handful-of-details technique is useful for historical or alternate-historical fiction as well.  You don’t have to have to give your readers all the information you could possibly gather about everything in the period you’re writing about.  Give them enough interesting and world-illuminating details, and let them do the rest of the work.  And nobody but you needs to know that you’ve structured the description around the interesting details you were able to collect, rather than researching every possible detail that the description might possibly include.

But because you’re relying upon your readers to do their share of the work in the matter of world-building and scene-setting, you don’t want to give them more of a burden than they can carry.  Every time they have to stop and recompile the scene in their heads to incorporate yet more details, you run the risk of losing them for good.

A White Room Problem

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Which is to say, one of the main ways to have your setting and background not work.

You know you have this problem when your workshop buddies point it out to you when a lot of your action takes place in the equivalent of a white room, description-wise — that is to say, in settings that are so barely visualized that they might as well be blank.  They lack what W. S. Gilbert might refer to as “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

If two of your characters are talking in a white room, you still need to give the reader some details to hang their visualization on.  Mention the unsettling flicker of the dying fluorescent light panel, or the faded scuff marks on the floor, or the spot on the wall where a few remaining bits of sticky tape hint that someone once put up a poster in that spot.  (See?  Now you’re in somebody’s former office, now empty of furniture.  It’s not just any white room; it’s a particular white room.)

And don’t forget:  for good description, you want more than just the visuals.  You want the sounds and the smells and the tactile sensations as well.  Does that empty office smell of industrial-strength cleaning agents?  Or does it smell of dust and old paper?  Can you hear the faint almost sub-audible hum of electric devices somewhere nearby, or the whirr of a fan, or the breezy rumble of an air conditioner?  Does the static electricity in the dry air make the hairs on your arms and neck stand up?  Or does the lack of ventilation send a trickle of sweat down between your shoulder blades?

It’s the particularity of detail, not the amount, that’s the key.  (We’ll talk another time about the other way that scene-setting can go wrong, which is through detail overload.)

Saving the Endangered Wansdyke

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This showed up today on ANSAX-L, the Anglo-Saxon language and literature mailing list, where I’m a long-time lurker. (I’m a long way from the groves of Academe, but I still like to keep up with the hot gossip in the field.)

It has all the earmarks of something that is chock full of local politics and confusing issues (there is nothing more opaque, sometimes, than somebody else’s politics — as I discovered once when I tried to explain local option liquor laws, wet and dry counties, and the Baptist/bootlegger alliance to a European correspondent), but I present it here for what it’s worth.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s pet peeve, O my readers (you patient and long-suffering lot), is presentism in historical fiction.

What, I ask you, is the point of writing stories set in the past if everybody in them — or at least every character intended to be liked or admired by the reader — thinks and at least desires to act like an enlightened specimen of twenty-first century humanity? And yet there is a market for such stories, possibly because not every reader-for-pleasure wants to spend his or her time working at the admittedly difficult job of empathizing with characters who might possibly hold opinions or indulge in practices of which twenty-first century persons do not approve. For it is an almost inescapable fact that even the most enlightened and progressive person of a past era will hold at least one or two opinions which are at best incomprehensible and at worst repugnant to the modern mind.  (They smoke like chimneys.  They spank their children.  They truly believe not just in the rightness but in the vigorous exportation of Western civilization and Protestant Christianity.  And so on.)  The past isn’t just another country; sometimes it’s practically another planet.  And space aliens live there.

In the immortal words of the old New Yorker cartoon, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.  But then, I’m a science fiction and fantasy sort of person, with the science fiction and fantasy cast of mind, which means that I’m the sort of reader who can derive pleasure from trying to think like a space alien for an hour or two.  That cast of mind makes the awareness that these people are not like us into a feature, rather than a bug, of true historical fiction.  The “not like us” factor is also what, in my opinion, distinguishes historical fiction from historical romances,† which choose to emphasize the points of commonality — the “these people are a lot like us after all” bits — rather than the points of difference.

†And I’ll save time right now by agreeing that it isn’t either the quality of the research or the quality of the writing that distinguishes historical fiction from historical romance — it’s the angle of approach. And I enjoy a historical romance as much as the next person, when I’m in the right mood.