Author: drdoyleeditorial

Does This Mean We’re Respectable?

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It certainly looks like it.  The Paris Review has interviewed Ursula K. LeGuin.

The interview is worth reading for a couple of different reasons . . . well, actually, at least three.

One is that the interviewer is not somebody from inside the science fiction/fantasy community, so the interview’s questions and answers aren’t the ones that a lifetime of reading interviews in Locus and similar in-group publications has trained us to expect.

Two is that the interviewer is not someone who knows a great deal about science fiction, to put it kindly, and watching LeGuin maneuver diplomatically around the resulting areas of ignorance is a pleasure to behold.

And three, this is Ursula K. LeGuin we’re talking about.  She’s always interesting, no matter who’s interviewing her and for what.

The Season Approacheth

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With National Novel Writing Month receding into the past, and the midwinter giftgiving season drawing ever closer, it’s time again for a display of crass commercialism on my part.

If you’ve got your NaNoWriMo manuscript in hand, and would like help in taking that finished product to the next level, I’m here to help.  My base rates are $1500 for a novel, or $100 for a first chapter sample (or for a short story, if that’s what you’ve got.)  More details can be found here.

Also, if you’re looking for a present to give to the writer in your life, you can give them a virtual gift certificate for a line-edit and critique — you can purchase my services in advance at the usual rate, and they can schedule the job whenever they’re ready.  If you like, I can even send you a PDF of a nice-looking gift certificate that you can print out and put into an envelope, or in a great big enormous box with a lot of packing peanuts, if that’s how you roll.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve, gentlebeings and fellow wordsmiths, is that pair of weasel words, “somehow” and “something.”

We’ve all used them, at least in our first drafts.  Our hero is engaged in breakneck pursuit of the villain, and his energy is flagging while the villain has wings on his heels (possibly literally, if we’re writing fantasy) . . . but somehow, our hero finds within himself a last reserve of speed and collars the miscreant.  Or possibly our hero is fast overtaking the bad guy, but somehow the bad guy pulls ahead by just enough to swing aboard a passing garbage truck and make his escape.

Later in the same epic, our hero is about to enter his home through the front door after a hard day’s work . . . but something prompts him to go around back and enter through the kitchen door instead, thus allowing him to get the drop on the waiting villain.

This is lazy writing.  It implies causation (thus taking the curse of random coincidence off the turn of events), but it does so without bothering to be specific about anything.  The alert reader — and it never pays to assume your reader is anything but alert — will notice that an actual cause or agent is missing, and will lose a certain amount of faith in the writer because of the omission.

Most of the time, you can jettison the “somehow” and no one will miss it.  The hero puts on a burst of speed and catches the bad guy, or the bad guy pulls ahead and makes his getaway — state it with confidence and your reader will believe you.

As for that stealthy entrance through the kitchen door . . . ditching the “something” isn’t enough to help you there.  For that one, you also need to come up with a reason.  If your hero goes round to the back based on the promptings of his intuition, you had better have established already that he’s an intuitive sort and that his intuition works in his favor more often than not.  Otherwise, you’d better have him noticing that the doormat is no longer lined up squarely with the edges of the front step, or that his cat is not dozing on her favored late-afternoon spot on the living-room window-sill, or that the burnt-out match stub he normally shuts between the door and the doorjamb when he leaves in the morning isn’t there any more (depending upon whether your hero is obsessively tidy, or a cat person, or professionally paranoid.)

The two general rules that apply here:  one, don’t dither; and two, specificity is your friend.

Here, Have Some Pie

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Pumpkin, this time.  All of ours is gone; and so is the cherry pie.  Some of the apple still remains, but not for long.

The weather here is unseasonably cold; the outside thermometer is reading 3 degrees Fahrenheit.  Normally we don’t get weather like that until mid-December or later.  Local opinion is that we’re going to have a cold winter; the question remaining is whether or not it’s going to be a snowy one.   Snowy is good, because snowmobiling and cross-country skiing are a big part of the local economy, such as it is, and a winter with substandard amounts of snow is the equivalent of  major crop failure.

But pie makes all things good.

Pumpkin Pie

  • 1 unbaked pastry shell
  • 1 can pie-pumpkin†
  • 3 eggs, slightly beaten
  • 1 cup light brown sugar
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp ginger
  • 1 and 1/2 cups canned evaporated milk (One 12-oz can.  Not sweetened condensed milk; not evaporated skimmed milk.)

Place the pie shell in your pie plate.

Mix the spices well with the brown sugar.  This breaks up the lumps in the brown sugar and keeps the spices from clumping together when you add the liquid.

Combine the eggs with the sugar and spices; beat well.

Add the canned pumpkin.

Add the milk and beat well.

Pour into the pastry shell.  (Actually, the way we do it around here is to add the filling to the shell a ladle-full at a time.  Better control that way, especially if it turns out you’ve got more filling than shell.  We use our largest pie plate for this recipe.)

Cook at 350 Fahrenheit for 45-55 minutes.  (Test it after 45, and give it another 10 minutes if it isn’t done yet.)

When a knife inserted into the filling comes out clean, the pie is done.

Enjoy.

†The kind that says “Ingredients: pumpkin.” Anything else is pumpkin filling, and an abomination before the Lord.

Family Feasts and Rituals

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We’re gearing up for Thanksgiving dinner already — tonight is pie production, because Thanksgiving dinner is nothing if not a pie delivery system.  This year we’re only doing three pies (cherry, apple, and pumpkin) because there are only going to be four of us at the table.  Come Christmas, when all three of the unmarried offspring will be temporarily in residence, we will be doing at least four pies (the current loadout, plus blueberry, and quite possibly some kind of chocolate cream pie as an extra.)

One of the things that a lot of science fiction and secondary-world fantasy often lacks, in my opinion, is this kind of tradition-laden family gathering.  Partly it’s because the protagonists of science-fictional and fantastic stories are so often loners, either by circumstance or by choice — they’re orphans, or they’re wanderers of one sort or another, or they’re estranged from whatever relatives they’ve got.  (Which is a pity, I think; nothing complicates life, or a plot, like family.)  But partly, I suspect, it’s because making up plausible and consistent holidays and family rituals that are convincingly alien but nevertheless feel like the real thing . . . is hard work.

(This is also where I like to give a nod to one of my favorite fictional Thanksgivings, the season four episode “Pangs” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It has everything, from the manic freakouts over getting the traditional recipes exactly right, to a look at some of the more problematic historical and cultural issues surrounding the holiday, culminating in a shared meal where everybody — even the captive vampire tied to a chair — is entitled to a seat at the table.)

Weather, We’ve Got Weather

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And I might even have had a blog post last night about short stories, and how long it takes to write one, if we hadn’t been in the part of northern New England that had freezing cold and high winds all day yesterday, and had the power go out for nearly five hours yesterday night.

Which wouldn’t have been bad — only annoying, and boring, and putting a serious delay in all the work I had in hand for the evening — if we didn’t also heat the house with electricity.  We toughed it out by candlelight for the first couple of hours, until our laptops ran out of juice; then we gave up and huddled under the down comforter and all the blankets until the power came back.

Then we spent today playing catch-up, and putting the finishing touches on the short story we were working on when the power went out.  This is a short story that either took us a couple of weeks to write, or took us about nine years.  We would periodically pull it out, and work on it some, and throw out bits and put in more bits, and come up against a brick wall and put it away again . . . and this went on, as I’ve said, for years.†

Then about a week ago, revelation hit and the wall broke and we had a finished draft.  The rest of the work was revision, seven drafts of it.  (I figure I’m in good company; the humorist James Thurber once claimed that most of his seemingly effortless casual pieces for The New Yorker went through at least six drafts before submission.)  Next comes sending the story out on a blind date with an editor somewhere, with all the concomitant angst and uncertainty.

Persistence.  Persistence is key.

†We didn’t have the external spur of an anthology we’d promised the story to, and we’re not primarily short story writers anyhow; otherwise, the process might not have taken so long. A good part of the final, successful effort involved throwing out all of the short story’s misguided attempts to turn into a novel.

More Internet Fun Stuff: Adopt a Skull

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The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has a skull collection, and they’re working on restoring and remounting them.  And they’re looking for sponsors! For only $200/year, you can contribute to the work on a particular skull, and have your name on a plaque next to it.

What does this have to do with writing?  Not much, except that most of the writers I know are fascinated by the weird, the unusual, and the specialized esoteric, and the Mütter Museum qualifies on all counts.  I note on their web page that they’re now partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which is an institution I remember with great fondness — I wandered in there one day shortly after arriving in Philadelphia for graduate school, took a random left turn, and walked straight into a room full of artifacts from ancient Sumer that I’d hitherto only seen in a Time-Life history book.

“Wow,” I said to myself, or words to that effect.  “I’d never have seen this if I’d stayed in Texas.”

Amusing Stuff on the Internet

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As a renegade medievalist and lapsed philologist with a bad case of Tolkien’s Disease (I haven’t yet had a novel break out into appendices full of invented language, but give me time), one of the things I keep an eye out for on the web is sites maintained by and of interest to word nuts like myself.

Today’s find is All Things Linguistic, where one can find links to discussions of what is and isn’t a sandwich (ham-and-cheese yes; paninis maybe; s’mores are an edge case) and Katharine Hepburn’s accent and translating Jabberwocky.  My favorite at the moment, though, is a Tumblr devoted to sample sentences — you know, those example sentences in language and grammar books that are mostly just dull but every so often seem to have been radioed in from another, stranger planet:

If there is both a direct object and an indirect object, then the indirect object precedes the direct one:

You should never have fed   that fish   steroids.

(To which all I can say is, Mad Science for the win!)

Support Independent Booksellers!

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It’s not that I have anything against large booksellers, or against chain booksellers . . . but I do believe that a rich and varied bookselling ecosystem is a good thing.

Right now, Star Cat Books is running an Indigogo fundraising campaign to help with the startup of a used-and-new bookstore in Bradford, Vermont, specializing in science fiction and children’s books.  They’re looking to raise $8000 by the end of the campaign, and have just secured a matching donor for the next $2500 of the fundraiser, so for a limited time only any contributions made will go twice as far.

A Culinary Follow-Up

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Or, cooking outside the present era, this time with a recipe from the 1400s:

Armored Turnips

  • 1 pound turnips, peeled and thinly sliced
  • 1/4 pound (or thereabouts) provolone cheese, thin sliced
  • butter

Parboil the turnips. Drain.

Generously butter a baking dish.

Layer the turnips and the cheese in the baking dish, finishing up with a layer of cheese.

Cook at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until the cheese is bubbly, and serve it forth.

This is the simplest version of this dish, the way that I learned to cook it decades ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism.  There are versions of it with sweet spices, and with savory ones, easily found on the internet (just Google “armored turnips”, and Bob’s your uncle), but this is the one that I know.  The original version I learned was meant to serve about thirty people, and used five pounds of turnips and one of cheese; it scales upward to a hundred or so if you’ve got the kitchen and the cooking crew for it, and that many mouths to feed.