Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Farewell to the Island

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vpxiGayHead Light

 

 

 

The Viable Paradise workshop is over for another year.  We had writing and music and pancakes and jellyfish and a sky full of stars.  (Also, if you were me, lobster tacos at the Lookout restaurant, and I just have to say, that was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted done to a lobster.)

The photo, by the way, is of the Gay Head Lighthouse on the Cliffs of Aquinnah — one of the five lighthouses on the island.  (The others are East Chop, West Chop, Edgartown, and Cape Pogue.) It’s called “Gay Head” because the headland there is a multi-hued clay cliff.  Obligatory literature reference:  The harpooneer Tashtego, in Moby-Dick, was a Native American from Gay Head.

If you wanted to apply to VP this year and couldn’t make it, next year’s applications open on 1 January 2015.

Busy busy busy

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If posting is kind of sparse for a week or so, it’ll  because Jim Macdonald and I are down on Martha’s Vineyard, where we’ll be teaching at the Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop.

As usual, we expect to learn as much as we teach.  There’s something about hanging out with a bunch of fellow writers and talking about technique and craft and what Edward Gorey so aptly referred to as “the unspeakable horror of the literary life” that works that way.

More Mindless Cookery for Distracted Writers

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Because there are some days when all you want to do is shove some ingredients into the crockpot and leave them alone for six or eight hours.

(I’ve been having a week like that, full of necessary but distracting things like purchasing a new car – well, to be more specific, a new-to-us car.  Now that we’re no longer transporting our offspring to and from college on a regular basis, there’s no need to continue nursing along the 18-mpg mini-van, so we’ve got a nice 27-mpg hatchback instead.)

Tonight’s dead-simple entrée is Crockpot Chicken Paprikash, which makes no claim to be authentically anything, other than dead simple.

Ingredients

  •     2 medium onions, thinly sliced
  •     1 teaspoon kosher salt
  •     1 tablespoon sweet paprika
  •     1 teaspoon hot paprika (or 1 T plus 1 tsp of whatever paprika you’ve got, plus a pinch of cayenne pepper)
  •    1 garlic clove, peeled and halved
  •   1.5 – 2 pounds boneless chicken thighs, cut up
  •   1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  •   1/2 cup chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
  •   1/2 cup sour cream

Directions

In the slow cooker, stir together the sliced onions, the salt, the garlic, and the paprika. Spread the mixture evenly over the bottom of the crock.

Layer the chicken on top of the onion mixture.

Add the stock.  Cook on low for 6-8 hours or until chicken is tender.

Stir the sour cream into the sauce.  Serve over egg noodles.

Optionally, you can cut up and add some mushrooms to the paprika-onion mix.  Very few things are not improved by adding mushrooms.  (The things that aren’t improved by adding mushrooms are usually improved by adding chocolate.)

Why Grown-Up Writers are Still Paranoid

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There are a lot of reasons – ours isn’t a job famous for encouraging a sense of security at the best of times – but this sort of thing is one of them.

A middle-school teacher in Maryland has been placed on administrative leave and “taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” based – if the news reports coming out of the town are to be believed – on the fact that he wrote and published a science-fiction book involving a school shooting some 900 years in the future.

Is it a good book?  I don’t know; based on the fact that it appears to be either self-published or published by an exceedingly small press, my guess is probably not.  But dammit, if we’re going to protect art from oppression and restraint, we shouldn’t get to throw in an “only if it’s really good art/the kind of art we approve of/not just mere entertainment” clause.  Just because the Muse does not love all of her lovers equally does not mean that all of her lovers should not be equal under the law.

Is the guy in fact crazy and/or a danger to himself and others?  Again, I don’t know . . . and the people whom I suspect are in the best position to know, to wit the students he interacted with on a daily basis, aren’t in a position to say anything.  Not that anyone would listen to them if they did, unless what they said supported the official line.

(Students know that this is how the world works.  To quote Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky, “You’ve been here six years and you expect things to be fair? My hat, Beetle, you are a blooming idiot!”)

And the fact that the Sheriff of Dorchester County is going around saying things like, “He is currently at a location known to law enforcement and does not currently have the ability to travel anywhere,” without specifying what sort of location it is, and why the writer in question is unable to travel, is – especially if you’re a writer yourself – downright unnerving.

Because it means that if you’re a writer, and at any point get entangled for some reason with the law, or with politics, or with the ever-hungry 24/7 news machine, then anything you have written can and will be held against you.  Even if you made the whole thing up.  Maybe even especially if you made the whole thing up.  People who can do things like that with their brains aren’t normal, after all, and probably shouldn’t be trusted.

Nobody ever promised us that this job would be easy.

They never promised us that it would be safe, either.

Yet Another Reason Why Young Writers Grow Up Paranoid

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A South Carolina high-schooler got hauled in by the police for questioning because “when [he] was given an assignment by his teacher to create a Facebook-type status report telling something interesting about himself, he allegedly wrote ‘I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.'”

Which would, in point of fact, make a great short story opening – it’s got the story problem right there up front, plus a good dose of implicit worldbuilding, and it’s also got a distinctive narrative voice. And it’s clearly fiction; I don’t think that the police and school officials in South Carolina believe – well, I certainly hope that they don’t believe – that the kid’s neighbor, or anybody else in town for that matter, actually owns a pet dinosaur.

(I dunno. Maybe they think that “dinosaur” is some kind of special troubled-teen code word for “golden retriever” or something.)

Always, when I read one of these stories, I think back on the stuff I was writing, back in my larval-writer high-school days, and I thank God that a) the times were different then, and while they were more uptight in a lot of ways, they were also more relaxed in ways we’re only now beginning to appreciate, and b) I was a “good girl”, which is to say I was an A student with no social life, and therefore got cut a lot more slack for minor eccentricities and crosswise encounters with the system, and c) I already knew better than to put anything into the hands of the educational authorities that wasn’t bland and non-threatening and well-behaved.

These days, I’m not sure even being a “good girl” would save me.

Another Simple Recipe for the Tired, Distracted, or Deadline-Beset

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For years I didn’t have a crockpot, because all my previous encounters with the technology had been in the early days, before the invention of the removable stoneware crock, and doing cleanup on a piece of kitchen gear that couldn’t be fully immersed in water pretty much negated all of the time and labor saved on the prep and cooking end.

Then one day I looked around in the kitchen department of the local hardware store and saw that things had changed since I was an impecunious grad student, and I was, as they say, enlightened.

This particular recipe is about as mindless as they come, which is a blessing on those occasions when you’ve got a cold, or a deadline, or just a bad case of too much of the daily grind:

Chicken with Onions

Ingredients

  • 4 large onions, sliced thin
  • 5 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (or more if you like)
  • 4 to 6 split chicken breasts, either bone-in or boneless
  • hot cooked rice (or orzo pasta, or whatever starchy substrate you prefer)

Directions

  • Put the sliced onions in the bottom of the crockpot.
  • Lay the chicken breasts on top of the onions.
  • Add the garlic, lemon juice, and cayenne.
  • Cook 4 to 6 hours on low.
  • Serve over rice or orzo or whatever you prefer

 

It’s Here!

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The weather is hot and sticky (well, for values of “hot and sticky” that obtain in northern New Hampshire, which means that folks in places like Arizona and Texas would think it pleasantly cool), but we’re happy anyway, because today is the day that our short story, “The Devil in the Details,” is up at Tor.com.

Enjoy!

Upcoming

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Time to start watching the skies . . . my co-author and I have a short story coming up on Tor.com on July 2.

We sold this story back in early December of last year, after having worked on it, off and on, for longer than I care to contemplate.  We’d take it out, tweak it a bit, get to about the halfway point, get stuck, and put it aside again to work on something else.  Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Finally, though, it clicked . . . we rethought a secondary character, threw out all the scenes that were trying to pull the short story out of its intended shape (when you’re primarily a novelist, your mind will sometimes insist on serving up novel-type scenes even when you don’t want them), and figured out who our bad guys actually were and what they were really up to.

After that, really, finishing the story was a snap.

The moral of the story?  As usual:  Don’t give up.

And sometimes, the cure for being stuck is to start throwing stuff out until what you’ve got left feels right.

(Don’t trash your out-takes, though.  See The Adventure of the Five Chapter Nines.)

Imposter Syndrome, in Full Cry

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To be a writer is to have imposter syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really.  Our vocation, and often our livelihood, depends upon convincing people whom we will most likely never meet to put credence in things which we have cobbled together out of our experiences and the experiences of others (if we have not, in the case of us genre romancers, made them up out of whole cloth – having first also made up the cloth as well.)  Small wonder, then, that we tend to lie awake in the grey hours before dawn, fretting that this time will be the time when our knack fails us, and the readers will see us for the shameless fakers that we are.

(The Anglo-Saxons had a word for that sort of grim insomnia: uht-ceare, meaning “the care or worry that comes in the period just before dawn,” or as a modern-day shrink might put it, “pre-dawn anxiety.”  Smart people, those Anglo-Saxons.)

This is why literary writers worry that they are writing for a narrow and diminishing audience, and their works will never find the wider recognition that serious writers got in times past; and why writers of popular and genre fiction worry that nobody is ever going to see anything in their work except the surface of it, and all their thematic and, yes, artistic concerns will go forever unnoticed and unappreciated; and all writers, everywhere, worry about money.

(This post brought to you by the short story rejection that arrived in yesterday’s e-mail, and by the concomitant necessity to nerve myself up for picking another potential market and sending it out again.)

Clash of the Titans

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If anybody ever wants a reason (besides brain chemistry or childhood family dynamics) for why writers can sometimes be a depressed and paranoid lot, they need only to look at the latest round of hostilities between major publisher Hachette and major online seller of damn-near everything from books to baby booties, Amazon.

The two entities are currently in the midst of negotiations over terms, and Amazon – not content with such ploys as tweaking discount policies and dragging its feet on things like delivery and restocking – has now removed the preorder button from the listings of a number of Hachette titles.

I’m not wasting my time on sympathy for Hachette; they’re big boys, and presumably knew what they were letting themselves in for when this dispute started.  Besides, they are a major publisher, which means that they’ve played plenty of hardball themselves, and presumably have built up the calluses.

No, my sympathy is all for the authors, whose books – which is to say, their livelihoods – are currently being stomped on and tossed about in this battle between two giants.  Because in the end, Amazon will continue to make money, and Hachette will continue to make money – and a whole bunch of authors will have lost potential sales (and money) that they’ll never get back.