…and we’re already contemplating another road trip. This one, thankfully, is briefer: a jaunt down to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough NH for an Impossible Futures booksigning, this Saturday the 26th.
More regular posting about life, literature, and the things that peeve or fascinate me will resume shortly.
I’ve been — still am, and probably won’t be at home with my main machine and good connectivity until sometime Monday — on Martha’s Vineyard with the Viable Paradise workshop, which is an intense and often transformative experience, even for the instructors. Spending a solid week talking about almost nothing except writing, because even the conversations about everything else tend to circle back to writing in the end, is energizing in the very best way.
Things learned this year include: sliced potatoes baked with sea salt, olive oil, and rosemary are the food of the gods; moments of sudden insight strike people in all sorts of ways; Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor may well be the filthiest play ever written, and also one of the most hilarious.
Applications for next year’s VP open on 1 January 2014.
…why aren’t you posting very much this week?
Because I’m on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, getting reading to be one of the instructors for this year’s Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop. The workshop is a great deal of fun, but it’s also a great deal of work — it takes up not just time, but mental processing power.
For your amusement, though, have a nice rant about MS Word from science fiction writer Charlie Stross. I’m a WordPerfect fan myself (they will take away my Reveal Codes window when they pry it from my cold dead fingers), but I use Word for my editing work because just about everybody else uses it; either that, or they use some obscure personal favorite and export the files to Word when they want to share them. I don’t think anybody really likes Word; at best, they feel about Word the way I feel about Windows computers . . . they do what I want, and nobody expects me to be in love with them. (Say bad things about Windows, and nobody cares. Say bad things about the Mac interface, and the Mac users make sad puppy eyes at you because you’re being mean.)
The life of the artist has always been a precarious one, financially speaking. Geoffrey Chaucer was not exempt from its ups and downs. The Canterbury Tales poet depended for cash on annuities that had been granted to him by Richard II, and when Henry IV took the throne in a regime change that ended with Richard II dying in prison, Chaucer was understandably concerned about the continuation of his stipend.
Reminding a king that he owes you money is tricky under any circumstances; doing so when the money was promised to you by the recently-deposed previous monarch is something beyond tricky. Fortunately for Chaucer, he had an in: His wife Philippa was the sister of Henry IV’s father’s last wife (and long-time mistress) Katharine Swynford, which made him sort-of family. Close enough, at any rate, that Chaucer felt he could get away with giving the new king a gentle nudge.
So here’s Chaucer, addressing not the king, but the artist’s true love, his currently-flat wallet:
To yow, my purs, and to non othir wyght
Complayne I, for ye ben my lady dere!
I am so sory, now that ye been lyght;
For certes, but yf ye make me hevy chere,
Me were as leef be leyd upon my bere;
For which unto your mercy thus I crye,
Beth hevy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!Now voucheth sauf this day, or hyt be nyght,
That I of yow the blisful soun may here,
Or se your colour lyk the sonne bryght,
That of yelownesse had never pere.
Ye be my lyf, ye be myne hertes stere,
Quene of comfort and of gode companye;
Beth hevy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!Now purs, that ben to me my lyves lyght
And saveour, as doun in this worlde here,
Out of this towne helpe me thurgh your myght,
Syn that ye wylle nat ben my tresorere;
For I am shave as nye as any frere.
But yet I prey unto youre curtesye,
Beth heavy ayeyn, or elles mot I dye!Lenvoy de Chaucer
O conqueror of Brutes Albyoun,
Which that by lyne and fre eleccion
Ben verray kyng, this song to you I sende;
And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende,
Have mynde upon my supplicacioun.
The poem worked; Chaucer got his money.
(For a modern English translation, go here; it’s the fourth poem down.)
Another take on the whole worldbuilding question: Chuck Wendig’s 25 Things You Should Know about Worldbuilding.
(What have we been doing the past couple of days when I wasn’t posting? Well, dealing with the mini-van hitting a moose halfway between here and Oxford, Maine. Moose collisions . . . are a thing, up here. Even a low-speed glancing collision, like this one was, can do some serious damage — there’s nothing quite like having something the approximate size and shape of a Hereford steer on stilts slamming into your windshield to put the capper on an otherwise perfect day. But nobody was hurt, except maybe for the moose, which ambled off into the woods before its state of health could be ascertained, and the mini-van is repairable, so once the adrenaline has quit pumping, all will be well.)
It was a dark and stormy night. . . .
You know, the first time that was used as a novel opener, it wasn’t a cliche. It was all the imitators that came afterwards that made it tired and hokey.
And “dark night” wasn’t redundant, either, in an era when urban skyglow hadn’t yet blinded large numbers of people to the differences possible in a night-time sky. A clear night with a full moon is a whole lot brighter than a cloudy night with a waning moon or no moon at all. (There’s a reason why night-time assemblies of all sorts — dances, lodge meetings, and the like — used to be held on full-moon nights. That way, people would be able to see the road on their way home.)
And right now, outside, it is indeed a dark and stormy night. The crescent moon is completely obscured by clouds, and we’ve had thunderstorms rumbling through all evening. The local volunteer fire departments have been called out at least twice for lightning strikes and downed trees smouldering on the power lines, and while we haven’t ourselves gotten any hail, other parts of the state haven’t been so lucky.
You could begin a novel with a night like this, if it hadn’t already been done.
Hot and humid, with thunderstorms happening in random places that aren’t here.
Not good weather for thinking, or for writing. Summer in general isn’t. Spring and fall are the best times, and the shoulders of winter. Deep winter is almost as bad as summer, because (as I’ve said here at least once) the answer to “How warm can you keep a nine-room house with a full basement in deep snow country” is “Never quite warm enough.”
It could be worse–a couple of years ago at about this time, we were dodging the remnants of Hurricane Irene on its way up the Connecticut River Valley, on our way down to Massachusetts to return one of our two remaining offspring to college. He attracts weird weather like that; when we moved him in for the first time as a mid-year transfer student, we ended up fighting our way through a massive snow storm that blanketed the east coast from Washington up through Maine.
Oh, well. Back to work, heat or no heat.
The only difficult part of this recipe isn’t actually difficult at all, just a bit fiddly — if cutting up a whole head of cabbage into thin strips and turning three or four carrots into matchsticks takes more time or attention than you have at the moment, save it for another day.
Pork and Cabbage Stir-Fry
1 head of cabbage, cut into strips
3 T peanut oil, give or take
2 or 3 carrots, cut into matchsticks
1-2 pounds pork tenderloin, cut in thin slices
2 tablespoons minced ginger
1 cup chicken broth, divided (3/4 and 1/4)
1/4 cup soy sauce
shot of sriracha
Directions:
In a large wok (or a deep skillet, or a dutch oven; but a wok works best), stir-fry the cabbage and carrots in hot oil for about 6 minutes, until the carrots are crisp-tender. Remove and keep warm.
Stir-fry the pork in the remaining oil for 2 minutes — add a bit more oil if you need to. Add the ginger and stir-fry for 2 more minutes or until the pork is lightly browned. (“Lightly browned” pork is actually a kind of pale grey. What they actually mean is, “no pink showing.” Thin slices of tenderloin reach this stage quickly.)
Stir in the 3/4 cup of chicken broth and the soy sauce. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat; cover and simmer for 3 minutes or until the meat juices run clear. Combine the cornstarch and the remaining broth until smooth. Gradually stir into the wok.
Return the cabbage and carrots to the wok. Add a squirt of sriracha. (If you don’t have a source of sriracha where you are, I have a suspicion that a healthy shot of Tabasco, while non-canonical, would have a similar effect.) Bring everything to a boil; cook and stir for 2-3 more minutes or until the sauce is thickened.
Serve over rice.
If things are a bit scattered around here at the moment, it’s because of the traditional end-of-summer flailing-about attendant upon getting the remaining offspring out of the house and off to school — one to graduate school at Rutgers (library science) and the other to his senior year at Curry College.
It only seems, sometimes, that we’ve been putting kids through college for roughly forever; in fact, it’s only been about thirteen years. But that’s still a good long time.
I’m incredibly proud of my offspring, just the same. They’re good kids, and they’ve always been incredibly patient with the vagaries and vicissitudes of having freelance writers for parents.
For a long time, I was — to put it mildly — skeptical about the value of classroom writing instruction, if by “skeptical” we mean “unconvinced of its utility and halfway convinced that its influence is largely malign.”
I blame early-writing-life trauma.
Picture me, in the eighth grade, bookish and awkward and laboring under the further social burden of being a new kid in the sort of town where everybody has gone to school together since first grade. I wanted desperately to be — well, not popular, because popularity looked like it came with more strings and preconditions than I felt like dealing with, but ordinary.
At the same time, I was already a beginning writer, turning out lachrymose poetry and lumpy prose and working hard at my efforts to improve both (harder, in fact, than I ever worked at any of the “draw one line under the subject of this sentence and two lines under the verb” exercises in our English textbook .) And I was as hungry for outside validation as any writer, beginner or established pro.
Unsurprisingly, there came a day when I had a finished story in hand and wanted somebody else’s opinion on it. (Needless to say, the story sucked. I was, after all, only in the eighth grade.) So I screwed up my courage to the sticking-point and showed the story to my eighth-grade English teacher, hoping to at least get some useful commentary out of the deal.
This was a big mistake, because she liked it.
She liked it so damned much she read it out loud to all her English classes. Which put paid to any hopes I might have had of appearing ordinary, and got me out of the habit of trusting English teachers about anything.
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