Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Mindless Cookery Revisited

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Or, yet another no-brainer crockpot entree for those days when the mind is on other things.  Around our house, this one rejoices in the uninspired but accurate name of:

Golden Mushroom Pork Glop

  • 4-6 boneless pork chops, or pork cutlets, or pieces of a bonless pork roast sliced into collops.  (Bone-in pork chops also work, but it’s annoying to have to fish the bones out at serving time.)
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced into rings
  • 1 can Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup, undiluted
  • 1 tsp ground sage

Put the sliced onions into the crockpot; then put the pork chops or cutlets or collops on top of them.  Empty the can of Golden Mushroom soup on top of the pork, and smear it around with a wooden spoon until all the pieces of pork are covered.  Put the lid on the crockpot and cook it all day on low or for 7-8 hours on high, until the pork is tender.

Serve with your choice of starch to sop up the gravy.

 

Short Stuff

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My husband/co-author and I have sold a short story to an anthology.  This is not actually that common a thing for us, because we’re primarily novelists, and most of the story ideas that swim into our nets are novel-sized ideas.

You can’t make a lot of money writing short stories, at least not these days.  There aren’t enough markets, and the rate of pay has not increased that much over the decades.  There was a time, or so I’ve been told, when a writer of short stories could at least keep him-or-herself from starvation by writing alone; but that was also a time when magazine short fiction filled the entertainment niche occupied these days by television and the internet.

Why, then, do we write short fiction at all?

One reason, of course, is that sometimes a short-story-sized idea swims into our fishing net, and it would be wasteful to throw it back.

Another reason is that for novelists, short stories function as advertising — they keep the writer’s name out in front of the public, and they provide readers with a sample that might lure them into buying longer works.  The primary reason that people buy a book, even in the electronic age, is because they’ve already read and liked something by the same author.

Finally, while you can’t make a living writing short stories, you can — sometimes — make a reputation.  And it’s a rare writer who’ll turn up his or her nose at the idea of acquiring a modicum of extra fame.

E-Readers and Salt Cellars

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So there I was in the kitchen brewing the morning’s pot of coffee, and to while away the time while waiting for the water to boil, I propped my Nook up on the salt cellar . . . and had a thought about the depiction of technological advances in science fiction.

Part of the fun of writing science fiction is the opportunity to create a shiny bright all-new high-tech future (or a dark and grubby one, if that’s where your interest lies.)  A lot of the time, though, when we create our futures, we forget that the past doesn’t go away.  Bits and pieces of it stick around and stay in use.  If you look in the right places, you can still buy buggy whips, because there are still people who use them.  In my own small (very small — population about 2500) town, there are homes that get their energy from solar panels, and homes where the owners cut their own firewood from the trees in their wood lot and burn it in their cast-iron stoves.  The same world that has an international space station in orbit also still has sailing ships and horse-drawn plows.

Change doesn’t happen at the same rate all over the place.  And people don’t stop using old things when new things are invented:  some people can’t afford the new things, other people don’t like the new things, and some people make a hobby out of liking and using the old things even when they could easily afford the new.  Digital watches were rare and expensive, once upon a time; when they became cheap and ubiquitous, the people who cared about such things went back to wearing finely-crafted hands-on-a-dial watches instead.

Any future we think up has to be as technologically mixed-up and diverse as the present we’ve already got, or our imaginations have failed us.

Pipe Dreams; or, the Someday List

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Like (I suspect) most writers, I have a Someday List — “someday” here being short for “Who knows, it could happen, someday someone in Hollywood might decide that the stuffed and mounted outer skin of one of my novels might work as the basis for a movie, and decide to pay me money for it.”

My Someday List changes from month to month, if not from day to day, depending on what things I’m hungry for and what things I’m annoyed by and exactly how much Someday Money I’m daydreaming about at any given moment. (It’s a generally-accepted truth that what most starving freelancers regard as a life-changing sum is the equivalent of pocket change for a major movie studio, but sometimes I’d rather daydream about a quirky budget flick by an independent producer who might actually get part of the story right. Other times, I’m all about the money.)

Anyhow, someday:

  • I’m going to get this house repainted. In light brown, this time, with white trim, instead of the dark brown with what I think was meant to be ivory but which looks more like mustard that the previous owners preferred.
  • I’m going to replace the wooden steps leading up to the double doors that we don’t use. They were old when we moved in, and have rotted since.
  • I’m going to tear down the front porch and the steps leading to the kitchen door that we do use, and replace the whole thing with one of those solarium/mudroom deals.
  • I’m going to rip out all the old plumbing in the downstairs bathroom and put in new stuff that actually works.
  • I’m going to put in a new kitchen sink and kitchen counter and kitchen cabinets, and while I’m at it a built-in dishwasher. And a tile floor. Or at any rate, fresh linoleum.
  • And I’m going to put in oil heat. We’ve already got the ductwork for forced hot air, so a change like that might even be doable for a comparatively small amount of someday money.

In the meantime, we work, like most freelancers, from day to day.

A Good Soup for a Snowy Night

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Because dried vegetables from the kitchen cabinet and meat from the freezer have saved many a writer from having to go out shopping on a winter day, and they can be purchased when the money is flowing in and kept on hand for the days when it isn’t.

Pantry Staples Beef Barley Soup

  • 1 slice of cross-cut beef shank
  • 1 cup, more or less, of pearl barley
  • a bit under a quarter cup of dried onion flakes
  • a generous shaking of dried chopped garlic
  • a good handful of dried champignon mushrooms
  • a good handful of dried porcini mushrooms
  • a moderate sprinkling of mixed dried vegetables
  • 4 cups of water
  • 2 cups of beef stock
  • 1 packet of onion soup mix
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 pinches of dried rosemary
  • soy sauce (a couple of tablespoons, I suppose)
  • about a tablespoon of tomato paste

Throw it all into the crockpot at about 10 in the morning and let it cook all day.  At dinnertime, fish out and discard the shank bone, then bring the soup to the table and serve it forth.

 

What’s in a Name?

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New writers often ask, “Do I need a pen name?”

The answer, usually, is “No.  Unless, of course, you do.”

What do I mean by that?  Let me unpack a bit.

There are several reasons why a writer might have a true need for a pseudonym, of which security is the biggest.  A writer who is engaged in saying things about powerful people and entities to which those people and entities might take exception, for example, may choose to write under cover of a nom de plume, as Jonathan Swift did when he wrote a series of political pamphlets about English fiscal policy in 18th-century Ireland under the pseudonym of “M. B. Drapier.”

Similarly, a writer whose regular employment involves working with or for people who might look askance at one of their employees having a commitment to something other than the job might use a pen name to keep the two lives separate.  Writers who work for the government, or for the military, also fall into this general category.

Then there are the writers who, for whatever reason, don’t want their friends, or family, or co-workers to know that they write — or sometimes, to know what they write.  Schoolteachers, for example, are expected to be as above reproach as Caesar’s wife — if you’re teaching eighth-grade English as your day job and writing steamy romance novels on the side, you probably don’t want the school board to catch on.  (Not even if half of them are devoted readers of your other persona’s literary output.  They’ll just ask for your autograph out of one side of their mouths and decline to renew your contract with the other.)†

Sometimes the decision to use a pseudonym is driven by economic reasons.  An author whose previous output had a lackluster reception, or which fell prey to one or another of the assorted bad things that can happen to good books, may choose to start over under a pseudonym.   Opting for this course of action used to be a closely-guarded secret, rather like going into the Witness Protection Program, but readers are more savvy, usually, than publicists think, and the cats in those cases never stayed in the bag for long.  These days, the economy-driven pseudonyms are more about what the marketing types would call “establishing brand identity” — this is the pseudonym for the author’s YA work, and this is the sf/fantasy pseudonym, and that one over there is for mysteries and thrillers, but everybody knows that they’re all the same writer at the keyboard.

And finally, you get the writers who chose to write under a pseudonym because they don’t like the name their parents stuck them with, or they like their name just fine but know in their heart of hearts that nobody outside of their particular ethnic group is ever going to be able to pronounce it, let alone spell it right or shelve it correctly in the bookstore, or they prefer to draw a hard line between their writer-persona and their everyday-persona for some reason that is private and particular to them.

†My parents were teachers. It didn’t leave me with a high regard for school boards or school administrators in general.

In the Deep Winter

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This is the time of year and the kind of day when it’s hard for me to get anything done, where “anything” covers a lot of territory, from writing to cooking to taking the trash to the town dump.

It’s bitterly cold out — we’ve got another wind chill advisory up, which means that going out-of-doors without proper protective clothing is a life-threatening proposition† — and distinctly chilly inside, and all I really want to do is huddle up next to the electric space heater in the office and try to think warm thoughts.

High summer is another hard time to get things done, but winter, I think, is worse . . . the heat only saps my physical energy, but the cold leaches away everything.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I need to get to work and do some editing, at the very least, before I turn into a pumpkin for the night.

†No exaggeration . . . in cold like this, a person living on one of the less-traveled roads could slip and fall on the ice on their way down the driveway to get the mail out of their mailbox, and die of hypothermia before anybody passed by who might see them and call for help.

Where I Was; Where I Am

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I was at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston, land — at the moment — of a myriad hand sanitizer dispensers.  It remains to be seen whether or not I’ve escaped catching the flu, or some lesser variety of con crud.  (Bring people from all over the country, and sometimes the world, into one hotel for a long weekend, and a lot of people are going to go back home with new and exotic colds and other viruses.)

Now I’m back in far northern New England, watching the thermometer drop and still chasing my Zeno’ s tortoise of a novel denouement.

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll have some cranky and intemperate things to say about dialogue attribution tags and their deployment.  But not tonight.

Shiny Internet Stuff

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Writers are intellectual packrats.    Set one down in a used book store or a library sale, and he or she is likely to come away with a history of carrier pigeons in World War I, a Peruvian vegetarian cookbook (in Spanish), and five non-consecutive volumes of The Bobbsey Twins . . . all on the grounds that “they might come in handy someday.”

Their browser bookmark lists are equally eclectic — you never know, after all, what information you might turn out to need.  Today’s interesting find:  a YouTube video by a woman whose passion is historical-recreationist hairdressing; in this one, she first dissects and then re-creates the complex seven-braid hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins (and Roman brides, but they only had to wear it for one day instead of all the time.)

She doesn’t speculate on the maintenance of the hairstyle — and it’s not the sort of thing that the ancient Roman primary sources, being written by men, would have bothered to talk, or even think, about — but just from looking at the way the hair was first braided and then put up, I’d guess that the multiple braids were done once or twice a month (or week, or whatever — I’m not an expert on braid-care), and then the style itself was put up in the morning and taken down again at night.

The Fine Art of Handwaving

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If you’re going to write in the science fiction or fantasy genres, sooner or later you’re going to end up handwaving an explanation.  Other genres sometimes do it too, but other genres don’t regularly work with props and plot elements that don’t yet and may never exist.

Some handwaving is easy, because the genre as a whole expects it.  Take faster-than-light space travel, for example — sf writers have been handwaving that one for so long that all they need to say is something like “hyperspace” or “wormhole jump” and the reader is there for the ride.  Readers aren’t dumb.  They know perfectly well that if the author of the story actually had the plans for a working faster-than-light drive, he or she wouldn’t be writing adventure stories for a living.   Too much explanation, in this case, would bring on a case of Handwaving Fail — all the audience wants to know is that the author is aware of the problems with faster-than-light travel, and that for the purposes of the story, those problems have been solved.  They don’t really want all the equations plus a diagram.

Sometimes the handwaving has to be subtler.  If you’re introducing a bit of tech that you’ve postulated just for the occasion, don’t draw attention to its extraordinary or purpose-built nature.  If you talk about it and around it as though it’s been hanging around the laboratory or the workbench or whatever since well before the current problems started, the reader will think of it as just another piece of the furniture, and with that you can slip it into its place in the story without occasioning comment.

If you’re looking at the need for a really large job of handwaving, stronger measures may be required.  My husband and I once co-wrote a YA thriller for a packaged series, and found ourselves working with a plot that would have ground to a shuddering halt if the main character had ever actually sat down and talked to the police about what was going on.  We got past that difficulty — and did it without making our main character an idiot — by compressing the timeline of the novel into two or three days and keeping our protagonist on the move and short on sleep the whole time.

So.  Three general tips:

Use built-in handwaves where the genre allows for them.

Don’t point at what you’re handwaving.

And when in doubt, keep things moving fast enough that nobody has time to stop and think.