Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

How to be a Patron of the Arts on the Cheap

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We can’t all be Lorenzo de’ Medici.  But even without a family banking fortune and the resources of Renaissance Florence to draw on, there are things an average Joe or Jane can do.  For example:

Buy your favorite authors’ books. This will not only earn them royalties, it will help keep them in good odor with their publishers.

If your favorite authors are self-publishing their backlist, or their beloved but quirky projects that never caught the eye of a regular publisher, buy those, too.

If you run into one of your favorite authors in the sort of social venue where such things occur, offer to buy him or her a drink.  (Some of us learned to drink good scotch back when normal human beings could afford to purchase it.  Now that a bottle of Laphroaig  costs $55 and up even before the taxes kick in, we’re not likely to buy some unless we’ve got an advance check burning a hole in our pocket.)

In a similar vein — many authors attend conventions and related gatherings, either for the sake of furthering their careers or for the sake of getting away from their keyboards and having some much-needed social interaction.  Often (the writing life being what it is) they’ll be doing it on a shoestring.  In which case, you can earn your Patron of the Arts badge by saying, “Can I take you to dinner?”  If they’ve already promised elsewhere, they’ll say so; if they’re flushed with funds or burdened by pride they may decline; but the odds are very good they’ll be delighted, and tell you so, because even writers who are flush with funds today are keenly aware that the same may not hold true tomorrow.

You can be political.  Programs like art in the schools, or library funding, or state grants to artists and writers, are always in danger of being defunded, and most of them contribute to the income stream of working artists.†  Fight to keep them going.  And continue to push for better health-care options for self-employed people — since the passing of Obamacare, it’s no longer quite as easy as it used to be to depress a room full of writers just by whispering the words, “health insurance,” but things could still be better.

†Your average working artist has a mixed income stream very similar in most respects to the income stream of small farmers — a bit of this and a bit of that and a little of something else on the side. Or, as  a sign on Route 3 once said: “Fresh Eggs. Aromatherapy. Tarot Card Readings. Chain Saws Sharpened.”

Civic Duty Accomplished.

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I have voted.

If your polls are still open, and you haven’t yet voted — what are you waiting for?

Go!  Shoo!  Vote!

(Somehow, I doubt that I’m going to get much else accomplished this evening.)

Another Item from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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More research gold — the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put a bunch of its publications up on the ‘net for on-line reading, PDF download, or print-on-demand.

All sorts of books are available: titles like The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480–1620 or Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color or History of Russian Costume from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century, to name just a few.

Man, I love the internet.  Time was, you’d have to go hit a major research library (if not travel all the way to New York) to get some of this stuff.

Uphill.  In the snow.  Both ways.

Why Movie Novelizations Tend to Suck

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Not all of them do, of course; nevertheless, when it comes to novelizations, suckitude is the way to bet.  Most of the time, though, it isn’t really (or at least, not entirely) the writer’s fault.

Reason number one:  The writer probably didn’t have that much time to work in.  The publisher wants the book to come out at the same time as the movie, and the studio doesn’t make the book deal until fairly late in the game (because in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, the novel tie-in is roughly as important as the Halloween costume and lunchbox rights.  Or maybe less.)  This leaves the writer facing the directive, “We don’t want it good.  We want it Tuesday.”

Reason number two:  The writer probably didn’t get a copy of the actual movie to watch before writing the novelization.  The studio doesn’t give those out to just anybody, and novelists aren’t even anybody.  The writer would have gotten a copy of the screenplay for the movie; if the writer was lucky, it would even have been the version of the screenplay that actually got filmed, and not some earlier — and superseded — version.

Reason number three:  The novelizer has to please not only his or her editor at the publishing house, but also the person at the movie studio who’s in charge of maintaining consistency and creative control.  This effectively prevents the writer from doing anything innovative or unusual with the material.

Reason number four:  A screenplay is a bare bone to make a good soup with.  It’ll run, typically, about 120 pages, of which a lot is white space.  A knock-down brawl or an epic swashbuckling chandelier-swinging duel may be set down on the page as just “They fight” — presumably on the grounds that the second unit director is going to be handling that sequence and will have his own ideas.  (The novelizers will count themselves lucky if the chandelier bit gets a mention, because viewers of the movie are going to remember it, and will complain if it doesn’t turn up in the novel.)  In any case, the fictional form that matches most closely a film in length isn’t the novel, it’s the short story or novella; but you don’t see novella-length tie-ins crowding the bookstores.  If an author has been charged with making an 80K or even 120K novel out of a standard-weight screenplay, and if he or she isn’t going to be allowed to make up additional story material to fill things out, then the only alternative left is going to be shameless padding.

So the next time you’re reading a novelization that isn’t one of the rare handful of actually pretty good ones, pause a moment and spare a kindly thought for the writer who strove to give the publisher and the movie studio the very best novel that they could get by Tuesday.

Deadline Brain

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From a fragment of conversation heard this evening in the office:

Me:  Is it Saturday that they want the cake for the church bake sale, or did I completely space out on things and it was today?

My husband and co-author:  Relax.  So long as they have it by 10:30 Saturday morning, you’re good.

In honor of that moment, and in lieu of something more substantive about writing (other than, my goodness writers do get spacey when they’re on a deadline), the cake recipe in question:

Marvelous Mississippi Mud Cake

5   ounces (5 1-ounce squares) unsweetened chocolate
2   Cups sifted all-purpose flour
1   tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup powdered instant coffee or instant espresso
2   Tbsp boiling water
1   cup plus 2 Tbsp cold water
1/2 cup bourbon, or rum, or amaretto, or cognac
1   cup unsalted butter at room temperature
1   tsp vanilla extract
2   cups powdered sugar
3   large eggs plus 1 large extra yolk
1/4 cup sour cream or buttermilk
cocoa or confectioners sugar optional

Generously grease  a nine inch Bundt pan – 10 cup capacity.  Position rack in center of oven and heat oven to 325 deg. F.

Melt chocolate in the top pan of a double boiler over hot, not boiling, water.  (Or, these days,melt the  chocolate in your microwave.) Remove chocolate before it is completely melted and stiruntil smooth.  Set aside.

Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda and set aside.  In a two cup glass measure dissolve the instant coffee in the boiling water, stir in the cold water, and bourbon or other flavoring and set aside.

Beat the butter with vanilla and sugar in the large bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle beater until  well blended and smooth. (Or use a handheld electric mixer if that’s what you’ve got.)  Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.  Beat in the extra yolk and sour cream.  Scrape down the bowl and beater.  Add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate and beat until the batter is smooth.

Remove the bowl from the stand.  By hand using a spoon or rubber spatula stir in small amounts of the flour mixture and the coffee-bourbon liquid.  Beat until the batter is smooth;  it will be quite thin.  Don’t worry if the batter looks slightly curdled.

Pour into the prepared pan.  Bake until the cake top is springy to the touch and slightly cracked looking and a cake tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean — about 65 to 70 minutes.  Do not over cook.

Cool the cake on a wire rack for 15 minutes.  Top with another rack or plate and invert.  Lift off pan,  Cool completely.

Top with light sifting of confectioners sugar or cocoa.  Serve with bourbon-laced slightly sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

 
I got this recipe from my father; I have no idea where he got it from.  It’s clearly been around for a while, though; you can tell that much from the fact that the original version called for melting the chocolate in a double boiler.

You Find All Sorts of Things on the Internet

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Especially when you’re doing research.

Some of the odder and/or more interesting (and even sometimes useful) places I’ve found in the course of doing research for different projects:

An Enigma Machine simulator.

A Vest Pocket Guide to Brothels in 19th-Century New York.

A timeline of historic food prices.  With a collection of links to historic menus.

A page for converting dates to and from the French Revolutionary Calendar.  (If you’re curious, today is Décade I, Decadi de Brumaire de l’Année CCXXI de la Revolution.)

One of many online date-of-Easter calculators, in case you want to know what date Easter is going to fall on in the year 2525.  (April 15th, by the Gregorian calendar, for the Western churches.)

An on-line text of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

No wonder research is so dangerous . . . you can fall into it and never come out.

Disaster Prep

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

It looks like Hurricane Sandy is going to hit the East Coast like a fist.  Even here in far northern New Hampshire, with an entire mountain range between us and the shoreline, the local public works guys are pre-positioning road barriers and suchlike in case of flooding from heavy rain.  (When you have local landmarks with names like Roaring Brook, it’s not hard to guess what lots of rain coming down on the tops of the local mountains can do to the land at the bottom.)  And everybody in Vermont is hoping that this storm doesn’t decide to pull an Irene and come ramping and stamping up the Connecticut River Valley, because some places over there haven’t yet recovered from the last set of floods.  And all of our friends on the coast, from Boston down to Baltimore, are white-knuckling it while they wait to find out just where Sandy’s punch is going to strike hardest.

If you’re in any of the likely-to-be-affected areas, don’t forget to secure your writing while you’re bringing the lawn chairs inside and laying in a supply of bottled water and batteries.  Nobody wants to be left in the position of having to either rewrite an entire book from the beginning or toss it out as an impossible job.

There are a number of different ways to make certain your work-in-progress stays safe.  Offsite backup to the cloud, via services like Dropbox or Google Drive, is a good starting point.  (If you don’t like or trust cloud computing, you can always e-mail a copy of the current WIP to a trusted friend.)  A flash drive or portable hard drive that you can shove into your pocket or your laptop case on the way out the door is also a good idea — that way, if you end up crashing for a week with Great-Aunt Eunice who lives in a big house on high ground with no internet and a dozen cats, you can still keep on working as long as you’ve got power.

As for the storm itself — you’re a writer.  Observe, and take copious mental notes.  It’s what we do.

I Knew There was Something I Forgot to Do Yesterday

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

And guess what?  It was updating this blog.  (See previous post about looming deadlines and encroaching tunnel vision.)

By way of apology . . . a recipe.  Not as mindless as some of my deadline standbys, but simple enough, and filling.

Scalloped Potatoes with Ham and Cheese

You need:

  • 8 potatoes, peeled and sliced thin (I used russets, because they were on sale, but I expect that any kind would do.)
  • 1 pound, more or less, sliced ham (enough to make one layer in a 13×9 serving dish, anyhow.  I used leftovers from a spiral-sliced cooked ham that was also on sale, but you could just go up to the deli counter and ask for a pound of Virginia ham, sliced thick.  No one says you have to put it all into sandwiches.)
  • 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
  • bread crumbs

Also:
2 cups of cream sauce, made thusly:

  •     4 T (1/2 stick) butter
  •     4 T flour
  •     1 cup chicken stock (I usually make it up from a jar of chicken stock base that I keep handy, but this time I happened to have one of those plastic boxes of ready-to-go stock in the refrigerator)
  •     1 cup cream or half-and-half (or milk, if that’s what you’ve got)
  •     pinch of salt (if the stock you have on hand is of the low-sodium variety)
  •     dash of white pepper (or regular pepper, if you don’t have white pepper and don’t mind pepper flecks in your cream sauce)
  •     dash of nutmeg

Melt the butter in a largish frying pan.  Add the flour.  Stir it around over medium heat until blended; don’t let it get brown.
Add the chicken stock gradually, stirring to keep the mixture from getting lumpy.
Add the dairy liquid, and keep on stirring.
Add the salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
When the mixture starts to thicken, it’s ready to go.  (If you have to give it a scrape to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan, it’s thickened.)

The first things you do:

Cut the ham slices off the ham.  This job can be outsourced to somebody in the household who likes playing with knives, in return for letting them have some of the ham to eat right then.  (Your cats would love to help with this, but as yet — thankfully — they don’t have the necessary knife-wielding skills.)

Peel and slice all those potatoes.  You’re not as likely to be able to outsource this bit, unfortunately.

Make certain you’ve got the shredded cheese you remembered buying at the grocery store.  (If you don’t have the cheese, don’t fret.  The recipe is of sufficient goodness even without it.)  Also, do you have breadcrumbs?  If you don’t, you can make some right now in the food processor, if you’ve got a food processor — about 3 slices of bread should do the trick.

The next things you do:

Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit and prep your 13×9 inch pan.  Grease it up with butter or Crisco, or use one of the cooking sprays, your choice.  Make sure you’ve got enough aluminum foil handy to cover the pan when the time comes.

Put your sliced potatoes in a layer (or a couple of overlapping layers, for best coverage) in the bottom of the 13×9 pan.  Put the sliced ham in a single layer on top of the potatoes.  Sprinkle the cup of shredded cheese on top of the ham.

Make the cream sauce, as described above.  When it’s thickened, pour it over the potatoes-ham-cheese layers.

And then:

Cover the 13×9 pan with aluminum foil.  (If it’s got its own lid, you don’t have to do this.)  Put the pan into the preheated oven and cook, covered, for an hour.

Then:

Remove the aluminum foil.  Sprinkle the dish with enough breadcrumbs to make a crust on top.  Put it back into the oven and cook uncovered for another 15-20 minutes, or until the breadcrumbs have gotten golden-brown and crispy.

And serve it forth.

(A further note:  The cream sauce recipe here is a good basic one, useful for making the creamed part of creamed onions, or for the gravy portion of biscuits-and-sausage-gravy (substituting fat from the cooked sausage for all or part of the butter), or for anything else that calls for a standard white sauce.)

Deadline Horror: The Looming

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For lo, I have sworn a mighty oath (“Darn it!” I said) that I’ll get this book finished before my birthday.

At the moment, I’m relatively sane, because the book has not yet claimed squatter’s rights on the greater portion of my brain, and complete deadline tunnel vision has yet to set in.

I make no promises as to what my state of mind will be like by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, though.