Tag: adventures in the writing life

Only Two More Days…

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…(and, as I write this, seven and a half hours, but who’s counting) until the US presidential election is over, and whatever comes next, comes next, but in any case I should stop getting multiple daily polling calls and stacks of four-color glossy political ads.

Meanwhile, to keep us all going, a recipe – not a simple one this time, but one that I got from my father quite a while ago.  It’s become my go-to recipe for when somebody phones up and says, “You will bring a cake to the bake sale, won’t you?”  Obligatory writing reference:  This is kind of like being asked to contribute a story to a charity anthology, except that you can’t keep re-using the same story from one anthology to another, but you can definitely make the same cake every time.

Anyhow, this is Marvelous Mississippi Mud Cake (or Triple-C Chocolate Cake, as I usually call it up here in far northern New England, where the marvelousness of Mississippi mud – providing, as it does, “the richest land this side of the Valley Nile” – is not exactly common knowledge):

  • 5   ounces (the original recipe called for “5 squares”, but that was before the chocolate makers changed to half-ounce squares and didn’t warn anybody) 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   T boiling water
  • 1   cup plus 2 T cold water
  • 1/2 cup bourbon, or rum, or amaretto, or cognac
    (bourbon is the classic, but up here I use cognac, it being more in the local idiom)
  • 1   cup unsalted butter at room temperature
  • 1   tsp vanilla extract
  • 2   cups powdered (aka confectioner’s) 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.  (This is a place where the recipe betrays its age and regional origins – I don’t think recipes say “grease” any more.  My father would have used Crisco; I generally use Baker’s Joy spray.)

Position rack in center of oven and heat oven to 325 F.

Melt chocolate in the top pan of a double boiler over hot, not boiling, water.  (Another indication of this recipe’s vintage.  These days, I melt my chocolate in the microwave.) Remove chocolate before it is completely melted and stir until 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 the 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, like me, use a handheld electric mixer because that’s what you’ve got.)  Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.  Beat in the extra yolk and the 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.  (Obviously, if you’re not using a stand mixer, you can skip that step.) 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 the batter 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 confectioner’s sugar or cocoa.  Serve with bourbon-(or cognac, or whatever booze you’re using)-laced, slightly sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

This makes a decidedly grown-up chocolate cake.  Treat yourself; after the campaign season we’ve all had, you deserve it.

One of the Things We Tell People in the Writers’ Workshop…

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…is that if people keep telling you that there’s something wrong with your story – they’re probably right.

They may be – in fact, they quite likely are – wrong about what, exactly, is wrong with your story, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the fact that you have a problem and the problem is real and you need to fix it.

The same thing, I would make bold to say, applies to politics.

(This is not, however, the point where I expound upon my grand theory of What Is Wrong With Our Politics and How to Fix It, because that sort of thing is not remotely within my skill set.  Your story, though, and how to improve it . . . that I can figure out, and gladly, too.)

Take Care, People.

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Hurricane Matthew looks set to romp and stomp all over the state of Florida, and possibly a goodly chunk of the Atlantic coast.  Some people who might have otherwise been reading this have probably already evacuated to safer climes; for others, I direct your attention to this web page on emergency jump kits, also known in the trade as bug-out bags.  (Full disclosure:  The author of the list is also my co-author.) They’re the bag you keep packed to grab when the state police come around your neighborhood telling everyone that the dam has busted/the wildfire has jumped the firebreaks/the chemical plant has exploded and you need to get out of there now.

If you’re a writer, your jump kit might also need to contain a means of continuing your work – anything from a paper notebook and pencils to a cheap netbook and a mouse, depending upon your purse and your habits.  And it’s never a bad idea to keep a current backup of the work-in-progress on a thumb drive you can grab on the run and shove into a pocket, as well as another backup on Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever offsite server you trust with your data.

For right now – stay safe, and take lots of mental notes on the storm while you’re getting slammed by it.  You’re writers, and everything is grist for your mill.

Lo! A Review!

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Speaking as an editor and instructor of writers, one should never obsess over reviews, because that way madness lies.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like a good review to brighten a writer’s day.  If you’re friends with a writer, and spot a good review of their work, it’s an act of kindness to let them know about it.  If you spot a bad review, don’t bother – even if it’s one of those completely off-the-wall, did-the-reader-even-read-the-story bad reviews – because for one thing, they’ve probably already heard about it from those other friends who make a habit of kindly supplying people with all the bad news they might ever need, and for another thing, it will only depress them.  See madness, above.

All that being said, there’s a nice review of the Altered States of the Union anthology over here at the Legendarium, in which the reviewer calls our story “Gertrude of Wyoming” a “shrewd and intelligent thriller.”  Considering that those were exactly the qualities we were aiming for, I for one am pleased.

A Trio of Links

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The Folger Library is sending Shakespeare’s First Folio on tour.  It’ll be making one stop in each of the fifty states, including Hawaii and Alaska; you can find your state’s Shakespeare stop here.

Also, a reminder for writers who might want to transform lived experience or known history into fiction:  Fiction has to be believable, while reality is under no such constraint.

And finally, an interview with one of the many authors over the decades who have been Carolyn Keene, about writing Nancy Drew novels.  Full disclosure:  I’ve never been Carolyn Keene, but I have been one-half of Victor Appleton.  Twice.  And I can vouch for the truth of this article.

My only beef is with the interviewer and/or the editor on the Slate end of things, who persist in referring to the author as a “ghostwriter.”  She was not – and doesn’t call herself one.  A ghostwriter is writing under the name of, and in the persona of, an actual person who is the purported author of the book.  Sometimes this is a flagrant pretense, but sometimes it’s for a good reason – if, for example, the “author” has an important or interesting story to tell, but absolutely no writing chops whatsoever.

At any rate, a writer for the Nancy Drew books, or the Tom Swift books, or any of a number of syndicated properties, is not a ghost writer.  The proper term for what they’re doing is writing under a house name – so-called because the name “Carolyn Keene” or “Victor Appleton” or whatever is owned by the publishing house, not by the writer of a particular book.  Which is how I can have in my personal library a Tom Swift hardcover from the mid-1920’s that used to belong to my father, and a couple of Tom Swift paperbacks from the early 1990’s that were co-authored by me and Jim Macdonald.

And “Victor Appleton” wrote them all.

One of the Good Things About Teaching

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— and about editing, for that matter — is the the opportunity to point with pride at a student’s (or client’s) success.

On this occasion, I can bask in the reflected glow from Viable Paradise alumna Fran Wilde’s winning of the Andre Norton Award for YA science fiction at the Nebula Awards just past for her novel Updraft, which also won the Baltimore Science Fiction Society’s Compton Crook Award for best first novel.

And as if that weren’t enough illumination, there’s a further glow coming by way of Debra Jess, another VP alumna and a Dr. Doyle’s Editorial client, for her novel Bloodsurfer, which is a finalist in two categories (best first novel and best paranormal) of the Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America Booksellers’ Best Award. The winners will be announced at this summer’s RWA convention.

Needless to say, I’m tickled pink for them both.

Playing Catch-Up

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It’s been a long winter.

Also an unseasonably warm one, which is never good for the local economy up here in the wilds of northern New Hampshire.  And I’ve been mostly quiet, for which I apologize – I took a wrong step at the bottom of an unfamiliar flight of stairs in the dark, and ended up straining a muscle in my back.  The alternative would have been slamming my head up against the corner of the table next to the stairs, so I can’t really regret the spine-wrenching contortions I put myself through on the way down, even if they did give me over a month’s worth of sore muscles.  In any case, there’s something about not being able to sleep comfortably for several weeks that turns one’s get-up-and-go into more of a lurch-to-one’s-feet-and-shamble.  The whole thing put me at least a month behind on everything, and I’m still digging my way out from under the resulting backlog.

A couple of things that happened while I was in Shamble Mode:

Our story “One Night in Bavaria” came out in the Tom Easton and Judith Dial anthology Conspiracy! , from NESFA Press.

The Viable Paradise Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop opened up for applications.  This year’s workshop will be held at the Island Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, from  Sunday, October 16th, through Friday, October 21st, 2016.

A thing that will be happening next month:

The contributors to Conspiracy! (some of them, anyway – time and distance happen to us all) will be doing a signing at Toadstool Books in Peterborough, New Hampshire on the 23rd of April.  Watch this space for the exact time.

Finally, a trio of links for your amusement:

An article on American Sign Language and its relation to French Sign Language, and the Philadelphia ASL accent.

An article on the New York Public Library’s Erotica collection.

And finally, a link to the University of Arkansas’s* new on-line archive of its Ozark Folk Song Collection. The UofA was my undergraduate alma mater, and I was fortunate enough to take a folklore class with Mary Celestia Parler, the scholar primarily responsible for collecting the music in the archive, near the end of her teaching career there.  Having this major resource made available on-line to the public is a wonderful thing – go Razorbacks!

*Yes, that is how you form the possessive.  The state legislature officially said so.

The Unified Doyle-Macdonald Arisia Schedule

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The Arisia Science Fiction Convention is being held this coming weekend at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, and (barring unforeseen disasters) Jim Macdonald and I are planning to be there.  Our schedule for the convention:

5:30 PM Friday  (Three bells of the First Dog Watch)

Thrown with Great Force:Classics We Won’t Finish – Literature, Panel – 1hr 15min- Marina 2 (2E)
This is a panel for all of you who didn’t finish LotR; everyone who needed to self medicate through Infinite Jest, exiled Frankenstein to the frozen wastes, or wanted to flush the Foundation. What did you fail to finish, which ones do you feel guilty about not finishing, and which ones do not make you feel any twinge of guilt at all?

    Kate Nepveu (m), Mark L Amidon, Vikki Ciaffone, Debra Doyle, Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein, Ken Liu
10:00 PM Friday  (Four bells of the First Watch)

Trains and SF/F – Fan Interest, Panel – 1hr 15min – Faneuil (3W)
Perhaps the most iconic development of the Industrial Revolution was the steam locomotive, and science fiction and fantasy has made great use of locomotives and trains throughout its history. Whether the “lightning rail” of D&D’s Eberron setting or the popularity of locomotives in steampunk, SF/F is no stranger to the love affair and sense of wonder people have for trains. Come “all aboard” with Arisia ’16, as we explore this phenomenon in the realm of fantastic fiction!

 Dennis McCunney (m), James Macdonald, Daniel Miller
10:00 AM Saturday  (Four bells of the Forenoon Watch)

The Founding Mothers of SF/F – Literature, Panel – 1hr 15min – Marina 2 (2E)
As we know, women invented all our favorite stuff! Mary Shelley defined science fiction with Frankenstein; Baroness Emma Orczy invented the superhero with The Scarlet Pimpernel. Let’s discuss the founding mothers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Catherine Lundoff (m), Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Victoria Janssen, JoSelleVanderhooft

10:00 AM Saturday (Four bells of the Forenoon Watch)

How to Write a Fight Scene – Literature, Panel – 1hr 15min – Grand CD (1W)
Come find out how viable your fight scene really is. An experienced panel of talented authors, martial artists, and maybe one hapless would-be victim will take your quick fight scene and act it out while our esteemed panelists help you work out the physical and literary kinks. Please no epic wave battles.

Keith R. A. DeCandido (m), Genevieve Iseult Eldredge, James Macdonald, Mark J. Millman
1:00 PM Saturday  (2 Bells of the Afternoon Watch )

Shifting the Language of SF – Literature, Panel – 1hr 15min – Marina 2 (2E)
Very few SF authors of the many who set stories in the far future ever speculate what language may sound like in following centuries and distant stars. Some formative works, like Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Orwell’s 1984 include this as a theme. Who else? What are the dangers of speculating vernacular? How might the language our descendants speak differ from ours? What works in SF imagine how the kids talk in the far future?

John Chu (m), Heather Albano, Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Lawrence M. Schoen

1:00 PM Saturday  (2 Bells of the Afternoon Watch)

Cinematic Writing and SF/F – Literature, Panel – 1hr 15min – Burroughs (3E)
SF/F literature gets a lot of its fans from other media, especially visual media like TV and film. How has it affected the writing of spec fic? Can writing be truly cinematic? What does cinematic literature look like? What techniques in SF/F point back toward more visual techniques in other media?

James Macdonald (m), Marlin May, John Scalzi, Sarah Smith, Ian Randal Strock

It’s the Longest Night of the Year

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Sunset’s at 4:03 PM (at least, it’ll be 4:03 at the local weather station I get my reports from), and by 4:30 it’ll be as black as the inside of a goat outdoors.  But we keep on keeping on, in the conviction that the sun will once again come back and the days will start their outward spiral toward midsummer.

In honor of the season, and of all its assorted celebrations, I’m once again offering my wintertime holiday special: 

From now through Twelfth Night (6 January 2016), my price for a full-dress line-edit plus a 3-5 page letter of critique drops to a flat $1000 for a standard-weight novel, which you can also purchase in the form of a gift certificate redeemable by the recipient at a future date of their choice.  (And if the gift recipient happens to be you, that’s perfectly fine with me.)

It’s Thanksgiving, Again.

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At least, in the USA.  (Canada has been thankful already.)

And speaking as a writer, here are a few things I’m specifically thankful for:

  • The personal computer revolution, which came along just in time to enable an epically bad typist like me to produce submittable manuscripts that didn’t shed white-out like dandruff and didn’t take roughly thirty minutes per page of final copy to produce.

    (Does anyone even use correction fluid any more? Or does it hang out with carbon paper in the Land of Obsolete Office Supplies?)

  • The internet, starting with bulletin boards and on-line services like AOL and CompuServe and GEnie, and moving on through mailing lists and blogs and the wonders of the world-wide web. No longer does an aspiring writer have to move to New York or Boston or Philadelphia in order to have a finger on the pulse of the literary world; anywhere with internet connectivity is only a click away.

    Research, also, has been made oh-so-much easier. Once upon a time, if I needed to consult an obscure text — a monograph about daily life in Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison in the late eighteen-hundreds, to pick a not-coincidental example — I would have had to drive at least two hours to the nearest major university library and consult their card catalogue to determine if they had a copy (which they very probably wouldn’t.) Then I would need to either try for interlibrary loan through my local library, which could take a month or more, or try to wangle university library privileges (good luck with that), or hope I could get everything I needed before the library doors closed for the day. Now, that book and hundreds like it are gloriously digitized and available on-line.

  • And this year, the World Fantasy Award people decided that henceforward they wouldn’t be using the bust of Lovecraft as the design for the award.

    This is a good thing, because now award winners who would prefer not to have a portrait of a howling xenophobic racist* on their mantelpiece won’t have to; also, the H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Bludgeon was possibly the ugliest major award in this or any other biz. (Back where I come from, the phrase “homely as a mud fence plastered with tadpoles” would just about cover it.) Gahan Wilson, who designed it, is an excellent cartoonist, but his gift does not, in my opinion, translate well into three dimensions.

    Not all blessings are unalloyed, since the change means we’re in for several rounds of acrimonious debate about what sort of design should replace the current one. (“A dragon!” “God, no. No dragons, no wizards, none of that extruded fantasy product stuff!” “Mary Shelley!” “Are you smoking something? Mary Shelley wrote science fiction!”) at the end of which the World Fantasy Committee will come up with something either boring or ugly or controversial or all three.

    Because such is the way of our tribe.

*Really.  Even by the standards of his day — which by the standards of our day are pretty appalling all on their own — he was extreme.