Tag: adventures in the writing life

The Slugabed Conundrum

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In the summertime, for those of us whose work doesn’t tie us to an alarm clock, getting out from under the covers at a timely hour is easy. The sky is already bright outside, most days, the room is warm, and the transition from sleepwear to regular clothing doesn’t involve any intermediate bare-skinned shivering.

Once the weather turns cold, though, things are different. You wake up, and the clock tells you that it’s a good and virtuous hour to get out of bed. But your ears and nose and any other exposed bits tell you that the room is distinctly chilly, and meanwhile the rest of you is snug under the flannel sheet and the down comforter in a nest which has by now reached the optimum level of retained body heat to keep you happy and warm for hours yet. Getting out of bed will involve, however briefly, an unpleasant bare-skinned interval between sleepwear-under-covers and daywear-in-the-bedroom.

So you look again at the clock, and decide that you can lie there for a few minutes longer. An hour later, you wake up, and look at the clock . . . .

And so it goes. In the deepest of midwinter, when the night-time temperatures drop to -20°F or even lower, I sometimes resort to putting at least the first layer or so of the next day’s clothing under the comforter at the foot of the bed, so that I can retrieve it in the morning and dress myself under the covers. But such measures are for January and February, not for November when it is merely, as they would say up here, a bit nippy in the mornings.

Sometimes Life Hands You a Sack of Ingredients

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Maybe you have a friend with a garden that’s overproducing, and you get a surprise gift of a bag of zucchini and homegrown potatoes. You already know about making zucchini bread out of other people’s excess zucchini, but the potatoes deserve to have something good done to them before they go to waste, so you decide to make this;

Spinach and Bacon Potatoes

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 large or 2 medium onions, chopped (when in doubt, err on the side of more onion, rather than less)
  • 1/2 pound bacon, finely chopped (the original version called for pancetta, the which we do not have, up here in the wilds of the north country, but regular bacon works just fine so long as it isn’t maple-cured or something like that. I buy packages of bacon ends and pieces at the IGA, and they do just fine as ingredient-grade bacon.)
  • 5 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (throw in a couple extra if your potatoes are running small)
  • 1 box of frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
  • 4 cups shredded Mexican cheese blend (cheddar will also work)
  • 1 pint heavy cream (or half and half, if you’re being economical with money or fat)

Directions

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a medium baking dish.
  • Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat, and sauté the onion and bacon until onion is tender and bacon is cooked through.
  • Alternately layer the potato slices, the bacon and onion mixture, the spinach, and the cheese in the prepared baking dish.
  • Pour the heavy cream evenly over everything.
  • Cover and bake 1 hour in the preheated oven.
  • Uncover, and continue baking 30 minutes, until bubbly and lightly browned.

The writing life can be like this sometimes, as well.  You may be going along, working on the project or projects you currently have in hand, when your personal muse shows up with a basket full of ideas and says to you, “Here.  I’m sure you can make something tasty out of these.”

Since it’s a bad idea to ignore gifts from your muse, even inconvenient ones, you’ll have to do something with all those fresh ingredients.  Maybe they can go together to make something you can whip up in a hurry before getting back to your main projects – a quick short story stir fry, as it were.  But maybe they’re better suited for something complex and long-simmering that you don’t have time for right now, so what else can you do?

Well, that’s where food preservation techniques real or virtual scrapbooks and idea files come in.  Get that gift basket full of ideas safely frozen or pickled or salted down and stored in the root cellar, and come the cold midwinter of the mind, they’ll be waiting there to nourish you.

When Writers Get Bored

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My husband and co-author James D. Macdonald got bored the other day – he’s also an EMT, and he was sitting around the ambulance HQ waiting for somebody in their area of operations to have chest pains or run their car into a tree, but nobody did – so he wrote this.

(This also explains why, in our collaborations, he’s usually the plot wrangler and I’m the prose wrangler.  The secret to picking a good collaborator is locating one who thinks that the stuff you find difficult is actually easy, and vice versa.)

Neophilia

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Which is to say, I’ve upgraded my desktop system to Windows 10 and – so far, anyhow – nothing vital has either exploded or disappeared into the ether.

I did take good advice, though, and didn’t use the “Express” setup option, because it defaults to sharing everything with everyone everywhere, which is a stupid thing to default to, but it wouldn’t be a Windows operating system without at least one stupid default.

(And no, I don’t want to switch to the Apple side of the force.  There are people for whom the Mac/iWhatever interface is deft and intuitive, and there are people for whom it is intensely frustrating, and I’m one of the latter. )

So now I’m checking to make sure all of my previously installed apps are still working as advertised, this post being a test of Windows Live Writer.  If you’re reading these words, then presumably Live Writer tested sat.

Today’s Mail

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DecoPunk CoverIn addition to the usual unsolicited credit card  offers at rates that make “usurious” sound like a good deal, the postalperson today brought us our authors’ copies of the anthology Decopunk: The Spirit of the Age, which contains our short story, “Silver Passing in Sunlight.”

I really like that cover, by the way . . . if they made a poster out of it, I’d  put it on my wall.

Link of the Day

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When it comes to the most frustrating aspect of the freelance life – to wit, actually getting paid for the work – this piece in The Toast nails it.  (The comment section is full of additional spot-on commentary.)

The single most reliable and prompt payer I have ever personally dealt with was a comic-book company; they paid their freelancers every other Friday on the dot.  They also got swallowed up in the Great Doom that befell the American comics industry in the mid-nineties, so go figure.

The worst? Universities, hands down.

(These are the honest companies and institutions we’re talking about here.  Of the dishonest ones, we shall not speak, mostly because to do so would require the use of very bad words.)

Weekend Comma Upcoming

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We’ll be at the Burlington, MA, Marriott for Readercon, which we’ll be doing on a relaxacon basis again this year (also on an extremely attenuated shoestring, thanks to the necessity of paying off this past winter’s even-higher-than-usual electric bill.)

One of the things we usually do at Readercon is finish up on Sunday with a summer movie.  I’ve heard some good word-of-mouth about Spy, of the “Don’t let the posters mislead you” variety.  And there’s always Jurassic World, or the latest Terminator outing, either of which would at least provide the requisite summer-move quota of violence and explosions.

In any case, if you’re in or around Burlington this coming weekend, Readercon is a nice place to be.

Ah, Summer!

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

I’d like to say I’ve been on vacation, but alas, the latter half of June wasn’t that entertaining.  Mostly it was spent dealing with assorted mundane but distracting issues like household repairs (ongoing and expensive . . . most of the time, when you live in a big old house, things fail one at a time, but this was the year when everything – including the dishwasher and the hot water heater – decided to go on strike at once), and oppressive weather  (after a prolonged winter, we’re now in the middle of a cool and clammy summer, with all the associated mosquitoes and mildew), and workshop work (reading all the submitted applications, and helping to finalize the roster of admitted students), and writing work (a set of revisions that I’ve been chasing for this long while now like Achilles trying to catch the tortoise.)

But now I’m back, and just to amuse you, a couple of peeves, or at least one peeve and an interesting word pair.

First, the peeve: People, you don’t beckon someone, you beckon to them.

Jill beckoned to Jane.  “Come look at this.”

I see this one even in published material, and can only conclude that either a lot of copy editors are falling down on the job, or a lot of authors are stetting more stuff than they should.

Now, the word pair.

Consider, then, immigrant and emigrant.  These two words can often be used of the same group of people – individuals who, singly or in groups, happen to be relocating from one country to another.  The difference is a matter of point of view.  If you’re standing on the pier and waving farewell as you watch their ship pull away, they are emigrants, people who are traveling from their country of origin to make their home elsewhere.  The clue is in the e- prefix, which comes from the Latin preposition ex, meaning (among a bunch of associated concepts) “from” or “out of.”

If, however, you’re on the other side of the ocean and watching their ship pull up to the pier, the same people are going to be immigrants, people who are coming into a country from somewhere else.  Once again, the  prefix is the key; this time, it’s im-, from the Latin preposition in, meaning “in” or “into.”

(If the same group of people are traveling from one place to another and either don’t intend or are unable to stay in one place, they are simply migrants. As for why the term emigrants should have more positive connotations than immigrants, which in turn has more positive connotations than migrants . . . all I can say is that language is sometimes weird, and people are sometimes jerks.)

It’s Magic!

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starcat030513For all you folks out there who are interested in Jim Macdonald’s other artistic vocation (the one that isn’t writing novels), tomorrow and Saturday he’s going to be doing close-up street magic in Bradford, Vermont, as part of the local downtown merchants’ Customer Appreciation Days. Look for him out in front of Star Cat Books – he’ll be the one in the hat.

Where I’ve Been When I Haven’t Been Here

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Working, mostly, clearing my way out from under a couple of editing gigs. Our trip to Albacon went well – it was a pleasant local convention with congenial people – and we were able to make a side trip to Ausable Chasm on the way out.

Chasm Sign02

Jim Macdonald (husband and co-author) has had a hankering to visit Ausable Chasm ever since he was a kid and first saw the classic Charles Addams cartoon showing the man and wife at a ticket window, with the caption “A round trip and a one-way to Ausable Chasm.”

Well, this year we finally made it. It’s impressive, even from up on the bank of the chasm:

Ausable Chasm01

All we had time for – we didn’t want to miss the Albacon Ice Cream Social later that evening – was the basic two-hour self-guided trail walk (well, Jim did the trail walk; I, as befits a person who has been spraining my ankles on everything from loose rocks to cracks in the linoleum since I was six years old, stayed up on the bank and enjoyed the tranquility.)  But I suspect we’ll be going back, now that we know what’s there. Both the chasm and the convention come highly recommended – do check them out if you have the opportunity.