For whatever reason, salmon does not like to have me cooking it. It always turns out dry and kind of tasteless. But this past Sunday, my grandparents were coming to lunch, and I invited my in-laws over to join us, and I needed something that would cook quickly. Experimental cooking on company? Why not? And who needs a recipe? Bah.
Sometimes I luck out. This turned out wonderfully well, and next time I have every intention of making tartar sauce to go with it (not because it especially needs it, but because I love tartar sauce.)
Orange Salmon (yes, I know salmon is naturally orange. I mean like the fruit, not the color.)
Rinse the salmon steak(s) and lay it out on foil. Shape the foil into enough of a bowl that it will hold liquid.
Douse the salmon well with lemon and/or orange juice (not from concentrate).
Season with garlic salt and pepper.
Layer thin slices of orange, onion and butter across the top of the fish and refrigerate for several hours.
Remove fish from refrigerator and pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.
Drizzle olive oil up and down the length of the salmon and bake for 10-15 minutes or until done.
Of all the words either Mr. Pond or I have come up with to describe the long-running blog-based conversation we've engaged in, his latest, webxchange, sounds like one destined to become an actual part of the English language. Maybe that's because when I Google it to see if anyone else has used it, I discover it already exists--and it even has a website, though for an apparently Paypal-like company. Hmpf. Oh well--I like it. Although I also like his other suggestion, blogalectic.
Mr. Pond responds to my vagueness about what good writing actually is with an emphatic "It can be quantified:"
Hamlet is great writing. If you don’t like it, fine. It’s still great writing. No one can argue that. ‘Taste’ simply doesn’t apply.
Because there are rules, and not just fashions. There are histories, and not just markets. There is light and darkness and music and structure and sound and fury—and these coalesce to make great literature.
Fashions come and go and sometimes repeat themselves, but the rules of great writing exist and they can be quantified. Hamlet succeeds--no educated person in their right mind would challenge the Bard, if only because the literary elite would shred them and eat them for breakfast. (Perhaps I should follow that statement with the assurance that I admire Shakespeare's brilliance with the dutiful respect of an English scholar and sometimes the fervor of a nerd who kills time in the shower by reciting Katharina's final speech from The Taming of the Shrew. No munching on me, elites.)
Mr. Pond continues with the following, and I agree completely:
We must judge a text by the fashion of its own time, not ours. We must look endlessly for those texts which transcend time. When we find them, if we care about what great writing is, we read them, submit ourselves to them, to learn why.
True. Very, very true. And the trick, for those of us aiming at the stars, is to write a tale that is both within our time and transcendent of it.
That is a resolution of contraries if ever there was one. Our hot, passionate, fleeting time, caught up in fad after fashion after fling, disrespectful of history and therefore unable to learn from it, busy trying to immortalize itself in 140 characters or less per idea--this we must unite, somehow, to the calm, unmoving, deeply resonant truths that were true ten thousand years ago and ever shall be.
I think the rules, the real rules of writing, are those which allow us to accomplish that goal. Those rules are most definitely not matters of adverbs and the passive voice. We may follow the laws of fashion to give our stories a chance at getting read and remembered, but the greater laws are just that--greater.
"This funny old writing life," Mr. Pond calls it, and elsewhere, "a wild, mad dream of golden leaves under a golden sky." Amen. It's the life in which we succeed wildly one day and fail the next, then succeed again after staying up half the night fighting a stubborn scene. It's asking for help, getting answers we hate first and love later. It's questioning and hoping, working out ideas, putting the secrets of our hearts out for anyone and everyone to see and critique.
But we don't do this without reason. One of my favorite wrockers has as her Myspace tag line the words "It's real for us." The quote comes from a young Severus Snape, referring to Hogwarts, but I've always been moved by Zoë's use of it. That world of wizards and wands and half-giants and house-elves and courage--it's real for us. The same is true of any world we enter through story, including the ones we write.
When the rules have me struggling with all my might, I know that behind the difficult passage is a world full of people and a quest that matters and magic and love. It's real for me, and that keeps me going.
A wedding, a couple of get-togethers with cousins, five hours of driving each way, sleeping—or not sleeping—in a motel, several trips back and forth to my parents' for time with grandparents, trying to write book in my head in spare moments because I haven't had much time with my computer—and little Jenna is pretty tired out tonight.
It has, of course, been worth every measure of weariness.
* * *
I do love a good wedding. And when I say "good wedding" I mean the real thing, where you know the bride and groom actually mean their vows, where God is respected, where the couple appear to have made it a family event instead of a selfish one, and where they both look honestly happy.
Our cousin's was just such a one—simple and beautiful and cheerful and full of faith and love. It made me happy to witness it.
* * *
That set of Lou's cousins live in the country, and I'm afraid that the country spoiled me for stargazing in the city. I could actually see the Little Dipper, which I've never managed to do from my house because it doesn't get that dark. The band of the Milky Way showed clearly, running through Cygnus and Aquila.
And I got to looking at the stars I thought were Virgo, and thinking... and on the next clear night at home, I spent a very frustrating hour re-trying to trace that constellation. Finding Virgo is easy, everybody says. Just "follow the arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica (Alpha Virginis.)" Well. I beg to differ over the easy part. I've been tracking it wrong for months.
I have, however, figured out the constellation at last. Unfortunately, only the alpha and beta stars are clearly visible from my front yard. Oh well.
* * *
If I read any exceptionally funny lines or sites this week, I've forgotten, so in lieu of that, here's a joke my dad passed to me over Facebook awhile back:
"My computer beat me at chess but it was no match for me at kickboxing."
I'm pretty sure I laughed till I cried at that one.
* * *
As much as I'd like to keep on writing of other things I've thought about this week, my brain is simply done. Lou and I have a quiet day at home tomorrow, and I'm grateful. Sunday we spend a little more time with my grandparents before they leave for Florida, and I'm grateful for that too.
I have grandparents in town this week, so instead of computer time I have family time. :)
This afternoon was happily summery, and while hanging out with Grandpa and Grandma at my parents', I took some pictures of the beauty around me. (For the sake of privacy, I won't generally post family pictures here... you're stuck with flowers and cute little animals today.)
When my parents bought their new place last year, the place had to have rat dung scrubbed from the inside, and the outside was a tangle of blackberry bushes and ancient cars. In that short time, with no outside contract help, my family has brought about a great deal of loveliness:
...of which that's just a taste. And here's a close-up of the sweet peas in the background:
I am so planting some of these next year.
The chickens decided to look at me while I was out taking pictures:
and here's my current favorite part:
want want want.
Anyway, I hope to have a post tomorrow. I'll do my best to handle that... and get caught up on email and comments here and at The Hog's Head and everywhere else... I'll try. :)
Today I've posted over at The Hog's Head, where instead of reviewing China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, I linked to an article he wrote about Tolkien, made a few comments, and asked for discussion.
Feel free to check out his post; it's got a lot of fascinating thoughts. And as a wordsmith, I have to applaud his choices to use a phrase like "the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian" and then refer to something as "totally cool" in the next paragraph. Anybody who can pull that off is awesome.
One of the highlights of this past weekend-across-the-mountains was the chance to breakfast and visit with the hostess of Tasty Tuesdays, Farmer's City Wife, and her farmer, who is Lou's cousin. I now really wish they lived closer, because they're a heck of a lot of fun.
The recipe for this week, "Peter's Mum's Soda Bread Recipe", is one I haven't made but intend to try tonight, because I have buttermilk that must be used immediately. I think I'll make the bread as cake (rather than farl) and serve it alongside a shepherd's pie.
Is it good? We'll find out shortly, provided I make it correctly and don't overmix.
Mr. Pond has come up with new words for our ongoing blogalogue, including blogversation and blogument. If I want to respond in kind, I'll have to resort to a thesaurus or a burst of inspiration, because I can't think of any more talking words to mesh with blog. Hmm. Maybe if I branch out... I could do web + debate = webate, but webate just looks weird.
Oh well.
Whatever you wish to call it, this conversation has a common question running through the posts, working on macro and micro levels, powering the frustration that sparked the post that fired up the diablogue: What is good writing? Or, phrased a little more personally, what does it mean to write well?
Honest-to-goodness bad writing is usually easy to recognize. Any of us can go over to YouTube, click on any popular video, and read a few comments; there are more trolls on that site than anywhere else I've ever found on the internet, and it shouldn't take long to find a stunning example of inelegance. Poorly constructed sentences, misspellings, vitriol and irrelevance, illogic, rambling ideas and the like exemplify, as Dickens might have said, "How not to do it."
Good writing tends to be harder to quantify. Among other things, in the past years of studying writing and literature, I've learned that tastes differ. Half of us at The Hog's Head thought the opening chapter of the first Potter book was hilarity and brilliance and the other half found it difficult to get into. On the publication front, one agent rejects queries for things another appreciates. Some readers and writers like semicolons and others find them awkward.
Then there are the rules of fashion:
show, don't tell—broken by Jane Austen
keep to a moderate sentence length—broken by Charles Dickens
avoid repetition—broken by Stephenie Meyer
restrict use of adverbs—broken by J.K. Rowling
avoid use of the passive voice—broken by Elizabeth Goudge
unify narrative perspective instead of head-hopping—broken by pretty much every writer before 1900 and at least 95 percent since then
et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum
(Perhaps I should add: Don't start sentences with conjunctions—broken by me at least four times in every blog-post. But I'm not famous.)
Every industry pro will say, and with good reason, that just because great writers got away with certain things in the past doesn't mean we can today. Likewise, that just because the mega-bestsellers broke a rule doesn't mean someone competing for publication should try. But does failure in any of these areas disqualify someone from being a great writer? Hardly. It just might disqualify someone from publication. The tougher the competition, the more technically flawless any of us has to be to win. So be it.
Mr. Pond, in his last posts, speaks of writing theory. He talks of "the precise, singing balance of words, tension, and music—the fusion of story and sound" and of the "place of passion in the human heart which contains the genesis of the quest for beauty, madness, and grief" that we write from. These are two aspects of great writing, inseparable, and he discusses the relation of rules and medium to the greater theme being conveyed. In the process he answers the question of what it means, for a storyteller, to write well:
"Bringing surface narrative into tension and harmony with deep narrative is the craft of storytelling. The art of writing theory is learning how to tell deep narrative in the way it deserves."
That is as good a definition of those terms as I've ever heard. The difficulty with this is that it still isn't measurable. There is always room for disagreement among critics over who succeeds and who fails and why. For instance, I consider Chesterton one of the greatest English writers in history, yet I've known people who found him unbearably rambly. I poke fun at Hugo for his intra-novel essays, but my husband loved Les Miserables, essays and all. There's no accounting for taste—mine or anyone else's.
But the difficulty hardly matters. So good writing isn't formulaic? Neither is it anarchic. It could rather be called alchemic—a purification process with infusion of grace, accomplished in part through the reconciliation of opposites such as form and freedom, tradition and innovation. True, no one ever made the philosopher's stone—a source of guaranteed immortality and unending riches—any more than any of us have made our souls or our writing perfect. But why shouldn't perfection be our goal?
We work on our talent, writing, reading, practicing, trying to express our thoughts with pen and paper, in essay and lyric and story, wrestling out our own relationship to the rules of the task. We'll know when we've succeeded, because someone will burst out with a warmth of response, something beyond the studied compliment, something drawn from that same place of passion that moved us to write in the beginning.
Though apparently Anchorage got 75-degree days before we did, Bellingham has finally decided to give the clouds a week off and we've had sunny days in the high 80s. This is what I've been waiting for—I love it. Sweet summer! How I long to keep it for the next three months.
* * *
One of Lou's cousins is getting married this weekend, so we're leaving for the east side of the mountains in a few hours. I still haven't decided whether or not to take my laptop or just a chunk of my manuscript and a notebook. Either way, I need to write.
But I'm also bringing China Miéville's Un Lun Dun (can't stay out of the kids' lit...) Sometimes it's just nice to read.
* * *
I need to learn to write when other things are on my to-do list. Most of the time I try to get everything else out of the way first, which never works—if I do succeed in clearing the day's list, I'm too tired to focus, or I get good and warmed up to the story at about 10:00 PM when I should be winding down. Next week's goals include getting some serious writing time in early in the day.
* * *
One of my favorite things about summer weather: I can stargaze without having to guess around clouds to trace constellations. This week I've located Aquila and its alpha star, Altair; Cygnus and alpha star Deneb; most of Scorpius including alpha star Antares; part of the constellation Libra, and the star Polaris. I had trouble with Polaris until I learned that a line drawn through Merak and Dubhe of the Big Dipper points straight at it.
Venus has also been shockingly, beautifully bright above the western horizon at sundown. The first time I saw it, I thought it was an airplane and couldn't believe my eyes when it did not move.
I've also learned this week that the zodiac is the ring of constellations along the ecliptic (the path of the sun.) This might be an appalling display of ignorance, but I never knew the term had a scientific meaning. Interesting.
* * *
Learning the stars' often strange and difficult names makes me think of this:
"If you've been assigned to me, I suppose you must be some kind of a Namer, too, even if a primitive one."
"A what?"
"A Namer. For instance, the last time I was with a Teacher—or at school, as you call it—my assignment was to memorize the names of the stars."
"Which stars?"
"All of them."
"You mean all the stars, in all the galaxies?"
"Yes. If he calls for one of them, someone has to know which one he means. Anyhow, they like it; there aren't many who know them all by name, and if your name isn't known, then it's a very lonely feeling."
—Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door (Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York: 1973), 78-79
That's one of my absolute favorite moments in fiction, especially in context with the rest of the book. A Wind in the Door is well worth reading and re-reading.
* * *
Lou and I watched the first several episodes of Season 3 of The Office on Monday night. I am still laughing at Jim sending Dwight faxes from Future Dwight, Andy calling Jim "Big Tuna," and Michael's response to a black-lit hotel room.
But then, I'm also still laughing at Dwight's complaints against Jim from an episode in Season 2. That reminds me of several pranksters I've known—and of the time when some other girls and I put all the youth leader's shoelaces in Zip-loc bags of water and froze them, and lay all fourteen of his boxes of Blueberry Morning breakfast cereal (no, I'm not exaggerating) under the sheets in his bed... haha, those were the days. :)
* * *
Twilight fans, I loved this post—recommended to me by fellow Blogengamot member Arabella Figg—about the power of Eclipse and the Saga in general. I think he's on to something.
Unfortunately, if anyone responded sensibly to his question at the end, it got lost in the hundreds of comments by trolls. But here are my two cents: I don't think it is possible to be pro-woman without understanding that what almost every woman wants is to be loved by someone who is stronger than themselves in some quantifiable way, and to propagate the species. Bella's story speaks to those primal desires. Of course it draws the crowds.
* * *
Funny line of the week, thanks to Tyler Stanton: "To whom it may concern: Please start a blog that consists entirely of pictures of people about to sneeze. This is the funniest face a human can make."
With that strange mental picture—Happy weekend, everybody!
I poured out the darkness and despair of an atheist struggling to establish bonds and hopes in a godless world where anything might, and could, happen, where happiness could be torn away from one in an instant, a world in which the condemned and the despised raised their voices in protest and song.
Author: Anne Rice
Synopsis: Rice, author of a number of acclaimed vampire novels, tells her story about being raised Catholic, becoming an atheist in college, and eventually returning to her faith.
Notes: To my surprise, most of this book actually talks about Rice's childhood (did you know that her original name was Howard Allen? Me neither.) She found reading difficult and experienced the world as very sensory and very beautiful, which obviously affected her writing; there is a strong sense of that beauty in her prose.
I could empathize with a lot of her thought processes and enjoyed the book—right up until the last chapter or two, when she decided to take on the Church's moral teaching. I don't really want to get into that, but will say this much: How people can think the Church is obsessed with sex is beyond me. I go to church at least once a week and can't recall the last time I heard the subject mentioned there. But turning on the car radio, walking through the checkout line at the grocery, seeing a movie or television or reading young adult fiction, there's no escaping it. No, Anne. The Church is not obsessed. The world is obsessed, and doesn't want rules. The Church has rules. That's all there is to it.
But when she talked about the Eucharist, I was right there with her.
The book kind of made me want to go read some of her vampire novels, except... Twilight notwithstanding, vampire anything doesn't do much for me. Twilight is hardly a proper vampire story, with its tortured hero who doesn't want to be a monster. I get the feeling that Lestat is the real deal. Hmm. I might stick with the sparkly one.
"There is a fine line, and it’s growing finer, between writing what is true, what is beautiful, what is Art, and writing what can sell, what a voracious market devours. So much of what the market produces leaves those of us questing for truth through beauty nauseated and weary."—Mr. Pond, Core Magic, Art's Caprice
I have one particular publishing industry truism which I do not hesitate to challenge (to be fair, it may not be meant quite as exclusively as it can be taken.) In last week's addition to our diablogue, Mr. Pond reminded me of it with this comment:
"One point on which Jenna and I entirely agree is that there must be a wider aim [in?] writing fiction than simply catering to the existing market."
That thought hadn't put itself into so many words in my mind, but yes, I do agree with that. And it is to wider aims that I look in contradicting the aphorism "Know your market and write for it."
Oh, I think about that. Mr. Pond says, and I concur, that "To a certain extent, if we want to write at all we have to pay attention to what the market is doing." I can reasonably quantify my book into genre and name a primary market.
But while I think my book is marketable to girls ages 14-17, I do not write toward that group as a demographic. What troubles me most about the aphorism is that too much focus on what the members of a target audience (especially that target audience) have in common makes it easy to miss what they have in common with everybody else. As C.S. Lewis said in his essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children, "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story." The same could definitely be said for teenagers' stories.
Most of my understanding of how to write for teenaged girls comes from not from knowing dozens of them—though after having been in youth ministry, they're not exactly unknown to me—nor from having been one, but from the part of me that hasn't changed since I was one of them, that won't change except to grow. And I write to that. I write for myself, for the part of myself that I believe to be universal. I write for my own sense of eucatastrophe, towards the spiritual experience I understand—the sort of thing, in short, that I would like to read.
I think that when we write for that part of ourselves, we write for everyone. Regardless of the number of people who read and love our tales, be it little or great, among them will be teenagers and grandparents, believers and unbelievers, liberals and conservatives, and everyone in between, because there are some things that all of us have in common.
The goal is not to please every person on every point—that's impossible—but to offer comfort, satisfaction and hope to anyone who goes, as Mr. Pond put it, "questing for truth through beauty" with the art we've created. If I've read Mr. Pond rightly, one of the strongest points of agreement between us is that the purpose of good storytelling is to offer things of that nature.
Readers sicken quickly on tales in which beauty is cheapened and truth irrelevant—or vice versa; too often, stories aiming to teach something or make a point wind up cheapening truth and making beauty irrelevant.
Writing and reading are two ways of following the quest, and the quest is a commonality that no demographic can contain. For that reason, I think little more of the market-specific target audience than of any other reader. My target audience, oh friends, is you and me.
P.S. Mr. Pond plans to post another installment today, so be sure to watch his blog.
Now this--this is summer. Blue sky all the way across and warm enough to wear shorts. I am so grateful.
I think quiche works well in summer; it's relatively easy and light and quite tasty. I made this version on a Friday night, so it is meat-free, but you can fill it with just about anything.
Basic Quiche
1 recipe tart pastry (this looks similar to the one I used... I don't want to break copyright by posting Fannie Farmer's here)
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
1 bell pepper, any color, diced
A couple of tablespoons of diced onion
1 tbsp butter
about 1/4 cup cooking sherry
Garlic salt
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
Parmesan cheese, grated for topping
Saute the vegetables in the butter and sherry; season with garlic salt to taste. Drain for several minutes in a colander.
Press the tart pastry into a pie shell and put the vegetables on the bottom.
Mix the eggs and heavy cream and pour over the vegetables.
Sprinkle with grated Parmesan and bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Lower heat to 300 degrees and bake for half an hour more.
I used the Fannie Farmer cookbook to get the amount of eggs and cream and for the baking times. Fannie Farmer has never let me down yet. :) Enjoy!
Since Mr. Pond and I have been dialoguing, I've seen at least three articles on industry pro blogs challenging some common truisms:
1. One of Jessica Faust's clients, Erin Kellison (book due out this month), shares her experience of sticking to her own vision for the story, not letting even contest judges convince her to change what she believed was the right direction for her book. My favorite line, referencing the tension between her ideas and the suggestions given her: "I think this tug-of-war can be illuminating, but it can also be deadly to a manuscript."
3. Rachelle Gardner tells her readers that while she watches trends, she doesn't put a lot of stock in them. After all, as we know from Professors McGonagall and Firenze, not to mention the average weather report, predicting the future is an imprecise branch of magic. :)
Also, I read a book this week that broke some of the style rules that have been tormenting me, yet managed to get published just last year. It might have helped that its author or publisher somehow got Stephenie Meyer's endorsement on the front cover, but it still made me feel better.
In his last post, Mr Pond says: "As artists and as storytellers, we are called to break the structures of the surrounding world—even of our own industry—to challenge those truisms that everyone in our generation just accepts without thinking." I have mixed feelings about this. In my opinion, some truisms and structures really need challenging and shattering, and others need building up and strengthening. The trick, for me at least, is in knowing which is which.
However we may differ on the subject, Mr. Pond and I agree that rulebreaking is part of the artistic experience. If for no other reason, this is true because the rules don't always agree amongst themselves, and we writers have to do our best and hope to find agents and editors whose preferences are reasonably aligned with our own.
To add to the conundrum: In art as in life, the rules are layered. Even if we disagree on certain principles, most of us agree that there may be contradiction between the laws of a nation and the greater laws of right and wrong on which the earth and humanity are founded. In art, the laws may not have a moral basis (no one's life, liberty or pursuit of happiness is endangered by sentences that start with conjunctions and end with prepositions) but they are still layered. The publishing industry has rules, and storytelling itself has rules.
Setting aside the literary elite's attempted break with the traditional laws of art, which is another issue, the industry's rules may be—not necessarily arbitrary, but formed of inconsistent things like taste and trend. There's nothing wrong with that; the industry has to sell books to exist, and who knows better what will sell than those who make their living selling? Not usually the new author, whose emotional investment, self-interest, ignorance of the market and sheer closeness to the work can all affect his perceptions.
But art has rules, too, and I'm pretty sure that practically every publishing professional would say that the rules of telling a good story are vastly more important than whether you sometimes use one-sentence paragraphs or whether your book contains vampires. Stephenie Meyer broke rules of plotting, pacing, length and style, but whatever you think about Twilight, a book that sells that many copies is feeding a central human hunger (and probably a spiritual one.) She succeeded at the great end goal of storytelling.
Her success doesn't mean I can get away with breaking all the same rules; it just means that I can read her books and hope that whatever fed me is something that I can grow in myself and my own work, for the sake of feeding others. And if I succeed at that, I might get away with not being of the Hemingway school of sentence structure.
As to what storytelling's key rules are, I'm not sure anyone has explained better than George MacDonald in his short essay The Fantastic Imagination. And I'll quote him, because I am wholly with him in this sentiment: "If any strain of my 'broken music' make a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain."
Coming up Wednesday, in response to another part of Mr. Pond's last post: one of my favorite rules to break, and the whys and hows thereof.
The third full revision of a novel is fun, but not quite as fun as the second. Most of the good parts get to be typed through without much touch-up, which leaves me spending the majority of my time struggling with all the hard parts. The first three chapters were the worst, I hope. I'm still not quite happy with them.
But I love being close to the story again, knowing the characters and feeling what they feel. Sometimes I just close my eyes and let myself walk through a scene in one character's head, trying to understand what they're sensing.
* * *
I am officially tired of renaming characters. With a couple of very important exceptions, almost everyone in my book has had at least one name change, sometimes two. Today I've wrestled with the fact that in my first drafts, one character didn't have a name--I referred to him as "the head of the council," which proved understandably annoying for the beta readers.
He has a name now, but giving it out too easily takes away from his mystique, the distance and authority of his character, and it doesn't work well with the proper forms of introduction and address. So I'm trying out different titles, and cannot seem to get used to any of the various possibilities. The one I like best causes some first-letter issues (too many capital P's on the page) but I'm tempted to let that slide or make it uncapsed. Hmm. At least it doesn't start with A.
* * *
Mr. Pond doesn't like my new word, but I've got to admit--well, first, that the word blog does sound like a horrible squelching noise in a swamp, but also that diablogue is kind of ugly. It sounds devilish, maybe because it has "diablo" in it. Mr. Pond's brother Eric suggests "blogalogue" for the advantage of assonance, which makes sense although I'm not sure I would have pulled the base word out of that just by looking. Which do you like better?
Either way, I hope to have another installment on Monday and you can read Mr. Pond's latest at the above link. I'm having fun with this; it gives me something to write about. Would you like to have a blog-conversation with A Light Inside? If you respond to one of my posts with a post of your own, and link it in the comments to the post you're responding to, I'll check it out and see if I can respond. Please, no hot-button politics, but anything else goes. I think. :)
* * *
A lot of things have been written about being childless. This is one of the most beautiful I've ever found. I've never been much of a poet, but sometimes there need to be less words, not more, to express something.
* * *
Most awesome line I've read this week: "Instead of drugs I just went to my “happy place,” which is currently the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando."--Jon Acuff. (Note: by drugs, he means novocaine.)
* * *
Other best line, all over Twitter but coming to you courtesy of @theknightshift: "Twilight is like World Cup soccer. They run around for 2 hours, nobody scores, and a billion fans insist that 'you just don't understand.' "
Seriously, people, you just don't understand. :)
* * *
Helpful line for writers: "The second best cure for writer’s block is other creative endeavors. Most writers I know are accomplished in other arts as well. I used to think it was “cheating” to draw or dance when I “should” be writing. Now I understand: The arts all nourish one another."--Jan Underwood
This is true. Music helps me a lot. And I'm not sure anyone can call my dancing "art", but after a long day of writing Thursday, I rocked out to Ministry of Magic for awhile. I'm pretty sure I pulled every muscle in the back of my right leg, but it was fun and it cleared my mind.
I clicked on this video simply because after a couple of weeks of seeing the word everywhere, I wanted to know what a vuvuzela was. Now I know.
* * *
After all my complaining about the weather yesterday, and a morning cold and damp enough that I actually ran the heat, this afternoon the clouds have parted, the sun is out, and I took a walk and am now sitting with the door open. Life is good.
Happy Fourth of July, everybody, and enjoy the rest of the weekend too. America, I love you!
Well, that and the usual daily duties... and vacuuming... and complaining about the weather. The first of July, and it's raining? I could be okay with that if we'd had anything in the way of sunshine, but our nicest day this year might have barely scraped 74 degrees. Nothing will dry out, and I still have to sit under a blanket to stay warm in the living room. Please, God. We need summer.
Her head cocked up when she heard my voice. "Jessica, did you read A Midsummer Night's Dream?"
"Yes," I stammered.
"Well, you're apparently the only one in the class who did then. The other students think it's a play about Lysol-ander, Queen Hippo, and Puke."
Author: Janette Rallison
Mini-synopsis: Aspiring high-school actress Jessica wants to win her ex-boyfriend back -- until she winds up coaching Jordan, a famous actor's son, on the part of Romeo. Jordan doesn't want much to do with drama as his father spent too much time putting acting before family, and Jessica will have to decide whether she cares more for him or the stage.
Confession: I checked this book out a couple of weeks ago merely because author Janette Rallison's answer to Shannon Hale's question about morals in fiction made me want to cheer. Sometimes it's just nice to read something by someone whose presentation of their belief system isn't going to feel like a personal attack upon me and mine.
Every now and then I pick up a book just wanting fun and nothing else. (Being me, I tend to look in the YA and kids' lit departments--adults always seem to have to put a sting in there somewhere.) This one was successfully that: lighthearted, humorous, and very clean. It wasn't a deep read and it probably won't change my life in any grandiose ways, but it made me relax and feel cheery and sometimes that's good enough.
Tasty Tuesday is still on hiatus at City Wife, Country Life and will return next week. But if you really want a recipe, here is one that I have every intention of trying out soon. I love tzatziki.
I meant to try it out today with a beef roast, but at 3:30 I discovered that it takes more than 2 1/2 hours to get a beef roast slow-cooked to perfection. Then I found out that my cucumber was moldy anyway. Tonight we're having chicken instead of beef, and I'll have to wait on my tzatziki until I can hop over to the grocery and get a new cucumber.
[This post is part of a continued blog-conversation (diablogue? I love nonsensical new Internet words) that Mr. Pond and I have going on around the topic of writing and editing. I'm taking it a step further, and talking about reading.]
All publishing industry advice blogs contain one unifying piece of wisdom: Read widely in the genre in which you intend to write.
As arrogant as it feels to say so, it's a piece of advice that has always raised a warning in my mind. I'm not quite crazy enough to oppose the successful publishing world and call the truism false. It makes sense to be well acquainted with the sort of book, similar to my own, that gets published nowadays.
And I do read in my genres. I look for books that have been published in the last ten years, especially authors' debuts. I try to do so regularly--but I'm picky, and when hunting through the bookstore or the library, there are specific things I look for (authors whose names I recognize, strong narrative voice, and/or a story that immediately draws me in. Note: "immediately draws me in" is not the same as "kicks me in the face with a mean first sentence." The advice to write an attention-grabbing first line has helped to make opening novels in bookstores an exhausting experience.)
I'm picky, and therefore do not necessarily read widely. I admit new books into my life like an introvert admits new friends (and I should know): slowly, with careful consideration of the necessary commitment, and usually one at a time.
And there's one thing that seems to me at least as important as keeping current with the newly published. For myself, I consider it more important and feel compelled to give the majority of my reading time to it, even when--especially when--I am absorbed in the writing process. That one crucial need is to re-read, repeatedly and obsessively, the stories that have mattered the most to me.
If I become a published novelist, this will be my secret to success: that I've lost count of the number of times I've read Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, Austen's books, Narnia and That Hideous Strength, Little White Horse, and Speaker for the Dead. I've read them until I can almost play back whole sections of the text in my mind, till the worlds are my homes-away-from-home and the characters are my close friends and the authors' voices have irreversibly influenced my own.
My primary reason for prioritizing the Stories That Mattered Most is that those books did for me what I want mine to do for others. I believe that core magic to be more important than trends of subject or style--not out of a need to protest industry standards like 250,000 words is too long or to "believe in myself" or my book in disregard of my own writing weaknesses, but to devote my very limited time and energy to the thing that makes me want to write in the first place, that makes a book re-readable and therefore especially desirable.
I could also put it this way: I'm not just aiming at getting a spot on bookstore shelves. I'm aiming at Harry Potter. I'm aiming at Narnia. Don't get me wrong--no one can guarantee a bestseller, or even a seller. But what I can do, or at least, what I can do my very best to do, is write a book with a life and love that speak to the reader.
Reading from the new releases is wise from a business perspective, and I'm not under any poetic high that could cost me my understanding of writing for publication as a business. Likewise, as someone who hopes for success as a writer, I think it right to support other writers.
But I think it's of limited value. Most of what I need to know about current standards, I've gotten from helpful industry bloggers. Get plot and conflict on every page. Make your protagonist and your genre obvious immediately. Keep your manuscript in conventional word count ranges. All of that is important for giving my story the best possible chance of getting read. For how to tell the story, though, what I need to know most comes from the books I already love.
This subject just begs for its own post, but for now: If you were offended yesterday by my recommendation of a book that is obviously not clean, please go read the comment thread and feel free to add further thoughts or questions. Mr. Pond made some good points and in response I tried to explain how I got through John Green's book when revulsion stopped me fifteen pages into Lolita, and to clarify what I found worthwhile.
Do you live in or write about northwest Washington State? You might consider submitting to Loose Leaf Journal, the brain child of one of my good writing and editing friends/beta readers. Annie's ideas for the project are quite intriguing and I can't wait to see what it becomes.
When possible, the link is to a video of my favorite song from the band/artist. My favorite of the lot is probably Carrie Pazdziora, who reminds me of Norah Jones but with a clearer voice--there's not much I like more in music than a good soprano or mezzo with a high, pure tone.
* * *
New favorite writing/artistic quote, courtesy of Marybeth Whalen: "A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."--Sidney Sheldon
* * *
As for writing, this has not been a good week--I've hardly looked at my book in days, allowing myself to get distracted by anything and everything. But while that's given me some frustration, in one sense it may be good. After the midnight battle with it last weekend, I think I just needed a break from it.
So I've read three books, and gotten some other work done, and decided at the last minute to go ahead and take CreateSpace up on their offer of a free proof copy for NaNoWriMo winners (while I have no intention of self-publishing this book, I'd at least like to see how CreateSpace does things.) The week hasn't been entirely unprofitable.
* * *
New favorite funny site: SoMuchPun.com. Of all I've seen so far, this one just might be my favorite. Or this one. Or ... aw, I can't choose. I laughed at a lot of them.
Later, I walked toward the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, "When you're walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it's silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?"
It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger, but I told her, "Yeah, totally."
For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, "Run run run run run," and took off, pulling me behind her.
Author: John Green
Mini-synopsis: Miles Halter, having gone to boarding school looking for a Great Perhaps, wants but can never quite attain the wild and wildly attractive Alaska Young. In searching for the part of her that is more than "her genetic code and her life experiences and her relationships and the size and shape of her body" [quote edited for spoilers], he learns of failure and forgiveness and what it really means to know and to love.
Notes: All right, I'm going to get this out of the way.
I don't like disclaimers, but sometimes, what else can you do? This book is not for children; besides containing a fair amount of profanity, it is told from the perspective of a high school boy confronted with "the hottest girl in all of human history," and neither of them have the least notion of chastity. I skipped several pages, myself, because 1. I have a really clean mind, and 2. I like it that way, and 3. in a couple of places these teenagers were doing things I've never even done, even though I'm happily married, which amounts to 4. sometimes I just don't need to know.
That said, I read the rest of the book. I figured that it's a bit nonsensical of me to want to be a YA writer without having read John Green, and I'd looked into one of his books in a bookstore recently and been absolutely captivated from page 1 by the voice. Besides, having made it all the way through Catcher in the Rye--of which I only liked one paragraph--I thought I could handle Miles Halter's mind.
And I loved the book. I loved the characters--Miles, the Colonel, the Eagle, Takumi, and especially Alaska. I loved the World Religions teacher and his class and the final things Miles writes about and the bittersweet ending that I almost couldn't read because of the tears in my eyes. There is one line in the last few pages that I've never yet managed to read without my throat catching and my eyes welling up.
It is not a Christian book with a Christian solution to the "labyrinth of suffering," but the solutions were of the sort that I as a Christian could identify with, at least in part. As someone for whom agnostic sensibilities are likely to provide a lifetime of struggle, the thoughts were even helpful. And as someone who admittedly has a hard time letting go of either my own mistakes or others', the book also made me think about failure and forgiveness in meaningful ways. Sometimes, you just have to "love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart."
That might be telling you more about me than about the book--but I can't say much more about the book without giving out major spoilers. Or rather, major spoiler. On that topic, I knew going in what the "before" was counting down to, and I'm actually kind of glad I did. But as most people will probably want to remain spoiler-free, I'll go no further here. I won't say 'Read the book'--I know too many people who would be offended--but I will say the book is worth reading.
Today I intended to do up a Currently Reading post. I've read three books this week, and the one I planned to write about first made me laugh and it made me cry and it hurt to read and I really, really don't want to cheat the post by trying to write it between now (6:59) and 7:50, when I have to leave for book club. I will try to write it up for tomorrow.
In the mean time, the comments on my post at The Hog's Head contain some great thought and I responded to all of them with some of my own ideas this afternoon.
Also, Mr. Pond dialogues with Monday's post on his own blog, talking about the shadow of Hemingway and "respecting the language of music in the idiosyncrasy of voice." (Which would probably be my favorite line in the piece, except that he also said "Too much good advice is bad advice." I heartily concur. But please don't stop giving advice, O wise publishing people, because the wealth of information is ultimately far more positive than negative.)
One more thing: If you were looking for a recipe yesterday, I apologize! The hostess of Tasty Tuesdays, Farmer's City Wife, is too busy harvesting cherries to blog this week. And if you prayed for cherry harvest, thank you (and thank God!) It sounds like they're actually getting one.
Today's post went to The Hog's Head. I had originally intended to post it here, but decided it belonged at least as well there. Referencing Shannon Hale's aggregation of thoughts from various YA writers and M.T. Anderson's excellent essay, "On Ideology and Chickens with Blankets," I'm hoping for a good discussion on the relationship between morals/worldview/ideology and storytelling.
You're welcome to check it out and join the conversation at this link.
It might be time for me to take a break from reading some of the how-to writing blogs I read.
Don't get me wrong: those blogs are immensely helpful most of the time. I've learned a lot about what kinds of things are valued and what kinds of things drive agents and editors crazy, and I'm certainly not giving up reading the blogs entirely.
But the new tips that hit my Google Reader almost daily have me paralyzed over my first chapter. I've been over every line till it hurts to look any more, twisting, rewording, restructuring, trying to kill this or that potential problem. I'll think I've got a paragraph or a page or a scene in order, and a day or two later I'm back, fixing something else--and then if I give it a little space and come back, I'll notice that in my desperate attempts to alternate sentence structure within paragraphs and on the page as a whole, I've started five paragraphs in a row exactly the same way.
Among the positive feedback given me by my beta readers were comments on the strength of the story's voice. I don't want to lose that voice, especially not to over-scrupulous self-editing. How do I know it's over-scrupulous? I don't. But I'm the sort of person who can lose reason to obsession over detail--the sort of person to wind up on the verge of tears at 1 AM on a Saturday night, trying to rotate paragraph beginnings and number of commas, wondering how to cut any more conjunctions without sounding like Ernest Hemingway, no longer confident that the scenes and mood accomplish what they set out to do.
Getting published, as I understand it, requires skill and competitiveness roughly equivalent to Olympic-level sport. I'm a good writer, even--I believe--a good enough writer, but there are a lot of good enough writers and no guarantees for anyone. At some point, I've got to accept the fact that it is impossible to please all readers, even all professional readers (like agents and editors).
Am I still going to work on things like repetition issues? Of course. But there's a huge difference between controlling a character's tendency to half-smile at everything and counting the number of ands in every paragraph. I want that sane sense of balance where the goal of perfection doesn't degenerate into perfectionism.
Send me an email with your address, David, and I'll have the CD sent to you. You'll have to let me know how you like it.
To all of you, thanks so much for participating! This was A Light Inside's first giveaway, but I don't plan on it being the last. I loved hearing from you of your favorite music, and spent a fun half hour rummaging around YouTube and other corners of the internet turning up the artists I didn't already know. I must say, you all rock. :)
If you didn't win and still want to get a copy of Gurrumul's CD, it is available for sale on Amazon and elsewhere!
Happy weekend, everybody.
* In case anyone wonders: to keep from confusing myself in the counting, I went ahead and used 9 for the top number, figuring I could reconfigure it if it landed on 3. Which, in fact, it did the first time. Haha.
You've got less than 24 hours to enter for your chance to win some free music! Friday afternoon I'm coming with the random number generator and will announce the winner.
* * *
Awhile back, agent Nathan Bransford asked about our "gap books": in his words, "those books that everyone in the world has read and talks about all the time and look we are really meaning to read them but we're all very busy and there are a lot of books to read and no one could possibly be expected to read them all and why do I have to defend myself aha;sldkjf;aj"
(For me: Moby Dick, anything by Kafka, The Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, The Lord of the Flies... okay, hopefully I've embarrassed myself enough now. I don't like depressing stuff--does that show?)
I reference this owing to a question in yesterday's comments that I couldn't resist making into a blog post; the answer attempted to become a full-fledged essay as I typed in the combox. It's the best question I've been asked all week. Here it is: "For someone who has never read Jane Austen, where do you recommend starting?"
To George (who generally puts me to shame in the reading department): I'm so glad these are your gap books, because now I get to answer this question!
Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma are--in my opinion--Austen's strongest works, and I recommend beginning with one of those three. Persuasion is probably the easiest and most relatable read for a modern American, although if said American has read other English classics, this might not matter. It meanders less, clearly values intelligence and integrity over rank, celebrates some degree of informality, and combines vivid portrayals of setting and character with a strong pensive mood.
On the other hand, Pride and Prejudice is the most popular; for several good reasons, I think. It includes lifelike characters who undergo excellent personal and relational growth, loads of the sly social mockery for which Austen is renowned, and brilliant voice and wit. It makes me laugh every time I read it, sometimes at things I'd never noticed before. I started with this one, and I've got no regrets over that.
Emma is a solid, well-plotted tale with exquisite character development and a true hero. It's also one of J. K. Rowling's favorite books; according to Rowling, "The best twist ever in literature is in Jane Austen's Emma. To me she is the target of perfection at which we shoot in vain."
My suggestion, then, for George and anyone else meeting Jane for the first time, is to pick whichever of those three appeals most to you from the outside and start there. Afterward, however, if you decide you like Austen, I highly recommend Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility as well. The former moves slower than the others, but has a very pure-minded heroine, and with its strong themes of faith and virtue, I find it a refreshing read. The latter, with sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as personifications of the title attributes, is a fascinating character study and moving tale, despite rambling a little (it was Austen's first published novel, after all.)
I liked Northanger Abbey, but its heroine is on the childish side and therefore not quite as relatable.
The short epistolary story Lady Susan portrays a truly awful woman, which is interesting, but I found it less engaging than any of the others and have read it only once.
I hope that helps! If any of you reading this have suggestions of your own, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I can talk Austen like Harry Potter--the fandom just isn't as well organized. (Maybe I should write some Austen-themed songs? A little pianoforte accompaniment would do, if only I would give myself the trouble of practicing...)
Have you entered for the music giveaway yet? The winner will be chosen Friday!
* * *
I've no idea how many times and partial times I've read this book. A lot. And since I've already once done this book's quote/synopsis/notes thing as per my standard for Currently Reading posts, here I'll just add further notes.
This edition, with the cover shown, contains editorial notes by Linda Bree. Editorial notes can get in the way of the story when reading, but they've proved really handy this time in finding out which poems Austen pulled her random quotes from, who the heck Miss Larolles is (maybe I should go read Cecilia now), etc.
The story itself never gets old--beautiful writing, beautiful emotion, and it just might be the easiest of Austen's books to read. Lyme Regis and Bath come alive as settings, more so than Meryton or Highbury, and there are a number of very lovable characters.
Sometimes I think this book should have scored higher on my Fifty Favorite Books list (it came in at #8, as I have a lot of most-favorite books.) After all, I identify with Anne Elliot more than any other of Austen's heroines. I'm not as good as she is, and Elinor Dashwood makes a close second, but still.
I've made pizza a lot of times lately. I love homemade pizza like college boys love Domino's--and with olives and mushrooms and artichoke hearts and such things, it's healthy, too.
The best thing about this pizza crust is that it doesn't have to rise, meaning that if I forget to start dinner till 4:30, it's no big deal. I'll start it at 5 and take the pizza out of the oven at 6. That's hard to beat. It works perfectly well as thick or thin crust, and I usually split the difference and make it a medium.
It tastes good, too.
No-Rise Pizza Crust
1 pkg yeast
1 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp oil
2 1/2 cups flour
Stir the yeast, oil, and sugar into the warm water and let sit for a few minutes (here I usually ready all the toppings, grate the cheese, etc.) Mix the flour and salt well, add the yeast mixture, and stir till well blended. Press into an oiled pan, top as desired, and bake for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees.
Thanks to his very kind publicist, I have the chance to offer a free copy of his upcoming album to one happy winner!
The album is beautiful, mellow and sweet like the above song (which is one of the tracks); it's the sort of thing you can listen to with your eyes closed, put into your child's lullaby mix, or turn on during a dinner party. He sings mostly in Yolngu Matha, his native language, with a little English thrown in, and backs himself with guitar. And I just love his voice.
Want a copy of the CD? To enter the contest, leave me a comment on this post including:
your name or some kind of handle by which I can address you if you win (i.e., anything but "Anonymous"), and
the name of a band or musician you like to listen to. Because I'm curious. :)
You can enter multiple times; just make sure you've got the above information in each post, so I don't accidentally think you're spamming and disqualify you.
You have until Friday morning! Sometime that afternoon, I will go find a Random Number Generator and get it to pick a number between 1 and the number of comments. The winner will then have a few days to email me their address, so be prepared to check back in case you win. (Blogger doesn't give me your contact information.)
As a continuation of last week's saying no, I am forcing myself to walk away from online debates more often. About once every month or two, someone somewhere manages to write up something really awful and I find myself wanting to get in there and defend what I believe to be truth, or at least common sense. It usually derails my day, and sometimes my week.
But I realized the other day that none of us can correct all the wrongheadedness on the internet. I can't even promise to never be wrongheaded myself. But I can write a decent novel, and my time is generally much better spent doing that.
* * *
As for novels, I have started revision again--a brand new draft in a brand new Word document. Right now I'm not setting a deadline, but I'd like to be submitting to agents in the fall. Might need to speed up, though--this first page has had me deadlocked for hours.
Maybe I'm doing something right? At any rate, I loved what Heath Gibson has to say in the linked article. He talks about wanting to write a great story instead of just a good one. I am with him on every word of that.
* * *
So... Lou and I, having run out of comedic movies to watch, have taken to renting and watching seasons of The Office (again, not clean, but funny...) Michael Scott is incredibly painful to watch, but the Jim/Dwight rivalry makes up for it in hilarity. When it comes to Jim and Pam, though, I keep finding myself wanting to yell "ONE OF YOU PLEASE ASK THE OTHER ONE OUT YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY PRETENDING YOU DON'T LIKE EACH OTHER!!!" But I suppose it would have made bad television to start things out all happy for them.
What I really don't get about The Office is Angela. Seriously, I have lived my entire life around Christians. Almost all of my friends and even my coworkers have been Christians, and while I'm used to seeing horrible stereotypes from Hollywood that might bring to mind one or two religious people I've known, I can't think of anyone who she reminds me of.
* * *
To my delight, we've had two nights this week when the clouds backed off and let the stars come out. I found Antares the first night and wanted to go out where I could look for Saturn and Vega but--well, I'm afraid of the dark. (I have a good imagination. There could be anything in those shadows!) Lou came out with me the next night, and if my calculations were correct, we found Vega over the house.
I still haven't found the Pleiades, but they're in Taurus, which appears to be only up during sunlight this time of year. Maybe in the fall.
* * *
I'm in Victoria for a couple of days with my schola, so I'll stop writing now. For those of you who have any experience in graphic design or layout or text development or breaking the chain on email forwards, this made me laugh and laugh. Thanks to Travis for the link.
And if you find humor in Michael and Dwight and the others, there's always Bryan Allain's Exodus According to The Office (possibly blasphemous, but funny...)
Bravd and Weasel looked at the figure, now hopping across the road with one foot in a stirrup.
"Fire-raiser, is he?" said Bravd at last.
"No," said Rincewind. "Not precisely. Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting 'All gods are bastards.' Got any food?"
Author: Terry Pratchett
Mini-synopsis: These are tales from a flat circular planet carried by four elephants on the back of a giant space turtle, and it only gets weirder from there.
Notes: I hadn't realized before picking up a Discworld book that the series is parody, but it didn't take me long to figure that out. From using 8 instead of 7 as the most magical number to making the protagonist an utter coward, from the gods playing something like chess with human lives to the inclusion of Death as a character (he talks in SMALL CAPS and likes card games--it's hilarious), the books are a twist on just about every known twistable feature of tales told.
Of course, parody isn't generally my thing. It doesn't let me suspend disbelief naturally. It took a little getting used to, then, despite the clever humor; also, it wasn't until part way through the second book that I realized I actually cared whether Rincewind (the main character) stuck around for future installments. He's such a heel in the first book. But once that connection hit me, I started really enjoying the story. After that it made me laugh a lot more... and now I just might go looking for book 3 one of these days.
The above quote had me snickering at random moments for days after I first read it.
Lately Anne Mini has been talking about one of my biggest problems as a writer. As I understand it, repetition leaps off the page and shouts in the face of a person trained to read for a living, and it doesn't bother me at all.
Until I see someone reusing whole phrases, or using the same descriptor multiple times in a paragraph, or overusing swear words--one may be an attention-grabbing slap, but curse-littered speech feels like a verbal fistfight--I'm not going to be offended by a few repeats. Consequently, my otherwise strict inner editor has to see a word many times before irritation begins to register.
In order to make myself catch the problems, then, I made a word cloud of my novel yesterday and then transformed the most-used words--excluding names--into capitals. There's nothing that annoys me more than unnecessary use of all caps (I make an exception for the super-fun band ALL CAPS); it's like having someone yell the word in a stream of quiet conversation. But even I can't miss the problem when I read a paragraph in which the word TOOK appears very loudly three times, none of them referring to hobbits or Canadian knit caps. Ack.
This is one of my favorite recipes. I promise, however, that when you take it out of the oven, it will not look like me.
Veggie Lasagna
2 cans tomato sauce
2 small zucchini, sliced
6-8 oz sliced mushrooms
Fresh spinach leaves
1 pkg lasagna noodles, uncooked
1 lb mozzarella or Monterey jack cheese, grated
Parmesan cheese for topping
1 lg or 2 sm containers of ricotta cheese
3 eggs
Basil, oregano, garlic powder, chili powder
Olive oil
Water
Put a little olive oil in a large skillet and add zucchini; cook till zucchini is nearly tender, add mushrooms, and cook a little longer. Add the tomato sauce and season to taste with basil, oregano, garlic powder and chili powder. Thin the sauce with about 1 1/2 cans of water (I just use a tomato sauce can).
Mix the ricotta cheese and eggs in a bowl until well blended.
Layer the lasagna in a 9x13 pan: a little sauce on the bottom, pasta, ricotta mixture, spinach leaves, mozzarella, sauce. Usually three complete layers will fill the pan. Pour as much leftover sauce as will fit over the top and finish with grated parmesan.
Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes or until noodles are tender when pierced. I recommend setting your 9x13 in a cookie sheet or on some foil as the sauce tends to boil over in the oven.
The vegetables can be varied according to your choice, and if you prefer meat, I make my meat lasagna the same way--just leaving out all the vegetables and browning a pound of Italian sausage for the sauce. That's also tasty. Of course, sausage, pasta, lots of cheese--that would be pretty hard to kill. :)
Keeping in mind the thoughts several of you gave me on my Sunday troubles a couple of weeks ago, for the last two Sundays I've made an effort to prioritize rest and yet allow creativity as it comes. I like the general concept. If the computer comes up, which happens when creativity strikes, it gets harder not to overdo--but that's just something I'll have to be careful of.
And now... after almost a month off thanks to essay, the time has come to revise my novel again. I'm doing a shorter version of my original novel revision process, focusing in on steps four, five, and six (all of which will be less thorough, since much less needs ripping up and replacing.) My new, short-form scene summary is nearly complete. I'm excited.
P.S. For those of you praying for Washington farmers, thank you! My cousin informs us that the cherry growers are still in business as of this afternoon; the forecasted rain has held off. They need another couple of weeks, so don't stop. :)
First off, if you're the praying sort, some of our family and other farmers on the east side of the Cascades need it. They're getting too much rain. The weeks of downpour here have attempted to drown my tomato plants and drive me bonkers, but over there the rain is actually threatening the cherry harvest, which is a lot of people's livelihood.
* * *
This year the Great Annual Memorial Day Street Hockey Game got rained into a covered playground again, but Lou and I joined the other players in the eleventh celebration of the event. I started attending the Bible study that became the G.A.M.D.S.H.G. back when I was nineteen (we started playing a couple years later) and now I'm thirty-two. People fly in for this--Joel set the record for distance traveled by coming from Korea this year. We bring the spouses and children acquired over those years.
Some of us are starting to feel our age on the asphalt rink, but almost everyone plays at least for awhile. Some things never get old.
* * *
I loved this post by Mike Duran on crafting a writing routine. Though I have more available time now, I remember what it was like to "carve writing time from the corners of exhaustion." And my routine-of-sorts still needs work.
Like Mr. Duran, I've also had to decide not to write the way Dean Koontz does. Props to Mr. Koontz, but I'd never finish a story his way. I needed NaNoWriMo.
* * *
I've theoretically taken the week off writing work. And by "theoretically" I mean I never pushed myself to work on actual story. I did, however, spend half of Thursday turning my brain into a frittering snarl over my query letter because inspiration hit and then ran away.
Right now I just can't wait to get good and going on the story again. I'll probably pull out my half-finished new scene summary tonight.
* * *
Of all the words that can be said, No is sometimes the hardest. I said it twice yesterday.
* * *
For your end-of-week cheer, I give you whoisthecutest.com. Also, in case you needed to know, there's always isithursday.org. Happy weekend!
... to Mr. Pond, regular commenter on this blog, who has gotten an original fairy tale published! The story is a sweet little piece, a short read, and if any of you readers like fairy tales, you should definitely check out that journal.
After several weeks of burying myself too deep in essay to get much else done, I'm back at The Hog's Head today posting about seeing fictional characters everywhere. That is something I do--seeing fictional characters around, I mean; sometimes they're even people from my own books. There's a toddling boy at church that looks so much like I'd imagine my main character's brother at that age that if I ever spoke to him it would require conscious thought to not call him the wrong name. And the Lily Evans I spotted recently was married to a guy who from the side looked a lot like another of my characters. I had a very hard time not staring.
Want to know who else I've seen? Click here to find out. And I'd love to hear if you have stories about fictional character sightings.
I hope all of you had an enjoyable day off from work, and for those of you who spent the day remembering someone you loved who died in war, my thoughts and prayers are with you and yours.
* * *
Tuesday means recipes, so here are two. The soup calls for taco seasoning, and I don't tend to keep that in stock around the house; besides, the seasoning is so easy to make that it's hardly worth buying the packets.
This might well be the easiest thing I ever make for dinner, not counting phone calls to Little Caesar's. :P
My variations on the soup: I use about a half-cup of Ranch dressing instead of the mix. Also, I usually cook it for about three hours on high, rather than six on low, but either way should work.
We usually chop corn chips into our bowls of soup and put grated cheddar cheese on top. That might be a little weird. Oh well. It tastes good.
For whatever reason, salmon does not like to have me cooking it. It always turns out dry and kind of tasteless. But this past Sunday, my grandparents were coming to lunch, and I invited my in-laws over to join us, and I needed something that would cook quickly. Experimental cooking on company? Why not? And who needs a recipe? Bah.
