I nap a lot…Almost all the writing I’ve gotten done in the last 7 weeks (outside of work) has been posting for this blog. On my novel, I’ve done some revision, spelling clean-ups, sorted out some of the scene- and chapter-order issues I ignored during NaNoWriMo, and have managed to write only one actual new scene. Since between us, we’ve been sick pretty much continuously since late December, maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about how little I’ve actually finished.
The last 7 to 9 days have been particularly bad. Those days that I’ve worked, pretty much every bit of energy I had has gone into trying to make deadlines there.
Last night was the first commute home from work since February 6 that I didn’t feel it was a struggle to walk the last block (or more) to the house. Even the day I drove in, I had to sit in the car for a few minutes after I parked to work up the energy to pick up my laptop bag and walk into the house.
And what did I wind up doing? I read, finishing off the book that I’ve been reading on my morning bus rides the last few weeks.
Maybe I needed a recharge before I can get writing again.
That smile…One night last week I was doing my thing—reading news online, occassionally checking my twitter feed—when a message pops up on IM. Honestly, I’d forgotten that my instant messaging client was up. I’d run it earlier in the day because it was a work-from-home day, and just forgot to log out of all the accounts. Anyway, the message that pops up says, “I liked what you wrote.” I didn’t recognize the name, but sometimes that’s just because I forget all the handles some of my friends use (and let’s not even get into the friends who have a habit of changing the name and user picture on their accounts all the frikkin’ time…).
So I type back, “Thanks. Which thing, specifically, did you like?”
I just want to stay under the covers.My friend, Barb, referred to the weird lingering cold, maybe flu, maybe multiple colds that seems to be hitting a lot of people as “the Martian flu,” and I’ve decided it’s a great name. I want to mention that said friend lives 1400 miles away, in Arizona. Another friend who reports a similar phenomenon in his community in January, lives 2200 miles away, in Texas. And another friend who reported it in her area lives 2800 miles away, in North Carolina. I mention this because I’ve had a couple of conversations with other long distance acquaintances where I mention the illness running around my office, where they’ve said, “I’m glad I’m not in Seattle!”
The thing is that I’ve been sick nearly continuously since the end of December, and so have a lot of people I know. We’ll be really sick with a certain constellation of symptoms for a few days, start to get better for a few days. Then we’ll have a couple days where we don’t feel completely, 100% healthy, but definitely nearly well. And then a slightly different constellation of symptoms will hit is full bore, and the cycle will begin again.
So, when I was up all night with symptoms that you do not want me to describe Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I felt an awful lot like that bowl of flowers in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books: “Oh, no. Not again!”…Continue reading Martian flu trumps Writers’ Night→
The birthday boy gabbing before opening a present. Scotty on the left.We celebrated Jared’s birthday last night at AFK Tavern. Friday is my usual work from home day, and my husband came home from his work early because he’s sick (he handed me a beautiful bouquet and said, “I got you some plant sex organs.” I love him so!). I had taken a sick day earlier in the week, and come home early myself on Thursday (though I took a short nap, logged in and worked from home for a couple more hours, took a longer nap, then worked some more, then went to bed). So I hadn’t been certain I would go to the party until just before leaving. Michael stayed home, sleeping.
Who, us?I’ve told the story more than once of the friend in high school who got angry at me over some family photographs. My mom had decided to change things up in the living room and had hung a bunch of old family photos on the wall. Among them were some pictures from when my parents were teen-agers hanging out with family and friends. There was also a photo of my paternal grandparents from their wedding day. My friend saw those particular pictures and thought that they were pictures of me. He specifically thought they had been taken at one of those amusement park or similar places where you and friends can put on some costume pieces and get a photo filtered in a way to look like an old sepia-tone photo from the late 1800s.
When I explained to my friend that the guy he thought was me in one of the pictures was my dad, and the guy in another was my grandpa, he didn’t believe me. And when I wouldn’t change my story as he demanded again and again that I admit I was joking, he angrily stormed out of the house and refused to talk to me for several days, until my mom confirmed the story…
Grandma cutting up some tomatoes.I mentioned the other day that I was planning to make chili for the Superbowl, and specifically to make my Grandma’s Chili. After posting my explanation about Grandma’s recipe, I wound up in several conversations with friends about my grandma’s way of cooking, and the nature of old family recipes. One friend had a great way to describe what I was trying to explain: for a lot of people, a recipe isn’t a list of ingredients in precise amounts, it’s a process.
Such a process recipe is my recollection of Grandpa’s cornbread. Approximately equal amounts of corn meal and flour, with some sugar, baking powder, salt, an egg or two (depending on how big a batch you’re making), some butter and some milk. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly first, soften the butter, add the eggs, milk, and butter, blend. If the texture and thickness isn’t right, add some more cornmeal, or some more milk. Pour into a greased pan and bake about 20-25 minutes at 400-ish degrees.
I set some goals for the year, and since this sort of thing often does not go as well as we hoped, I tried to set some very concrete steps for the goals. I tried to model the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.
Since being accountable to someone seems to keep me motivated, I also planned to post updates throughout the year. The beginning of a new month seems like a good time to do that:
Goal: Reduce the outrage.
Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.
Progress: I have been limiting the amount of time I spend reading the during breaks and listening to the Wait! Wait podcast each week. I’m still getting riled up about certain kinds of news, but I also feel as if I’m laughing at the antics of the wingnuts slightly more often than I was.
Goal: Write more regularly.
Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.
Progress: I have been writing during part of my lunch break at work, though I’ve been writing blog posts more often than fiction. I’ll keep working on this.
Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.
Step: I didn’t have a good concrete step for that. Which may be just as well, given that for most of the month of January, my husband and I have been sick or trying to get over being sick, et cetera.
Progress: We haven’t been able to resume our weekly get together and chat night. I didn’t have to cancel Writers’ Night nor miss out on the AFK Tavern meet-up with out-of-town friends, so I wasn’t a total hermit.
My friend, Anthony, has been trying to get folks together for a regular “drink and draw” on a Sunday afternoon at AFK Tavern, and I’ve put the next one on our calendar. Which may help with the next goal.
Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.
Step: I didn’t have a good way to make myself do that instead of other things.
Progress: If I can manage to attend the Drink ‘n’ Draw meet ups, I should get some sketching done there, as well as seeing friends just for fun. I still need to come up with some more steps to push this one along.
Me and my maternal grandmother. I think I was four?My maternal grandmother was an improvisational cook. If you asked her for a recipe, it was always a bit of a ramble. If you worked with her to make whatever it was, there was always a narrative that went with it, with frequent asides about alternate ingredients you could use if you didn’t have something, or if you wanted it to be a bit different.
Most of her recipes began with the sentence: “First, chop an onion.” Most of her childhood was in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, but she also lived in Texas at several points, and her accent sounded more coastal Texan than Missourian. Her oldest brother, who was born in Kansas, often teasingly called her the family’s Texan transplant. I have sometimes labeled homemade chili’s I’ve made from Grandma’s recipe as “Grandma’s Texas Chili,” because of this.
As I mentioned above, her recipes are never strict. I must have eaten her chili hundreds of times, and helped her cook it dozens of times, and I suspect that no two of them were ever exactly alike. Her chili recipe differed from her others because, it begins with, “While the bacon is cooking down, chop an onion and your peppers.”
Among all the variants of Grandma’s chili I ever had, the only three constants were: onions, beans, and bacon. Usually there were several kinds of peppers, but if she didn’t have peppers, she’d just sprinkle in some (or, depending on her mood, and whole lot of) cayenne or even paprika. She favored ground beef, but would substitute pork sausage, ground chicken, or sometimes chopped meatballs or even chopped bologna, if that’s what she had. There might be tomatoes, or not. Frequently the tomato component would be generous dollops of her homemade green tomato relish (which was always spicy), because she almost always had many jars of it in the pantry. Even if she didn’t cook the relish in the chili, she’d usually set out a jar so you could add some to your bowl to spice it up.
She wasn’t particular about the beans. When I was younger, she almost always started with dry beans that soaked overnight. Later she was more willing to use canned beans, since they were more convenient. Any beans would do. I remember more than once she used Van Camp’s Pork & Beans.
The basics of the recipe were:
Cook some bacon until it is very crisp, set the bacon aside.
Chop your onions and peppers up while the bacon is cooking. Saute the onions and peppers in the bacon grease.
Add your meat. Yes, even if it is extremely non-lean hamburger, cook it in the bacon grease. The bacon is very important!
Season liberally with salt. Optional spices to throw in while satueing include pepper, chili pepper, cayenne, paprika, garlic, or pickled hot vegetables.
Add tomatoes or tomato relish or tomato sauce if you are doing tomatoes.
Depending on how you’re doing the beans and what kind of pan you’re cooking the onion, peppers, either add the beans and some liquid to the pan, or start the beans cooking in a pot and add the meat, onions, et al, to them.
Crumble up the bacon and stir it in.
Get the chili to a boil for a while, tasting and adding seasoning, until everything tastes right.
Serve with grated cheese if you have it, and/or green tomato relish, or some salsa, or…
I mention the hot pickled vegetables because she almost always had some of those around the house, too. I was one of the few members of the family who loved eating those as much as Grandma (later, when I started regularly making haberno salsa to bring to family dinners, Grandma always asked to take the leftover home, so I started bringing a separate container of it just for her to take). One time, when she didn’t have any fresh peppers and didn’t have any cayenne, she fished all the pickled peppers out of a jar of the hot veggies, and poured some of the hot pickle brine into the pan with the sauteing bits.
Even with the wildest substitutions, by the time Grandma was finished, it was always Grandma’s Chili. And it was always great.
I’ve only gone all out on Grandma’s Chili a few times in the seven years since she died. I make chili all the time, but it’s not Grandma’s. When making “ordinary” chili, I am as prone to substitutions as Grandma was, and almost never use bacon. When I make chili that I call Grandma’s Chili, I always soak beans overnight, spend too much time choosing bacon, always get some fresh peppers, and onion (usually a sweet one). I try to steer the taste to the milder end, since my husband (and most of our friends) can’t take the kind of chili that Grandma or I would call hot. Sometimes I make some haberno salsa for myself and the brave souls.
I didn’t pick up any really hot peppers. I stuck to mostly sweet ones, since as far as I know it will only be Michael and I eating my chili tomorrow while I watch the Superbowl.
Obviously not actually me, as there is only one remote in the picture…Several years ago I was reading about the new shows coming out the next season, and one, The Big Bang Theory, sounded like exactly the sort of show that I would hate. So I didn’t make any attempt to watch any episodes. Not very long after the season started, I heard from a few different acquaintances that it was not a good show. The specific comments were that it made fun of nerds by portraying them in completely exaggerated, stereotypical, and unrealistic ways. So I continued to ignore it for all of the first season.
And then another nerdy/geek/fannish friend happened to mention, midway through the second season, that he was strangely addicted to the show. I mentioned the reasons I had assumed I wouldn’t like it, and he said, “Oh, me too!” Then he explained how his wife (a person who has been even more immersed in fannish culture than either her hubby or me) had watched the first season on Netflix. “I tried to ignore, and work on stuff on my computer. But it kept making me laugh… and it usually made me laugh because the characters acted exactly like some of our friends.”
“Just let me finish this scene…”My friend, Barb, who can write circles around me, more than occasionally writes about the process of writing. She’s doing a meme this month answering questions from her followers, and she recently posted a combined answer to a question from me and one from Lyrstzha. Her explanations are great, as always, but as I read her response to the question, “The difference in process between writing a stand-alone fic and writing a whole universe?” I realized that my answer would be a lot different.
For me, there is no difference between how I write a stand-alone story or a long series of stories set in a single universe. That’s because in one sense, I never see any story as a stand-alone, even if I never write any sequels, prequels, or stories otherwise set in the same universe…
Font Folly 