Wrestling with Writing

My youngest daughter, Sarai, a super writer, just called and said she’s about 2/3 of the way through with the book she started last September. Okay, now I’m jealous. But, you know, I’ll bet I would be further along on my own projects if I sat down and wrote. She sits down and writes. I’m like, well, okay, if you want to cheat….

Here it is Thursday, and I haven’t even started my Culinary Chronicles for next week. Staying up till all hours watching the convention and rehashing it with my husband is just not the way to stay on task. Then I’m sleepy all the next day. Any excuse.

I actually do have a good reason for not being any further on my mystery series project: I have to know the people and the place the series is set better. I got the idea, I made up people and setting, I wrote one short story and started a novel, and then I had to stop. The story needs to be a novel, too. I don’t yet have a clear enough idea about the main characters in the novel I’ve started–If I go on before I do, I’ll make a mess of things. That’s starting to gel, so I just have to keep working on that for a little longer. I’m wrestling with POV on the project, too. Do I make each one first-person, from a different person’s POV? Do I make them all third-person? If third, how deep do I go? Limited or omniscient? That’s starting to come clear, too. I know I must have written a bazillion words on SIDESHOW before I got the POV and characterization right, and then it just barreled along.

Writing exercise: Take a story or book you like, or a bit from a classic. If it’s written in first person (I), re-write it in third person (he/she). If it’s written in third person, re-write it in first person. Try it in limited third (only in one person’s head) and in omniscient (in everybody’s heads).

Technorati Tags: Writing, POV, characters, Sarai Deurell, writing exercise, SIDESHOW

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Slaving Over a Hot Stove

I’ve been pickling all morning. Our cucumbers crop is going nuts, for the first time in a LONG time. I got a batch ready for making dill pickles and a batch ready for sweet and sour pickles. Boil this, boil that–it’s hot, sweaty work, and I feel very virtuous. I forgive myself the blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and fried ham I had for breakfast.

My husband and I are going to get glasses today. We always bundle as many errands as possible into any trip, especially a trip to “the big city”, which is anyplace with more than 6,000 people. So my mother is coming with us, and we’re going to the craft store, the BIG grocery (not Wall-Blart), the gigantic pet supply store, the while-u-wait eyewear place and a furniture store that’s having a scratch-n-dent sale.

My husband has his heart set on dining room furniture. We don’t have a dining room, mind you. We have a couple of tables we keep pushed up against various walls in the family room, and pull them out when we have family parties. He wants a nice table and matching chairs. Bless him, if he wants it, we’ll get it–he’s the best guy in the world (and no, he doesn’t read this).

Writing exercise: You go out on a series of errands. A series of seemingly unconnected things happen until, at the centerpiece of your shopping trip, they all come together and result in your going home with something other than what you came for. Can be major or trivial.

 

A Disappointing Day

Here I am at the library, and I’m thinking about going home.

FOOL that I am, I volunteered to do a web site for my church. –I’m looking forward to it, which just shows how warped I am. I already have a fan site up for it, which is WAY out-dated, as is the official site, which is why we want a current one. ANYWAY, I dropped by church to confer with the interim pastor and the secretary, thinking they would be there today, and they weren’t. So I went on in (I haz a kee) and set up my laptop, figuring to use the church’s shiny new internet access. Requires a password, which in my case I have not got.

So I came to the library, thinking I could go park in the conference room, make coffee, heat up my sack lunch…. The conference room is reserved today.

Oh, well, I can set up WordPress on my server so I can use it for a pro site for my writing and merch…. and cPanel is not loading there today.

So now I’m thinking, FRACK! I’ll just go home.

If this is the worst thing that ever happens to me, I’ll be well off, yes?

 

West Baden

Mom and I went to West Baden Spa last week. No, not as guests, as tourists. The place is GORGEOUS! I can’t imagine actually staying there. It probably costs a couple yards a night. Worth it, if you have it, but we don’t have it. The atrium in the center of the building is so big, they actually held a car show in it. Here’s a picture of it, with a child in the center amusing himself by racing from the center to the edge.

West Baden Spa Atrium

This is the kind of thing that blew me away–this kind of detail:

This was just sitting on a side table. Note the reflection of the massive dome.

And this, a light fixture way up on a wall:

I love this stuff.

I just joined the Storybookers Yahoo group, and I couldn’t be more delighted. I stumbled on a book called STORYBOOK STYLE by Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister a couple of years ago. Storybook Style is hard to define, but easy to recognize. It looks like… well… storybook illustrations. Urban American houses that look like castles or French farmhouses or English cottages. The story is that Disney animators passed an enclave of these houses on their way to the studio and copied them into Snow White.

Well, I’m off to town, where I can get high-speed Internet access. See you there!

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In a Pickle

My #3 daughter came over last night with her two sons, one 15 and one 3. We had breaded tilapia, fresh lima beans, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. The 15 loves raw cucumbers, but he said, “I only like you-all’s. The ones you get in the store taste like… they don’t have any taste.” The 3 likes the dill pickles I make with them.

The recipe for dill pickles, I got from the Mirro All-Purpose Cookbook, copyright 1954. After I met my husband, we learned that our families were close long ago, but lost touch and we never knew it until our courtship brought them together again. One of his sisters gave me the Mirro cookbook because it had been a gift to her from my late grandmother. How’s that for Fate, Providence, Co-incidence or What-Have You?

Here’s the recipe:

Dill Pickles

1. Select cucumbers about 5 inches in length. Wash them well and cover with salted water. (1 cup salt to a gallon of water.) [note from me: use less salt if using Kosher salt]
2. Pour boiling water over cucumbers while preparing the following:
           1/2 cup salt [see note above]
           2 cups vinegar
           3 quarts water
3. Boil one minute.
4. Drain cucumbers, pack into clean, hot jars. Place dill and a bud of garlic in bottom of each jar.
5. Pour boiling hot mixture over cucumbers. Seal immediately.

Naturally, I don’t do it this way. In addition to lightening the salt load, I put the cucumbers to soak and boil the pickling liquid in the morning, letting the cucumbers soak and the liquid cool all day. Then I put the cucumbers into the jars and pour the COOL liquid over them, seal and refrigerate. They have to be kept in the refrigerator, but they’re crisp.

p.s. That goodness for spell-checkers. I have consistently spelled pickles pickels, and only automatic spell-checking has saved me from myself.

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Update and Eggplant

I’ve been juggling what to do about integrating my blog with my web site, so my web site looks like a garage sale, with conflicting design elements…. Embarrassing! I’ll probably just update the content this month and (I hope) get everything cleaned up by September. It would go a lot faster if I had a couple of clues as to what I’m doing, but I’m no web maven. The sad part of that is, I’m webmaster for four sites, including my own. How sad is that? Pretty darn sad, I’d say.

I made Eggplant Parmesan for supper last night. During the summer, that’s one of my favorite dishes. It’s hot and kind of heavy, so I usually don’t have much with it–last night, we had corn on the cob (half a cob each) and a salad of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. The reason I like it in the summer and not in the winter, when it might be more appropriate, is that I can get eggplant at the farmer’s market. Charlie (the marketeer, not MY Charlie) has the best eggplant ever. They’re never bitter and, if I cook them they same day, the skins are so tender I don’t have to peel them. Here’s my recipe:

Eggplant Parmesan

Slice an eggplant into rounds. Beat together an egg and some milk. Dip the eggplant rounds into this and then dredge them in seasoned breadcrumbs mixed with grated Parmesan cheese (real, not from a cylinder). Pan-fry in corn oil or garlic-flavored olive oil or a mixture of both. Drain on paper towel.

Oil a casserole dish large enough to hold the rounds snugly. Open a can of tomato sauce and season with pepper, chopped garlic or garlic powder, chopped onion or onion powder, basil, oregano and parsley or use bottled Italian recipe sauce. Cover the bottom of the oiled dish with a schmear of this. Cover the bottom of the dish with the eggplant, overlapping the rounds. Cover with the rest of the tomato sauce and sprinkle with Italian cheeses (I use the kind already grated and bagged).

Cover loosely with foil or dish lid and bake at 350F for about 45 minutes. Uncover and continue baking until the cheese browns a little.

We like it.

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Too Much Time at the Library–Not

I was in the library again the other day, sitting at the coffee area table just inside the glass double doors with the USE OTHER ENTRANCE sign on it, greeting all the people who used that entrance. The library has to keep the door unlocked in case of emergency, and distracted people occasionally use it. Sometimes people poke their heads in to ask me questions, like, “Where’s the bank?” The bank sold the building to the library about ten years ago, so it looks like some people get out even less than I do.

Maybe I spend too much time in the library. Patrons ask me usage questions, under the impression that I’m staff.

I always see lots of people I know, though, in the library and passing by outside. I get a lot of personal and association business done that way–a few words to Leah saves a game of phone tag over a simple question about the Southern Indiana Writers’ ghost story anthology. Catching Bernie on the street gets a quick answer to a question about the Corydon Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) web site. I got to wave and say hi to lots of people I know, strengthening our network of acquaintance, which is one of the sweetest benefits to living in a small town.

Technorati Tags: small town, library, Corydon Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), web site, Southern Indiana Writers, ghost story

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A Yummy Bite

I carry a notebook and pen everywhere with me. Yes, yes, partly so I can jot down conversations I overhear, descriptions, settings, plot twists and characters I encounter and think up. Partly, though, so I can copy down recipes I come across.

This past Saturday, I was at World on the Square International Family Fun Fair and, in the food line, I came across something I had to copy down.

This is one of those little finger foods that women think are cute and I usually think are a waste of perfectly good ingredients. Nasty as this may sound, though, I do assure you that it is DELICIOUS.

Bacon Wraps

• white bread
• bacon
• softened cream cheese
• brown sugar (YES, BROWN SUGAR)

Spread cream cheese on bread. Cut off crusts. Cut bread in half and roll tightly. Wrap with 1/2 slice bacon and secure with toothpick. Roll in brown sugar. Bake at 350F until caramelized. Remove immediately.

When I make these, I’m going to use that pre-cooked bacon, so the bacon will be nice and crispy by the time the brown sugar is caramelized.

I’ve had bread and cream cheese wrapped around asparagus, buttered on the outside and baked, and that’s very good with or without bacon, and I’ve had water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and baked (when I do it, the water chestnuts always crack and break and taste like tin–I’d like to try them with FRESH water chestnuts instead of canned). This beats both, though. And when I say something beats asparagus, you KNOW I like it!

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A Most Satisfying Supper

Even though it’s August, the nights have been chilly and the days have been comfortable. I felt a craving for what’s usually a winter meal. I baked a small loaf of bread in the toaster oven, cut up some cabbage and got some Polish sausage out to thaw. Melted some butter in a skillet and put the cabbage in there with some salt and pepper and just a smidgen of sugar. When it was good and hot, I put the sausage in, turned down the heat, and covered the pan. My husband came in from the garden with some ripe tomatoes and green peppers, so a small pepper got itself cut up and added to the cabbage, and two tomatoes got themselves sliced–thin for him and thick for me.

I picked some parsley and cut it up into some boiling water and cooked some flat noodles. Bed of noodles, sliced cooked green peppers on one side, Polish sausage on the other side, cabbage piled on top, hot fresh bread and sliced fresh tomatoes on the side. Mmmmmmm!

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Getting Ready for the World

I’ve been getting ready for World on the Square today. World on the Square happens in Corydon, Indiana on the second Saturday of August every year, from 4-8. Corydon is just a little town, what you call your semi-rural community, but every year there’s this family festival with booths featuring different countries. The booths have information and artifacts, pictures, sometimes stuff for sale. There are musical acts from different backgrounds, like a bagpiper and belly dancers (not at the same time, although that would be interesting….). There’s a free tasting buffet of food from different countries, from cabbage and sausage to Thai satay. And it’s all free, which is a price I like a lot.

So I’m volunteering in the food tasting venue, which is definitely fox-in-the-henhouse. I made English shortbread, since I’m part English.

My friend T gave me her shortbread recipe:

a whole pound of butter!!
1 ¼ C powdered sugar
4 C flour
1 t double-acting baking powder
¼ t salt
(Optional: 1/2 cup ground nuts)
Preheat oven to 325
Place all ingredients into a large bowl and cut together thoroughly. If necessary, finish mixing with hands. The dough will be soft.
Roll dough into 1 1/2″ balls. Place on ungreased sheet and flatten with a cookie stamp. Baking time is approximately 20 minutes.

It is WAY good! Makes about SEVEN DOZEN cookies.

I also made some lemon basil cookies for another thing on Sunday, but that’s another posting. Now I have to go sit under the fan and read. Ah’m tahrd.