Scriniary

Apparently I’m two or three months behind on cooking posts.

Stuff I can still remember making lately, for a generous definition of lately:

* Mexican tomato soup with cornmeal dumplings: Kind of interesting. If I make it again – and I may not – I would use a less strongly flavored oil for the dumplings than olive oil. (From Cooking Light, but I can’t find the recipe at their site yet.)

* Black bean cakes: beans, pepper jack cheese, onion, coated with cornmeal. They were really good (and also made a tasty breakfast). (Also from Cooking Light, also not on their site yet.)

* Corned beef, steamed cabbage, and soda bread. (No points for guessing what day this is from.) The bread, alas, did not bake all the way through, despite sounding deceptively hollow when thumped. A second attempt with an extra 10 minutes of baking time fared much better.

* Tuna noodle casserole. Not very exciting, but it’s easy to double and it freezes well.

* Tamale pie. Basically used the recipe from the Joy of Cooking, but replaced a third of the ground beef with either zuchinni (yummy) or broccoli (good but weird). And replaced much of the salsa with canned tomatoes + various herbs, spices + aromatic veggies. And left out the cheese the second time. I guess I pretty much used their dough recipe and made up my own filling. Also easy to double and freeze.

* Chicken soup with dumplings. I love dumplings.

* Black bean tortilla bake. From Skinny One-Pot Meals. With a lot less cheese than it calls for, because it wanted a lot of cheese. And the second time we didn’t have any nonfat ricotta anyway.

Filed by scriniary at 8:36 pm under Food
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Cast in Shadow was even better than Cast in Courtlight.

The beginning felt a bit slow to me — probably because it stopped to explain things I’d already figured out while reading the second book in the series — but once the story got going, I was hooked.

Kaylin annoyed me a lot less in this book, and Severn enchanted me just as much, so that worked out well. (The scene where Kaylin explains why she’s mad at Severn was fairly chilling even already knowing the reason.)

And now I have to wait for the third one. Drat.

Filed by scriniary at 8:29 pm under Books
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Links:

• I’m a fan of saving the environment, but doing without toilet paper is further than I want to go by a long shot.

• What’s the next puzzle craze after sudoku? Article with sample puzzles. The nurikabe was really easy.

• Limyaael’s Non-Villain rant. There’s no reason that you need to assume a villain in order to have a story. Mainstream fiction and many “classic” novels get away quite handily with having no villain, or only one truly despicable character in a populated world where many other shades of morality exist.

Writing Summary:

Goals for the past week:
Two reviews – one on the OWW, one off.
Revise ATfD. Almost done.

Although there’s a large energy barrier to critting, I really enjoy it. I like taking things apart and seeing how they work, and I like the chance of discovering something really good.

I should write more short stories. (I won’t, of course, because I don’t have short ideas.) It’s so nice to be able to go over a whole story in one sitting, and keep it all in my head at once. I need more practice with endings, too, and they’re a lot faster to get to in a 2k word story than a 90k story.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise (and submit) ATfD.
Write post about beginnings of novels.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (Only one or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Other stuff:
I’m in the early stages of creating my own WordPress theme. Since I don’t know PHP at all and my CSS is built on a weak foundation, this is slow. But fun.

Filed by scriniary at 1:41 am under Life, Writing
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Life is Too Grim Already — a group “working for a brighter genre” — now has a website. Currently it lists one book.

Filed by scriniary at 11:51 am under Books
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Cast in Courtlight was *really good*.

I missed a lot, I know, because I have not read the previous book, Cast in Shadow. I bought Courtlight without realizing it was the second in the series, and it took me a while to pick it up because of that, but it wasn't a problem. I had no idea what was going on with either Lord Nightshade or Severn, but that just added to the fun. (Though I'll probably reread it after I read the first one. Reading the summary of the first on Amazon just now already cleared up a few things.)

Sagara did a wonderful job with the setting and world in this book. Every few pages, I'd stop to mutter, “That's so cool!” There's a very realistic sense of history, and the descriptions are clear without bogging down. I wish I had more of an idea of the size of the fiefs compared to the size of the city; maybe the first book will help. The Barrani are a very strange, alien but understandable, species.

The only thing that bugged me in the book was Kaylin, the main character. I liked her, but she's one of those characters whom all the other characters love. She's always late, she's rude, she's willfully ignorant of anything that doesn't suit her interests — which seems like a poor survival skill — and yet everyone loves her.

The secondary characters are great, however, and the plot was adequately twisty, and there's a lot of humor — nice sarcastic humor — and did I mention all the random cool bits?

And lucky me, when I went to the bookstore to order Cast in Shadow yesterday, it was sitting on the shelf. After I get a bit farther in I'll post something about my personal taste in beginnings of novels.

Filed by scriniary at 3:28 am under Books
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If you are using the plugin to add Google Reader Shared Items to your sidebar, you need to update it to account for recent changes in Google Reader.

Either download the new version, or make this simple change:

On line 346 (that’s near the bottom), there is a line
htmlspecialchars($item->link[1]['href'])

Delete the “[1]” and the plugin should be fixed.

Filed by scriniary at 2:00 pm under Uncategorized
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Warning: This post is all about me — no links this week. Sorry. (Go watch more hockey fights if you're bored.)

Updated my exceedingly boring nonfiction site with some of the FrameMaker stuff I was playing around with recently. I have a bunch of links (to old clips) I need to add to that site someday soon; since my articles are all on other sites, that's tricky, since they could disappear at any time.

Shameless plug: If you click on this link to the html version of the FrameMaker tables article that I sold to AC, they will pay me an additional $0.0015. (So no, I won't notice if you look or not!)

Writing Summary:

Took the week off due to sickness. I did get some reviews done early in the week, at least.

Goals for the coming week:
Two reviews – one on the OWW, one off.
Revise ATfD.

Tasks for whenever:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned.
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 9:05 pm under Uncategorized, Writing
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Misc:

• lavenderbard has started a community for Life Is Too Grim Already, an organization (still being developed) that she came up with to promote the creation and distribution of “not grim” science fiction and fantasy, largely by making it easier for readers to find this kind of book.

I like grim quite a lot, but since it is sometimes nice to read something not-grim, I'll keep an eye on this. I went over my reading list from the past few years and came up with hardly any not-grim books.

• frost-light on whether to tell someone that the book you're critting for them stinks: Honesty is golden when it comes to critiquing. Now, you don't have to be rude and say “this stinks” or “you're the worst writer ever!”, but an explanation of the how, what and why is important. Mentioning what you DID like also is important, because that shows the writer where their strengths are (at least in your opinion).

Absolutely right. If someone's serious about improving, it doesn't do any good to not tell them the problems you see. (Though figuring out whether they're serious or not can be tricky.) But rudeness doesn't actually help get your point across.

• Justine Larbalestier forwards a question about good day jobs for writers.

• Yesterday I discovered hockeyfights.com. Ratings, reviews, and videos. I am both amused and happy that I can see fights from games I don't watch.

Writing Summary:

Goals for the week fortnight (halfway through):
Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.
Not the scenes-that-could-be-a-short mentioned above, darn it. Have successfully resisted.

Unexpected stuff that came up: Revising a short story, and some critting on the OWW.

This week I need do to more critting, which is only partly a blatant attempt to get more reviews. I also have a few reviews to return. And I continue to test the “learn how to write better by critting” thing that so many people have mentioned…

Filed by scriniary at 9:20 am under Books, Writing
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Writing Summary:
I took the week off from writing, mostly, and may take this week off as well. Needed a break, and needed time to do some other things.

Also, my brain thinks it should be in story-producing mode, rather than editing mode or writing mode. Story-producing mode means daydreaming. It seems incredibly non-productive (because I lie around in bed producing nothing tangible), and it steals creative energy from whatever I should be working on, but without it, there would be no stories to write in the future.

Though it'd be nice if my brain weren't stuck on a story that's so far down the to-write queue. Maybe I can make these scenes into a short story. They're more bits of the Joceln-and-Arthos book, and I'm already trying to sell the prologue as a short story. And it could be more emotion-practice….

Should do in the next two weeks:
Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15
Finish ch 1-3
Type ch 4-10
Notebook notes for ch 11-15
Not the scenes-that-could-be-a-short mentioned above, darn it.

Monthly Checkup:
My February goals have morphed into March goals. But I made progress on the more important ones, and on various things that came up since I set them, so whatever. I seem to have two big problems with setting medium-term goals: changing my mind partway through, and a lack of motivation since I have no deadlines.

I try to think of them more as guidelines, and as long as I'm being productive on something, to not worry about it much. It'll all even out eventually.

Misc.:
So I'm reading this book that shall remain unnamed. And, argh. It's a sequel to a book that I liked a lot – enough that I picked up books 2 and 3 without any reservations. But oh, the angst! Why is it so much more annoying than in book 1? Possibly because it isn't new? Or is the author really beating me over the head with it that much more in this book? Or is the plot just not as interesting/fast-paced as in book 1, and so doesn't make up for all the whining? Or am I just over sensitive to emotional stuff because that's what I've been working on lately?

(Those would be rhetorcal questions, though you're welcome to answer them anyway.)

There are a lot of little bits that seem very repetitive. I feel like the author tells me everything twice. I was going to put it down at chapter 10, but kept going — there is just enough plot to drag me through the slowness, and the angst seems to be dropping off (after a bit with too little emotional payoff) — and then I hit a bizarre statement about wine transportation that made no sense, and important plot points ought to make more sense.

Sooo…..maybe I'll just move on to the next thing on the to-read shelf. You only get to annoy me so much before I put the book down “temporarily” and neglect to pick it up again. Even if I do want to know what happens, it may not be worth my time.

There are probably lessons here for me as a writer, but I suspect they're not ones I should be learning. I tend to err the other way — not including enough, rather than too much.

Filed by scriniary at 7:59 pm under Books, Writing
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