cloudy Saturday
Books -- still on Tiptree. The one is a book with a couple unpublished stories and a lot of correspondence. It's amazing but depressing that her letters are better, funnier, more evocative and more thoughtprovoking than pieces I spend months with. The other is a book of short stories, and the two I just read were real punches to the gut: "Morality Meat" and "Yanqui Doodle." She says that she stopped or slowed down writing after a while because she was digging so deep into emotional territory that really hurt, and wow. The despair and visceral horror at what Tiptree imagines for society just rolls off the pages.
CHEERY. Anyway. Latest baking: just oatmeal cookies for a little party at work. The recipe didn't call for ANY spices, which seems blasphemous for oatmeal cookies, so of course I dumped in every sweet-spice (there must be some kind of classification system for spices, right?) I have: allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, plus black pepper because it goes into gingerbread, which I lurve. Ah ha ha.
Sweetie and I belong to a CSA/farm-share (we put $$ in sometime in late spring and get 22 weeks of fresh produce from a farm upstate). I have become an EXPERT in preparing big leafy greens of the collard/kale/chard varieties. Stir-fry and baked chips are our favorites (kale chips are way yummier than they sound, even if they sound good to you). We've been getting carrots, and I have discovered that carrot tops are edible, particularly in pesto with fresh basil (we had a plant then got another plant in the CSA, which we decided to try to re-plant instead of just eat). We also get a dozen eggs per week, which is hilariously overwhelming. We end up hard-boiling most of them in a panic when the egg drawer fills up. I'm tempted to find a good recipe for egg salad, which never sounded good to me until my foodie aunt was telling me about the way she does it. Hmm...
Writing: my goal is to revise Sad Robot story with the comments I got from workshop. I'm pretty happy with it as is, but it could use a bit more info in strategic places. At least I should probably know more things about what's happening even if I don't outright tell it to the reader. Also I'm busy dreaming up my 2012 NaNo; the project title is "Magic is Rotting." One year I downloaded personal wiki software and had a marvelous time creating a universe for something I don't even remember, but it bugged out on me and I wasn't ever able to revive it. Anyway, I'm looking for something like that again. Thoughts??
My other writing goal is way more boring: updating one of my law school papers to submit to a law review or journal. I'm just finding more recent articles on the subject than the ones I cited back whenever I wrote it and going to incorporate those so it's less obvious that I wrote this paper three years ago.
Saturday morning is a pretty good time to blog, it turns out. Now I must make notes on a workshop piece... yes, sweetie and I are planning to attend a Saturday workshop. Madness!
CHEERY. Anyway. Latest baking: just oatmeal cookies for a little party at work. The recipe didn't call for ANY spices, which seems blasphemous for oatmeal cookies, so of course I dumped in every sweet-spice (there must be some kind of classification system for spices, right?) I have: allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, plus black pepper because it goes into gingerbread, which I lurve. Ah ha ha.
Sweetie and I belong to a CSA/farm-share (we put $$ in sometime in late spring and get 22 weeks of fresh produce from a farm upstate). I have become an EXPERT in preparing big leafy greens of the collard/kale/chard varieties. Stir-fry and baked chips are our favorites (kale chips are way yummier than they sound, even if they sound good to you). We've been getting carrots, and I have discovered that carrot tops are edible, particularly in pesto with fresh basil (we had a plant then got another plant in the CSA, which we decided to try to re-plant instead of just eat). We also get a dozen eggs per week, which is hilariously overwhelming. We end up hard-boiling most of them in a panic when the egg drawer fills up. I'm tempted to find a good recipe for egg salad, which never sounded good to me until my foodie aunt was telling me about the way she does it. Hmm...
Writing: my goal is to revise Sad Robot story with the comments I got from workshop. I'm pretty happy with it as is, but it could use a bit more info in strategic places. At least I should probably know more things about what's happening even if I don't outright tell it to the reader. Also I'm busy dreaming up my 2012 NaNo; the project title is "Magic is Rotting." One year I downloaded personal wiki software and had a marvelous time creating a universe for something I don't even remember, but it bugged out on me and I wasn't ever able to revive it. Anyway, I'm looking for something like that again. Thoughts??
My other writing goal is way more boring: updating one of my law school papers to submit to a law review or journal. I'm just finding more recent articles on the subject than the ones I cited back whenever I wrote it and going to incorporate those so it's less obvious that I wrote this paper three years ago.
Saturday morning is a pretty good time to blog, it turns out. Now I must make notes on a workshop piece... yes, sweetie and I are planning to attend a Saturday workshop. Madness!