pameladean

One of my small bad habits is to use Post-It notes to record what I fondly and optimistically call my menu plan for the week. (It's a bad habit because Post-It notes are comparatively expensive. I do write on both sides of them, which makes for a lot of awkwardness, although eventually the sticky side becomes covered with cat hair and will only stick to a few things instead of all of them.)

My menu plans are a great deal like my book synopses. They are necessary to give some semblance of order to the writing of chapters or the getting of groceries, but after the book or the meals are done, they are mostly a source of hilarity, or occasionally of despair. Book synopses are also necessary to sell a book to a publisher or interest an agent in doing so. The menu plans are to sell to me the idea that I am in control of what's going on in the kitchen.

Here is one from a while ago that I mostly adhered to:

Baked tofu, Etc. Etc. is sweet potatoes, baked frozen rolls, and some kind of roasted vegetable, often broccoli.

Tuna Risotto. This is amazingly delicious. I had to dramatically increase the amount and type of vegetables in it, and omit the peas, to make it vaguely compatible with a diabetic regimen, but it happily absorbed all changes. I think I added roasted baby carrots on the side, but if you put enough vegetables IN, you don't have to have any BESIDES. I may have balked at putting carrots in a risotto without a recipe to reassure me, or, now that I think about it, probably the pan wasn't big enough for any more vegetables. I also used a Completely Wrong White Wine, but it was still really good.

Fish Masala Cauliflower. This means fish masala, and some kind of curried vegetable accompaniment involving cauliflower. I always leave myself the option to just roast the cauliflower, but it's better to make a curry of some kind out of it. If I roast a vegetable we just eat all of it on the spot, unless it is really seriously enormous; whereas aloo gobi or cauliflower with green beans and potatoes, which is what I think I made this time, will produce some leftovers.

Here's one that went a little sideways:

Chickpeas, eggplant, green beans. I think this was a casserole, but Raphael doesn't like eggplant and I developed a lack of desire to prep the green beans. I put off using the ingredients. The green beans survived to be used later in a vegetable curry, but the eggplant, originally bought to be grilled and served cold, with roasted bell peppers and onions, to my tea group,and already on that count a bit aged, did not. Fortunately it was only a small one.

Enchiladas, cabbage. I did make this. The enchiladas use Trader Joe's soy chorizo and a different brand of green chile enchilada sauce and are very good. I roasted the cabbage with some garlic cloves.

Pasta with smoked salmon, broccoli. This was intended to use up a package of smoked salmon I hadn't needed for the tea. Said package ordered imposingly, "DO NOT CONSUME AFTER DECEMBER 6TH." But I had plenty of time til then and I didn't end up making the dish that week because Raphael had made a different pasta dish with salmon on Sunday and that seemed like enough salmon for a while, especially since we'd had a kind of marathon to use up the fish masala from the previous week.

If I recall correctly, I made vegan jambalaya that week instead of the salmon pasta. Doubling the onion, bell pepper, and celery produces a dish I can eat without spiking my blood sugar if I have a generous vegetable side, which was probably the broccoli. The third dish of the week might have been vegetable soup with grilled sheep's-cheese sandwiches, since I was finishing up the white sandwich bread that I got for the tea. We also had tea leftovers, including all the cheese I'd gotten and forgotten to take with me. At the last minute Lydy got sick, and after consulting my guests about how much they wanted to risk getting sick too, Janet very kindly offered her kitchen and dining room for the feast, and carbonel equally kindly gave me and all the food a ride to Janet's. Well, all the food except the cheeses, which I forgot. So we had both extra-fancy bread and extra-fancy cheese to use up. The sheep's milk cheese went into the sandwiches, the goat gouda went to the MinnStf meeting, and the goat cheese -- not chevre, but a hard gratable cheese -- encrusted with rosemary went into a caramelized onion and goat cheese tart that I took to a party. I need to make it for my tea people next year.

I also made a mashup of two recipes: chickpea biryani and tofu biryani. This took forever and required quadrupling the vegetables. It was very good, though I didn't increase the seasoning enough, and also mashing together two recipes made the spice mixture a bit odd. I smoothed it out in passing but I didn't really use enough of anything but green chile, and didn't use all of the right things.  I think I'll complete the mashing by looking up a standard vegetable biryani next time and seeing what seasonings would work better. I also had to use faux sour cream thinned with lemon juice because I didn't have any plain non-dairy yogurt. It worked fine; but I feel that yogurt would add more flavor and also more nutrition, provided I use soy -- coconut is all very well but it has no protein.

The list for the week just completed was this:

Pasta with smoked salmon
Macaroni and goat cheese
Risotto

I really did need to use up the smoked salmon, so I did. The recipe called for a pound of pasta and three ounces of salmon. I used twelve ounces of pasta and 4.5 of salmon, but there wasn't much flavor, sadly, so I put in a 7.5 ounce can of regular salmon and extra garlic and lemon juice. I also put in a lot of onion and an entire small cabbage, thinly sliced, and a bunch of grated pecorino romano. It was very tasty, though not as elevated as I'd been led to believe.

I put off the macaroni and goat cheese because, while I usually make it with soy milk, Eric had pointed out affordable goat milk at Trader Joe's and I'd gotten a carton. But I've never had goat milk before and decided to put it off til a time when a bad digestive reaction would not mess up my weekend.  (I later discovered that I was out of elbow macaroni, anyway, so it was just as well.) Instead I made the jambalaya and roasted broccoli, which we mostly do not ever get tired of.

I hadn't decided whether I'd make tuna risotto, which uses mostly ingredients from the cupboard or freezer and can thus be assembled very readily, or a tofu risotto I'd been eyeing. In the event, I made Hoisin Explosion Tofu (based on a chicken recipe) with extra vegetables, broccoli and snow peas, besides the bell peppers. I did this mostly because I'd discovered a partial bag of cashew halves and pieces that was going to expire in a month or two.  About half of them had gone into the biryani, but the other half needed a home, and this was it. And then on the last day of the week I made a chickpea, mushroom, and kale soup with toasted goat cheddar sandwiches. We had used up the fancy sandwich bread by then, but had some goat cheddar that lydy had picked up at the co-op for us. In hiking season the goat cheddar makes great cold sandwiches, but we are not winter hikers.

To end with, here is a list of things for some week or other that I did not make any of:

Enchiladas, veg
Chickpea stew with greens, cornbread
Mushroom spinach soup with cannelloni beans
3-Cup Tofu

I'm going to make the 3-Cup Tofu at some point, but I feel we've had quite a lot of mushrooms and greens and chickpeas and will probably not do either of those dishes for quite a while. I forget why I didn't make the enchiladas. Oh, right: Trader Joe's didn't have any soy chorizo. And I couldn't decide whether to use an actual recipe for the tofu or adapt a chicken recipe.

I regret the lost eggplant, but on the whole we don't waste a lot of food.

This is really much too close to my writing process, if you allow the lost eggplant to stand in for deleted subplots or perhaps unnecessary research. Maybe both!

I hope you are all eating what you like and writing what you need to. Or, if you prefer, the other way around.

Pamela

So there are a lot of ways to talk about narrative and fictional structure generally, a lot of ways of mapping it all: scene and sequel, rising and falling action, hysteron proteron, many more. I used to read about them avidly. Long ago when I was in college and struggling with short stories, one of my English professors suggested that I write a play, because the structure was predetermined and you could just plug elements into the template.

None of this has ever been of the slightest use to me except as an intellectual exercise. Well, that's not quite true. It's very useful for enhancing the experience of reading other people's finished works. It took me years to be even moderately good at using theories of structure for that purpose because my brain does not do that and in fact tends to dig in its heels and specifically refuse to do that, but I did manage it after the fact with other people's work.

I can't write that way, though. It will not happen. Everything just turns to water and runs away. I've stolen plots from ballads and Shakespeare, but even then, they warp and twist, and I write what I can write and then move it around and try to make it approximate the structure I thought I was using. I can more or less do thematic structure or emotional structure, but actual plot structure, the arrangement of the incidents, as Aristotle called it, is still opaque to me. It has to proceed from character, setting, theme, and mood and then get nudged around until, if you stand at the right angle, there is a plotlike arrangement of things that happened.

I know a lot of people who can see structure and write with it initially set up like the skeleton of a new building, but I cannot do it.

I'm not exactly asking for advice, though I wouldn't mind it. You'd have to be prepared for me to say, "Nope, won't work" or a more polite equivalent. But I'm curious about how other people, readers or writers, perceive or create structure in stories.

Pamela

I have, not exactly in my hand right now, but very near by, and honestly I think I might sleep with it under my pillow, the termination paperwork for The Dubious Hills AND the cancelled and as-yet unpublished sequel to Hills, that is, the work sometimes known as Going North.

This has been imminent for some weeks now and I have been trying to figure out what to do. I will let you guys know as soon as I have.

What I can say is that Going North needs to be re-expanded, not to its former two-volume length, but by perhaps 20,000 words; that probably not all of them will be words that I have already written; and that I am very well, indeed painfully, aware that people have been waiting for far, far too long for this book; so I will do my best to be expeditious.

One might well ask why I didn't do the revisions while I was awaiting the paperwork, but I can only say that they had not come properly into focus, and in fact I needed to write a short story first to get things to line up or clear up or whatever this analogy thinks it is doing just now. I would apologize for my creative process, but that wouldn't make it any less annoying.

Pamela

Elise is having a large sale for various noble purposes, and it will be the last one for a while because she will be starting her convention season. Here is the link:

http://elisem.livejournal.com/1869278.html

Well worth just admiring at length, even if you can't afford to buy anything. And bear in mind that Elise discounts things dramatically from time to time, so "can't afford" might change.

Elise also asked that people who have some of her shinies talk a little about one that we have, or that inspired us. I'm glad she didn't ask for a favorite, because I couldn't.

The necklace I'm about to put on to go to the MinnStf party tonight is called "Strategy and Tactics Among the Mermaids." It is purple and green and iridescent and structured and it brought back to me all the times that I visited Eric in California and we went to Moss Beach to look at the tidepools and be stared out of countenance by the harbor seals. I started a story based on it. The story is now either trying to become a novel or just being annoying, but I'll get to the end of it one day.

I could not, in fact, afford the necklace, but I admired it in Elise's comments section and an extremely kind friend got hold of Elise and bought it for me, which made all three of us happy.

Pamela

The copy-edit of the Liavek collection, which Pat and I decided (with the agreement of the publisher) to call Points of Departure, arrived a couple of weeks ago. Sunday evening I emailed my version of the file to Pat, who had agreed to merge the two and make sure that my unfamiliarity with Microsoft Word and, indeed, with any kind of electronic editing and copy-editing arrangement whatsoever, had not created any horrors that needed fixing.

There were some editorial remarks and changes as well, but very minor ones, the editor having thought that we had done a good job on the stories the first time around and knew how we wanted them to be.

I had forgotten the stages of dealing with a copy-edit, which, in my case, go approximately, NOOOOOOO, Are You Kidding Me, I Cannot Write For Toffee Not If It Was Ever So, Okay I Can Fix That If You Insist, Bored Now, Thank Goodness Somebody Noticed That, The Rest of This is Nonsense and I Will Not Do It, Really Bored Now, Really Why Did I Think I Could Write, Oh All RIGHT, This Is Very Annoying But You Have A Point, and I Am So Done Now.

I believe that copy-editors cannot catch everything that is actually wrong without also pointing out a certain percentage of things that are not wrong at all, and the writer just has to deal with it; but I had almost forgotten this, because it's been so long since I had anything published.

It was interesting to me that all the changes I balked at came down to either voice or viewpoint. The first and last of my Liavek stories are in the first person, and I was really not at all willing to change much of anything. The middle three stories and my sections of the new collaborative story are in third person, but there is in each one a particular viewpoint that dictates word choice and style generally. I was not altogether aware of this when I wrote them, but when I tried to make changes that on the surface seemed perfectly reasonable, it always came down to viewpoint.

On the whole I feel that all of the stories have held up remarkably well, and actually found myself becoming weepy both over the end of my last one, "A Necessary End," and Pat's last one, "The Levar's Night Out."

I am so pleased that this collection will be available as an e-book. I think the release date is in May, but I'll keep you apprised as things get closer.

Pamela

David went around the yard a week or two ago and took some splendid photos. You can look at them here.

I had a lovely time at Wiscon and managed not to bring any horrible viruses home with me. Raphael and I went to Murphy Hanrahan Regional Park earlier this week and saw clouds of dragonflies, mostly dot-tailed whitefaces with a leavening of frosted whitefaces, common whitetails, and at least one twelve-spotted and one four-spotted skimmer. Over the weekend Eric and I went to Eloise Butler, where we saw dozens of four-spotted skimmers and a goodly number of whitetails; not to mention two large and extremely oblivious wild turkeys browsing under the birdfeeders. We also went to Lebanon Hills Regional Park, where we were too late for dragonflies but delighted to see fireflies twinkling and flashing in the vegetation next to the fire road.

Also, I had a writing date with Pat WINOLJ, made copious notes, and wrote 500 or so new words on the Liavek novel. The style of the novel as written so far pleases me a lot, but it's rather mannered, and getting back into it will be interesting.

Pamela

I had meant to mention, my book is due on October 15th, and that is a real deadline. I am really not sure if I'll be about as quiet as usual or post madly when I get stuck. I sometimes think that I should have gotten something like a garden-design program for this book so that I could stick things here and there to see how they looked before committing to any given order of events. I think I have only one more major alteration to make before the end. I think.

Pamela

No, this entry is not about the spring, but about my Amazing Expanding and Shrinking Book. Unfortunately, no book or any other prose work of mine has ever been adept at shrinking, and this one is no exception.

Partly at Eric's behest, I'd made some impromptu decisions about where I should be in the revisions when, so that the project, being without external deadlines, would not languish too long. I actually did finish up with Chapter 12 (formerly 16) within a few days of when the calendar said I should. Eric had been strongly urging me to do a word count at this point, so I did.

Sixty-seven thousand, eight hundred and eighteen. What this demonstrates is that, if I had only to cut the book down by half, I'd be doing very well. But since I have to cut it by nearly 75%, this is Not Good Enough. I am taking a few days off to sulk and also to ponder, two states that often come together with me.

I have removed five characters and four subplots, as well as a lot of incidental repetition and indulgent description, but there is no way I will get to the end of this story in another 23,000 words. I haven't decided exactly what to do. There are a lot of intractable and sometimes contradictory requirements. This book is a sequel to two others, and the incluing I already did for the story-so-far was not sufficient, so that has to be done, and it is not exactly simple and straightforward, because simple and straightforward is not what I do. The characters remaining are heavily entangled still with those no longer present, and I'm not proposing to warp their personalities and the past by removing references to the missing. The plot is somewhat ornate, and there is only so far one can simplify it before it becomes simply silly. I use description for characterization, to distinguish points of view, and for pacing and thematic pressure, so I'm not sure how much of that I can get rid of or whether getting rid what I'm willing to sacrifice would even be sufficient.

David asked, when apprised of this dilemma, whether I didn't need to mow the overgrown lawn at one height and then again at a lower one, and this is in general how I want to proceed. However, I'd like to have a few principles in mind as I go through the rest of the book for the first time, even though I know a second mowing will be necessary. The only thing I have thought of so far is to significantly pick up the pace (I hate that a lot) so that what's missing won't have time to make itself known. However, even at the glacial pace of the original, readers complained about not seeing enough of characters who will be offstage for much of the second part of the book, so there are some limits to this approach. Still, at the moment, it's what I have.

I'm planning to save a copy of the first pass through, though, just in case.

P.

P.S. Hey, Jo, the LJ spellchecker thinks that "incluing" should maybe actually be "uncling." As in "uncle me no uncles," I assume, though it could also be a command to let go of something, to peel oneself off.