Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 277

When you dream in stories

Here’s a post at Kill Zone Blog: Writing in the Dream Zone

I have a good friend who dreamed the entire plot of her first novel, which became the debut installment in an enormously successful thriller series. Why can’t I have dreams like that?

Hah, well, I expect the plot tightened up a good deal in translation, as it were.

I do dream in plots, not all the time, but pretty often. When I do, I’m often the narrator planning the story and telling it, not a character actually acting in the dream. When bad things are happening, I, as the dreamer, already know about the happy ending coming up. (You see how thoroughly I disapprove of tragic endings? Even the back of my mind totally hates tragedy. I hardly ever have nightmares.) (When I do, it usually involves losing a dog. Naturally.)

Have I ever turned a dream into a real plot and written a book based on it? No. Have I ever turned a dream into a world and halfway worked out characters and the beginnings of a plot based on it? Yes. So you may still see a story of that kind get smoothed out, written down, and published. Who knows?

At Kill Zone Blog, Laura Benedict adds:

There are so many theories on what dreams are. Just a few:

Subconscious problem solving.

Wish fulfillment

Random neuron firing

Emotional cleanup using dream symbols

Messages from the future or past

Messages from the future. Sure. I don’t think that counts as a *theory* exactly.

But seriously, the kind of dream where you are telling a story and acting as a narrator doesn’t fit any of those categories at all.

I wonder how many other writers … or readers … have story-type dreams where they are narrating rather than acting as a character? How about you all? Chime in:

A) Yep, that’s totally me, I have that kind of dream!

B) Nope, that sounds kinda weird.

C) Other.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The Nine Mistakes All Beginning Writers Make

I take issue with the “all.” I’m positive that many, many writers never even flirted with some or most or even any of the mistakes mentioned in this brief post by Elizabeth Andre.

On the other hand, they are certainly all mistakes. Or, shall we say, tactically speaking, if you make any of these mistakes, you will never be a writer.

… yeah, pretty sure I was never really drawn to any of the enumerated mistakes.

I do remember reading a post someone wrote (sorry I can’t be more specific) about some people who say they want to be writers but they are really into worldbuilding as a hobby. And how that is a legitimate hobby as long as it’s okay with them that they never actually write a book.

I bet it’s hard to tell the worldbuilding-only hobbyist from JRR Tolkien for the first few decades of work on the world, though.

Please Feel Free to Share:

My other kind of baby is nearly ready to be born

You know what I’m talking about, right?

Coming out on March 14th! Mysterious strangers, ghost dogs, and the dream of a brighter future . . . you know you want this just for the dog, right? Also the horse. I am quite fond of both the dog and the horse.

It’s a wolfhound type of dog, btw. Not a Cavalier. Maybe someday I will put a cute fluffy little dog in a book, but this is not that day.

And it’s not exactly a normal horse. A horse-like creature, we shall say.

I urge you all to preorder this book here. Especially because the cover price is quite reasonable, especially considering how appalling prices are for many new hardcover are these days.

I will mention, though, that I will be doing a drawing of newsletter recipients for a chance to win a free copy of The White Road. So if you haven’t already, hit the Newsletter button at the top of the page to sign up.

But hey, whether you’re eligible for the drawing or not, preorder a copy anyway! You can always give an extra copy to a friend, right? And the copy I send you will be signed, so you’ll need an ordinary copy to give away or lend or whatever.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Pastrami-style Turkey Breast with Cornmeal Bao

Yeah, haven’t been very good about updating this site from home, even though I could because my connection will be okay till May. What can I say? I’m busy writing . . . in between bouts of puppy playfulness! They are staying awake for longer and longer, which is adorable but does cut into my time for stuff that does not involve puppies. Also the weather is so nice how can I resist taking dogs to the park? All of a sudden if I get 2000 words per day, it counts as really productive!

So, I’ll try to catch up with posts over the next couple of days.

First, I’m filing this under the new “Real Food” tag – this is another new-to-me recipe I made recently that was a big hit, with me and with my parents. I don’t always, or even often, take my parents any of the food I make because we have widely divergent tastes. But I figured they would like this, and I was right. (The dogs all upvoted this recipe, too.)

For a change, I made this almost just as it was written. The original recipe, from Bon Appetit, can be found here.

The turkey was very easy. The bread was no harder than any other yeast bread; you just need to plan ahead. The black pepper sauce was super simple.

In case you, like me, seldom deal with large pieces of meat and are not sure how long it might take to defrost a whole turkey breast in your fridge, I got this one on Sunday and it was thawed and ready to cook on Thursday.

Pastrami-style Turkey Breast

2 Tbsp coriander seeds

2 Tbsp black peppercorns

1 Tbsp fennel seeds – I am not a huge fennel fan, to say the least, but sometimes fennel is all right in a spice mixture. I used almost the full amount here and liked the combination very much.

2 Tbsp Kosher salt – you will want to use about half this amount if you are using regular salt

1 6-8 lb skin-on bone-in turkey breast

1 Tbsp oil – I forgot this and everything turned out fine

Grind the seeds in your handy spice grinder. Or, of course, use already-ground seeds. You ideally want rather a coarse grind, though, which is hard to find; and I’m not sure fennel seeds come in ground form. You could use a mortar and pestle if you have one (I do), but this is a huge amount of seeds to grind if your mortar is small (mine is tiny).

Anyway, grind the seeds. Add the salt. Pull the skin away from the turkey breast and rub the spice mixture on the meat under the skin. I never did this before, but it wasn’t hard. Let the turkey rest at room temp for one hour or refrigerated for 12 hours plus room temp for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Put the turkey in the oven. Roast for 40 minutes or so. Reduce the oven temp to 250 degrees and roast for about an hour longer. Let rest 30 minutes before carving.

My meat thermometer turned out to have a dead battery, and I didn’t quite go for the maximum suggested times, which is what I suggest here because my turkey breast was just a tiny bit pink near the bone. So if you don’t have a meat thermometer, I suggest 40-45 minutes and then a full hour and then resting for the full 30 minutes. That will probably work unless your oven temps are very different from mine.

Cornmeal Bao

You probably know that “bao” are Chinese steamed breads. (I actually learned this word from Firefly. Remember where that came up? What a great episode.) I really like steamed breads, though my success with occasional forays into dumplings is, ah, mixed. These are pretty easy, though.

2 Tbsp sugar

¼ oz (2¼ tsp) yeast

2/3 C warm water

2 C flour

1 C Jiffy corn muffin mix. This will leave about a third of a package, which I used to make pancakes with. Then I got several more boxes of Jiffy corn muffin mix, because the pancakes were pretty tasty.

1 Tbsp kosher salt, or a little less if that seems like a lot to you. It seemed like a lot to me.

1 tsp baking powder

Make the bread dough. Let rise 1½ hours or so. Divide into 16 balls and roll each ball into a 6” by 3” oval. Mine were difficult to roll out to those dimensions without getting pretty darn thin. The thinnest ones didn’t rise enough in later stages of this recipe, so I suggest not trying too hard to get the 6×3 ovals. But do roll the balls out into ovals, not circles.

Brush the top of each oval with vegetable oil. Fold the ovals in half lengthwise, making rough half-circles. This is the final shape. You are making them this way so the breads can be steamed, then opened up like sandwiches for the turkey.

Let the little rolls rise 60-90 minutes. Steam for 10-12 minutes, most likely half at a time unless your steamer has a lot more room in it than mine. My two-tiered bamboo steamer held eight bao at a time without crowding.

Black Pepper Sauce

¼ C sugar

3 Tbsp soy sauce

1 Thai-style fresh chili, a bird’s eye or half a cayenne or probably half a serrano, whatever you have handy, minced

½ inch piece ginger, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

2 Tbsp soy sauce

2 Tbsp dark soy sauce or soy paste or a more regular soy sauce plus a little more sugar

2 tsp rice vinegar

1 tsp freshly ground, coarsely ground black pepper. You will have to measure it to believe how much a tsp is, probably. I ground what seemed like a lot and then ground some more.

Heat the sugar with the 3 Tbsp soy sauce until the sugar dissolves. Add the remaining ingredients.

Assemble the sandwiches: Slice the turkey. Open the sandwiches. Fill with turkey and drizzle with black pepper sauce. The original recipe suggests adding mayonnaise, pickles, shredded carrots, and cilantro. I tried all those additions except the cilantro, since I forgot to get that. All the extras were fine, but frankly unnecessary. The turkey and black pepper sauce worked great with the cornmeal bao, no other additions necessary.

If you try this, I hope you like it as much as we did.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Marie Brennen’s college archaeology paper on Elfquest

So, I happened across this today at Marie Brennen’s Swan Tower:

When I was a sophomore in college, I wrote an archaeology paper on Elfquest.

No, really.

I think that is funny and delightful, perhaps partly because I did something similar in an Anthropology class. My version was writing a detailed ethological description of a science fiction species. (I got an A, although I think the professor was kind of bemused.)

Brennen says:

It was supposed to be a paper looking at the Wolfriders as hunter-gatherers and the Sun Folk as horticulturalists/early agriculturalists. Naturally, when I finally had a paper topic I enjoyed and could have run well past the guideline of 10-12 pages, I had a professor who said anything past twelve pages he would chuck in the trash, and then dock us points for not having a conclusion. The result is that the paper wound up only addressing the Wolfrider half of the equation, because I ran out of space for anything else.

Yeah, that’ll happen.

So, this post, if you click through, is a summary of the original paper, which is linked as a pdf. When I’ve got time, I want to click through and read the whole thing.

You know what would be ultra-fun to analyze for a class? Gender roles in A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. If I were in college, I would be specifically looking for a chance to write that paper.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Run away, run away

Here is a post which is kinda a companion to yesterday’s Terrible Minds post on Is it time to ditch your agent.

From Janet Reid: That bright red flame you see is me on fire

Querier: Lately, I’ve been seeing agents charge for query and page-evaluations, and I don’t mean at conferences or for charities. (A pitch here for QueryShark which is free and excruciating, but still free.) Isn’t charging for services while those same agents can benefit from or request mss, against AAR Ethics code…?

Janet: Pardon me for a moment here while I set on my hair on fire.

Yes, this is incredibly NOT OK.

It does violate the AAR Canon of Ethics.

And NO you should not query an agent who does this.

Click through if you’ve got a minute and would like to enjoy the rest of the rant.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Check out India’s space program!

Here at tor.com, a post by Swapna Krishna: India Launches a Record-Breaking 104 Satellites on One Rocket

These are little bitty satellites, but still.

You’d be forgiven if you had no idea India had a space program; it’s still in its fledgling stages, but it’s come incredibly far in a short amount of time. Yesterday, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) made history, launching a record-breaking 104 satellites aboard a single rocket. … ISRO’s sights are set high, but in between launching orbiters to other worlds, India’s space program has focused on increasing their launch capabilities. They’ve been building bigger and more sophisticated rockets capable of taking larger payloads to space. The ISRO has made a name for itself with its ability to deploy multiple satellites with one launch. … India can accomplish this using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), a reliable workhorse of a rocket that was responsible for the launch of both the lunar and Martian orbiters. Operating since 1993, it had put 122 satellites successfully into orbit before February 14, 2017, with 38 straight successful missions.

Very impressive. Good luck to them, and here’s hoping we in the US (and other countries) step up and give India some competition. The more the merrier! I will feel much safer with a few solid self-sustaining human colonies off Earth.

Especially if they take Cavalier King Charles spaniels with them. As they will, if they are wise.

Flowers, too.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Time to jump ship?

Here’s a post, entertaining and informative, at Terrible Minds: IS IT TIME, DEAR WRITER, TO DITCH YOUR LITERARY AGENT?

I generally come back at anti-agent posts pretty hard, so as you might expect, this isn’t one of those. It’s a post about real warning signs that maybe you’re with the wrong agent (or a scammer pretending to be an agent, though imo that should be fairly obvious).

I actually know someone who experienced number four:

4. Your agent doesn’t seem to like your books. This is a thing. I’ve seen it. I don’t understand it. But any time the agent gets a new draft of your book, they tell you in words minced or unminced that they don’t like it, they can’t sell it, won’t rep it.

She has a new agent now and things are working much better.

Number nine is the funniest:

9. Your agent just ain’t selling your books. Something just isn’t coming together, but your books ain’t moving. Assuming you have confidence in those books, it may be time to look further afield for a new agent. It’s not a personal thing — but if a real estate agent were not helping to sell your house (or at least helping you to understand why the house isn’t selling), then some new blood may be necessary. And by “new blood” I do not mean human sacrifices, please be advised. Human sacrifices are a no-no. That’s how publishing used to work but new regulations have strictly forbidden it blah blah blah, so now it’s no longer “politically correct” to sacrifice humans and — well, it is what it is, so you may just need to find a new agent.

And the whole post is worth reading.

Also, yep, my agent answers my emails. Never answering your emails, yeah, that’d be a bad sign, I’m pretty sure.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Oh, is it Valentine’s Day?

I didn’t think of doing a romantic post in time, but:

Here is a good post on couples that go from antagonism to love, from Random Musings of a Bibliophile, with quotes and pictures. I so agree about Eugenides and Irene. And pretty much the whole list, actually.

Here’s a post on romantic books over at By Singing Light. Ooh, ooh, major thumbs up for Gaudy Night! And several others on the list.

Here’s a post on favorite romantic couples over at Chachic’s Book Nook. On the (rare-ish) occasions I’m in the mood for a contemporary romance, I always look to Chachic for pointers.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Thieves steal £2m of rare books by abseiling into warehouse

Wow.

Via The Passive Voice, this really startling article at the Guardian:

Antiquarian books worth more than £2m have been stolen by a gang who avoided a security system by abseiling into a west London warehouse.

The three thieves made off with more than 160 publications after raiding the storage facility near Heathrow in what has been labelled a Mission: Impossible-style break-in.

The gang are reported to have climbed on to the building’s roof and bored holes through the reinforced glass-fibre skylights before rappelling down 40ft of rope while avoiding motion-sensor alarms.

Scotland Yard confirmed that “a number of valuable books”, many from the 15th and 16th centuries, were stolen during the burglary in Feltham between 29 and 30 January.

That just … are you sure we haven’t fallen into a novel? I can’t believe this actually happened.

Maybe eventually we’ll see a movie about this.

[O]ne dealer lost £680,000 worth of material. Experts said the most valuable item in the stolen haul was a 1566 copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, worth about £215,000. … Among the other books stolen were early works by Galileo, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and a 1569 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

When we talk about valuable rare books, we’re not messing around.

The article suggests these was job-for-hire, with a particular collector behind the theft, because these books would be impossible to sell at auction.

Really, this cries out for a movie.

Please Feel Free to Share: