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Live Today: Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight

Out now at Amazon

Eight Doors from Dawn to Midnight

And if any of you have read it, then I would GREATLY APPRECIATE IT if you would click on that link and leave a review!

I have no other complete standalone novels sitting around gathering dust, which I’m very sorry about because it was great to be able to pull this one out, dust it off briskly, and toss it out of the nest and into the world.

I do have a really long SF novel that would have to be rewritten extensively, which I have actually poked at, though not for quite some time. Also a couple hundred pages of a portal fantasy, but I doubt very much that one is … what is the term? Revisable? Rewritable? Rescuable? Anyway, I don’t think it would cooperate with revision efforts. It’s interesting mainly because it was my first try at writing something in first person. I got confused about questions such as — who is the narrator telling this story to? When? Plus I had very little idea about the plot of the second half and no clear scenes in mind, so anyway, that one just didn’t go anywhere and I’m not likely to pick it up.

I ALSO have one to three chapters each for … hmm … four? I think four fantasy novels. Not counting Tuyo #12. I mean standalones that aren’t related to anything else. One of those is calling me in a sweetly seductive voice, plus I recently thought, “Oh, yes, that is the overarching plot,” and this sort of epiphany makes it a lot more likely I’ll pick it up. It’s set in an incredibly ornate world with flying chariots drawn by giant clockwork swans and triple-souled mages and on and on, it’s really fun. Plus there’s a dog. My first real no-kidding dog character in a good long time. I could show you the first bit, but I hesitate to ever share a chapter of a totally unfinished novel because who can say when or if the whole thing will appear? You know, the pile of books to write just never seems to get any shorter …

MEANWHILE

I really would appreciate it if you would click through and leave a review for Eight Doors. I’d like to run a promotion for it, but not until it’s got a decent handful of reviews.

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Poetry Thursday: Eugene Field

Here’s a poet I’ve never heard of. He was born in 1850 and died just before the turn of the century. There’s a bit of a biography here, including this bit:

He had once said he really did not love all children, just his own. Yet in the last period of his life, often in the evenings the neighbor-hood children would gather in his yard and he would entertain them with fanciful stories of marvelous creatures which resembled, at first, the birds, crickets, and other inhabitants of local woods and gardens. But his creatures were creatures of the imagination, his descriptions included real words nobody else would have used with children, and brand new words nobody had heard before because he made them up. You will find words like these in his poetry, too. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know precisely what they all mean. American writer and book-seller Denise Chávez wrote an essay about her childhood among books and stories in which she mentions the Dinkey bird poem. She says that “I never knew what an amfalula tree was, and yet I did. I knew other, brighter and better worlds existed out there — worlds imagined and longed for.”

He wrote poems for children. Here are a couple:

04. The Dinkey-Bird

Bravuras, staccatos, roulades, appoggiaturas, robustos, and roundelay are all terms related to different types of songs and music.

In an ocean, ‘way out yonder
     (As all sapient people know),
Is the land of Wonder-Wander,
     Whither children love to go;
It’s their playing, romping, swinging,
     That give great joy to me
While the Dinkey-Bird goes singing
     In the amfalula tree!

There the gum-drops grow like cherries,
     And taffy’s thick as peas–
Caramels you pick like berries
     When, and where, and how you please;
Big red sugar-plums are clinging
     To the cliffs beside that sea
Where the Dinkey-Bird is singing
     In the amfalula tree.

So when children shout and scamper
     And make merry all the day,
When there’s naught to put a damper
     To the ardor of their play;
When I hear their laughter ringing,
     Then I’m sure as sure can be
That the Dinkey-Bird is singing
     In the amfalula tree.

For the Dinkey-Bird’s bravuras
     And staccatos are so sweet–
His roulades, appoggiaturas,
     And robustos so complete,
That the youth of every nation–
     Be they near or far away–
Have especial delectation
     In that gladsome roundelay.

Their eyes grow bright and brighter,
     Their lungs begin to crow,
Their hearts get light and lighter,
     And their cheeks are all aglow;
For an echo cometh bringing
     The news to all and me,
That the Dinkey-Bird is singing
     In the amfalula tree.

I’m sure you like to go there
     To see your feathered friend–
And so many goodies grow there
     You would like to comprehend!
Speed, little dreams, your winging
     To that land across the sea
Where the Dinkey-Bird is singing
     In the amfalula tree!

*** *** ***

27. Fairy and Child

Oh, listen, little Dear-My-Soul,
     To the fairy voices calling,
For the moon is high in the misty sky
     And the honey dew is falling;
To the midnight feast in the clover bloom
     The bluebells are a-ringing,
And it’s “Come away to the land of fay”
     That the katydid is singing.

Oh, slumber, little Dear-My-Soul,
     And hand in hand we’ll wander–
Hand in hand to the beautiful land
     Of Balow, away off yonder;
Or we’ll sail along in a lily leaf
     Into the white moon’s halo–
Over a stream of mist and dream
     Into the land of Balow.

Or, you shall have two beautiful wings–
     Two gossamer wings and airy,
And all the while shall the old moon smile
     And think you a little fairy;
And you shall dance in the velvet sky,
     And the silvery stars shall twinkle
And dream sweet dreams as over their beams
     Your footfalls softly tinkle.

*** *** ***

14. The Fly-Away Horse

Oh, a wonderful horse is the Fly-Away Horse–
     Perhaps you have seen him before;
Perhaps, while you slept, his shadow has swept
     Through the moonlight that floats on the floor.
For it’s only at night, when the stars twinkle bright,
     That the Fly-Away Horse, with a neigh
And a pull at his rein and a toss of his mane,
     Is up on his heels and away!
               The Moon in the sky,
               As he gallopeth by,
     Cries: “Oh! what a marvellous sight!”
               And the Stars in dismay
               Hide their faces away
     In the lap of old Grandmother Night.

It is yonder, out yonder, the Fly-Away Horse
     Speedeth ever and ever away–
Over meadows and lanes, over mountains and plains,
     Over streamlets that sing at their play;
And over the sea like a ghost sweepeth he,
     While the ships they go sailing below,
And he speedeth so fast that the men at the mast
     Adjudge him some portent of woe.
               “What ho there!” they cry,
               As he flourishes by

With a whisk of his beautiful tail;
          And the fish in the sea
          Are as scared as can be,
From the nautilus up to the whale!
And the Fly-Away Horse seeks those far-away lands
     You little folk dream of at night–
Where candy-trees grow, and honey-brooks flow,
     And corn-fields with popcorn are white;
And the beasts in the wood are ever so good
     To children who visit them there
What glory astride of a lion to ride,
     Or to wrestle around with a bear!
               The monkeys, they say:
               “Come on, let us play,”
     And they frisk in the cocoa-nut trees:
               While the parrots, that cling
               To the peanut-vines, sing
     Or converse with comparative ease!

Off! scamper to bed–you shall ride him tonight!
     For, as soon as you’ve fallen asleep,
With a jubilant neigh he shall bear you away
     Over forest and hillside and deep!
But tell us, my dear, all you see and you hear
     In those beautiful lands over there,
Where the Fly-Away Horse wings his far-away course
     With the wee one consigned to his care.
               Then Grandma will cry
               In amazement: “Oh, my!
     And she’ll think it could never be so;
               And only we two
               Shall know it is true–
     You and I, little precious! shall know!

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Hidden Gems

From Jane Friedman’s blog:

The Hidden Gems list excludes Big Five publishers (including acquired properties like Rodale and Hay House), as well as other publishers of significant size, like Norton and Scholastic. We let you know every month what we’ve excluded, or how we’ve changed list compilation. For July 2025, we’ve excluded maps and atlases, Bibles and Bible studies, compilations and box sets, kids’ school workbooks, and test prep guides.

Here’s what they’ve put together:

Top Fifty Small Press Titles

Top Fifty Self-Published Ebooks

Top Fifty Self-Published Print Books

It’s a straightforward post: just the lists with minimal commentary. It’s looking at best selling titles, with no assessment whatsoever of quality or (genre, or category) genre. If they’re bestsellers, I’m not sure they’re really hidden gems? But they’re not out from Big Five and other bigger publishers. Let me just scan down the lists … okay, Freida McFadden is on here TEN times! Hidden gems my foot.

Relatively small proportion of fiction. How to Draw Everything: 300 Drawings of Cute Stuff, Animals, Food, Gifts, and Other Amazing Things by Emma Green. Moms on Call: Basic Baby Care 0–6 Months by Laura Hunter. Lots of books like that — nonfiction of all kinds.

How about the ebooks? Those are all fiction, as you’d expect. What proportion of these are romance? Lots, I think. How many are series novels? A BUNCH. Oh, here’s a fantasy novel: Gild by Raven Kennedy.

Gold. Gold floors, gold walls, gold furniture, gold clothes. In Highbell, in the castle built into the frozen mountains, everything is made of gold. Even me.

King Midas rescued me. Dug me out of the slums and placed me on a pedestal. I’m called his precious. His favored. I’m the woman he Gold-Touched to show everyone that I belong to him. To show how powerful he is. He gave me protection, and I gave him my heart. And even though I don’t leave the confines of the palace, I’m safe.

Until war comes to the kingdom and a deal is struck. Suddenly, my trust is broken. My love is challenged, and I realize that everything I thought I knew about Midas might be wrong. Because these bars I’m kept in, no matter how gilded, are still just a cage. But the monsters on the other side might make me wish I’d never left.

This is a quote adult novel unquote. Oh, here’s a trigger warning: This book contains explicit content and darker elements that may be triggering to some, including mature language, violence, manipulation, Stockholm Syndrome, and non-consensual sex.

So … it’s abusive erotica with a fantasy veneer? I’m guessing, but that’s what this looks like to me. 300,000 ratings on Goodreads; a mere 75,000 ratings on Amazon. You know, I’m going back to saying, Hidden gems my foot.

I guess it would be tricky to do a post about actual hidden gems. How would you find them? They would be by definition relatively unknown, after all.

How about this: Go to the Amazon book page of some novel you think is wonderful but has fewer than 5000 Amazon ratings. Look at the also-bought titles on that page. If you go to the page for Body and Soul by Conroy, you will find a book called Starting Out in the Evening by Brian Morton. This book has fewer 240 ratings on Amazon. I would call this book relatively little known, but if readers who buy the Conroy book by this one, maybe it is beautiful.

Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller’s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master’s thesis about Schiller’s work and sets out to meet him—convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world’s spotlight—the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller’s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and intellectual engagement that investigates the meaning of art, fame, and personal connection

I have to say, I think this sounds a lot more appealing than the King Midas story.

Or how about this one: The Finest Hat in All the World by Colleen Parkinson. The title made me click through. It’s got 600 Amazon ratings.

A life-changing gift arrives at Des Stewart’s doorstep in early January 1917. Her name is Phena, and she is nine years old, troubled, temperamental, and desperately in need of someone she can trust. That someone is her Uncle Des.

That sounds charming. It’s only $2.99. Fine, Amazon, send it to my Kindle app.

Anyway, I think this might be a good way to put together a list of actually less-well-known works. Any such list would wind up curated to specific tastes, of course, because you start off saying, “I like this book; it seems special to me; what are other books I might like given I like this one?” That’s totally different from saying, “Statistically, what’s selling the best right now?”

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Penric evolving

What do you all think of the latest Penric novella?

I thought it was … fine, I guess? Some time ago, I ranked all the Penric novellas that were then out. Oh, that was five years ago, so it’s been a while. I put “The Physicians of Vilnoc” at the bottom, finding it severely lacking in Desdemona and not very appealing in other ways. Since then, what have we seen?

The Assassins of ThasalonKnot of ShadowsDemon DaughterPenric and the BanditThe Adventures of the Demonic Ox

Hmm. I really liked The Assassins of Thasalon, Knot of Shadows suffered from EXTREME OBVIOUSNESS of the bad guy, Demon Daughter didn’t really do it for me, and as far as I’m concerned, the Demonic Ox is about at the same level — simple to the point of simplistic, nice enough but not something I’d go out of my way to read.

Penric and the Bandit has actually grown on me a bit over time, and the link goes to a review by Liz Bourke because I happened to notice that post and thus decided to write this post.

Liz says: Bujold gives great force to the meeting of the numinous and the practical, the interpenetration of soul and matter, divine and world, and this, as much as the sleight-of-hand and misdirection-caper in Penric’s relationship with Roz and in his contest of wits and survival with the other bandits, that’s the heart – or perhaps we might say, the soul – of the story.

I think this story grew on me for various reasons, but one of them is that the slight-of-hand aspects appealed to me more on re-reading.

The earlier stories were:

Penric’s Demon, approximately 150 years after The Hallowed HuntPenric and the ShamanPenric’s FoxMasquerade in LodiPenric’s MissionMira’s Last DanceThe Prisoner of LimnosThe Orphans of RaspayThe Physicians of Vilnoc

And I do think most of these are very much superior most of the more recent ones. There’s more to each story, it seems to me — more depth — the new characters introduced are more interesting and they contribute to the depth. The situations are more interesting and present problems that are more interesting, more complicated, more important, or all three. That’s how it seems to me.

And I don’t think I appreciated being pulled out of Penric’s pov because (sorry!) the children just aren’t very interesting to me. It makes an intriguing contrast with the Foreigner series, where I honestly think CJC should move on from the older characters, let them step into the background, and center the children. I think that would revitalize that series in the most tremendous way and open up ten thousand great directions for the overall story arc. Not that I think that’s going to happen, but that’s what I’d like to see. With the Penric stories, I feel more like saying, Let’s split Penric off from his family and put him and Desdemona back in the center.

Naturally I’m sure readers would be all over the place with opinions about this. This is just my personal reaction to the Demonic Ox.

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Update: All right, That’s Handy

So, I really liked Marie’s idea to rewrite a few scenes from Hedesa from Kelleos’ point of view and drop those into the newsletter, and I started to do that, and paused about two paragraphs in and said, “Oh, he’s writing a letter!”

And that’s what’s going in the newsletter in a couple of days. I think I set it to drop on the 5th. It’s about 5000 words because, I mean, if you go to the trouble of sending a letter to someone who’s about 1500 miles away and the letter needs to be carried by hand, there’s no point dashing off a quick note. It’ll explain a bit more about what Gedes thought was going on when he shoved Raga. I wouldn’t have understood that myself until writing Hedesa. It has to do with Gedes’ protectiveness, which I realized was a major thing for him pretty quickly, but I don’t think I knew it when I wrote that first chapter.

After that, I kind of had an idea for a shortish story unrelated to the Tuyo world and wrote that, so that was Saturday and a bit of Sunday. It’s actually a story that shows the first time Thaniel Hale met any Ubez, from Hale’s point of view. This sort of thing happens when I’m listening to audio chapters. This narrator is fabulous, by the way. I’m going to try to get a Chirp deal for the Invictus duology as soon as both books are finished.

So that takes care of the October newsletter, unless, I mean, I might write something else instead for October. A Halloween story would be appropriate. Anyway, the newsletter is under control for a few months, so that’s good, and it’s always super handy to think of ideas suitable for short stories when I kind of need short stories. I wish it always happened. If anybody else has suggestions, don’t hesitate, because that has sometimes been super helpful, as Marie’s suggestion was.

Meanwhile, I have comments back for Sekaran, and it shouldn’t take long to write the little additional things I haven’t done yet, so by this time next week, I expect I’ll be ready to begin dropping a chapter or half-chapter per week at my Patreon and sending the whole thing to a couple more early readers. I’m glad I have that planned for a November release instead of October because that’s just relaxing. Unless the cover is delayed and then it will be essential and also stressful.

Meanwhile, I’m picking lots and lots of apples and desperately making apple cake, apple pie, chicken with apples, pork chop with apples …

Conner wants allllll the pillows

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Mayuma: Filipino American Desserts Remixed – by Abi Balingit

So, you probably don’t recall, but back in May and June, I kept Tiny Boy Four (Piolo) for about a month while his people went to the Philippines, and when they came back, they brought me this cookbook, Mayuma: Filipino American Deserts Remixed, quite possibly because they saw the huge number of cookbooks displayed on my kitchen island and on the shelves built into that island. (I don’t know how many cookbooks, but probably in the neighborhood of a couple hundred.)

As it happens, I have zero interest in general cookbooks, but considerable interest in (a) cookbooks focused on a specific region; (b) cookbooks that trace a cuisine through history; and, (c) cookbooks that are focused in some other way. And it’s nice when the author is clearly having fun. This book falls into category (c) – Filipino ingredients, but mostly in strikingly original, often quite elaborate, fun desserts. I’m going to share one of those with you today, but let me add up front that anybody could make this, but unless you’re into Filipino cooking, you’ll need to get special ingredients before proceeding. I didn’t want to drive to Global Foods in St Louis because, I mean, it’s a drive, so I ordered the special ingredients from Amazon.

This recipe is a multi-step process, but no part of it is difficult and you can spread it out over three or more days if you prefer. I did it over three days, and I’m going to give you the steps in order by day, though nothing stops you from doing it all on one day, of course, but it’s going to take about four hours – mostly while you do other things! It’s not like you have to spend four hours actively engaged in making these! But it’s not something you’re going to whip up spontaneously when unexpected guests arrive, is what I’m saying.

Ube Melon Pandesal

This recipe does not involve melons in any way, which confused me until I read the headnotes more carefully and realized that the crosshatched top of each dessert is to supposed to resemble a melon. I … don’t see it. I would call this

Ube Pandesal

And thus avoid confusion about whether melons are involved somehow. If you wanted a name that would be meaningful to American guests who aren’t familiar with Filipino ingredients, possibly

Purple Cookie Sweet Rolls

Because that’s what they are. They have an ube yeast bread layer, an ube jam layer, and an ube cookie layer. And I sprinkled mine with extremely fine gold dust because I thought it would be pretty with the deep purple color, which it was.

Day One

Make the Ube Halaya Filling

Ube are deep purple yams. I didn’t know whether they were in fact a kind of yam, but the author helpfully gives the scientific name, which is Dioscorea alata, so that is indeed a yam (and not a sweet potato, btw, because that’s a different genus). Ube Halaya is ube jam, or I would call it ube butter because the consistency is a lot like the apple butter my mother used to make. You make it using powdered ube, which Amazon carries, and ube extract, which, yes, Amazon also carries. It takes a while, but nothing stops you from doing random other stuff in the kitchen at the same time, or, for that matter, reading at the same time.

4 oz ube powder

1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk

1 can (13.5 oz) coconut milk

2 Tbsp brown sugar, which seems kind of unnecessary to me what with the sweetened condensed milk, but for once I followed this recipe exactly. Almost exactly. Anyway, I did this part exactly as the recipe said, including the brown sugar.

½ tsp kosher salt (or less regular salt, maybe a generous ¼ tsp)

4 Tbsp unsalted butter

1 tsp ube extract

Whisk together the ube powder plus 3 C water and heat over low heat for 8 minutes. Stir in the sweetened condensed milk, coconut milk, sugar, and salt. Cook over low-medium heat, stirring frequently, for 60-65 minutes, and here is where you can wash the dishes, rearrange the fridge, scrub the cabinets, or read a book. Incidentally, should you let the whisk tumble out of the pot and spatter deep purple goo all over the floor, it helps to have plenty of spaniels around so you can solve this problem by calling the command, much loved by dogs everywhere, “Clean up!”

The stuff thickens to what the author says should be the consistency of mashed potatoes. I think mine was a bit thin compared to mashed potatoes, more like apple butter. It worked just fine.

This makes FAR more than you will need, so if you happen to have something else to do with half a can of sweetened condensed milk and half a can of coconut milk, you can certainly halve the recipe. I did not have anything else in mind to do with half cans of anything, so I made the full recipe, and I guess I will now look for more recipes using ube halaya or else slather it on biscuits, whichever.

Spoon the ube halaya into a jar and chill. The author says you should use it up in two weeks, which I don’t think will be a problem, but also, I bet it lasts longer than that. Anything that lasts in the fridge for quote two weeks unquote will probably be find for a month.

Day Two

Make the Ube Cookie Dough

8 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened, and in my microwave, 15 seconds is perfect for softening butter.

1 C powdered sugar

2 large eggs, room temp, and the way to bring eggs to room temp quickly is to run a bowl full of hot water and put the eggs into the bowl for five or ten minutes. Voila, room temperature without having to think ahead.

1 Tbsp ube extract

½  tsp kosher salt (or somewhat less regular salt)

1 tsp baking powder

3¼ C cake flour, and I had that handy so I once again did follow this part of the recipe exactly. If I hadn’t had cake flour on hand, I would have just used all-purpose flour because life is short and I’m not going to worry about this when it’s not even a cake, for heaven’s sake, but a cookie.

Cream the butter and powdered sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time (again, a cake thing to do, but fine, I did it this way). Beat in the ube extract. Combine the dry ingredients and stir that into the creamed mixture to make a cookie dough. I used my stand mixer for all this, and I do love that mixer. I can’t believe I used to make thirty kinds of cookies at Christmas without a stand mixer.

Pat into a ball or disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill at least two hours or until you feel like proceeding. Cookie dough is patient stuff and I suspect you could let it wait for days, but I moved ahead the next day. Therefore –

Day Three

Make the ube yeast bread dough and finish the pandesal

½ C warm milk

1 1/8 tsp yeast

1 C all-purpose flour

1 C bread flour, and okay, fine, so I did depart from the recipe again here and used another cup of all-purpose flour because that was what I had.

7/8 tsp salt, and for crying out loud, just use 1 tsp, there are limits.

1 egg

¼ C sugar

2 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened

1 Tbsp ube extract

And while the author gives detailed instructions, here are my much simpler instructions: Put all the above into the bowl of your handy stand mixer and turn on the mixer. Use the dough hook, of course. Knead until it looks about right, adjusting as necessary – I had to add more flour (this is normal when it’s humid) (it’s SUPER humid right now). When the dough has come together into a smooth ball and looks like it’s about right OR after five or seven minutes, turn off the stand mixer.

Honestly, this is not rocket science. If you’ve ever made bread dough, do it like that. If you haven’t, then bread dough should be smooth and only lightly sticky, but if it’s a little sticker than average, it’s fine. I spray my hands with cooking oil spray before handling sticky-ish bread dough. It really is fine.

Shape the surprisingly small lump of bread dough into a ball, put into a medium-sized greased bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and put someplace warm for an hour. You can turn on your oven for two minutes, turn it off, and put the bowl in the oven with the door closed and that will be fine. Since it’s August, you can also put the bowl outside on the deck if you happen to be in Missouri and that will be hotter than the oven would have been. Don’t put the bowl where spaniels can get to it, and by the way, eating yeast bread dough is definitely not okay for dogs and you should call the vet if your dog ever eats any raw yeast bread dough. Just one of those random trivia things I’ve picked up.

The dough is supposed to double in an hour. I never really worry about it. After an hour, I assume it’s ready and generally speaking this works fine.

Finish the Purple Cookie Sweet Rolls, Step By Step Instructions

2 Tbsp fine dry bread crumbs, optional, see below

2 Tbsp sugar, optional, again see below

A) While the bread is rising, take out your cookie dough and divide it into twelve portions. The portions weighed about 2.2 oz each, as I recall. I did weigh them, though you can size them by eye because variation here is not going to be very important. Roll the portions into balls. Set aside.

B) Get out the ube jam and have that handy.

C) Bread dough has now risen? Great, divide that into twelve portions as well, and they will be remarkably tiny and this, it turns out, is fine. I think they were about 1.4 oz each, so smaller than the cookie balls. I was highly suspicious about this and thought maybe there was a problem, but no.

Shape each bit of bread dough into a ball and toss a kitchen towel over them so they don’t dry out.

D) Roll out a bread dough ball to a five-inch circle … or a three-inch circle … or whatever. It turns out that this doesn’t matter AT ALL.

Yeast bread dough is very easy to work with, usually. This is no exception. Put one Tbsp of the ube jam on the circle of dough, and this can be a rather generous Tbsp if you like. Bring up the edges of the dough circle and pinch to close. This is extremely easy. There’s no fuss, no mess, it’s about the easiest filled bread-type thing I have made in my life. Sort of tuck the edges under and shape back into a ball. Put seam side down on a cookie sheet.

E) Get a cookie dough ball and flatten that with the palm of your hand to about three inches. Take a knife or pastry scraper (that’s what I used) and score the cookie in a crosshatched pattern, not cutting through it. Pick up the cookie circle, and the pastry scraper is handy here, or use a pancake turner or whatever you want. Smooth over the top of a bread dough ball, and it will cover the whole thing and that is fine. I REALLY had doubts about this, but seriously, it’s fine. The cookie thing is supposed to be big compared to the bread thing. It’s fine! Keep going.

F) Repeat with all the dough. You’ll have TONS of filling left! That’s expected! Just use it for something else.

G) Let rise in a warm place for 50 minutes or so. Preheat the oven to 350 degree.

Dip tops in bread crumb / sugar mixture, OPTIONAL. I didn’t do this, see below.

Bake for 15-20 minutes OR LONGER IF YOUR COOKIE SHEET IS PALE-COLORED, which I nearly forgot about. The thing is, these are PURPLE. It’s a bit hard to judge when they’re done because how often have you baked PURPLE cookies? In retrospect, I think this is what the breadcrumbs might be for – to turn golden so you can tell more easily when they’re done. I was like, breadcrumbs? What? and skipped it. Thus, I judged doneness by touch and intuition.

I used my largest cookie sheet, on which they all fit, and it’s pale-colored, and therefore I think I baked these for 25 minutes minimum, maybe more like 28 minutes. I judged doneness by touch and then confirmed doneness by cutting one in half and looking at it. The cutting-it-in-half thing worked fine. I judged doneness perfectly, it turns out, but I have baked A LOT of cookies in my life, so if in doubt, maybe try the breadcrumb thing and see if that is in fact a way of helping judge when they’re done.

Optional: gold powder, dusted onto the top through a very fine sieve, if you didn’t use the bread crumbs. Powdered sugar would be just as good, though.

And there you go: a dozen exceedingly purple and highly unusual cookie sweet-roll treats that would be fine for dessert plus breakfast the next day. I thought this might be too purple for my mother, but it turns out she was delighted to try purple cookie sweet roll things.

I think these would be fun to make with kids. Assembling them is simple. The bread dough is cooperative, the ube filling is cooperative, the cookie you fold over the top isn’t especially tricky. It’s all quite easy, quite unusual and very, very purple.

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Poetry Thursday: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A familiar name, but nothing actually leaps to mind for me other than Old, Definitely Old Enough to be In Public Domain. Poetry Foundation is annoying to copy poetry from because WordPress doesn’t agree with the spacing, but it’s always great for a bio:

One of the preeminent figures in German literature, poet, playwright, and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1749. The child of an imperial councilor, Goethe had a thoroughly classical education before entering Leipzig University in 1765. Though he was there to study law, Goethe earned accolades for his poetry, written in the lyric and rococo style, and completed his first collection, Annette, a collection of love poems. In 1768, Goethe suffered a severe lung infection and spent nearly a year and half convalescing, during which time he wrote the Leipzig Songbook, a series of ten poems set to melodies. One of his most famous works, the loosely autobiographical The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), also dates from this period.

Much more at the link. Also, of course Goethe wrote Fauste, which is why his name sounded super familiar. I should have remembered that. The link goes to Project Gutenberg. However, how about featuring some much (much!) shorter poems here today. Let me see. How about this one:

Song of the Traveler at Evening

Over all the hills now,
Rest.
In all the trees now
Shows
Barely a breath. Birds are through
That sang in their wood to the west.
Only wait, traveller. Rest
Soon for you too.

***

I find that very appealing. And it’s so much easier to appreciate something that’s only a few words long. This is practically haiku. It reminds me of Up-hill by Christina Rossetti, which I have always liked very much and found easy to memorize and remember. But let me stick to Goethe for this post. My Poetic Side has a lot of his poems.

Here’s one, chosen nearly at random because there are so many:

To Father Kronos

HASTEN thee, Kronos!
On with clattering trot
Downhill goeth thy path;
Loathsome dizziness ever,
When thou delayest, assails me.
Quick, rattle along,
Over stock and stone let thy trot
Into life straightway lead

Now once more
Up the toilsome ascent
Hasten, panting for breath!
Up, then, nor idle be,–
Striving and hoping, up, up!

Wide, high, glorious the view
Gazing round upon life,
While from mount unto mount
Hovers the spirit eterne,
Life eternal foreboding.

Sideways a roof’s pleasant shade
Attracts thee,
And a look that promises coolness
On the maidenly threshold.
There refresh thee! And, maiden,
Give me this foaming draught also,
Give me this health-laden look!

Down, now! quicker still, down!
See where the sun sets
Ere he sets, ere old age
Seizeth me in the morass,
Ere my toothless jaws mumble,
And my useless limbs totter;
While drunk with his farewell beam
Hurl me,–a fiery sea
Foaming still in mine eye,–
Hurl me, while dazzled and reeling,
Down to the gloomy portal of hell.

Blow, then, gossip, thy horn,
Speed on with echoing trot,
So that Orcus may know we are coming;
So that our host may with joy
Wait at the door to receive us.

***

OKAY, ALSO, because yesterday’s was heavy on piano, let’s see about keeping that theme: I’m sure there’s more. This is one poet whose poems were set to music A LOT by ton of famous composers.

A couple of Goethe’s poems set to music.

At the bottom of this post, “Song of the Spirits over the Waters” set to music.

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Body & Soul by Frank Conroy

You all recommend a good many books, as you know, and I get samples or sometimes the whole book and there they all sit until I finally decide I have time to read something and skim across first pages until one catches my eye in the right way. I can’t define the right way, except I suppose it has to do with my mood. Anyway, most recently, this was Body & Soul by Frank Conroy.

I read this book very slowly, emerging now and then to think: Why can’t more literary fiction be like this, instead of so much of it being nihilistic fiction about depressive, ineffectual, self-destructive, selfish, petty, stupid, or otherwise thoroughly unpleasant protagonists stuck in a pointless world, like wishy-washy grimdark except with boring settings and less plot? (I realize this is a broad brush.) (And yet there are reasons I have this impression of literary fiction.)

Though as far as that goes, you aren’t going to get much fiction like this, because nobody can write a book like this unless they are deeply knowledgeable about some field of endeavor. Conroy has to be a genuine expert in music because nobody else could write a novel like this. He’s got to be an expert with language as well, so, I mean, that’s impressive.

This saga of a son of the working class who grows into a piano prodigy is “hypnotically readable” – says the description, and it sure is. That’s the prose, because this story would not work if it had been written by someone less skilled.

Claude moves through this life as if he were playing a difficult composition, swept up in its drama and tension, surprised by its grace notes. There, that’s a perfect one-line description. Good job, whoever wrote that.

This book is set right after WWII, mostly in NYC. It’s a historical, except that the setting is thoroughly subordinate to music and the perception of music. Everything in this story is subordinate to music and the perception of music, but the setting and the characters are in fact also beautifully drawn. The setting never falters for a second, and given this is a historical setting, I mean also the attitudes and preconceptions and assumptions that are infused into this setting

The characters are rendered with astonishing subtlety. Conroy invites the reader to treat all the important secondary characters as simple; not exactly one-dimensional, but simple in the role each of these characters is going to play in the story. Then he rather gently – or occasionally much more abruptly – redesigns the roles those characters play and reorients the reader’s opinion of each character. I really admire this, especially when the characters turn out to develop in positive ways, which happens for three different important secondary characters. Another develops in a negative way, but it’s a wistful sort of progression rather than horrendous. That’s four important secondary characters who shift dramatically over the course of the story. That’s a lot. And even though a lot of the shifting happens off stage, out of the reader’s sight, this works beautifully.

The pacing is slow. The whole story stretches out over about twenty years. Twice the narrative skips sharply over four or five years, but the pace of the story remains in general rather slow.

The writing itself is lovely. I mean, really lovely. I highlighted a lot of passages because I knew I would write this post and knew I would want to refer to some of the sentences. There’s an epigraph, by the way:

That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it. – Goethe, Faust.

I do enjoy epigraphs. Maybe someday I’ll think of including one in a novel myself. Anyway, nice choice of epigraph here.

Fatherhood is a thing in this novel. Claude’s mother is one of the important secondary characters who shifts dramatically – tremendously – over the course of the novel, in a good way. But she is in the background, and Claude does not know who his father is. His teacher, a man named Aaron Weisfeld, becomes the central father-figure in his life. From the time Weisfeld picks up the role as Claude’s teacher and father, he does not change a jot, and noticing that, thinking about that, would also be a good thing to do for anyone interested in characterization and how characters work in stories, how their roles may shift or else remain rock-solid and why it works or doesn’t work in specific cases. It works here – everything works here, basically. Weisfeld is enormously reticent, yet the reader gains a clear sense of him without, possibly, being able to put a finger on exactly why or how. I think this begins in the very first scene where Claude meets Weisfeld, and continues with unerring, subtle precision right through to the end.

The reader, but not Claude, learns the actual truth about his parentage late in the novel, and this is an interesting grace note the author is giving to the reader – I mean, it’s a lovely grace note, and the decision to include it, but only for the reader, is an interesting choice. And also an appropriate choice. It’s worth noticing how Conroy does this, because he does it with one of the rare moments when he steps away from Claude’s pov, but he steps away and then back so gently that it’s not jarring.

There are quite a few moments when a sentence is not from Claude’s pov, and in fact this novel is actually written in Omniscient, not 3rd person. Usually it’s hard to tell, but every now and then this is crystal clear. Shifting from a narrative that looks like 3rd person to a narrative that is clearly Omniscient, is an interesting choice and well worth thinking about. I hope I remember to direct aspiring novelists to this book as a beautiful example of subtle Omniscient.

Aside from using this kind of unusual Omniscient in the first place, I can see why Conroy handled the reveal about Claude’s father the way he did – I see practical reasons – he would have had to add another two hundred pages if he hadn’t reserved this knowledge for the reader. It’s a long book already. And it ends at a good spot, on a good line. It would have been possible to end it at other points, but Conroy’s choice to end where and how he does is a good choice – that’s what I think.

I see a fair number of questions in the general neighborhood of: How do you know where to end a novel? And I think usually the ending point is pretty obvious, really, but sometimes it isn’t and this is one of those stories where it isn’t. That’s because plot isn’t centered here, so there’s no obvious moment where the plot ought to conclude. It’s worth thinking about why Conroy stopped where he did and whether that worked for you and why or why not. As I say, I thought this was a good ending. I could tell you the ending line, but I’ll just say that the ending would be too abrupt without the last sentence, but with the last sentence, it’s fine. That last sentence creates the right tone for the ending. The ending here is a matter of striking that tone at one of many possible appropriate moments, not of arriving at a specific ending point.

All right, sentences, I meant to share some. The prose is virtually note-perfect throughout, pun intended. Let me see.

He heard the exquisite control with which Fredericks released the music into the air. It was eerie. The piano seemed to disappear and somehow the lines themselves filled the boy’s consciousness, the architecture of the music lucid in every small detail, the whole statement sealed, floating and folding into itself, and into silence.

Everything seemed smaller – the town, the trees, hedges, and houses. It did not seem as long a walk to Fredericks’s mansion. The sun caught a window on the highest turret, blazing more brightly than fire, and the gravel of the driveway crunched under his feet. He felt well prepared. The great hushed room with the French doors and the pianos had not changed. Only the light, since it was later in the day, angling in thick mellow shafts over the polished instruments.

The bell rang faintly, and he was momentarily hypnotized by the sound. He focused entirely on the bell, and when it tinkled again at the next shock he found himself comparing its weak clarity with the deep, rumbling, chaotic sounds from next door. He stood motionless, closing his eyes and listening with total concentration, listening across the entire spectrum. Without thinking about it he began to time the blows of the wrecking ball, anticipating them.

And then something extraordinary happened. At the precise instant of the crash, followed a split second later by the bell, he hallucinated the full sound of an orchestra and a piano playing two chords in succession, the first chord dissonant and the second consonant. The hallucination was clear and precise, complete in every musical detail, which he instantly memorized. Then it was as if he had gone deaf to real sound. Although his eyes and the soles of his feet told him the demolition was continuing, he heard nothing.

One could certainly pause here to take these sentences apart. Starting sentences with conjunctions, using commas before conjunctions or otherwise – look at that comma before “and into silence” in the first bit I excerpted. That’s lovely. You could justify leaving that comma out because this is a this is a pair of parallel clauses – folding into itself and into silence – but it works much better to put the comma before that final clause because it’s a way of adding subtle emphasis to those last three words. Look at those occasional very short sentences in the midst of longer sentences. Look at the use of adverbs. And adjectives.

Notice that the author is in no way trying to “show rather than tell,” but is perfectly fine with telling the reader, “Claude felt well prepared.” Why does that work? It works because trying to “show” emotions pushes the reader out of the protagonist’s head. Just flatly telling the reader what the protagonist is feeling is far more intimate. Also, that sentence is only four words long, which makes it stand out. Also, this is Omniscient, remember, which provides scope and reason for telling rather than showing.

But beyond the sentences, what else? As you see from that last excerpt, there’s a lot in this novel about music, about the technique involved in playing the piano, about the structure of music, and most of all about the experience of music as perceived by a musical prodigy and expressed by his extraordinarily gifted teachers. I followed almost none of this, and yet I appreciated the obvious tremendous depth of knowledge infused into this novel. That depth comes through flawlessly. You don’t have to know anything about music to get that. But I bet someone deeply knowledgeable about music and the piano would love this book even more than I did.

One thing I particularly loved, though, is this foreign, even alien experience being conveyed through the prose in a way that allows me – almost as far from knowledgeable as you can get – to dimly grasp what this kind of musical awareness might be like. In that sense, this novel is a bit like Ed Yong’s An Immense World. The sensory world, the perceptual world conveyed in this book is hardly more comprehensible to me than the sensory world of an animal that directly senses magnetic or electrical fields. It’s remarkable and magical.

In another sense, this perception of music is closer to comprehensible for me, not because of the music, but because of the drive toward excellence, the experience of artistic flow, the explication of perception as something that is very different from person to person, much more different than can easily be understood.

Let me see, though. What else about this novel?

All right, there are threads of romance, and they are thoroughly in the background, and I think that’s deliberate because what is in the foreground? Music, and music teachers, and people who share music as the central truth of their lives. This is all entirely dominant in the story, so much so that every relationship that doesn’t revolve around music sinks into the background. And I think this is deliberate, or if not, then I think it is nevertheless effective. Pulling Claude’s relationship with his mother into the foreground or his relationship with a lover into the foreground would have shifted the focus of the story in ways that would not have worked for this story, that would have turned this story into a different story. Those relationships are there because Claude is a person, not a disembodied spirit. But they’re backgrounded to about the greatest degree possible while still having enough reality to even call them relationships. By far the greatest emotional bond is between Claude and Weisfeld. This is an extremely restrained relationship, and yet there are deeply emotional and touching moments that arise from it.

In every part of this novel, the emotion is restrained. This is not a novel that wallows in emotion even when the characters feel something deeply. Would I call this an intellectual novel? I’m not sure. I don’t enjoy novels when I only appreciate them on an intellectual level. I think this is a deeply artistic novel about the perception and experience of art, and I think I loved it not because I connected to it emotionally – which is normally why I love novels – and certainly not because I appreciated it intellectually, but in a third way, much less common: I think I felt drawn in because of its sheer artistry. I could have been pushed hard away except that along with the artistry, this novel is infused with the generous sensibility that is so crucial for me, without which I can’t stand a novel no matter how well written it may be.

What other novels did this one make me think of?

Most obviously, Thursday’s Children by Rumer Godden. Amazon doesn’t seem to have a Kindle version, so the link is to a paper edition. Here’s an epub from Kobo. Either way, these two books could be read as companions. Godden’s book centers ballet, not music. Anyone who loves either novel will also love the other. I can hardly imagine any exceptions could be possible.

Most relevant for anybody who particularly loves SFF, Tribute by Sherwood Smith. That one is a (standalone) novel that sets music on one side of a balance, and plot and character on the other, producing a novel that is both super approachable and in which music is central.

I don’t know what I’m going to read next. I’m kind of reluctant to start something else. Ilona Andrews is so catchy, they can break me out of a book hangover or reading slump. Since they’ve got that new one, maybe that. Whoever mentioned Ilona Andrews had a new one out, thank you – and I’m really happy Alison recommended this one by Conroy to me – and I very much appreciate you all telling me about books you think I’d like! There are so many books I would never notice if you didn’t point them out to me.

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Five more novel openings, four real and one fake

Without preliminary or intrusive commentary, the first paragraphs of five novels. One is fake. Which is it? It’s very possible some of you will recognize one or more of these because at least two were recommended by commenters here in the relatively recent past. I wanted novel openings that looked pretty good and selected for that.

1)

The shuttle rattled just enough on ascent to make the shy kid beside me grab his duffel like it was going to leap out the airlock. Outside the viewport, the docking spires of Port Achernar fell away in a blur of steel and light, the black curve of space opening up like someone had pulled back a curtain. I leaned back, hands laced behind my head, boots braced against the seat in front of me. “Magellan,” I said, drawing it out like it was a song title. “Fastest cruiser in the Fleet. Smartest too—AI’s practically a celebrity. And now, she’s about to meet me.”

The kid beside me peeked up through his fringe of hair, then looked down again as the shuttle’s engines purred into cruise mode. “You’ve… uh… been on ships before?”

“Not officially,” I said, grinning at our reflections in the viewport—me all casual confidence, him looking like he wanted to melt into the bulkhead. “But I’ve memorized her schematics, weapons grid, crew roster—heck, even the deck layouts of the mess hall. I could pilot her blindfolded, reload her railguns mid-spin, and still beat the engineering crew at cards before dinner. Stick with me,” I added, “and you’ll be a legend before you even find your bunk.”

Fake or real?

Confidence from one (100% sure it’s fake) to ten (100% sure it was written by a real person)?

2)

I would do absolutely anything for my brother.

“This is hardly a high-security lock, Ren,” Christian whispered, motioning at the precise movement of my hands. “Now isn’t the time to be perfect. Scrub those pins.”

“Scrub these,” I whispered back to my twin, my lips barely needing to move in order for him to hear me. We had perfected the art of nearly silent communication over the past seventeen years. I carefully pressed in the torque wrench and slid my lock pick across one pin at a time, feeling them, discovering their secrets, movement, and depth. A schematic of the lock drew itself in my mind, and I rotated the picture to determine which pin to move first.

Fake or real?

Confidence from one (100% sure it’s fake) to ten (100% sure it was written by a real person)?

3)

His first view of the outside was through the small, fan-shaped window of the basement apartment. He would climb up on the table and spend hours peering through the bars at the legs and feet of people passing by on the sidewalk, his child’s mind falling still in contemplation of the ever-changing rhythms and tempos of legs and feet moving across his field of vision. An old woman with thin calves, a kid in sneakers, men in wingtips, women in high heels, the shiny brown shoes of soldiers. If anyone paused he could see detail – straps, eyelets, a worn heel, or cracked leather with the sock showing through – but it was the movement that he liked, the passing parade of color and motion. No thoughts in his head as he stood or knelt at the window, but rather, from the images of motion, a pure impression of purposefulness. Something was going on outside. People were going places. Often, as he turned away from the window, he would muse on dimly sensed concepts of direction, volition, change, and the existence of the unseen. He was six years old, and much of his thinking, especially when he was alone, went on without words, went on beneath the level of language.

The apartment was small and dark, and he was locked inside until that terrific moment each day when his mother came home with her taxicab. He understood about the cab. There were passengers. She picked them up in the street and took them from one place to another (as the people walking outside were going from one place to another), but she herself had no destination.. She went where the passengers told her to go, and remained, in a sense, a witness, like himself. The cab started out in front of the apartment in the morning and returned at night. It appeared to him to be going around in circles.

Fake or real?

Confidence from one (100% sure it’s fake) to ten (100% sure it was written by a real person)?

4)

My day is tidily laid out on my new LifePlanX app. It’s a work of art, to be honest. Here, the Life of Gracie Reed is beautifully organized and color-coded in neat little rows, a guarantee against indecision and inaction.

This Gracie has it together. This Gracie is a boss. Totally unlike the real, pathetic Gracie who just stepped out of the lawyer’s office and promptly started blubbering like a spineless wuss. You waited until you were outside, I congratulate myself. You didn’t cry in front of him. Small wins are still wins.

I tap my phone screen so that meet with lawyer is emphatically crossed out, which makes me feel a teeny bit better even though nothing’s actually changed. But according to my latest self-help read, just saying the word done is supposed to deliver a shot of that sweet drug dopamine, and I’ll take all the satisfaction I can get.

Fake or real?

Confidence from one (100% sure it’s fake) to ten (100% sure it was written by a real person)?

5)

Esmée Takylor was making a sandwich when the teakettle told her the ship was going down. Moments later, she was tying her boots, and it was still talking to her from the stovetop, broadcasting a distress call that no one else from town would hear. They were all dancing anyway.

She pulled on her father’s wool coat, the metallic voice beginning to fade as she ran out the door. Her dog, Atlas, bounded full force behind her.

From the porch, Esmée could hear the music from the dance, and she paused just long enough to calculate. She balanced how much time she would lose running to get more help against the reality of doing all the work herself, and then she turned away from town and ran.

Fake or real?

Confidence from one (100% sure it’s fake) to ten (100% sure it was written by a real person)?

***

*****

***

Here are the answers:

1) ChatGPT-5

Here is what I told Chat: Write the opening paragraphs of a YA SF novel. The protagonist is joining his new ship. He is cocky and has a lot of attitude. The style of the story is breezy and humorous. Go.

I think this is astoundingly good. I don’t think ChatGPT could keep this up and generate coherence for more than a few pages, but I would think this had been written by a human if I hadn’t watched ChatGPT generate it. I’ll be very, very interested in whether any of you thought it was fake. If you did, do you know why? I think there are tells, but I don’t think I would have spotted them in this case. I think peeking up through a fringe of hair is a bit overdone in the typical generated way. I think the me, all casual confidence, him, like he wanted to melt, is the sort of character description that is typical of generated fiction.

Again, I don’t think I would have caught it in this case.

2) The Awakening of Ren Crown by Anne Zoelle

This is the one I would have picked as generated. I’m almost totally sure. I think this opening looks a lot like generated openings. This book was strongly recommended to me by a commenter here and I therefore have every reason to expect I will really enjoy this book, but nevertheless — and even though I like the first sentence — this is the one I think I would have picked as generated on the basis of these short excerpts.

I like the colorful cover:

Her paintbrush brings objects to life—why not her twin brother, too? But even in a world where layers of magic create entire worlds on top of our own, some rules should never be broken.

It will end in tears, I tell you.

3) Body and Soul by Frank Conroy

It’s impossible that this was generated. If someone handed me this and asked me to bet yes or no with $1000 riding on the bet, I would take that bet and say this was written by a real person, and not only that, but by an uncommonly talented author. I’m halfway through this novel as I write this post and nothing has changed my mind about the uncommonly talented part.

There is an out-of-tune piano in the small apartment, and in unlocking the secrets of its keys, as if by magic, Claude discovers himself. 

An amazing book that makes it almost possible to imagine the experience of a musical prodigy.

4) The Stand-In by Lily Chu

It looks real to me, but I don’t think I would have cheerfully bet a lot of money on that.

Gracie can’t believe what she’s hearing: due to their uncanny resemblance, gorgeous actress Wei Fangli wants Gracie to be her stand-in. The catch? Gracie will have to be escorted by Sam Yao, the other half of Chinese cinema’s infamous golden couple. Problem is, Sam is the most attractive—and infuriating—man Gracie’s ever met.

Sounds like a fairly standard but fun rom-com. This is the kind of thing I sometimes like if I’m in the right mood. Light, fun, low-stress, contemporary setting, the kind of book I can read without paying a lot of attention to it.

5) This Impossible Brightness by Jessica Klagman

These few paragraphs aren’t really enough, are they? But it looks real to me because it’s so surreal. Nothing here looks odd or off in the way generated text usually seems to. I don’t think I would have bet a lot of money on it, though — not unless I had another page or so.

After the mysterious disappearance of her fiancé, Alma Hughes moves to a remote island in the North Atlantic, where she hopes to weather her grief and nurture her ailing dog. But the strange town of Violette has mysteries as well. Townsfolk say that the radio tower overlooking their town broadcasts messages through their home appliances, their dreams, even the sea itself. When lightning strikes the tower, illuminating the sky in a brilliant flash, Alma finds herself caught in the unexplainable aftermath of one of Violette’s deadliest storms.

As the sea consumes the island, threatening its very existence, the deaths and lost memories of the recently departed also devastate the community. Alma, with a unique link to the lost, may be the only one who can help them move on. But to do so, she must confront a tragic loss of her own. On this doomed island haunted by echoes of the departed, Alma searches for meaning in her future—and dares to discover the power of hope among the living.

Confronting tragic loss isn’t my favorite thing. Remote islands and magical realism might be. The ailing dog, it depends. Does the dog get better? Because watching an ailing dog slowly die is something that … how shall I put this … I have seen this often enough in real life, let’s say, and I anticipate seeing this six more times personally. I sympathize, but I don’t want to follow someone else’s experience in that direction. Google, tell me, does the dog die in this story? … Google says no. Good, or I would delete the sample right now. As it is, maybe I’ll read this.

What do you all think?

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Update: Taking it Easy; also, Cake

I’m adding this and that to Sekaran, but rather casually. I’m waiting for comments from hither and yon, though actually one early reader read it in less than 24 hour and zapped it back to me; hence the adding of this and that. I’m trying to figure out a clever battlefield maneuver that would work for the scene I have in mind and that can be described in, oh, three paragraphs or so, and since my personal battlefield experience is nil and I’m having trouble thinking of a comparable historical incident I can lift whole and revise lightly to fit, this is slowing me down a trifle. Even if I leave it vague, I want to give the impression that this incident actually took place. What can it be? Hmm.

Well, I’ll think of something eventually.

In the meantime, I have read a book! Which I will tell you later this week; I’ve just about got that post written. I may — I realize this is shocking — read more books!

What else … Let me see. Oh, I wrote a note to myself to hurry up and write something to go into the newsletter. I could use the second chapter of Sekaran, but I would sort of like to transition to something else. In a few weeks, I’ll probably start dropping chapters and half-chapters of Sekaran over at my Patreon, and I believe I would like something else for my newsletter. I’ve got another sale schedule for … let me see … September 3-7, and therefore I should schedule the newsletter somewhere in there. Maybe the 5th, which is a Friday and also the day after Eight Doors will drop at Amazon. I can certainly write something short by then. Or, if not, as short is always iffy for me, then part of something longer.

Otherwise, everything is calm. I’m picking apples. This year, the electric wire around the top of the fence has stopped the vicious monsters that inhabit these woods from stealing all the apples.

They are vicious, I tell you

Image from Pixabay

Last year, the electric wire didn’t function or the squirrels were more desperate or who knows, but they got every apple. This year, that’s not a problem, and as a result we are going to be practically drowning in apples for the next little while.

Firecracker Apple Cake

Thanks to whomever came up with this recipe; I have no record of where I got it

1 1/2 C all-purpose flour
2 tsp cinnamon (I use 1 tsp because cinnamon is not my favorite)
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger (I use a heaping 1/2 tsp because ginger IS my favorite
1/4 tsp cayenne
3/4 C veg. oil
3/4 C packed brown sugar
1/4 C sour cream (I used Greek yogurt)
2 large eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla
1 3/4 C cubed apple, or whatever, you can probably use more if you happen to have apples overflowing. I didn’t measure.

THE CARAMEL GLAZE

2/3 C packed brown sugar
6 Tbsp light cream
5 Tbsp unsalted butter
4 large egg yolks
1/2 generous tsp cayenne

Make the glaze:

Put all ingredients in a small saucepan and stir constantly over medium heat four about four minutes, until the mixture coats the back of a spoon. If you make this ahead, you will need to warm it to pourable consistency before you use it.

Make the cake:

Grease and four a Bundt pan. Combine all the dry ingredients and set aside. Whisk together the oil, brown sugar, sour cream, eggs, and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and fold together to blend. Fold in apple. Pour into prepared pan. Bake at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes, until a toothpick near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes and turn out onto plate. Glaze warm cake with half the warm glaze. Pass the rest of the glaze with the cake as you serve it.

The recipe suggests vanilla ice cream, but I never use it because I love the glaze and don’t think the cake needs anything else. In fact, I could easily eat the glaze out of a jar with a spoon. Mmmmm.

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