Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 352

What books would you like to see translated to the big screen?

In the comments to the previous post, Cheryl mentions that someone is making a movie version of THE MOON AND THE SUN by Vonda MacIntyre.

Here’s what Amazon says about THE MOON AND THE SUN, which I see won the Nebula in 1997:

In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV rules with flamboyant ambition. In his domain, wealth and beauty take all; frivolity begets cruelty; science and alchemy collide. From the Hall of Mirrors to the vermin-infested attics of the Chateau at Versailles, courtiers compete to please the king, sacrificing fortune, principles, and even the sacred bond between brother and sister. By the fiftieth year of his reign, Louis XIV has made France the most powerful state in the western world. Yet the Sun King’s appetite for glory knows no bounds. In a bold stroke, he sends his natural philosopher on an expedition to seek the source of immortality — the rare, perhaps mythical, sea monsters. For the glory, of his God, his country, and his king, Father Yves de la Croix returns with his treasures: one heavy shroud packed in ice…and a covered basin that imprisons a shrieking creature.

And here is a helpful comment from Lisa Jensen at Goodreads, which gives us a clearer picture of the actual story:

Vonda N. McIntyre’s thrilling historical fantasy introduces an entirely unexpected hero: Lucien, Count de Chrétien, war hero, personal advisor to King Louis XIV of France, second most powerful man at court, and well-schooled in the arts of love. Lucien is also a dwarf. But as the only character moral enough to assist the heroine at her impossible task, he sets a standard by which more conventional fictional heroes shrink in comparison. A “sea monster” is captured and delivered into the decadent court of the “Sun King.” Young Marie-Josèphe, newly arrived at court, discovers that despite its leathery skin and twin fishtails, the creature is a variety of human — a “sea woman,” telling stories of her people in haunting songs that only Marie-Josèphe understands. Marie-Josèphe plots to win the sea woman her freedom before the creature winds up an entrée on Louis’ dinner plate. Her only ally is Lucien. What they risk for each other, and what they gain, gives the story resonance, while shifting perceptions of beauty, monstrosity and morality glimmer like phosphorescence on a moonlit sea.

Hmmm. Lisa Jensen’s comment appeals to me quite a bit more than the official description. Here we get a look at the actual protagonist and the conflict and the stakes, all of which are missing from the back cover copy. It does sound like it might be a bit difficult to make into a movie, but it will be interesting to see someone try.

But this makes me think: what other ambitious novels would you like to see made into a movie, but doubt it could be done well? I must say, I wouldn’t have thought THE LORD OF THE RINGS could be done well, but aside from a handful of quibbles, Peter Jackson did a great job. (THE HOBBIT, not so much, but I’m not invested in that because I never cared much for THE HOBBIT.)

One that would be easy and fun: THE WARRIOR’S APPRENTICE by Bujold. I’d love to see that!

Ooh, another that would be delightful and perfectly possible, THE DEATH OF THE NECROMANCER by Martha Wells. Don’t you think that would make a fabulous movie? I wouldn’t change a thing, the characters and plot and setting are all perfect for a movie.

I have to say, I think THE FLOATING ISLANDS would make a beautiful movie. Though I would be distressed if the special effects people gave my dragons bat wings. Feathers, people, read the book. Also semi-transparent. I wonder if they’d get that right?

Now, on the other hand, a work that might be impossible, even with today’s special effects, CJ Cherryh’s FOREIGNER series. Or am I selling special effects short? People can do amazing things today. But only one important human character? And obviously you couldn’t make just one movie. Some producer could just settle back for a decade making one after another.

A work that, like WINTER’S TALE, is probably too broad-scale is John Varley’s GAIA trilogy. Or another: Sherwood Smith’s INDA quadrilogy. All those different povs, and long time scales — those would be hard to handle well. But wouldn’t they be wonderful?

Recent Reading / Recent Watching: WINTER’S TALE by Mark Helprin / Akiva Goldsman

So, recently I found out about “Winter’s Tale”, the movie version, with Colin Farrill and Jessica Brown Findlay and Russell Crowe and Will Smith. How interesting! Who would ever think of doing a movie version of WINTER’S TALE?

Have you all read WINTER’S TALE by Mark Helprin? It first came out in, let me see, 1983, so I suppose I was in high school when I first read it.

I’ve read it several times by now, and in fact I just read it again because I was curious to see how the movie related to the book. The book itself is the sort of story that requires a good deal of patience from the reader; in fact it’s the sort of story that you are only going to enjoy if you love words and writing, glorious description and high concepts; not so much if you’re into plot and action. So it doesn’t seem, on the face of it, to be the sort of book that is really meant to turn into a movie.

So, the book:

There was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not deep, and the sky was swept with vibrant stars, except in the east, where dawn was beginning in a light blue flood. The air was motionless, but would soon start to move as the sun came up and winds from Canada came charging down the Hudson.

Beautiful! And then we get multiple detailed plotlines:

1. We open with Peter Lake, an orphan, raised on the streets of New York in the 1800s or maybe the early 1900s. He’s a thief, a decent person who has gotten himself afoul of a dangerous streetgang led by the crazy-in-an-interesting-way Pearly Soames. Peter Lake breaks into a fine home and meets and falls in love with Beverly Penn, who is consumptive and dying. They have a short, intense relationship. She dies. He allows Pearly Soames to catch up to him, but the white horse, far more than a natural horse, carries him out of time through the cloud wall that encircles New York.

The cloud wall? Okay, WINTER’S TALE was the first “magical realism” I ever encountered. The world is like the real world, but with magical stuff woven through it, which no one seems to take much notice of or consider very surprising. The most important magical thing is the cloud wall that surrounds New York. It’s like a maelstrom of mist and anybody who disappears into it vanishes. And sometimes reappears, sometimes many years later, as Peter Lake does, but don’t hold your breath, it’ll take a while.

2. A hundred years later, more or less, Virginia Gamely leaves the village of Lake of the Coheeries, a place that is not quite contiguous with the real world, and goes to New York with her infant son; and she meets Hardesty Marratta, a young man who is searching for a perfectly just city, and they eventually have a daughter named Abby. We also become acquainted with Christiana Friebourg, who in her childhood encountered and fell in love with a white horse that fell like a meteor out of the sky; and Asbury Gunwillow, who has the apartment next to hers but has never seen her, though they talk to one another through the walls; and Praegar de Pinto, editor of the Sun, who runs a campaign based on poetry and passion and becomes mayor of New York; and Jackson Mead, dedicated to forging a bridge out of light that will, one gathers, link Earth to Heaven. There are hints that Jackson Mead might be a fallen angel, though this is not explicit. I’m leaving a lot out, here. As you might gather, nothing in this half of the book feels as focused as the first part involving Peter Lake and Beverly Penn. I imagine this whole part is where a reader who is invested in the early romance subplot falls out of the story with a thud.

3. Peter Lake reappears, and Jackson Mead makes his attempt to build his bridge, and Pearly Soames and his gang reappear, looking a lot less human now, and, well, stuff happens.

Now, see, all through the book, the idea of the perfectly just city trying to “rise” out of our mortal world is absolutely central to the story. The idea of justice and a perfectly just city, of timelessness and a timeless perception, is one that the reader is asked to grapple with over and over. The concept of “justice” is a difficult one, given the plainly evident injustice of New York. So we get passages like this, where early on, Isaac Penn, Beverly’s father, says to Peter Lake:

“. . . I realize there is too much needless and cruel suffering. But you, you don’t seem to understand that these people whom you profess to champion have, in their struggles, compensations.”

“What compensations?”

“Their movements, passions, emotions; their captured bodies and captured senses are directed with no less certainty than the microscopic details of the seasons or the infinitesimal components of the city’s great and single motion. They are, in their seemingly random actions, part of a plan. Don’t you know that?”

“I see no justice in that plan.”

“Who said that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand – until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.”

What Helprin is trying to express, I think, is the kind of divine plan that you have to step outside of time to perceive; the plan that is perceptible to God and not to men. Except in this book, sometimes people catch glimpses of it – Beverly, who is dying, sometimes sees visions of the timeless world that exists beyond our world.

“They mean to me that the universe . . . growls and sings. No, shouts. . . . Like a dog, but low, low. And then it shouts, mixed voices, tones, a white and silver sound. . . . The light is silent, but then it clashes like cymbals and arches out like a fountain, to travel and yet be still. It crosses space without moving, on a fixed beam, as cleanly and silently as a pillar of ruby or diamond.”

Helpin also provides philosophical asides, not in any character’s voice, but directly:

. . . . To enter a city [with your soul] intact it is necessary to pass through one of its new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts on which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.

So, how in the world can all this be handled in a single two-hour movie? It can’t, of course, and the writer and director – it was Akiva Goldsman, if that means anything to any of you who might be movie buffs. Anyway, Goldsman didn’t try. Instead, he took the early subplot with Peter Lake and Beverly Penn and kept that nearly intact. He kept a ton of details – the story of how Peter Lake came to be orphaned on the streets of a New York, the stars in the roof of Grand Central Station, actually I’m impressed by how true to the book he kept this part of the movie.

Then he ditched most of the rest of the novel, but retained small fragments (notably Virginia Gamely and her daughter Abby), working them into a much simpler good-vs-evil storyline: He made Pearly Soames into a demon under the direct authority of Lucifer, and made the white horse into a guardian angel. Then he added a single brand-new touch in order to pull the movie together: he set it up so that anyone may carry within them the seeds of one miracle – but it’s never a miracle for themselves. Each miracle is meant for someone else. Peter Lake is carrying a miracle meant to save the dying Beverly Penn . . . or is he?

Then Goldsman cast Peter Lake forward in time, just as happened in the book (although with a different explanation for how this happened), and we whoosh through a very much streamlined plot with a direct conflict between good and evil. (Spoiler: the good guys win).

How did this work? Well, if you go into the movie knowing that it can’t possibly do everything the book did, then it actually works fine. It’s a charming movie with a pleasantly straightforward story about true love and the unexpected ways that miracles work themselves out, enhanced by nice scenery, good acting, and a really beautiful white horse. I’m going to watch it again now that I’ve re-read the book

The one thing that didn’t work for me at all was Will Smith as Lucifer. I have no idea what Will Smith is like in the real world, but as an actor, he kind of radiates a nice-guy aura, don’t you think? Anyway, *I* think so. He didn’t work as Lucifer for me – not nearly evil enough. That wasn’t a problem with Russell Crowe. He made Pearly Soames into a thoroughly scary dude. And Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay were good.

The bottom line: the movie is pleasant to curl up with on a cold winter night, especially if you love white horses that fly. The book, on the other hand, is a story for a patient reader who loves gorgeous writing to sink into when in a meditative frame of mind. It’s definitely a winter book, guaranteed to make you long for a pair of skates and an endless frozen lake, followed by a roaring fireplace and a mug of hot chocolate. If you’ve never read it, then, well, it *is* the middle of January, a good time to give it a try. If you have read it, what did you think?

Fan art

Here’s an interesting post at tor.com, about Greg van Eekhout’s CALIFORNIA BONES.

It’s a book about friends and family, trust and betrayal, the love of power and the power of love. But at its core, it’s a heist novel—and you can’t have a heist without a crew. So, here they are –

And then sketches of quite a few characters. I haven’t read this book yet — I have an actual physical copy, but as always it may be a while before I get to it. But this character description sounds appealing:

Daniel Blackland is an osteomancer, a person who acquires power by eating the remains of extinct magical creatures. That bone he’s picking his teeth with probably came from some kind of dragon or griffin, and he no doubt stole it. Because, in addition to being a wizard, Daniel is a thief.

As it happens, I have a soft spot for thieves. Have I written a book yet with a thief as a character? Hmm. . . no, not yet, and in fact I was forced to take this great thief character out of one of my WIP as I revised. (Not forced as in my editor made me, forced as in there wasn’t room in the story for this character, great though he was.)

The post details and sketches half a dozen other characters. It does look like a fun book. Any of you read it yet?

Coincidentally, my very first book purchase of the new year was NORSE CODE by Greg van Eekhout, prompted by reading EIGHT DAYS OF LUKE and Greg commenting that this was his favorite DWJ story and he was very into Norse myth and drew on that for his first book:

Is this Ragnarok, or just California?

The NorseCODE genome project was designed to identify descendants of Odin. What it found was Kathy Castillo, a murdered MBA student brought back from the dead to serve as a valkyrie in the Norse god’s army. Given a sword and a new name, Mist’s job is to recruit soldiers for the war between the gods at the end of the world—and to kill those who refuse to fight.

But as the twilight of the gods descends, Mist makes other plans.

I thought that all sounded cool, but I must admit, I haven’t read that one, either. So many books, so little time!

One page summaries

So, yesterday, my agent asked me for one-page summaries of two of my WIP, the ones scheduled to come out next year. This sort of extra little assignment, like one last editorial request for a minor revision or page proofs with a very tight deadline, appears surprisingly often, especially when you are just about to start working on the climactic scene of something else.

Which was not actually true this time, because I am still working on MOUNTAIN, but I’m not quite at the climactic scene yet, so it was a good time to take an evening to work on this instead of pressing forward.

So, go try to shrink your favorite 400 page novel to a one page summary. Think about writing the back cover copy; do it like that. Go on, I’ll wait.

*Twiddles thumbs*. *Whistles*.

Hard, isn’t it? Now that I’ve a reasonable version for each WIP, though, I thought you might like to see what I came up with. So, here:

——-

The Keeper of the Mists

The ambition of the Wyvern King burns hot as summer and unrelenting as time. All lands will fall beneath the sway of his terrible sorcery, until he rules the world. Only the tiny land of Nimmira lies hidden from the Wyvern King, concealed behind its shifting borders of mist and confusion.

The magic of Nimmira is rooted in its Lord, who holds in his heart all the boundaries and enchantments that protect and conceal his land. On his death, a new Lord must take up the magic of Nimmira and renew the concealing mist that keeps the land and folk of Nimmira safe.

Ignored by her father, raised in humble circumstances by her mother, recently orphaned and struggling to build a life for herself, Kerianna Ailenn certainly never expected to become the Lady of Nimmira. Yet, on her father’s death, she finds a heart-deep knowledge of her land unfolding within her, for the succession has passed over all three of her older half-brothers and come to her instead.

Now Keri must learn to use both her new magic and her new authority. For allies, she has her half-brothers, if she can trust them; and the ancient mysterious Timekeeper of Nimmira, if she can learn not to fear him; and two childhood friends who are almost as much out of place as she is.

But she must learn quickly. Because the Wyvern King is waiting, and now the mists of Nimmira are failing . . .

————

Okay, so, how accurate is the above? Well, I sure left out a lot, but then, how else are you going to summarize the entire book in less than 300 words? I deemphasized some important elements (Keri’s friends) and left out some important elements (an important secondary character from a country I didn’t mention; some of the important magical elements of the story). And I rearranged some elements, implying that Keri realizes that the succession has come to her because of “magic unfolding within her” rather than because the Timekeeper tells her so; in the actual story, the magic starts unfolding shortly thereafter.

But the point is to capture something of the story, preferably something both of the plot and the flavor. What do you all think?

Okay, next:

————-

The Mountain of Kept Memory

Long ago the Kieba, last goddess in all the world, raised up her mountain in the drylands of Carastind. There she dwells still, her ceaseless charge to protect the world from the unending plagues that arose at the ending of the age of the gods.

Gulien Madalin, heir to the throne of Carastind, finds himself more interested in piecing together fragments of ancient history than in the tedious business of government. Or of watching his father govern, for Gelder Madalin, king of Carastind, does not share power.

Of course, sometimes an ambitious man may discover a splinter of some forgotten god’s power, and then ancient history may suddenly become thoroughly relevant. But no such threat can trouble Carastind, for who would dare threaten the land in which the Kieba has chosen to dwell?

But Gulien has come to believe that his father may have somehow offended the Kieba – offended her so seriously that she has withdrawn her protection from Carastind. Worse, he fears that Carastind’s enemies may suspect this as well.

Then he learns that he is right, and that invasion is imminent.

Gulien’s sister Oressa knows what’s important: avoiding the attention of her royal father while keeping track of all the secrets of the court. No one is more skilled at remaining unseen than Oressa; no one is better at piecing together scraps of overheard gossip. But when she overhears news about the threatened invasion, even Oressa is shocked to discover what her father plans to give away in order to buy peace.

Then she is even more horrified to learn that Carastind’s enemies will not agree to peace at any price. They mean not only to conquer Carastind, but to cast down the Kieba and steal her power – and they may be able to do it, for ancient fragments of the gods’ devising have fallen into their hands. Now Gulien and Oressa must each decide where their most important loyalties lie, and what price they are willing to pay in order to protect the Kieba, their home, and the world.

———-

Obviously I thought it was crucial to start with the setting — in fact, there are two setting paragraphs, the first and then the third.

Also, I made it look like Gulien is the main character, when he is actually the secondary protagonist. Oressa is the main protagonist. I did that because it seemed to make sense in the summary and because (unless I change my mind) the brief prologue is in Gulien’s pov, so the reader is going to meet him first.

I would like to have emphasized Oressa, maybe even started with her, but the summary didn’t seem to work that way.

Oh, and I don’t think there’s much doubt in the story about “where their loyalties lie.” I think this summary implies that Gulien and Oressa even find themselves on opposite sides, which would be a very cool story idea, but does not happen in *this* story.

Oh, and I see that I totally implied that the “enemies” of Carastind are all one faceless mass, which is not at all the way the story works out.

Still, in some ways, this summary is surprisingly accurate. How does it sound, though? Catchy, I hope. Can you tell at all that MISTS is YA, whereas MOUNTAIN is adult? In fact, one of the things I will need to do at the end of this revision of MOUNTAIN is read through Oressa’s sections and see if I can tell whether she now sounds like a young woman of 20 rather than a girl of 15.

Anyway, there you go: Summaries in 300 words (or so).

For my next trick, maybe I will try to come up with taglines — one-sentence summaries. That’s even harder!

I’ve got your dialogue tags riiiight here

I picked up this five-page handout last semester. Some student gave me a copy; their teacher had passed these out when talking about how to write a narrative essay, which incidentally is not a term I’m just in love with. A narrative essay: do you mean a narrative or an essay? I know, I know, the term is meant to describe an essay that uses narrative to make its point, but this seems a bit subtle for English Comp I in a community college where — I am not trying to be snarky, this is just a statement of fact — a large minority of the students are reading and writing at about the fifth-grade level or below.

So, in general, when assigning a narrative essay, the instructor requires dialogue. And of all the handouts that a student can perhaps do without when learning to write dialogue, a five-page handout listing about a million possible alternates to “said” strikes me as the one to drop. It is almost entertaining, also a bit frightening, to imagine how the instructor (I don’t know who it was) might have introduced this handout. “Said is so boring! Be sure and use alternates whenever possible!”

Now, I do not agree that “said” is uniquely invisible , because I have found it far too visible when overused. Nevertheless, consider the following list of “a” alternatives to “said”:

acknowledged

added

admitted

advised

affirmed

agreed

alleged

alluded

announced

answered

apologized

appealed

argued

articulated

asserted

assured

avowed

Now, some of those could perfectly well be used as dialogue tags, and in fact if properly used they would vanish gently into the text. “Appealed” could not, in my opinion. Listen to this:

“You have to reconsider,” she appealed.

“No, listen, this is terribly important,” she appealed.

“Please, please, please,” she appealed.

You see? Perfectly dreadful. There’s nothing wrong with the word, but as a dialogue tag, no. Just no.

“Articulated” is even worse, especially since I can’t help but think about the articulation of bones when I see the word. “Avowed”? I don’t think so, not even in the highest of high fantasy. “Alluded”? Are you kidding me?

Acknowledged, added, admitted, agreed, announced, argued — I would say that set could be used as tags. The rest are iffy or impossible. (Okay, close to impossible, I’m sure you could use even “alluded” as a tag if you were sufficiently determined.)

This list has about 230 words — I didn’t count, that’s a rough estimate. Two hundred and thirty! I don’t know whether to laugh or weep at the idea of English Comp I students being told that all these words are suitable dialogue tags and they should avoid “said.” Not, I repeat, that I know how the instructor presented this handout; maybe it was with a “use with caution” label. But still, if you provide it, you are implicitly endorsing it.

Incidentally, the handout *I* most often offer students is the one that shows comma usage in dialogue. Of course you could just look in any novel to see how dialogue is handled — I remember doing exactly that when I started working on my very first book ever (I looked at Bujold) — but a handout that clearly shows how to integrate dialogue into text is still a handy thing.

Also, I would like to see the narrative essay dropped from the class. One semester is too short even to focus on normal expository essays. Why complicate the issue with narrative? Offer a different class in fiction and narrative nonfiction writing instead. But that’s just me.

Dictated, foretold, voiced — voiced, seriously? It’s enough to make me throw up my hands and declare, “For heaven’s sake, stick to ‘said!'”

Seriously?

On Not Giving Up

A must-read post by Kameron Hurley, about the confluence of hard work and luck.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read The Mirror Empire, or anything else by Hurley. Surely some of you have. Thoughts?

Here’s what Goodreads says about The Mirror Empire, btw:

On the eve of a recurring catastrophic event known to extinguish nations and reshape continents, a troubled orphan evades death and slavery to uncover her own bloody past… while a world goes to war with itself. In the frozen kingdom of Saiduan, invaders from another realm are decimating whole cities, leaving behind nothing but ash and ruin. As the dark star of the cataclysm rises, an illegitimate ruler is tasked with holding together a country fractured by civil war, a precocious young fighter is asked to betray his family and a half-Dhai general must choose between the eradication of her father’s people or loyalty to her alien Empress. Through tense alliances and devastating betrayal, the Dhai and their allies attempt to hold against a seemingly unstoppable force as enemy nations prepare for a coming together of worlds as old as the universe itself. In the end, one world will rise – and many will perish.

To me, I must admit, that all just sounds . . . cluttered. Back cover copy is hard to write, I know! But this doesn’t do it for me. What do you all think?

The Writing Process –

So, you know, how much writing work you get done varies so much day by day. For me, this is true to a much lesser extent if I am currently producing pages for a new manuscript under a fairly tight deadline, because then I set a minimum number of pages or words per day and more or less stick to it. The feeling that you are making progress is itself a motivator. But lately! With this revision! (of MOUNTAIN.) It is just hard to tell on a day to day basis whether an adequate amount of progress is being made.

I mean, like this: last Sunday I wrote 15 pages (about 5000 words). This is a lot for me unless I’m in the endgame of a book and it’s flowing and I’m really into it, and then I can write quite a bit every day for a while. But just picking up this revision from nearly a cold start, that was a ton.

Then Monday, nothing. Not a word. Granted, that’s the day I went up to St Louis and went to Global Foods and picked up Ish, but still, I was home all afternoon. Didn’t even turn on the computer.

Tuesday I finished the chapter I’d been working on, leapfrogged over a chapter that didn’t need much work, deleted a whole chapter that had to go, gazed at the blank screen for a while, made a couple notes about the new chapter that might go there, and quit for the day. Amount of actual progress: net loss of 5000 words, iffy in terms of ideas about what to do.

Wednesday, nothing. I opened the file once and looked at the blank spot.

Yesterday, I veeery slowly and painfully wrote 2000 words of the new chapter. I’m also proud to say that I got my percentage of games won up to 74% in Spider Solitaire. This should tell you how little I wanted to work on the manuscript, because solitaire is the game I switch to when I’m really annoyed with or bored with writing. (This is why I don’t want interesting games on my laptop; solitaire is as distracting as I need, which is to say, not very.)

Finally, having gotten that annoying chapter started, I whooshed through 2000 words this morning and should easily do that much again tonight, possibly finishing the chapter or getting it set up to finish tomorrow. Then I get to leap ahead about fifty pages, which will be extremely satisfying and get me into the endgame of the book, part of which will again have to be rewritten extensively.

How worried was I, yesterday? This is actually the point I wanted to make: not at all worried. Annoyed, yes, mildly, because it’s not fun beating words out of the aether when they’re not flowing and you really are not in the mood. But even if the deadline for this manuscript was Feb 1 (it’s actually March sometime, I forget exactly), I wouldn’t have been worried. Days like that are just part of the deal. Once you plow through an annoying section, the next bit is liable to be a downhill run. Relatively, anyway.

Back to work Monday! Unless we get freezing rain and ice on Sunday and thus start the new school year with a snowday. I see a “winter mix” is predicted for Sunday, so that could happen. Even if we are off Monday, I won’t quite tie this manuscript up before school starts. But I will probably juuuust about hit the next tedious, annoying section I will need to deal with (hopefully the last).

Which is fine. No matter how tedious bits of this revision are, I expect I’ll wrap it up by the end of the month, which is soon enough.

Meanwhile! Time to open up the manuscript file.

After a special visit to Global Foods –

I only get to go to Global Foods in St L about twice a year, because though I’m in St L quite often, I almost always have dogs in the car. In that case, it’s usually a) too hot, or b) too cold, or c) just too unnerving to leave the dogs in the car for an hour and a half while I carefully go down every aisle.

But since I needed to take Deb’s girls back to her and pick up my Ish, I could cheat by dropping her girls off, going to Global Foods, then coming back to pick up Ish and admire her recent litters of puppies (a litter of five right before Christmas and a litter of two on New Year’s Eve — she actually called her vet out of a New Year’s Eve party at ten till midnight for an emergency C-section. (!) Well, at least he was awake. (And not drinking; he was on call.)

Back to the subject, though. Although the point is to pick up a lot of Chaokoh coconut milk (which is the brand I like best), unusual spices, cool produce, etc, and I always have an actual list in my hand, I also always try to get something I’ve never purchased before. This trip, I picked up frozen peeled fava beans, which I’ve never tried before because Walmart doesn’t carry them, and millet flour because it just sounded interesting. Possibly the weirdest item I got this time: salt cod and a can of akee, because I just thought it would be interesting to try that famous Jamaican dish.

As an aside, let me add that NO MATTER WHAT, you will forget something on your list. In my case, I particularly wanted amchoor powder (powdered green mango), which I have run out of. It was the FIRST item on my list. Yeah, I forgot to get any. Sigh.

I did get pomegranate molasses and Aleppo pepper, though, so that’s something.

Anyway, let me share with you the first thing I did with millet flour:

Millet Shortcakes, based on a recipe from THE SPLENDID GRAIN by Rebecca Wood

1 stick butter

1 C light brown sugar

1/2 C milk — I used coconut milk, because I didn’t have any real milk handy and because I had some coconut milk left over from something else.

2 eggs

1/4 tsp almond extract — I left this out

1 Tbsp freshly grated lemon zest — I left this out, too

1 C millet flour

1 C all-purpose flour

1 C ground almonds — I used ground pecans, because I’m not all that crazy about almonds and anyway I had some ground pecans in the freezer. My uncle has pecan trees, so pecans are much much much cheaper for me.

1/2 tsp kosher salt — I used regular salt because the smaller grains of regular salt disperse more evenly in baked goods than the flatter, larger flakes of kosher salt.

Then the author called for caramelizing fresh plums and using those as a topping, but I used canned sweetened plum puree from our orchard thinned (they are very tart and strong-flavored after cooking them down) with coconut milk.

Okay: Cream the butter and sugar. Stir in the eggs and milk. Combine the dry ingredients and stir in. This will make a stiffish dough. Spoon into six large mounds on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. Cut warm shortcakes in half horizontally and spoon plum filling over bottom, top with other half of shortcake and spoon over more filling and/or whipped cream.

I thought the texture of these shortcakes might well be too dry and crumbly, what with all that gluten-free millet flour and pecan flour. But no, it was fine. The shortcakes had a soft, pleasant texture and a very nice flavor. I took some to my mother, who also liked them quite a bit. She had them with a raspberry topping.

Now, I know you may not have millet flour handy, but you might try this with all wheat flour or maybe barley flour or whatever. Or, if you’re totally determined, I expect you can find millet flour somewhere. Or you can buy it on Amazon; it’s not very expensive. I got the “Swad” brand from India because that’s what Global Foods offered, but there’s lots of other brands available.

Millet flour is gluten-free but when I checked on that, I also found that it contains goitrogens, which could suppress thyroid activity and leads to goiter. This is perfectly fine and harmless if you eat millet in moderation, but if you’re on the popular gluten-free kick, you may not want to base all your baking on millet. Just thought I’d add that because I know so many people are going gluten-free these days. Personally, I prefer to keep to a highly variable diet that neither cuts anything completely nor is based on anything in particular, but that’s just me. I will certainly make these millet-pecan shortcakes again, and soon, because millet flour goes rancid rather fast and what with all the banana leaves and lamb shoulder chops and veal dumplings and Chinese sausage and gyro meat and so forth that I stocked up on, I don’t have room for flour in the freezer.

Well, I learned a new word, so there’s that

Hey, did you all know what “ekphrastic” meant?

This post on tor.com offers “three ekphrastic dialogues.” Check them out!

Okay, so Google says “Ekphrastic refers to a form of writing, mostly poetry, wherein the author describes another work of art, usually visual.” Fine, fine, this use of the term to describe dialogue that takes place between the writer and the main character is a fun extension of the concept.

Now, I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: is this what it’s really like to write?

No. No, it’s not. Or at least not for me. And I’m as much as just-go-with-it seat-of-the-pants writer as anybody. Still, I am not likely to forget the Mountains of Night or be startled by the appearance of a whole evil army.

Fun post, though.

Using Kickstarter to give yourself an “advance”

So, I missed the thing where Stacy Jay ran a Kickstarter for a new book and said in her summary for said Kickstarter that some of that money was going to go for living expenses for a couple months while she wrote the book. In other words, it was going to function as an advance.

And evidently quite a lot of people got upset because Kickstarter is supposed to fund production costs, not living expenses and there was this big Twitter brouhaha, which I missed, fortunately, because life is too short. But the upshot was, Jay was startled and upset at being shouted at, and withdrew the Kickstarter and apologized.

And then Chuck Wendig and Laura Lam wrote a post about this, which is what I saw first and how I found out about all this.

As is frequently the case, I agree with Chuck. (And Laura.) I wish Jay hadn’t withdrawn the Kickstarter; I’d drop over there and kick in. Good God in Heaven, what, now we have special arbiters of Kickstarter Correctness to tell us what we can and can’t try to fund? Evidently someone out there — more than one someone — is offended because someone somewhere has a different idea than they do of what crowdfunding can properly be used for? Even though nobody is actually being forced to fund anything?

What exactly is up with that?

Laura’s take-home message:

Kickstarter is optional. If a Kickstarter is your jam, you pay the level you choose. As long as you receive the product on time as promised, the obligation has been fulfilled. If I’m paying $10 instead of $5 and that $5 difference is going to go to letting the artist whose work I admire be able to create a better book sooner, and I know that and don’t care, then what, exactly, is the problem here?

As usual, Chuck goes on a bit, but here’s his fundamental take home message:

…honestly, I don’t see the problem. Not contributing money toward the Kickstarter is the cleanest, simplest way to let her do her thing while simultaneously not supporting her. Just as you likely do day in and day out with 99.9% of the media that crosses in front of you.

What Laura and Chuck said is too obvious for words, except evidently not, since a good many people on Twitter don’t seem to have figured out that people can legitimately disagree about this stuff.

Also, the overall take-home message of all this is plainly: Don’t explain what exactly you’re going to use Kickstarter money for, and there’s no problem. You think that’s what that Twitter outburst was meant to provoke? Because I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Me, I’m all for letting people run their own crowdsourcing campaigns however they want, and letting people decide what they do and don’t want to fund. We’re all adults, yes? No one needs special advisors to tell them whether they think it’s okay to fund an author’s time in order to get a book they want to read.

Update: I’m glad to say that *my* Twitter feed is filled with people making supportive comments about Jay’s situation and decrying the outrage mob. Good.