Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 416

A very snazzy infographic –

So we find that twitter is sometimes actually useful! Because I wouldn’t have noticed this infographich without a tweeted link.

See, it seems a young Chinese woman has created an infographic to show how emotions for which there aren’t English words map onto the world of emotion. Isn’t that a neat idea?

To be sure, some of the terms seem pretty indistinguishable from concepts we already have. Like this Japanese word which is supposed to express the “emotional attachment between friends, family, even animals” — I wonder how that is supposed to be different from at least a broad conception of “love”?

I like the Hebrew term which means “sick on you”, ie, obsessed. If Maria and Janet in Sharon Shinn’s shapeshifter novels had to pick a word to describe their feelings for their boyfriends, this term would certainly fit better than “love.” (Sorry, the word is given in Hebrew characters, and I have no idea what the phonetic spelling would be in English.)

I have absolutely no idea what the Turks mean by Serefe, though. I mean, what?

One of my favorites didn’t make the list — pena ajena, which is Mexican Spanish for the embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation. (That one is given below the infographic.) That’s a useful term. This emotion is exactly why I can’t stand watching sitcoms, because almost all the so-called humor in the shows is based on putting the characters in embarrassing situations and then laughing at them. I don’t think that’s funny; I think that’s embarrassing. I guess I’m not alone, since evidently we have this term for that feeling.

How about you? Any of these emotional states strike a chord of recognition with you?

Dialogue Tags: The Bad, the Visible, the Audible, and the Absent

Dialogue should bring your characters to life. We all know that. It should contain and express their unique voices! It should be witty or profound or surprising or interesting or in some way effective! Right? Just serviceable dialogue is not good enough. Dialogue must not be boring or stilted or too predictable, and it should not make your character sound like Mr. Spock, unless, of course, he is Mr. Spock. Above all, dialogue should avoid silly or incompetent use of dialogue tags.

I mean, we all know perfectly well how a bad writer sometimes handles dialogue tags. Like this:

“You can’t mean it,” she exclaimed.

“I assure you, I mean every word,” he smirked.

“Oh, you’re too, too cruel,” she moaned.

“You better believe it, babe,” he sneered.

I’ve actually seen fanfic written like this, so don’t think it never happens. But of course most writers understand that “said” is invisible and most other dialogue tags are visible, right?

Which, actually, is a bit of an overstatement. The fact is, as I recently noticed while listening to an audiobook, “said” is often but not always invisible. In a minute I’m going to provide several examples of dialogue and take a look at what makes “said” pop out of the sentence almost as much as the tags above, and what techniques writers can use to keep that from happening.

But first! Let me add that actually quite a few other dialogue tags are nearly invisible if used effectively and in moderation. I don’t think everybody acknowledges this, though it is obvious.

Some other tags that generally work include: “shouted”, “whispered”, “protested,” “murmured”, “muttered”, and “answered.” But this is certainly not an exhaustive list. Opening up my current WIP, I see that in the first conversation, I use “inquired”, “observed”, “conceded”, “added,” and “repeated” as well as “said” – I only use “said” a couple of times. This is all within two or three pages, yet (I would argue) none of these tags stands out or catches the reader’s eye.

I really do want to emphasize this: if used smoothly and correctly and in moderation, lots of tags besides “said” sound just fine, barely draw the reader’s notice, and in fact add to rather than detract from your dialogue. To use them properly, of course, you need to have your character shout only when she ought to shout, and so on. And it’s certainly true that you don’t want to tag too many lines with any of these. But go actually look at what kinds of dialogue tags are used by really good writers such as Patricia McKillip and you will find plenty of variation, far more than you might expect given the popular advice to avoid tags other than “said.” You definitely don’t want to surrender your artistic judgment to some simplistic rule – even a rule that is cited everywhere as though it was handed down on a stone tablet from God.

And, hey, while on the subject of overstated advice, how about adverbs? I mean, how often have we seen advice to cut all adverbs from dialogue tags? That’s going a little far, too. Of course you don’t want this:

“I really must get my husband to a doctor at once,” she said urgently.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her heartily. “There’s a hospital less than half a mile away.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” she exclaimed thankfully. “Can you help me get him into that taxi?”

But if you open any novel by Patricia McKillip, you will see that she sometimes uses adverbs in dialogue tags. If she does, then clearly it’s okay! So that no-adverb rule is better conceptualized as “Don’t use too many adverbs in dialogue tags, and never when the adverb is redundant.” Lots of times it is perfectly clear from the context that your character is worried or in a hurry or awkward or whatever, and if it’s perfectly clear, then you don’t need to have her say something worriedly or hurriedly or awkwardly. Or rather than “said quietly” maybe you should be saying “whispered”? Because you don’t want to use an adverb merely as a substitute for the actual right word.

But it’s important to understand that neither “murmured” nor “whispered” nor “muttered” mean the same thing as, for example, “said gently.” The first sounds quiet, the second tentative or secretive, the third embarrassed. Only the adverbial tag sounds kind. Sometimes you really do need to say “said gently” and no other construction will do. It’s important to have enough of a feel for language to know when that is, and be confident enough to ignore overstated advice.

Now, back to use of the ordinary “said” tag. Look at this tiny sample of dialogue, from Scalzi’s REDSHIRTS, which I just listened to. And it was really good, btw – an excellent choice for audio format. But look at this:

“I was promised a long story,” Duvall said, after they had gotten their food and drinks.

“I made no such promise,” Dahl said.

“The promise was implied,” Duvall protested. “And besides, I bought you a drink. I own you. Entertain me, Ensign Dahl.”

“All right, fine,” Dahl said. “I entered the Academy late because for three years I was a seminary student.”

“Okay, that’s moderately interesting,” Duvall said.

“On Forshan,” Dahl said.

“Okay, that’s intensely interesting,” Duvall said.

Notice something? Every single line is tagged and in all but one case, the tag is “said.” Besides that, in all but one line, the dialogue comes first and the tag afterward – the sentence pattern is nearly always the same. Of course I selected this tidbit on purpose to illustrate a point, but I promise you that the overall feeling you get, given Scalzi’s writing style in this book, is that every single line is tagged with “said.”

I wonder how many readers actually start to notice all those “he said, she said” tags? When you’re reading, I wonder if you don’t just skim over this dialogue so fast you really don’t notice the tags? But I can tell you, when you’re listening to this in audio format, those tags sure catch your ear. They don’t sound exactly silly, but they start to pick up a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard quality.

Then you get used to it and the dialogue tags stop being so annoying, and I actually did find this story highly entertaining, and honestly it is an excellent choice for a short drive (the whole thing is six cds, but that includes three short stories; the main story is only four cds long).

But listening to this story made me really notice dialogue tags, which is exactly what the use of “said” is supposed to avoid. Compare the above sample to this, which you may recognize as a bit of dialogue from NINE PRINCES IN AMBER by Zelazny:

Just as she neared, I sat up.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Why – good evening,” she replied.

“When do I check out?” I asked.

“I’ll have to ask Doctor.”

“Do so,” I said.

“Please roll up your sleeve.”

“No, thanks.”

“I have to give you an injection.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t need it.”

“I’m afraid that’s for Doctor to say.”

“Then send him around and let him say it. But in the meantime, I will not permit it.”

“I’m afraid I have my orders.”

“So did Eichmann, and look what happened to him.” And I shook my head slowly.

Out of fourteen lines of dialogue, only four are tagged. Using so few tags could lead to confusion, but in this case it doesn’t, because it’s perfectly clear from context which character is saying what. Only one tag is “said”. Neither “replied” nor “asked” stands out or sounds the least bit stupid. The fourth tag is, of course, a movement tag, which is an excellent way of tagging a line without using “said” or any substitute.

You know who really does a great job with movement tags? Sarah Addison Allen. Check this out – it’s from THE GIRL WHO CHASED THE MOON, which I’ve decided is my favorite of her books:

“You’ll never guess what Stella told me last night,” Sawyer said, strolling into the kitchen just as Julia was finishing the apple stack cake she was going to take to Vance Shelby’s granddaughter.

Julia closed her eyes for a moment. Stella must have called him the moment Julia left her last night.

Sawyer stopped next to her at the stainless steel table and stood close. He was like crisp, fresh air. He was self-possessed and proud, but everyone forgave him because charm sparkled around him like sunlight. [ . . . ]

“You’re not supposed to be back here,” she said as she put the last layer of cake on top of the dried-apple-and-spice filling.

“Report me to the owner.” He pushed some of her hair behind her left ear, his fingers lingering on the thin pink streak she still dyed in her hair there. “Don’t you want to know what Stella told me last night?”

She jerked her head away from his hand as she put the last of the apple and spice filling on top of the cake, leaving the sides bare. “Stella was drunk last night.”

“She said you told her that you bake cakes because of me.”

Julia had known it was coming, but she stilled anyway, the icing spatula stopping mid-stroke. She quickly resumed spreading the filling, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “She thinks you have low self-esteem. She’s trying to build up your ego.”

He lifted one eyebrow in that insolent way of his. “I’ve been accused of many things, but low self-esteem is not one of them.”

“It must be hard to be so beautiful.”

“It’s hell. Did you really say that to her?”

She clanged the spatula into the empty bowl the filling had been in, then took both to the sink. “I don’t remember. I was drunk, too.”

“You never get drunk,” he said.

“You don’t know me well enough to make blanket statements like ‘You never get drunk.’” It felt good to say that. Eighteen years she’d been away. Look how much I’ve improved, she wanted to say.

See that? Not just movement tags, but thought tags. We are carried straight into Julia’s point of view here, and her thoughts and reactions substitute for dialogue tags several times just in this little snippet. In fourteen exchanges, there are only three actual dialogue tags. But there are only three completely untagged lines. Movement and thought tags accompany the remaining lines of dialogue, keeping us completely, effortlessly aware of exactly who is saying what – there’s no possible way to get confused. Allen manages this even in a quite long scene with a lot of different characters, which, believe me, is a tricky kind of scene to write.

Let me just add that Allen also works a lot more description into her dialogue than either Scalzi or Zelazny, often with very beautiful unexpected metaphors and analogies worked in, like charm sparkling like sunlight and, oh, lots of examples – read the book.

Now, where does Allen stand on the adverb question? Let’s take a look:

“I’m sorry,” she immediately said. “I didn’t mean to –”

“Win, you know my brother would be alive today if it weren’t for her mother,” Morgan said tightly.

“No one in town has ever said a word about that night,” Win said calmly.

“Like I said, I didn’t know her well,” Julia said carefully.

These kinds of tags are not that rare in Allen’s writing; it took me no time to find a good handful of examples. And in every single case, the adverb makes the dialogue more effective. It really does. That “calmly,” given the context, conveys Win’s self-possession, which is his central characteristic. Saying “carefully” in that last line – it’s one more way of signaling the reader that there is a secret Julia is trying not to give away. All these adverbs do something, they’re important, and no, the feel they add to the story could not be conveyed just via the spoken words of dialogue.

So . . . to sum up, my advice is: be aware of the common advice to minimize adverbs and also be aware of why adverbs are considered to detract from dialogue, but do not write off the use of adverbs in dialogue until you’ve studied how authors like Patricia McKillip and Sarah Addison Allen write dialogue. And that goes double for dialogue tags in general: pay attention to how skilled writers handle dialogue tags, and don’t take simplistic advice like “only use ‘said’” or “avoid dialogue tags” too seriously. No simplistic rules can ever substitute for your very own feel for the language.

A few more Adventurous cookies –

Moving right along, we come to –

CHOCOLATE GINGERBREAD MARSHMALLOW BARS

These are meant to look a LOT like ice cream bars. I made a couple different versions, experimenting with different flavors, with different techniques of assembly, and with the amount of marshmallow. I found making a full recipe of marshmallow was better, both to make the cookies look A LOT like ice cream bars and for the marshmallow to balance the cookie and for ease of prep.

To my surprise, I liked this gingerbread version significantly better than the kind I made with plain chocolate cookies and coconut marshmallow. Until this contest, I was under the impression that I didn’t like chocolate combined with ginger. Apparently I was wrong! These are good, not THAT hard, and just plain fun to serve.

2 2/3 C. flour

1 C less 1 Tbsp cocoa powder

1 tsp ground ginger

¾ tsp salt

1/8 tsp baking powder

1 ½ sticks butter

1 stick margarine

1 C. sugar

2 egg yolks – here’s what to do with the yolks if you used the whites for the paciencia!

1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger

1 recipe marshmallows, prepared like THIS, but with 1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger and 1 C. minced crystallized ginger added.

Combine the flour, cocoa, ginger, salt, and baking powder. Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg yolks and grated ginger. Chill the dough thirty minutes or so. Divide in half. Roll out each half, between a sheet of parchment paper and a sheet of waxed paper, to a 12 x 8 inch rectangle. Peel off the waxed paper and trim the edges so you have two nice straight-edged rectangles, still on the parchment paper.. Poke holes in the dough with the end of thermometer or similar blunt instrument – you want the holes to look like the ones in ice cream sandwiches. Lift the paper with the rolled-out dough onto baking sheets and bake at 350 degrees for 16-18 minutes, until set. Try not to overbake. Cool completely on the baking sheets because if you try to lift the parchment paper up, the cookie sheets will break, which isn’t a total disaster because the marshmallow will disguise a lot of flaws, but try not to break the cookies if possible.

Now, fit one cookie into a shallow 13 x 9 inch baking dish, which you have prepared by lining it with foil and spraying the foil and sides of the dish with cooking spray. Now prepare the marshmallow and pour it over the cookie, working fairly briskly because it is easier to spread while warm. Top with the second cookie sheet. Cover the dish loosely with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature overnight to let the marshmallow set.

The next morning, use the foil to slide the whole shebang out of the baking dish. Use a pizza cutter sprayed with cooking spray to trim extra marshmallow away from the edges. (You can eat that extra marshmallow as a reward for tackling this recipe – not that it’s that hard, honest.)

Cut into bars about the size and shape of ice cream bars. I found a 3 x 2 inch bar looked nice. The best way to cut the cookie is to use a sharp serrated knife to gently saw through the top cookie, then press straight down through the marshmallow and bottom cookie layer. Dip the edges of the marshmallow into cornstarch if you wish, to keep them from sticking to everything. I am pretty sure you will get admiring comments when you serve these. Plus, they’re really good. I kind of overdosed on the first batch I made.

CHOCOLATE ORANGE PINENUT SPIRALS

I saw a picture that looked nice in a cooking magazine, but totally changed the dough. I didn’t add enough orange when I made them; I’m going to suggest ingredients that should significantly bounce the orange flavor, but I admit I haven’t actually tried the cookies again with the adjusted ingredients.

1 C. butter

4 oz cream cheese

1 C brown sugar

1 egg yolk

½ tsp orange extract (I didn’t include this in my trial run, but I think I should have)

2 Tbsp Grand Marnier OR orange juice concentrate

2 ½ C. flour

¼ C. cocoa powder

½ C. ground pine nuts or other nuts

A filling to make sandwich cookies with, if you wish – for the contest, I used an ordinary chocolate ganache with a bit of orange extract and a good pinch of cayenne. This was fine, but a caramel-orange filling would be a good choice, or my brother suggested vanilla ice cream, which I am pretty sure would be fabulous. But the cookies aren’t bad at all just as-is.

Cream the butter, cream cheese, and sugar. Beat in the egg yolk and orange flavorings. Add flour. Divide the dough into two portions. Add the cocoa to one half and the ground nuts to the other half. Chill about an hour. Roll out each portion between two sheets of waxed paper to a 16 x 8 rectangle. Peel the top sheet of paper off the nut layer and use the other sheet of waxed paper to help you lay it over the chocolate layer. You do want the chocolate layer on the bottom because it is going to be stiffer than the nut layer, which will make it easier to roll the dough up jelly-roll style if you have the chocolate layer on the bottom. (Yes, I am speaking from experience.) Roll up the two layers together into a nice tight spiral. This is not at all difficult. Wrap the log of dough in plastic wrap and chill until very firm – several hours or overnight.

Slice the log ¼ inch thick and lay the slices on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 9 to 11 minutes, until set and just a little browned on the bottom. Cool completely on racks. Use whatever filling you like to assemble into sandwich cookies, if you like. These are pretty and impressive and really not at all difficult.

Enjoy!

Recent Listening: A Hat Full of Sky

So, I ran up to St Louis yesterday to do some (fun) errands, which let me finally finish listening to A HAT FULL OF SKY by Terry Pratchett. Which was really very good, of course. It’s supposed to be YA, but I don’t know, I think it’s actually MG — Tiffany is only 11 in the story. There are, it turns out, four stories in the Tiffany series: THE WEE FREE MEN, A HAT FULL OF SKY, WINTERSMITH, and I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT. Naturally I am listening to them out of order, because I didn’t happen to have burned the first one to cds yet. I’ll go back and pick that one up first before going on to the later two, and it may take awhile to get to any of them because I won’t be showing again till next fall. I’m thinking of using audiobooks while weeding next spring, though. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?

ANYWAY. I usually don’t go out of my way to read MG, but there are exceptions — Diana Wynne Jones, for example. And Terry Pratchett is like DWJ in that all of his books are likely to appeal to adults, even if they’re more aimed at children. And though I’m not that interested in his earlier books, it’s hard to beat his later ones — and all the Tiffany books count as later, imo.

So, anyway. Pratchett caught the small personal concerns of a child as well as the big concerns of an adult. I loved Tiffany! I was right there with her in her impatience and distaste for dealing with some of the daily concerns of a witch — witches as social workers: that was certainly new. I was with how Tiffany grew and changed through the course of the story, but didn’t ever become too perfect. I enjoyed watching her figure out Mistress Weatherwax. I really appreciated how some of the minor characters stayed themselves (Anagrama) or else chaged pretty dramatically (Petula). (Sorry if I don’t have the spelling quite right, I was listening to the book, remember, not reading it, so these are phoenetic spellings.)

Now I’m looking forward to going back and picking up THE WEE FREE MEN.

Now, about those errands I was running: what am I going to do with this fennel bulb? I ran up to Global Foods, see, to renew my supply of Chaokoh coconut milk (very important!), so you can see this was a fun errand, not the tedious annoying sort. I only get up to Global Foods a couple times a year, see. They have just about everything! They hang flags in the aisles so you can see what counry’s food is in that aisle. I always go up and down all the aisles. I get pressed tofu, which I like, and things like couscous, which they have in bulk, and of course I look carefully at the fascinating produce. Hence the fennel bulb. I also got some beautiful baby bok choi and beech mushrooms, bean sprouts, dates and figs, quinoa — my mother wanted some and I like it ground into flour and used in baking — I already have lemon grass in the freezer, but I picked up some lovely poblanos and jalapenos. I tried hard to exercise self-control, but jeeze.

I always try to pick up something new to me, and I always give way to the urge to pick up something indulgent. I wanted anduille, but they were out, very disappointing. I forgot to look for dried Chinese sausages, alas. I picked up shrimp balls, used in South Asian soups, which were both new to me AND indulgent. I looked at lamb and goat, but it was too expensive. I got whole grain barley flour, which I’m almost out of, and chickpea flour, which I like for making various Indian dishes.

Then I came home and made soup with the shrimp balls and bok choi and the beech mushrooms and a handful of bean sprouts. It was very good,which was nice, because I sure didn’t follow the recipe. Even my mother loved it. I also made beef satay with peanut sauce, which was excellent. Today, pad thai. Lots of good things in store over the next few days. Ah, cooking, the hobby that is truly its own reward! But I still have no idea what to do with this bulb of fennel.

So, here we are in 2013 –

And you know what I just realized?

That I may need to get moving if I want to be able to nominate / vote on the Hugo this year! The 2013 WorldCon website wasn’t working for me a few months ago when I tried to buy a voting membership, but I expect the problem, whatever it was, has fixed itself in the interim. And I do want to be eligible to vote, because though I don’t expect to attend WorldCon this year, I really enjoyed reading and arguing about the nominees last year. Plus, my brother commented that amazingly enough Hugo nominees seemed better than average, as two of his favorite books last year were nominees. AMONG OTHERS and LEVIATHAN WAKES. Neither of those made my top ten for the year, but they both were indeed really good.

Plus! The novellas last year were REALLY good. And I would NEVER HAVE READ THEM if not for the Hugo Voter’s packet. Since I don’t seek out short stories or novellas, I wouldn’t even have known they existed except for the Hugo Voter’s packet. As it is, hey, I’ve got ‘em on my hard drive right here, which is great.

The deadline for buying a voting membership in time to nominate works for consideration is Jan 31st. I think I’m actually eligible to nominate because of buying last year’s Hugo membership, but I’d better check! I’m sure you all know that anybody at all can buy a voting membership and vote on the Hugo, right? Yes, it costs $60, but on the other hand, you do get the Hugo’s Voter Packet, which is a free electronic packet containing all the finalists, provided by the publishers. This means that you can read ALL the Hugo finalists without breaking a huge gaping hole in your book budget. Not to be sneezed at, right?

Last year I read all the novels, the novellas, the novelettes, and the short stories. I watched some of the movies, but none of the short-form visual stuff. I didn’t watch the podcasts and I didn’t look up the artists and I didn’t know anything about the fan awards. This year I want to include at least the artists in my vote, and maybe the podcasts, and MAYBE even the films. You get the podcasts in the Voter’s Packet, so no need to go track them down.

So! Supposing you all say WOW THIS SOUNDS LIKE FUN, what books came out in 2012 that you might like to nominate?

The problem is that I personally NEVER get anything like caught up with current titles, not even the very highly recommended titles, because, well, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m sure you feel the same way.

I have some predictions, though. Whether you or I nominate them or not, the final set of nominees will include: RAILSEA by China Mieville and THE KILLING MOON and/or THE SHADOWED SUN by NK Jemisen. I have these on my TBR pile downstairs, and after realizing they were going to be eligible for the Hugo this year, I moved them to the top. I am really pretty sure to love them all. I need to read them! But probably not much before it is actually time to vote.

But what titles are there that may well be fighting for their share of well-deserved nominating votes? The other 2012 titles I have downstairs are THE SERPENT SEA by Martha Wells, which you know I loved; and THE RAVEN BOYS by Stiefvater, which I know is the first of a series — I am not normally inclined to vote for any part of a seires until the series is completely finished — and RUINS by Orson Scott Card. Which is the second book of a series, and I sort of expect there is a third book coming, but I don’t know for sure.

I know the Book Smugglers have already said they’re nominating THREE PARTS DEAD by Max Gladstone, SEER OF SEVENWATERS by Juliet Marillier, and A FACE LIKE GLASS by Frances Hardinge, none of which I have read. I really loved the first book of the Sevenwaters series and frankly had not realized there were so many more set in that universe. Frances Hardinge had been on my radar because everyone keeps insisting I MUST try her, and yes, yes, I believe you all, but back to the thing about limited hours.

What else ought to be nominated?

And . . . let me just mention here . . . very modestly at the very end of this post . . . but (clears throat): HOUSE OF SHADOWS also came out in 2012 and is eligible. Just sayin’.

Recent listening: REDSHIRTS

Okay, this review over at The Book Smugglers didn’t encourage me to run out and get the book. Though actually, if you check out this list, you’ll see that Thea went on to include it on her honorable mention list for 2012. (Also HOUSE OF SHADOWS, which I know, I mentioned before, but hey.) To summarize Thea’s review very very briefly: She loved REDSHIRTS but hated the three short stories included as codas after the main book, considering them self-indulgent and not in keeping with the spirit of the zany novel that precedes them.

Well, I got this in audio format because Audible was offering a 2-for-1 sale right before Christmas, and when I needed to drive to St Louis . . . um . . . eight times? in quick succession, this is one of the books I choose to listen to. Thus finding out, btw, that one cd will last exactly long enough to get from my house to the reproductive vet, which is a good thing to know.

And I don’t know. I mean, I do know about the main story! REDSHIRTS is hilarious, fast-paced, zippy, and definitely loads of fun as an audiobook. I laughed out loud many times while listening to it. I loved the way Ensign Dahl gradually figured out what was going on with his ship being caught up in “The Narrative” and I loved the way he used The Narrative to beat itself. I definitely don’t want to say too much about this because I would hate to spoil all the clever details for anybody, but trust me on this, this is a delightful story and a perfect choice for a longish (say, six hour) drive.

But I hadn’t realized that it is only four cds long and that the other two cds were the short stories. Naturally I listened to them – I mean, regardless of Thea’s review, when you’re driving you’re kind of a captive audience. And yes, those short stories really are a lot more serious in tone than the novel, but I didn’t hate them. In particular, I quite liked the one about Jenkin’s wife. If any of you have read this yet, what did you think of the coda stories?

More Adventurous Cookies

I’m just posting a couple at a time because, hey, don’t want to overwhelm everyone with cool possible recipes. But check these out:

SWEET POTATO-CHOCOLATE-GINGER PILLOWS

I admit that my first attempt at sweet potato cookies were a major flop. I knew exactly the texture I wanted: cakey and soft and pillowy. What I got was far too moist and sticky, a total waste of excellent chocolate. I’d tried a variation on a pumpkin cookie, but I was so disappointed in the result that I switched completely to a recipe that originally used sour cream, for which I substituted an equal amount of cooked pureed sweet potato. Then I changed the spicing and added fresh grated ginger and chopped bittersweet chocolate and, well, here you go:

4 ½ C. flour

4 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 tsp nutmeg, preferably freshly grated

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp cayenne

½ C. margarine – this will give a softer, more cake-like texture than butter – I used a brand that is only about 50% fat, which is going to give an even softer texture.

8 oz cream cheese – again, this helps give a soft texture

2 C. sugar

2 eggs

1 C. cooked pureed sweet potato, or I imagine pumpkin would be fine.

2 tsp grated fresh ginger

1 ½ C. finely chopped bittersweet chocolate, or you can use mini chocolate chips. Or, for that matter, you can leave out the chocolate. I thought these cookies were really good without chocolate. I made them without chocolate first, see, because I was afraid of wasting more great chocolate on another flop. But this version was fine.

Filling:

6 oz cream cheese

3 C. powdered sugar

½ Tbsp grated fresh ginger

½ C. minced crystallized ginger

Combine the dry ingredients. Cream the margarine and cream cheese with the sugar. Beat in the eggs, sweet potato, and grated ginger. Stir in the flour mixture. Chill at least one hour.

Roll out the dough 3/8 inch thick (measure it, this is thicker than you may expect). Even after chilling, the dough will be soft. Roll it out with a light touch, adding as little extra flour as possible – rolling it out thick will help here. But don’t be obsessive about it, they’ll be fine if you do have to use a bit more flour. Cut out cookies with a 3 inch round cookie or biscuit cutter and place on parchment-lined baking sheets. Re-roll the scraps and cut out more cookies. Was quite pleased with the texture of these cookies even after the dough had been re-rolled three times. Anyway, when you get as many cookies cut out as possible, bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, until set and just browned on the bottom. Cool on sheets for a few minutes and then cool completely on racks.

Combine the filling ingredients, adding enough powdered sugar to make a decently thick and spreadable filling, and assemble the cookies.

DEATH BY HAZELNUT CHOCOLATE COOKIES

For these, I started with a chocolate-hazelnut cookie I found online, which had garnered comments such as “More like a dog biscuit than a cookie.” Obviously lots of room for improvement there! I punched up the sugar a lot and added English Toffee Bits. I also made a kind of homemade Nutella as the filling, but nothing stops you from using actual Nutella, which I think would work great. Also,I know hazelnuts are super expensive; I think I’ll try these again with walnuts and I bet that will work just fine. If you try this recipe with some other kind of nut, let me know how it works out!

1 C. butter

½ C. sugar

½ C. brown sugar

¼ tsp salt

1 egg

1 Tbsp Frangelico, or ½ tsp hazelnut extract, or hey, both – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as hazelnut extract until I happened to fortuitously stumble across it at the right moment.

½ tsp vanilla

4 Tbsp cocoa

1 ¾ C. flour

2 ¼ C. chopped toasted hazelnuts, divided

½ C. English Toffee Bits

If you want to make your own hazelnut filling:

1 C. toasted hazelnuts

2 Tbsp sugar

8 oz bittersweet chocolate

¼ C. butter

½ C. cream – I used coconut milk because of contest rules, but really I suggest you just use cream.

2 tsp Frangelico or ¼ tsp hazelnut extract

If you have untoasted hazelnuts, toast them: spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 13-18 minutes, until decidedly golden in color, shaking occasionally. Cool. Rub off skins by wrapping in a kitchen towel and rubbing briskly.

Make the hazelnut filling: Combine the hazelnuts with the sugar in a food processor and grind into a gritty paste. Melt the chocolate with the butter. Whisk the cream into the chocolate mixture. Whisk in Frangelico and/or the hazelnut extract. Whisk in the nut paste. Chill until thickened.

Make the cookies: Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the salt, the egg, the Frangelico and / or hazelnut extract, the vanilla, and the cocoa powder. Stir in the flour and 1 ½ C. chopped nuts and the toffee bits. Spoon down the middle of two sheets of plastic wrap. Use the plastic wrap to help you form the dough into two logs (which is a bit soft, but you can get it shaped into logs if you work at it for a minute). Freeze the logs overnight. Roll each log in the remaining chopped nuts. Slice ¼ inch thick and place on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 375 degrees for 6-8 minutes, just until set. Try not to overbake. Cool a minute or so on the sheets, then cool completely on racks.

Assemble into sandwich cookies. Unusually for sandwich cookies, I think these are significantly better the day they are assembled, while the toffee bits retain some crunch. If I make them again, I will keep the filling separate and assemble cookies right before serving.

And! A tidbit of good news I almost forgot!

Over at The Book Smugglers? Scroll WAYYYY down, and you will find that HOUSE OF SHADOWS made Thea’s list for Honorable Mentions for 2012.

That’s H of S’s second appearance on a best-of list at The Book Smugglers during their Smugglivus . . . that I know of. I kind of fell behind in reading ALL the Smugglivus posts. Though I read enough that my wishlist kind of exploded.

Adventurous Cookies

I wound up submitting nine cookie recipes for the Scharffen Berger Adventure Coookie Contest – I couldn’t quite get the caramel filling to work out or I would have submitted a variation of one of these, making ten recipes, which was the maximum allowed. But hey, coming up with nine good recipes in one month, I’m pretty happy with that. One took three tries before I thought it was okay to submit, but some I did hit on the first try.

I suspect most entries must surely come from professionals, so I don’t know that any of my recipes have much of a chance – but hey, I did develop some great recipes! So it was definitely worth the trouble to enter. Next year I will try to remember to check out this contest in October, which is when it started this year. Three months to work on recipes would be much better than trying to do it all in one month!

Here are the cookies I submitted:

Pine Nut Orange Florentines

Chocolate-Coconut Paciencia

Chocolate-Sweet Potato-Ginger Pillows

Gingerbread-Marshmallow Bars

Chocolate Pinenut Orange Spirals

Death By Hazelnut Chocolate Cookies

Mayan End-Of-The-World Chocolate Cookies

Aztec Gold Cookies

And (my favorite) Taste For Adventure Triple Ginger Chocolate Cookies

So! I know some of you bake! Here are the first couple recipes! If you try any of them, I’d be interested in what you think.

PINE NUT-ORANGE FLORENTINES

For this cookie, I just took an ordinary Florentine-style cookie, substituted chopped pine nuts for sliced almonds, added Grand Marnier and orange zest – I think orange goes well with pine nuts and, of course, chocolate. Then I used melted chocolate to sandwich the cookies together. These didn’t turn out super-fancy because it was hard to get the cookies perfectly round – if I was trying it again, I’d chop the pine nuts a bit finer, chill the dough, and see if I could form the dough into little tiny balls rather than trying to drop the dough on the cookie sheets. If you try this, let me know how they come out.

½ C. butter

2/3 C. sugar

2 Tbsp cream

2 Tbsp corn syrup

1/3 C. all-purpose flour

½ tsp vanilla

2 tsp orange liqueur such as Grand Marnier

¼ tsp orange extract

2 Tbsp orange zest

1 C. finely chopped pine nuts (or other nuts – I actually prefer almost every other kind of nut to pine nuts. I’d probably use walnuts here if I did this again, but hey, I’m not the boss of you. Sliced almonds or pecans or whatever would be great, but take it from me, you aren’t going to be able to roll the dough into neat balls if you use sliced almonds, which are too pointy.

1 C. bittersweet chocolate, melted

Combine the butter, sugar, cream, and corn syrup in a saucepan. Heat until mixture reaches 230 degrees, stirring frequently. Remove from heat and stir in flour and all the orange flavorings. Stir in the chopped nuts.

Drop onto parchment-lined baking sheets by rounded ½ tsp (or chill dough and roll into tiny balls). Bake at 350 degrees for 8-11 minutes, until caramelized and lightly browned. Cool on the paper. When the cookies are cool, they will lift right off the paper.

Melt the chocolate. Brush chocolate on the underside of one cookie and sandwich with another cookie of similar size and shape. If you like, drizzle more melted chocolate across the tops of the sandwich cookies.

CHOCOLATE-COCONUT PACIENCIA

Paciencia are Filipino meringue cookies. I simply substituted cocoa powder for a bit of the flour – you substitute 2 Tbsp cocoa for every Tbsp flour you take out – and then I added coconut extract, then made a chocolate ganache with coconut milk and coconut extract. I got these to work perfectly once, but the second time I couldn’t get the egg whites to whip stiff enough. It might, I admit, have been lack of patience. I mean, these cookies get their name for a reason. Below, I’ll provide every possible suggestion for getting the egg whites to whip really stiff. On a day when you’re feeling patient, you really should try these – they’re quite addictive when they work.

2 egg whites

½ C. sugar

¼ tsp coconut extract

¼ C. + 1 Tbsp flour

2 Tbsp cocoa powder

1/8 tsp baking powder

6 oz bittersweet chocolate

4 oz thick coconut milk from the top of an unshaken can, or 4 oz heavy cream – it doesn’t make any difference, I just used the coconut milk because it was an “adventure” ingredient.

1 tsp coconut extract

Beat the egg whites until quite stiff. Don’t use totally fresh eggs – they should be at least a week old. Bring the egg whites to room temperature before you beat them – leave them sitting in the bowl for at least half an hour before you start beating them, and an hour is better. You know you mustn’t have a speck of yolk in the egg whites, right? Before you start, you might wash the beaters and bowl in hot soapy water even if they’re already clean, just to make absolutely sure there’s not a trace of grease anywhere. But then give everything plenty of time to dry completely because even a drop of water can interfere with egg whites whipping. I have NEVER had trouble whipping egg whites until these cookies, so don’t let me scare you away from trying them. I think all the sugar and stuff interferes a lot more than just whipping the egg whites by themselves.

So, as I said, beat the egg whites until quite stiff before you start to add the sugar. I think that’s where I went wrong, starting to add the sugar before the egg whites were stiff. You can tell whether the egg whites are stiff by switching off the mixer and lifting the beaters straight up, btw – the peaks left in behind in the egg whites should stand up straight, not fold over. Standing up straight means you have whipped the egg whites to “stiff peaks”.

Okay! Gradually beat in the sugar, a Tbsp at a time. Only when you have stiff peaks AND all the sugar has been added should you beat in the coconut extract. Now: combine the flour, cocoa powder, and baking powder and beat that in. You should still have stiff peaks. If the mixture has partially collapsed again, beat it some more. I swear, the first time I made these the whole process only took about ten minutes.

Spoon the batter into a pastry bag (or a zip lock bag with the tip of one corner cut off) and pipe quarter-sized mounds onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake at 400 degrees until lightly toasted, 12-15 minutes, trading the positions of the baking sheets halfway through to compensate for any hot spots in your oven. Cool the cookies on the baking sheets. When cool, the cookies will lift right off the parchment paper.

Make the ganache: heat the coconut milk or cream with the chocolate in your microwave and stir until smooth. Stir in the coconut extract. Set the ganache aside until it thickens, about 30 to 40 minutes. Assemble sandwich cookies, but don’t eat any yet – they are super-crisp and will be much better if you continue with the patience. Store the cookies overnight at room temp in an air-tight container. NOW pick up a good book and settle down with these softened, chewy cookies for a real treat – they are quite wonderful.

Okay, you’ll find the next cookie recipes I’ll post will be much more foolproof!

Recent reading: In the Land of Invented Languages

Which is a nonfiction book by Arika Okrent.

What an interesting name, isn’t it? I mean the author’s name. Arika Okrent. Doesn’t that seem like a great name for a linguist?

Actually, Okrent has a double PhD, in linguistics and psychology, and it sure shows in this book. I got it for Christmas, and it turned out to be fascinating, a great book to start off the new year. It’s exactly what the title says it is: a book about invented languages – well, no, actually, it’s a book about the kinds of people who invent languages, and about what they’re trying to achieve when they invent a language, and about what features make natural languages succeed when (nearly) all artificial languages are complete failures. It’s also really well written and just fun to read.

Do you have any idea how many people have sat down throughout history and invented their own language? Hundreds and hundreds, it turns out – maybe thousands. “The nine hundred languages, over nine hundred years, we do have evidence for,” Okrent says, “suggest that the urge to invent languages is as old and persistent as language itself.” Wow. Who knew?

Apparently the most common motivations for inventing a language are:

a) To improve on existing languages – to design a language that is logical and consistent and unambiguous and which reveals the Truth of things – and then to convert everybody to your wonderful language.

b) To encourage universal understanding among peoples and thus create world peace.

c) To play with language as a game and hobby.

I bet it won’t surprise you to learn that the only artificial languages that have ever succeeded at all – that people have ever voluntarily learned and spoken and translated Hamlet into – belong to the third type.

Language inventers who go in with the intention to design a new language that everybody will swoon over and learn and give up their own languages for, a new language that will clarify the true nature of everything in the universe and prevent misunderstandings and promote world peace – yeah, those people are pretty much all nuts. It’s like the language inventor gets consumed by some odd combination of delusions of grandeur and obsessiveness. This does not lead to good things for the poor language inventors, who often become quite bitter when things don’t work out as they imagined.

None of that applies, however, to languages designed for fun – obviously Tolkien falls into this group – or to be fun things to participate in. There are two successful artificial languages, it turns out – I mean, languages normal people can actually learn and hold a conversation in. You know what those are? Yeah, Esperanto (Okrent spends plenty of time on Esperanto, the greatest success story in the world of invented languages), but what do you think the other one is? Right, you got it – Klingon. That strikes me as kind of wonderful. Though I sure don’t plan to learn Klingon, which is apparently really difficult. I mean, I had a hard enough time with French in high school, so count me out for Klingon. But after reading Okrent’s book, I can see why some people get absorbed in the language as a hobby.

The guy who designed Klingon, Marc Okrand, is a linguist who got roped in for the job by Paramont. He worked out a full grammar, and it’s a wonderful job: believable, alien, difficult, flexible. Klingon is an agglutinating language that tags all kinds of prefixes and suffixes onto base words – it has twenty-six noun suffixes, twenty-nine pronominal prefixes, thirty-six verb suffixes, on and on. It has features similar to things in Italian, Turkish, Korean, Native American languages – all kinds of stuff that seems really strange if English is your native language. Okrent says the language came out “completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd.”

Here’s a Klingon proverb, just as an example: Dubotchugh yIpummoH – If it’s in your way, knock it down. Or literally, Du (it-you) bot (block) chugh (if) yI (imperative) pum (fall) moH (cause).

Isn’t that interesting? No, come on, isn’t it?

Compare that to this, possibly my favorite in the get-real world of invented languages:

hi jun pa bol, “ciq ven! – gozi ben gozi fu bau han ceq, kai han turo kai toilsa xaq hu sta skai. hikai gozi fu tenho feimkian por sam ke gozi be fintir ko kujai hu sta to dunia.”

Which means: “and letter-pronoun-j past speak, “invite come! I-you future build one city, and one tower and letter-pronoun-t separator-particle top which is-located-in-sky. And you-I future have-become fame-name-for-prevent that I-you passive spread-throw to all-place which is-located-in the world.”

Got that? No? Well, it started off as “Let us build a city with a tower whose top may reach unto Heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

That one is from a language called Ceqli, invented in the nineties, and apparently all that I-you pronoun-t stuff is the best it can do with the story of Babel. Wow, I’m sure that one will convert everyone away from their native languages. I do find it hard to imagine that language inventers actually think their languages are going to sweep the world, but evidently they often do think so.

And there are plenty of languages that are harder to pronounce, or harder to understand, or both. Okrent spends quite a bit of time on something called Philosophical Language, invented by John Wilkins in the sixteen hundreds, in which the words weren’t supposed to stand for things, they were actually supposed to define things. Like, everything in the universe. You couldn’t use a word without knowing exactly what you meant. Okrent says she “I settled in for a long weekend with [Wilkin’s Philosophical Language] . . . I emerged blinking and staggering, unsure of whether any word in any language meant anything at all.”

But you know what she realized, after working with Wilkin’s huge tome on his language and its concepts? Not that a conceptual language of this kind is totally impossible, she already knew that. No, she realized that Wilkins might not have invented a usuable language, but he had invented a thesaurus. How about that?

One more quick note: an otherwise completely unusable pictorial language called Blissymbolics (invented by a guy named Charles Bliss) actually is used today to communicate with children with cerebral palsy and teach them written English so they can communicate with anybody, when before they really couldn’t communicate with anybody. Bliss himself was definitely nutty and actually tried to prevent the rehab center from using his language (since they were “doing it all wrong”), but still, how many of us can say we’ve done something as important as open a doorway for communication with otherwise mute children?

Anyway, a great book.

This is a really neat book, an excellent choice to start off the new year.