Dianne Pearce's Blog, page 3

DON’T FORGET!

It’s not to late to get your work in INSTANT NOODLES!

Find out all about it HERE

Or HERE

My Enemy Is Not My Enemy: Perfection Is My Enemy

Shhhh. Everyone is sleeping at my house. My messy house. My house that is part house, part pet rescue (and I have just risen and lit a candle, burning my finger in the process, because of what someone… who shall remain nameless (Finney) has just done to the litterbox), part office, part school, part dorm room (once your kid tops 15 your house becomes more of a dorm than a home), part respite center (for my relative who stays here during treatments), and 100% rented, in fact the rent was just raised this month.

I want to say this to my fellows: my ADHD buddies who recently figured out that’s what’s been going on all these years, or who knew it all along, my fellows coping with parental estrangement, my fellows blooming late, or trying for a second or third bloom, my fellows who sometimes push things to the side so they can sit at the table and eat (move the computer, bottles of vitamins, child’s homework, couple of bills, stray fruit from the bowl, to the right and sit down and enjoy the meal, dammit!), my fellows heating up their coffee for the… fourth? time, my possibly low-grade lonely or depressed fellows, my fellows with stick-up straight bed hair, or the rotten haircut, or the inevitable hair loss, my fellows of the wide waist, or short stature, or clumsy feet, or poor eyesight, my fellows of the resilient smiles, I want to say this: what you did was good, and you should appreciate it.

For example, I give you my peach somethings, pictured above. I got the idea that my daughter and I might try to take her amazing pot pie on the road by making it hand-held. My daughter loves pie crust, and I thought she might like puff pastry. It’s been years since I worked with puff pastry. Of course, being just a dormer here, when I thought we might make the chicken handy sandwiches, she got invited to join the gang from 9th grade at the movies, Minecraft, at also the movie is at the mall, and we have a good mall, so to hell with hand pies. And I 100% agree. But I also have my visiting relative, and this morning, as usual, I am up hours before the rest and a couple before the sun, and I got out a bag of frozen peaches, and one of the puff pastry sheets and thought, “Let’s do this thing. Nice with coffee.” And it’s been a minute since I used puff pastry. I had thawed it in the fridge, as recommended, and when I unrolled my roll the whole things fell to bits like I was trying to make bandages from my petticoat in the civil war. The hell? And, frankly, I wasn’t sure if you, if I, could roll-out puff pastry without it losing its puff, because it’s been a minute. I should have gone Googling, but instead I just plowed ahead with my usual devil-may-care (and, considering my personality, I wonder if mine expression should be angel-may-care?), and rolled the pastry, on parchment paper, with flour, a little. Enough to give me some pieces big enough to use as a base. And then I cut the others into quick strips with the pizza cutter, which I am a little squeamish to use, having just finished watching the (mostly) excellent Killing Eve) and glued the thing together with macerated peaches, corn starch, dollops of cold butter (one square for the peach thing, one square for me, because :butter), and egg wash, placed the upon fresh parchment, and threw them in a 400 degree oven and looked at them after 9 minutes, and then again when I remembered and smelt them (about three minutes more). 

The puffiness of the puff pastry is not quite there, not quite the delicate peeling flower I had hoped for. “There are layers there,” Paul Hollywood might say to me someday.

Imperfect, but still some flake

It is crisp, and there is burnt peach goo around them on the paper, which is like the red glass on a candied apple in the way it hits my molars, and I like the taste. And then, of course, I made whipped cream, which, if you have a food processor, is as easy to make as falling off a log. The peaches in the pastry are just a bit tart, which is perfect because my whipped cream is always a tad too sweet, probably because I was raised on Cool Whip. Listen, those containers made good Tupperware, and no one in the 70s who wasn’t Julia Child made real whipped cream. The thought was scandalous. Cool Whip, and it’s disgusting and shelf stable cousin Reddi Whip exist because moms were expected to make dessert often, if not for every meal, and real cream cost money, and who had expensive food processors or stand mixers? And, probably, with the incredible destabilization of the United States Trump has forced on us, cream will be pricey again, and RFKJr. will try to sell us on preservatives, as soon as The White House communicates to him that everything real has gotten too expensive, and also they have stock in Conagra. Yep, did you not know it? Raging liberal here. In any case, for a warm morning treat directly from the oven, with real whipped cream, and strong coffee to drink is A-ok, and better than a lot of people are having this morning, which is not to snub those people, but to say to those of you also offering imperfect baked goods to your loved ones: they’re gonna love them, and they’re (hopefully) gonna appreciate that not everyone has them, and you have made them lucky by your (imperfect) efforts and your perfect love.

So, dammit, write the damn book. If you need help getting to the finish line you can ask me. I’ll help you. And when your book is finished, and published, and out in the world, a few people are going to read it, and some of them will love it, and some of them will like it, and so on. It will be, no matter who you work with and no matter how many times you polish it, imperfect, and meaningful, and enjoyed. So learn to embrace the messy with the neat, the sweet with the too sweet, or too sour, the perfect lamination and flaky layers with the slightly squished layers covered by whipped cream. What you can do, and the way you do it, no one else can do, and it’s time here is fleeting. Make the most of your time to share yourself, and leave a bit of you for those who come behind.

Love ya’~

Check out one of the many blog posts I authored for another blog today!

Where Oh Where Can Your Work Be Found?

IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 15: MY NEW FAVORITE BAND

Wake up and rock out!

I love finding music I would not normally find.
This musician, from Los Angeles, calls the music glimmer rock.
All I know is that it is fantastic and over too quickly.

God save the queens!

I need something like this right now. Something that feels punk, and resistant, and full of a big fuck you to oppressors everywhere.

Duh, weirdos who want to go back to 1950, it’s not the conservative spending goals we dislike, it’s the hate and cruelty you seem to so enjoy.

Well, I don’t enjoy it. So god save the queens! Let’s play it again!

Try this one too!

Everything’s fine, when it’s clearly not.

Another sweet tune:

Truly, some people are not happy about things changing.

Well, not me. I may not get everything that’s below me in age, but I am here for it.

Here is an article on the Wonderland EP.

You should probably buy the EP, by the way. I did. All the cool weirdos did. I am here for the weirdos.

And, dammit, save the queens!

Hang tough all the wonderful DEI people, the women, the immigrants, the LGBTQii+, and all the allies too!
I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this mess, but I do believe we will.

Or we’ll move.

Buy a copy of Vienna Vienna’s soon to be hit song “God Save the Queens” and the EP Wonderland!

A Very Sad and Very Fond Farewell to Stan Charnofsky

Please stop by to find out all about the wonderful Stan who has recently flown away.

New Post Up At Medium

Check it out here.

New Post Up At Author’s Electric: RIP My Dearest One

See the post here.

IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 14: I’M IN YOU

I cannot believe how long it has been since I last did one of these posts.

Well, I’m back baby.

Again.

Listen, let this be a bit of information for all you scribblers of any sorts, you can always go back to it. You are the rules, so hop back in.

I got the vinyl going today, sitting at my desk with the front door open to let in the Los Angeles version of chilly weather. It’s delightful.

I rearranged my “office” a few weeks ago, and now the record player is right up against my desk. Let me get you a photo:

Oh, mama, lookie who is there, just looking at me. He’s positively smoldering at the sight of me! I honestly don’t know if I’m worthy. But he seems to think so.

I’m In You, the album you see there, is a very underrated album. First of all, 1970s albums that are less hard-rock, but still rock, have that sort of high-pitched, lightly plucked sound that I think of sort of orginating with Jefferson Airplane, like “Love, Lovely Love.” It comes across as a spring sound to my ears. So if you think of The Beach Boys and etc. as the sound of summer, Frampton could win for sound of spring, because he does that soft, twang guitar and laid back sound I just love. I grew up in Philly, where I always think the best season is spring, because it’s cool but not humid. Fall can be too hot and humid even as the leaves change, or freezing cold, but spring is delightful, and, I think, from the 70s to now, has probably shortened by a month or so as summer heats up sooner each year, in my anecdotal experience. If you’re lucky enough to live in Los Angeles you are luck to have that humidty-free, winter-is-not-here-to-stay feeling from, typically, November through July. July, August, and September, unless you’re on the Westside, you’re going to want to be indoors and as naked as possible, but the rest of the year you can float along on this light jacket daytime weather that turns to sweater weather at night, and it’s fantastic. IT makes me get a feeling in my skin that I’m young, that life is full of possibility, that the air smells of flowers. It makes me come alive. Like Frampton.

For this post I want to highlight not a single song per se, but the whole of I’m In You. The album has the gentle vibe of spring weather, full of possibility, but also chill. I want to highlight a song that really hasn’t ever gotten the attention it deserves: “St. Thomas (Don’t You Know How I Feel).”

I could argue that Frampton, who wrote “Do You Feel Like I Feel,” was a bit obsessed with the word feel, because he uses it at least 14 times in this song, but that just makes this song easier to sing along to. The point is not the lyrics. The point is the vibe. This song is a feeling more than a message. There’s a fantastic solo in the middle. And Frampton is a great guitar player. It’s a gentle rocking of a song. Take a listen and see if it doesn’t make you think of spring.

Did your blood pressure just drop five points? You know it did.

Of course, we cannot go forward without mentioning the title track. “I’m In You.”

“I don’t care where I go when I’m with you
When I cry you don’t laugh cause you know me

I’m in you 
You’re in me
You gave me the love, the love that I never had

You and I don’t pretend; we make love
I can’t feel anymore than I’m singing”

And what I always just loved about this song, aside from the idea of me and Frampton being in each other, was the opening line, “I don’t care where I go when I’m with you,” that also ends the song, but I’m gonna make the guess that the final word of the song is “with” and the “you” is not sung, but played by the guitar, which is super cool, and makes it more emotional. It ends on that high note. Frampton seems to be merging the physical with the sound. It’s working for me:

Those 70s guys, damn:

How great was that? So chill.

I have to point out one more song on the album that I have never been able to get enough of, “Signed Sealed and Delivered.”

It’s a Stevie Wodner song, in case you didn’t know, and I am a huge Stevie fan from his 60s and 70s catalogue, and I love this song by Stevie, but I also loved the cover by Frampton. (By the way, my last “it should be half an hour” post was on the Red Hot Chili Peppers who also covered Steve beautifully: “Higher Ground.”)

But, back to Frampton:

I saw this comment on YouTube:

Peter Frampton’s 1977 – “Signed, Sealed, Delivered … I’m Yours” – on his album I’m in You. His version also contains instrumental elements from Wonder’s hit “For Once in My Life” Mick Jagger is featured on backing vocals. Frampton’s version was released as a single. Motown Soul delivered from England’s Peter Frampton. With this re-make of the Classic Stevie Wonder Hit, Frampton topped The Billboard “Hot 100” at #18, and #13 on the Cashbox Top 100, also #13 in Canada.

So, today, as I enjoy the “Punxsutawney Phil Was Wrong” feel of the great Los Angeles weather, I want to offer you the thought to give Frampton a listen. You think The Beach Boys own that nice-weather vibe, but spring is better than summer any day, and Frampton is a great ride you may have missed.

Check out his Tiny Desk concert too:

I don’t know Frampton, but his whole vibe is “gentle soul,” and I love that about him.

Enjoy….

Tired of Paying More for Less on Reedsy?

Did you know that hiring an editor through Reedsy locks you into their platform? You can’t communicate with your editor outside their system, and on top of that, you pay extra fees—while your editor also gets charged from your payment. That’s right—double-dipping at its finest.

But writing thrives on genuine collaboration, not platform restrictions.

That’s why I’m offering a FREE professional edit—so you can experience firsthand what it’s like to work with an editor who’s focused on you, not a platform’s bottom line.

One short story (up to 12 pages)
A chapter (up to 12 pages)
Up to five poems

No strings. No hidden costs. Just real, high-quality feedback to elevate your writing.

As a member of IBPA, EFA, and ACES, I bring industry expertise and a commitment to excellence. In the past year alone, I’ve edited over 75 books and short story collections—and published many of them.

 Pick a time that works for you—any date, any schedule.
 Check out just a teensy bit of my portfolio and see the results for yourself.

Let’s get your writing polished—without the unnecessary fees.

New Post Up at Medium

Check it out!