R.R. Angell's Blog, page 2

Rise of the Starter Culture

Last July I recklessly attempted sourdough bread from scratch. We had a commitment ceremony where I promised to feed and protect my newly born starter, buy suitable glass jars and crockery jugs for the rising tyrant, for better or for worse, et cetera. Well, not for worse, because if it goes bad you kill it and start over. That, in and of itself, is a reason to take care that your sourdough beast lives and thrives because it takes weeks to create one from just flour, water, and wild yeast. I feel like I am making Belgian beer sometimes.

Okay, maybe there wasn’t a ceremony, but living with a sourdough habit is a bit like a relationship. You keep it chill, then warm it up when you need it, and feed it until you know it loves you again. You don’t want to waste anything, so you learn to make all kinds of things from the sourdough discard: pretzels, pizza dough, popovers to name a few, all strangely starting with the letter “P.” But the best thing is making your own super tasty whole wheat sourdough sandwich bread. It takes about three days, including the warm-up feedings, but it is worth it. Seriously.

I keep the starter in the refrigerator most of the time so I don’t have to feed it. About every week, I pull it out and feed it. If we are running out of sandwich bread, then I feed it every 8 or 12 hours to get it super bubbly and then start the bread process. Here’s what it looks like.

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The sleeping starter emerges from the depths of the refrigerator waiting to be fed with equal parts water and flour by weight.

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‘Tis a happy starter that doubles in size four to eight hours after feeding. It’s ready to use!

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Make the levain from the starter. This provides the yeast engine for the bread. Yes, it’s spelled LEVAIN on the King Arthur Baking site.

Then we wait overnight. The levain will double in size and be bubbly. Before it collapses, however, you throw all the flour, water, and any additions like seeds in the mixer and make a dough. Let that rest for two hours and then you can add the salt and the levain. It rises for a couple of hours and will get nice and pillowy. Then you break it into two loaves and put it in the pans, spritzing it with warm water and sprinkling some rolled oats on top. Let them rest, then toss them into the refrigerator overnight.

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After rising in the refrigerator for around 18 hours, I toss them into a preheated 500 degree F oven and turn the heat down to 475. Bake for 20 minutes and turn down to 450. Bake for another 20 and turn down to 425. Finish baking at 425, usually about 10 minutes until the core temperature is between 200 and 210 degrees F. So far, I’ve over cooked them all and will experiment with reducing the higher temperature times to see what effect that has on the finished product. If you haven’t figured out yet, my kitchen is my favorite laboratory.

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Two sourdough bread sandwich loaves fresh from the oven. Cool them on a rack for at least two hours before slicing.

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I have found a bread knife to be indispensable! With practice, you can make the slices any thickness you want.

We go through one loaf per week. I bake ahead, of course, then slice and freeze the loaf we don’t need right away. Baking your own bread takes time, as you can see. Besides being super yummy, you know exactly what is in your bread because you put it there!

Here’s a link to the post that got all this started: Sourdough Starter Starting

If you’d like to see my favorite sourdough multigrain sandwich bread recipe so far, you can see it on the King Arthur Baking Company site here.

Bon appetite!

Tag

In the 1990s, I started writing a bunch of short stories based on liminal moments in my life growing up gay in the 1960s and 1970. Over the next twenty-five plus years, they became the a fictionalized memoir of Steven Sterling, a character very much like me growing up very much like I had grown up only with slightly different characters and arrangements of events. The liminal moments, those singular demarcations in a life where there is no going back, yep, kind of like an epiphany when the world and the understanding of something, usually revolutionary, changes in the protagonist and the reader.

“Tag” was the first story in the collection to be published. The year was 1997. The publication was the fledgling issue of The Baltimore Review. This was before I started the MFA program at American University. Because of the content, one reviewer claimed that this kind of writing had no business being published. I’m sure that only helped the new literary magazine gain some early notoriety, though Barbara Diehl and her staff produced a fantastic magazine that still exists today.

Fresh.Ink, an online magazine that publishes only reprints picked “Tag” up and posted it in November 2020. You can read it here: https://fresh.ink/magazine/8228

You can find The Baltimore Review here: http://www.baltimorereview.org/

My Queer Words Podcast Interview

I couldn’t believe it when Wayne Goodman, the founder of Queer Words Podcast, wanted to interview me for an episode. I had just been selected to be a part of the 2020 Pride Bundle of books, edited by Catherine Lundoff of Queen of Swords Press, that would be available in June (LGBTQ Pride Month if you didn’t know) and was already flying high.

Yes, I was nervous as hell. I’d been a huge fan of Queer Words for over a year at that point. QW is a fabulous way to get to know all kinds of queer writers, artists, and activists that you wouldn’t normally run across in your daily life. Unless you listened to Queer Words, of course. Wayne is a consummate interviewer (he also does the music) and has a set list of questions he asks to all his interviewees, so I already knew the questions he would ask when he called. I was a mess, but Wayne’s skill at sound editing made me sound half-way decent.

But you can be the judge of that. You can listen to it here: https://queerwords.org/2020/10/23/bob-angell/

RADIO HEADS

You’ve heard the phrase “East of Maui?” It used to loosely reference coolness, surfing off the beaten path, something that implied laid back fun, a little irreverent and definitely wild. Last century, a few folks got together a started a surf shop with that name.

This century, I found “East of the Web” and was intrigued. They snagged one of my head swap stories and you can read it here: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RadiHead1159.shtml

My Confluence Schedule for the weekend of Oct 2 – 4, 2020

I’m attending C’Monfluence this weekend, a FREE Virtual Conference. Come join us!

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Link to guest list: https://confluence-sff.org/cmonfluence-2020/cmonfluence-guests/
Link to registration:  https://confluence-sff.org/cmonfluence-registration-2/

My Schedule: Three panels, a reading, and a coffee klatsch where you can come and talk to me in a group setting  

Friday 10/02/2020      6:00 – 6:50      Track 2 – panel            LGBTQ Protagonists in SF/F  “What the title states. Do we need to say more?Duration: 50 minutes. This item will be recorded”      Catherine Lundoff       R R Angell  Kelly Robson   Gail Carriger 

Friday 10/02/2020      8:00 – 8:50      Track 1 – Webinar       Old Dogs, New Tricks            “There may be some newer ways to organize, develop and build your story than using pen and paper. And I ain’t talking about that new-fangled computer thing either. Duration: 50 minutes. This item will be recorded”      J. Thorn   Lawrence Schoen  A.T. Greenblatt Julie Czerneda      R R Angell       

Saturday 10/03/2020 12:00 – 12:25  Track 3 – Reading       Reading                       R R Angell 

Saturday 10/03/2020 2:00 – 2:50      Track 4 – Interactive   Klatsch            “Bring your beverage of choice and come hang out with (insert guest name here).This interactive, social chat is limited to 15 participants. Some spaces will be determined via a lottery system.Duration: 50 minutes.”            Brenda Clough            R R Angell 

Sunday 10/04 11:00 to 11:50            Track 1 – Webinar      Let’s get series-ish      Looking at writing a series. Pitfalls and Pluses. A better precise coming soon!     Martha Wells   R R Angell Michelle Sagara Jennifer Foehner Wells

Links to the daily schedules:

Friday: https://confluence-sff.org/schedule-friday/

Saturday: https://confluence-sff.org/schedule-saturday/

Sunday: https://confluence-sff.org/schedule-sunday/

Sourdough Starter Starting

I have lost my will. I have given in. Curiosity has bitten this cat and it may be fatal. I have risen to the siren call of sourdoughing that has taken so many over the past several months. Forgive me. Expect to find me buried me in homemade bread very soon.

Okay, that isn’t such a dire situation, is it? The internet is full of warnings that keeping a sourdough starter around is like having an extra kid or pet. You have to keep it alive with regular feedings. I’ll go with the pet idea. I need a name for it. Any ideas?

I decided to go with how-to directions from a 230 year old US company that is 100% employee owned. The King Arthur Baking Company makes awesome flour. They also offer free recipes and advice. My nephew gave me one of their giant cookbooks more than a decade ago and I love it. Here’s the link:  https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-starter-recipe

Why now? Have you heard of Dan Buettner? He’s the Blue Zone guy that studies longevity in global communities. He’s trying to figure out why certain people live to 100 years. Homemade sourdough bread seems to be one of the components. Here’s a YouTube of him with Rachael Ray talking about food and longevity.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4MjGC-XX90

The KAB (King Arthur Baking) process for cultivating your own starter is very simple. Start with 113 grams of organic rye flour and add 113 grams of water and leave it alone at room temperature. Every day for a week you discard 113 grams of the stuff and add 113 grams of fresh all purpose flour and 113 grams of water. Here is how the process has gone so far. We’ll get to maintenance in a blog update later on after I get there.

First day:
Photo of rye mix. No bubbles. Sticky lump.

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Second day:
Photo of infant starter. No bubbles. Soft.

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Third day:
Photo of soft starter, a bubble or two.

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Day four:
Sort of goopy starter with bubbles. 

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Did you notice that it says to discard 113 grams of starter every day? That seems wasteful. I couldn’t do it, so I saved my discards into one lump and made crackers out of it. I am now hooked! Here’s a photo of my sourdough discard thyme crackers. The ones on the left have salt. They are delicious.

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Day Five and beyond: coming soon!

Clarion West Write-a-thon Underway!

This summer, I’m writing for an awesome cause—and I need your support.

I’m writing for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, the fundraiser that helps support world-class instruction to empower emerging and underrepresented writers. Clarion West is a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing some of the best speculative fiction workshops in the galaxy. It’s run by volunteers and a small, hardworking paid staff, and it depends on the support of the community.

[image error] Clarion West Writers Workshop Logo

Many of you know that I graduated from the workshop in 2004 and since then I’ve published many stories and a novel. I have participated in the CW Write-a-thon almost every summer since 2004 but I’ve rarely asked for sponsorships. This year, the Workshop (a major source of funding for the organization) was cancelled due to the novel coronavirus and we are all pulling together to keep this wonderful organization going.

This summer, I am working on a collection of linked short stories that I stared almost thirty years ago. Of the 34 stories int eh collection, I have three new stories to write and eight to rewrite. So far, I’ve finished the largest new story (15,000 words) and rewritten two. Progress! Of the existing stories, I’ve sold five over the years, one of which is new and will be published next year and another will be republished online at https://Fresh.Ink in September.

I hope you’ll sponsor me and help support my goals and the Clarion West writer’s workshop. A sponsorship in any amount helps, as does helping spread the word to friends, family, and coworkers.

If you’d like to sponsor me, please visit https://www.clarionwest.org/members/rrangell/ It takes only a few minutes to donate, and it makes all the difference in the world to both me and Clarion West.

Thank you so much!

June is Pride Month! The 2020 PRIDE MONTH BUNDLE is here!

What better thing than to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride than with Ten Awesome eBooks bundled together to keep you reading all month long!

The 2020 Pride Month Bundle – Curated by Catherine Lundoff

A note from Catherine Lundoff:

Celebrating Pride Month with a StoryBundle has become an annual tradition, one in which we present a different and wonderful collection of LGBTQ+ books and authors each June.

This year, I’m curating the Pride Month Bundle for StoryBundle and it is an amazing lineup. We have novels and novellas as well as an anthology and a single author collection, each one a unique and terrific read. As always, at StoryBundle, you name your own price—whatever you feel the books are worth and you can designate a portion of the proceeds for our selected charity, Rainbow Railroad. Rainbow Railroad is a nonprofit that works with LGBTQ refugees, helping them to leave dangerous situations and safely resettle in new areas.

The 2020 Pride Bundle includes two works by creators from New Zealand, in honor of this year’s Worldcon. A.J. Fitzwater, author of the joy-filled collection The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper, is a Sir Julius Vogel Award finalist this year, as is editor Andi C. Buchanan, whose ground-breaking special issue of Capricious SF Magazine, Capricious: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, is also included in the bundle.

Like your queer fiction to have elements of the Southern Gothic, perhaps a touch of horror and mystery, coupled with sumptuous writing and compelling characters? You’re sure to enjoy A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney and Catfish Lullaby by A.C. Wise. Looking for beautifully written stories set in historical settings with a fantastical edge? We’ve got you covered with Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett’s Armor of Light, Floodtide by Heather Rose Jones and Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston. Want adventures set just beyond the worlds we know? Come along on some glorious adventures with Grilled Cheese and Goblins by Nicole Kimberling and the novellas The Counterfeit Viscount and The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus by Ginn Hale. And finally, for something a little different, join author R.R. Angell’s cadre of queer college students as they play an unusual game set in virtual reality with an AI who’s more than she seems in Best Game Ever.

Not only is this year’s bundle an intriguing mix of stories, it’s star-studded too! Our bundle’s authors and editor have won the Astounding Award, the Otherwise Award, the Sir Julius Vogel Awards and several Lambda and Spectrum Awards, as well as being finalists for awards like the Nebulas. So there we have this year’s Pride StoryBundle – lots of variety, lots of new voices, a fun mix of new and classic tales, adding up to 11 great reads for a great cause! – Catherine Lundoff

* * *

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For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of four books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.

Best Game Ever by R. R. AngellThe Counterfeit Viscount by Ginn HaleA Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance GidneyCapricious IssueCapricious: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue by Andi C. Buchanan

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all four of the regular books, plus seven more more books, for a total of eleven!

Grilled Cheese and Goblins by Nicole KimberlingThe Armor of Light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. BarnettFloodtide by Heather Rose JonesThe Hollow History of Professor Profectus by Ginn HaleWill Do Magic For Small Change by Andrea HairstonThe Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. FitzwaterCatfish Lullaby by A.C. Wise

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub, .mobi) for all books!

It’s also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

Get quality reads: We’ve chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that’s fine! You’ll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there’s nothing wrong with ditching DRM.Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Rainbow Railroad!Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you’ll get the bonus books!

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, tweet us at  @storybundle  and like us on  Facebook .

[image error]All the books in the 2020 Pride StoryBundle

#rrangell

Wild Life in the Garden

Despite warnings, we planted mail-order tomato plants before that last arctic blast. We’ve had good luck in the past and, sure enough, all six plants survived the cold snap, only to be ravaged just days later by an unseen marauder!

Of course, with all this time at home coupled with a love of gardening, we were mad to get to the bottom of the mystery. Who and what was going after our tomatoes? (My vote was on the raccoon that lives nearby.) Three plants had been pulled up, their roots exposed. We replanted them and wondered how to protect them from The Beast.

I’d bought some netting two years ago when our Asian Pear Tree pushed out a bumper crop in the hopes that I could salvage some from the birds and squirrels. That was a success, and I had leftover netting. So, we drove stakes into the ground and wrapped the tomato bed with netting.

We have a surveillance camera in the backyard so we can watch the birds and the garden, and it also records. I pulled out the trusty tablet and took a look. It wasn’t the raccoon after all, but a crazy spastic squirrel that dug, leapt, flipped, rolled, and sprinted around the yard. For some reason, it seemed to find the tomato plants irresistible, as if they were the catnip equivalent for squirrels. Crazy!

This squirrel really likes our tomato garden! 33 seconds of manic activity.

Then I noticed there were two crazy squirrels. The neighbors had recently sprayed for ticks and mosquitos and I wondered if they had gotten poisoned somehow. It turns out that they were just two crazy squirrels looking like a WWF (Wildlife Wrestling Federation) smackdown.

Wildlife Wrestling Federation? Nope.

Um… not quite. So, something to do with hormones and pheromones and dirt. I don’t want to spoil the party, just wanted them to find another bed somewhere else. They have a perfectly good nest up in the tree, after all. The netting should help, right?

Five days later and the netted bed remained a squirrel-free zone. Then we looked out this morning to find the one little guy can’t stay away.

The squirrel is back

The poor thing was terrified of me and surprisingly good at not getting completely entangled in the mesh netting. After some maneuvering, I was able to open a hole and liberate the little devil.

I think I’ll call him Skippy

I doubt he’ll be back rooting in this bed again, but I suspect that he’s learned all about netting and that has me worried about my pear crop!

Stay tuned for some good news next month. Also, I’ll be posting soon about my latest project, making an audio recording of my novel, Best Game Ever. #rrangell

Story Evolution – You’re not writing for you.

Okay, so I did something interesting and, I hope, successful. This involves a story I’ve been writing and rewriting for a very long time and it’s based on an event in my childhood. Yes, fiction based on real liminal moments growing up gay in a homophobic world. I’ve been working on a collection of these for many years – some of the stories have been published. For this particular story, I finally figured out how it should go and started over, taking what was a 4,000 word third-person diorama and going with a first-person for the next round.

This took longer than I thought (doesn’t it always?), and I’d beat myself up over not finishing it and getting it out the door. I hadn’t looked at the word count until I was nearly finished with this last go ’round. When I checked, I had a novelette weighing in at just under 10,000 words, and that was after editing it down from much more. So, considering that my novels usually come in around 100,000 words and have taken years in some cases, I cut myself some slack and relaxed.

In a week, I’d scrubbed the thing clean and had something to be proud of. It had nostalgic scenes describing the landscapes, weather, people, anecdotes, and so on, in exquisite detail. It had my memories almost down to the dragonfly. It was ready to go, a perfect addition to the collection IF I WAS JUST WRITING IT FOR MYSELF. Lightbulb moment, huh?

For fun (I told myself so it wouldn’t hurt) why not take a copy of this “finished story” and scrape out all the nostalgic bits, all the lovely but unnecessary descriptions, and see what was left? Would the story still work?

My 9,800 word story whittled its way down to 7,200 words. It was every bit as evocative as the long version without all the padding that really did get in the way. My mind had wanted things to be perfectly accurate even though they were unnecessary to the story line, even for scenes that I had made up.

So, what to make of this? Well, it was important for me to core-dump as many details as I could into the writing of it. In the editing of it, I had everything I needed for the story right there and all I had to do was subtract out the bits that weren’t needed, that didn’t move things forward, that weren’t absolutely necessary. Those are the right details. Sometimes you have to learn things on your own; even though you may know them intellectually (and may even have taught them). Until it matters, it doesn’t matter.

That’s my epiphany for the week. Yes, I did submit the story so now the jury is out on that, but I’m very happy, and have new eyes that I’m looking through.

Be well, be safe. Write on.