Zilla Novikov's Blog, page 33

Book Report Corner

by Nicole Northwood

@nicolebooks_

the sad b*stard cookbook – OUT NOW!

♬ Funkytown – Lipps Inc.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook, reviewed in Tiktok form. A work of Art.

Get your free e-book copy here.

Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Sabitha : Maria Bouroncle joins us to talk about her fascinating new-crime novel, It Came to Me on a Whim – The Story of Ingeborg Andersson, Child Murderess . We’re very lucky to have her, since this story was just published in English for us to enjoy! Maria, can you tell us about your book?

Maria: It Came to Me on a Whim tells the story of my great-aunt who killed her three children in a small Swedish village in 1929. The story and what happened that day was a well-kept family secret for seventy years. I stumbled upon it back in 1999, as one of my cousin’s patients asked if we were related to “that old murderess Ingeborg”. We both knew her very well as children, since Ingeborg lived with our grand-mother, but we had no idea she had been married or had any children, let alone three.

I was 34 years old at the time and had just given birth to my daughter. I simply couldn’t grasp the news. It wasn’t until my father passed away twelve years later that my thoughts of Ingeborg resurfaced. I finally decided to ask my relatives what happened, and I began digging through the archives.

Sabitha : I can’t imagine what that would feel like. Is that what inspired you to write this book?

Maria: It was never my intention to write a book about Ingeborg. However, after years of research to shed light on the tragedy and trying to understand how a woman I’d loved as a child could have committed such a horrific crime, I got truly obsessed with the story. It wasn’t until an old relative passed me the letters she wrote to her husband from prison that I knew I had to put her words on paper. I’ve included these letters in my book. In one of them, she writes, “I think about the children all the time and about you but forgive me I didnt know what I was doing O God if it could be undone.”

Sabitha : How did you choose the title? Is that part of the story?

Maria: When asked why she killed her children, Ingeborg simply replied, “It Came to Me on a Whim”.

Sabitha : What do you most want your readers to take away from reading your book?

Maria: Ingeborg was born in 1901. Her parents were farmers, and she was the second to youngest of seven siblings. She went to primary school for six years and when she was 23 years old, she got married to the boy next door, who was a relatively well-to-do farmer. Artur was seven years her senior and seems to have been a modern and kind man. Pretty soon after their beautiful wedding, they had three children together, two boys, and one girl. But Tor only lived to be five years old. Efraim was three and Lucia was only one year old when their mother killed them.

I’ve tried to capture this troubling story without too many gruesome details. By letting my narrative jump back and forth between different time periods, as Ingeborg’s thoughts probably did, I hope to put the reader inside her mind to understand her, just like I’ve tried to do. Despite the rigid structures of the prison, I also wanted to show the kindness of the staff who cared for her. I’ve dedicated my book to Tor, Efraim and Lucia, and it’s my sincere hope that Ingeborg’s story will bring mental health issues into the light. 

Sabitha: Thanks for sharing your story—such a fascinating and tragic tale. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Maria: It Came to Me on a Whim is available on Amazon. Links to my socials can be found here.

Merry Sad Bastard Christmas!

What could make a better Christmas gift than a copy of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die?

The e-book is free on our website. If you print it out on the work printer, the print edition is free too. If you like professionally bound books, check out daddy bezos.

New Night Beats Canon!

There’s a brand-new story just published in the Night Beats Extended Universe!

When Talia and her best friend, Jaeger, agree to host a small graduation dinner party together at their rental house, Talia doesn’t anticipate that she’s going to end the night by admitting she’s fallen in love with him.

What starts out as a quiet night over plates of perfectly cooked salmon, listening to acoustic music on the back patio, quickly turns into intoxicated conversations over stacks of dishes after the guests have left. Though Talia tries to hide her feelings, after a few too many glasses of wine she can no longer deny the way she feels. An innocuous discussion with Jaeger around the future of their friendship following the end of the semester soon dives into deep emotions, leaving the two sharing an intimate moonlit dance, a warm bed, and maybe even more.

Read the latest addition to Night Beats canon. Run Me Down: A Romance Novella by Nicole Northwood is free on Wattpad.

Rachel A Rosen talks about Cascade!

Watch Rachel A. Rosen talk about Cascade at the Brighton Public Library on Tuesday, Dec. 6. It’s on Zoom—get the link through their calendar!

Cooking with the Big Sad

by Zilla Novikov

Most advice for dealing with depression makes depressed people feel worse.

Fish oil supplements, running, and meditation help some people. Maybe they even help you. But for the rest of us, they deliver a simple message. Your depression is your own damn fault because of your bad lifestyle. If you ate better, exercised more, and changed your negative attitude, you wouldn’t have this problem. 

If you, like we did, look online for depression-friendly recipes, you will find almond-crusted barramundi and walnut-crusted maple salmon, promising Omega-3s to fight brain fog and B vitamins to boost mood. If you happen to be an inland-dwelling vegan, such personal lifestyle tweaks are inaccessible to the point of satire. This is a feature, not a bug. The thing these recipes have in common is that the cost of ingredients, difficulty of preparation, and incompatibility with numerous dietary restrictions mean they are inaccessible to most mentally ill people. If only you would do this, they promise, and then it becomes your fault because you do not, and so you must not really want to be well.

If capitalism is driving your employer to exploit you and the rich to destroy the planet, the solution is not to do Pilates about it. No amount of chia seeds are going to fix how you feel. You need some empathy and some survival strategies. Surviving means you have to eat, even if you don’t want to, even if there’s no food in the world worth the effort of lifting a spoon to your mouth. 

Many of us also have stigmas and taboos when it comes to food. Maybe someone has told you to avoid “bad” foods, or questioned if you really needed a second cookie. Maybe for you, the concept of eating is complicated by feelings of guilt or shame. But judgment doesn’t help. It’s better to eat than not, and we are not the sum of our worst days.

My depression is not my fault. My brain chemistry is fucked and I need medication to function. I tried lifestyle changes for years, delaying as long as I could before I acknowledged what felt like a moral failing. Before I accepted my inability to will myself cured. Diet advice gave me one more thing to try before taking that step. But crushed flax seeds weren’t what I needed. What I needed was a hug, and guidance to get through day by day until I was ready to admit my truth.

Depression cooking for me is low-effort, cheap, easy foods, with minimal ingredients that I probably already have in the house. It’s carb- and spice-heavy. It’s eating popcorn out of a bag or boiling instant noodles. It’s food that’s tasty enough to be appealing even when the thought of eating seems exhausting.

Of course, this isn’t the same for everyone! Some people have to avoid carbs or gluten, others find high levels of spice challenging at the best of times. Contrary to the advice you’ll find online and in diet books, there’s no silver bullet for our problems, individually or societally. But we can do our best to make things better for each other as a community. 

Collective change starts at a local level, and for us, dealing with the social problem of depression begins with acts of mutual aid. Whether it’s reminding folks that they’re not alone or sharing the coping strategies that have worked for us and our friends, we’re here with each other as we battle not just the Big Sad, but the environmental, political, and economic context that enables it at its worst.

I wrote a rant (see above) but I also—with my community—wrote a cookbook to share our coping strategies. The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. Also the e-book is free. We gotcha.

Spanish Croquettes paired with The Shadow of the Wind

Fiction To Sink Your Teeth Into, a feature from author and professional chef Rohan O’Duill!

Fermín breathed deeply, with relief, and I knew I wasn’t the only one to be rejoicing at having left that place behind…

“Listen, Daniel. What would you say to some ham croquettes and a couple of glasses of sparkling wine here in the Xampañet, just to take away the bad taste left in our mouths?”

This month I have chosen the atmospheric and beautifully written Shadow of the Wind and paired it with Spanish croquettes. I hope that this recipe, along with a nice glass of rioja, will immerse you into the Barcelona vibe that comes through so strongly in the book.

Traditional Spanish croquettes are made with a béchamel sauce and involve a two-day cook, so I have simplified this a bit by using potatoes for the croquettes. Apologies to our Spanish readers for the abomination.

Snack – serves 2/3

Ingredients

• 3 regular potatoes, peeled
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 finely diced onion
• 75g cup grated Manchego cheese
• 50g diced Serrano ham
• 50g flour
• 2 eggs
• dash of milk
• 100g breadcrumbs
• Salt and pepper
• Canola oil for frying
• Peri peri sauce to serve with

Utensils

Pot or deep fat fryer, & 3 Bowls.

Method
• Peel and boil the potatoes for 20 mins. Strain and mash. Add in the diced onion, egg yolk, cheese, Serrano ham, salt and pepper and mix together.
• Set up a panné station of three bowls. One with flour, one with the eggs and milk, and one with the breadcrumbs.
• Break the potato mix up into small balls about the size of a ping-pong ball. Form each of them into a cylinder shape. Dip this croquette into the flour and breadcrumb in turn.
• Pour about 4cm of oil into a pot and heat up to gas mark 6. Gently place the croquettes into the oil and cook until golden brown. Open frying is extremely dangerous so supervise the pot at all times and make sure there are no kids or nosy cats in the immediate vicinity.
• Serve with the peri peri sauce and a nice glass of Spanish rioja. Sit back and enjoy the book.

Variations
Leave out the ham to make vegetarian. Change to a vegan cheese to make vegan.

Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Sabitha : We’re joined by Dale Stromberg, here to tell us about his collection of strange and mesmerizing microstories, Melancholic Parables . Dale, best of luck explaining this fascinating book to us.

Dale: Melancholic Parables is a collection of microstories that mix whimsey and dolor, irony and absurdity. With a frequently appearing protagonist who is not always the same person, they are not linked and not unlinked. Sometimes they horrify; sometimes they are almost dad-jokes.

Sabitha : This is not a typical book. What inspired you to write it?

Dale: While a musician in Tokyo, I decided to blog daily for a year to connect to fans. The blog was bilingual. I soon strayed from writing about music to writing about anything, including tiny stories. I was in a psychologically troublous period, so these fragments had a consistently melancholy tint, though I often took refuge in humour. I’d come home with a couple bottles of cheap wine and start writing. By the time the wine was done, I was done (e.g. unconscious)—which was one reason to keep it brief. Another was the fact that working in two languages required me to write everything twice. After a year, I had about 300 fragments, and I thought of collecting those I liked best into a book.

Sabitha : We have a lot of writers in our community. What’s your writing process?

Dale: Think about it. Draft it. Manicure it. If it’s not working, rewrite from scratch. Produce more than I can use, then select the good bits.

Sabitha : How did you choose the title?

Dale: Fiction writers often hope readers will “willingly suspend disbelief,” but I wondered, do I hope this? A teller of parables doesn’t necessarily have the same expectation: it is not at cross-purposes for a reader to simultaneously believe the “story” and also disbelieve and consciously examine it. I came to see my stories as parables instead—not lessons (nobody should take lessons from me) but pieces which were about something other than what they were about.

Sabitha : What book do you tell all your friends to read? Besides yours of course!

Dale: Recent good reads: Edie Richter is Not Alone (Rebecca Handler), Ghosts of You (Cathy Ulrich), An Inventory of Losses (Judith Schalansky), Knickpoint (MBF Wedge), Lilith’s Brood (Octavia Butler), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Arundhati Roy), Most Famous Short Film of All Time (Tucker Lieberman), Though I Get Home (YZ Chin), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (James Tiptree Jr.), The Word for World is Forest (Ursula K Le Guin), Something Like Hope (Hengtee Lim).

Sabitha : When you picture your ideal reader, what are they like?

Dale: When I first heard Sonic Youth, I thought they were doing it all wrong; when I first heard Sigur Rós, I found them boring; both ended up favourite bands of mine. I had to be in the right time of life before their music fit. Instead of an ideal reader, maybe I imagine the reader being in an ideal place—similar to where I was when I was writing. I was shut up in myself, seeing everything in dim grey colours, aware I was an ill fit, aware it was all in my head, but unable to get out of my head. I don’t wish for anyone else to end up like that, which implies that I hope not to have ideal readers. I guess that’s weird.

Sabitha: Not as weird as you think. Thanks for sharing your story and how it came to be. We’re looking forward to reading—look out for a Book Report from Zilla! In the meantime, where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Dale: You can mute me on Twitter or chuckle at my clumsy web design here. Preorder Melancholic Parables ahead of 29 November 2022 at Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books, or Smashwords; if you prefer paperback, a print version will go live on Amazon in late November. A lovely way to support any indie author is to leave an honest review on Goodreads or wherever you leave your reviews.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook Release!

Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It’s vegetarian/vegan. It’s a community-built project. And the e-book is free. It’s hard to survive late capitalism and we want to help.

Want an e-copy? Newsletter subscribers get it right away so sign up and enjoy! Plus, the newsletter has monthly pictures of our cats. Sometimes our dogs and our fish. But mostly cats.

Want an e-copy and hate newsletters? We’ll make it free for everyone in January on the e-book platform of your choice. Or sign up to the newsletter and unsubscribe after you get the Sad Bastard Cookbook. We all know how to game online systems.

Want a print copy? Unfortunately, the pervasive nature of capitalism means we’re selling print copies on Amazon for money. We live in a society.

Want a print copy and hate Amazon and/or capitalism? We’re not the biggest fans either. Subscribe to the newsletter, download the free pdf, and print it. We’re cool with that. We made it legal with Creative Commons (4.0 attribution non-commercial), but if you get a thrill from breaking the law, you can pretend it’s not.

Want to help us make The Sad Bastard Cookbook a success? Work with us to game the book-recommendation algorithms so more people see the cookbook in their suggested “To Read” books. Leave us a review Goodreads or Storygraph (or anywhere else). The algorithms rate reviews higher than anything else, so saying what you honestly thought of the book is incredibly valuable to us—and to other readers. It’s one of the best things you can do to promote our work.

Want an amazing editor for your own project? Victoria Rose (she/her) is an editor, writer, avid reader, self-described geek, and fan of all things creative. You can find her at FlickeringWords.com. Lindsay Hobbs (she/her) is a book lover, fiction editor, occasional writer, and cat mom. You can find her at topazliterary.com. We had a truly wonderful experience working with both of them. Their eye for detail was incredible, and they knew how to change our words without changing our meaning. Most of all, they believed in the project and they treated our work with love. If you need an editor for your writing project, you should see if either of them have an opening.

Want to hear us get sappy? The Sad Bastard Cookbook was the work of the community coming together. From professional editors volunteering their time, to complete strangers suggesting recipes, it was truly a wonderful experience to create something meaningful with so many of you. We hope it help you find food you can eat, and helps you know that you are loved. Please, take care of yourself.

Content notes for The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Mental and physical illness, disordered eating, and dark humour throughout, as well as occasional mentions of alcohol, swearing, and political references. If you have specific food triggers, some recipes may be unpalatable to you.

Book Report Corner

by Zilla N.

Reading Melancholic Parables is like listening to someone speaking what sounds like gibberish but you understand every word.

What is this book, this compilation of microstories? It’s about all those tiny thoughts that run through your head, which you’ve never bothered to ask if anyone else wonders too. How would it feel to live your life twice, if you remembered everything? Is that weird feeling of being watched because of time-travelling tourists? What if there was a language in the dial-up modem buzz? Bellatrix Sakakino wonders along with you, and lives through the answers. That’s part of this book. But that’s not all of it, not exactly. This is a book about being born in the wrong time, the wrong body, the wrong world. It is a book about failing to belong. It is a book about loneliness.

The microstories are absurd and deeply meaningful. I found myself wanting to quote them, but all-too-often unable to pull apart passages into neat quote-sized fragments, because sentences hung on paragraphs, on microstories, on the book.

“Not every book is for every reader. A book must rhyme with you, or you with it.”

This is a witty, clever book, but it’s also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself. It might be better for me if this book didn’t rhyme. But it does. This is a book for me. It might be for you, too.

Preorder Melancholic Parables ahead of 29 November 2022 at Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books, or Smashwords.

(We received an advance copy of the book for review purposes.)