Marian Allen's Blog, page 481

Color Me Kindle

I finally bit the bullet and joined the Kindleboards. Fora scare me spitless, and it's not just because the late great Bob Iles and I got kicked off one. I can't figure out how to know if somebody has posted something interesting without reading a bazillion posts, or how to reply to somebody who replied to somebody else or…. It does not compute. I feel like my brain is about to asplode. But Imma try.

If you're on Kindleboards, I have two topics for my writing:

Eel's Reverence

my short stories

So, if you ARE on Kindleboards, pop in and say hello to me and keep me from freaking out. Post your topic or Kindleboards profile or book page link in the comments, and let's get to know each other over there.

WRITING PROMPT: A character and a friend get bounced from a gathering.

MA

Meanwhile, Back at the Blog….

I'm apposta have a post up today at Karen Syed's LIFE AS A PUBLISHER, but I'm not certain when it goes up so, in the meantime, here is a restaurant review.

Mom and I went to New Albany and, as always when we go to New Albany, we had lunch at Lancaster's. Not Tommy Lancaster's, but Lancaster's Cafeteria. Fans of food in New Albany (Indiana, in case you don't know) remember The South Side with mouth-watering fondness. Well, go to Lancaster's and you'll think you're back there. Good home-cooking and reasonable prices. Some of the same staff. Sometimes we invent reasons to go to New Albany, just so we can eat at Lancaster's, that's how good it is. Even Charlie likes it, that's how good it is. You could get a vegetable plate and be happy.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are our favorite days. Tuesdays they have brats and sauerkraut and spareribs, and you can get the kraut with the spareribs rather than the brats, if you prefer. We prefer. Thursdays are chicken-fried steak with plenty of milk gravy. Oh, man, I'm drooling, just thinking about it!

So that's my Wednesday stop-gap post. When my post at LAAP goes up, I'll link to it. Meanwhile, what's your favorite restaurant? Do you have a favorite cuisine in general, but your FAVORITE restaurant is totally different? Because my favorite cuisine is Indian, but my favorite restaurant is Lancaster's a mid-west home-cooking joint.

WRITING PROMPT: What is your main character's idea of "home cooking"?

MA

More Wins! Happy!

First, I'm posting today, as every Tuesday, at Fatal Foodies. Today's post is about corn pudding, and how they ate it all up at the church pitch-in. Recipe included.

Second, (BORED BY GEEKINESS? SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH) not only did I fixify my Linux computer, I got my husband's Windows XP computer into the loop. He doesn't have a wireless card in it, so I bought him a wireless thumb thing (not TOO geeky, me) and installed it. He picked up the network right away, but Internet Explorer said it couldn't connect. Even though the connection was made and on and pumping away like a disco band. The IE troubleshooter told me the firewall wasn't allowing HTTP, HTTPS or FTP access, so I checked, and made sure it was. I even tried turning the firewall completely off, but kept getting the same message. But I know a trick worth two of that: I went to a computer that WAS connecting and downloaded Mozilla Firefox and installed that. It wouldn't connect, either, but it told me what was really wrong: the proxy setting was wrong. Charlie got the computer from a friend, and I don't know why the proxy setting wasn't set to automatic, but it wasn't. So I fixed it and BINGO! ~danse danse, danse danse~

Okay, you can start reading again now. I submitted a short story, "Dry as Dust" to Dark Valentine magazine for their Pisces water-themed fiction fest and it was accepted! I had a story, "The Prophecy", in their Fall Fiction Frenzy, and I'm delighted to appear there again. I'll certainly post the link as soon as it's scheduled. Appropriate, to be accepted by Dark Valentine on February 14, no?

WRITING PROMPT: Define "dark Valentine".

MA

How To Write Flash Fiction

First Method

Write a novel.
Locate the most important scene.
Locate the most important moment of the scene.
Delete everything else.

Second Method

Just write that most important moment.

I recommend the second method, and I say this as someone who has written a truckload of flash fiction. Of course, a truckload of flash fiction is like a truckload of ear buds–mostly packaging. Still.

Here's an example, which I am writing on the spur of the moment. Ear buds. Let's start with ear buds. Makes me think about my daughter when she was a teen and my grandson when he was a teen. So let's have a teen. Could do a parent or grandparent, but let's have a teen. The teen is wearing ear buds. Why? Duh–to listen to music. Why? "Just because" isn't a story, so let's give him/her a reason. Okay, I'm going to make this a boy. He's drowning out his environment. So let's call the piece Soundtrack

SOUNDTRACK

I tuck the ear buds in as tight as they'll go. The lead singer screams, the guitars wail. One day, I'll have a growth spurt, and then it'll be Dad. For now, it's the singer, the guitars and my Mom.

So there you have it: a few lines with a story behind it and a story leading from it, encapsulated in a moment. Flash.

WRITING PROMPT: Go thou and do likewise.

MA

Sample Sunday, Home On The Range

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the cut-and-don't-paste technique of improving one's writing. As a case in point, I referred to "Home on the Range", a story I wrote for the Southern Indiana Writers Group's anthology IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING. It gots a cow in it. When we went to Nashville, Indiana some years after the anthology came out, Joanna Foreman pointed this post card out to me with a picture (produced by American Geographics, photo by Darryl Jones, Marion County) that would have been a perfect illustration, if we could have acquired the right to use it.

Here is the beginning of that story as it stands. If I had it to do over, I would cut almost all of this and just leave enough to set things up–just a couple of lines. I might even cut all of it, and just drop a word or a line into the good stuff later. Okay, here it is:

No, here it isn't. I can't do it. It's THREE FREAKIN' SINGLE-SPACED PAGES of don't-need-it. Oh, okay, here's the first part of it:

My life was so simple, before I got my heart's desire.

I had always wanted to live in the country. Nobody I knew lived there, but my elementary school readers were full of pictures of Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot and Puff wandering around unsupervised under a round yellow sun. According to them, carrots and spinach were good in the country. Since I had to eat the damned stuff anyway, it seemed natural to dream about living where veggies actually tasted like something edible.

Granny Babs, who watched me while Mom and Dad worked, had been through the Depression and World War II rationing. With me to help her, she had most of her big back yard put out in vegetables. Her property butted up to the Forestry, where she took me hunting for wild mushrooms, blackberries, fiddlehead ferns, watercress, and all that wilderness fodder.

The kids at school called me "Wilder", after Laura Ingalls Wilder of "Little House on the Prairie". It was certainly better than my given name–which was Mamie Jane Nael–and it even sounded cool, during my rebellious teens.

In my junior and senior years of high school, I worked at Cloverburg's Health Blossom Food Cooperative. I worked there during the summers while I was in college getting my Health and Nutrition degree … and for seven years after that, when a Health and Nutrition degree didn't translate into any other job.

By that time, I had turned into a vegetarian. Not just a vegetarian, but a vegan, which is not an alien race from outer space, but a person who eats only plants–no meat, no eggs, no dairy. Granny Babs and Mom had taught me to cook, and the urge to convert the family to my diet drove me to construct vegan meals they couldn't resist.

That led to my first cookbook, VEGAN FOR MEAT-LOVERS, written under the name of M. J. Wilder. It had very respectable sales–for a vegan cookbook. The second, M. J. Wilder's VEGAN AND LOVING IT, did even better. The third, M. J. Wilder's MEATLESS LOAF AGAIN?, was the best yet. I didn't make enough to retire on, but my needs were simple and I was single–I had a nice little umbrella for a rainy day.

Then Mom and Dad retired to Florida, Granny Babs passed away, her house burned to the ground, and an insurance check came addressed to me, her beneficiary. The day after I deposited the check, a customer came into Health Blossom–where I was still clerking–saying she and her husband were moving to California, and they needed to sell their place in the country–five acres on the other side of the Forestry from Granny Babs' old house. It would take me fifteen minutes to drive to work from there, less time than it took through traffic from my apartment.

Dream come true.

The house had been modernized, but didn't look it. There was a summer kitchen at the other end of a covered boardwalk, in good repair but in no way modernized, with a big old wood-burning cast-iron range for canning. Attached to the summer kitchen was a creekstone spring house, also in good repair. There was a barn, which the folks I bought the place from used as a garage, and there was a hen-house, which they had scrubbed and whitewashed and used to dry herbs. There was a rummaged-up area about half the size of a basketball court, surrounded by rabbit wire, that they called a garden, but was more like a place they tossed seeds and hoped for the best.

"We bought this place and fixed it up," my customer said, "and spent a month or so out here in the summers. We thought we might move to the country full-time, but we both work in the city and the commute would have been brutal in the winter, so the place has really hardly been used since we restored it. There's just one thing. There's a wild cow in the woods."

Her husband groaned. "You had to tell her that." He gave a little laugh. "It's some story everybody around there tells. About three years ago, one of the farmers lost a cow through a gap in his fence. He never found it. It was taken by a carnivore, if you ask me–a two-legged carnivore. But ever since then, there've been all these 'wild cow' sightings in the Forestry. Of course, nobody's seen it except for people who know the story, but that doesn't stop the legend, does it?"

If I had it to do over, I might start out with "We bought this place and fixed it up," but not go through the convolution of making the people customers at the store. Or I might just begin where the excerpt I posted at the Southern Indiana Writers web site begins.

What do you think? How much don't-need-it are you willing to wade through to get to the actual story?

WRITING PROMPT: Where is the heart of a story you love? Going backwards, where does the writer first engage you in that point?

MA

Lonnie Rides Again

I finished the first draft of "Lonnie, Me and the Battle of St. Crispin's Day" and took it to the Southern Indiana Writers Group critique meeting last week. Got some great ideas of ways to make it better, so Imma do that today and email the repaired version around. I'm submitting it for the SIW upcoming HOLIDAY BIZARRE anthology, which will include most or all of the stories from our out-of-print CHRISTMAS BIZARRE and some new ones featuring other holidays.

In "Lonnie, Me and the Battle of St. Crispin's Day", Lonnie and Tiny return to the neighborhood where they lived as boys and attend the parish church's Saint's Day Festival, October 25, Saints Crispin and Crispinian. There is alcohol present. There is dancing. There are games of chance. And Lonnie is married to a hard-shell Baptist. Things get…interesting.

I was worried about this story, because "Lonnie, Me and the Hound of Hell" went over so well; I was afraid this story wouldn't be very funny by comparison, but the SIW members present assured me that they were sufficiently amused. I am content.

Now Imma go work on the rewrites. Happy!

WRITING PROMPT: Where did you grow up? Or any of your characters? Would you/he/she go back? Why or why not? What is one strong positive memory of that place and time?

MA

Geekarina WIN!

Now the tale can be told of how one woman running Linux, alone in the wilds of Windowsland, survived a boot sector crash. Bear with me; I have a Friday recommend. Skip this bit, if you don't speak geek.

Yes, children, for the past week or so, I've been updating through my laptop because my trusty Linux desktop would not load. Tried restarting. Tried turning it totally off then on. Could it boot in safe mode? Yes, it could, so the hard drive wasn't toasted.

Tried ootching in the back door through the command prompt and deleting some files, since one of the FAILED messages I was getting said that there was 0 capacity on /. Did not work. Tried popping the install software in and running repair. Did not fix. Tried updating from the install software. Did not fix. Finally had to call it a fresh install, keeping existing partitions. WORKED!

So I'm back in business, slowly learning what I need to retweak to get it back to what it was. Flash doesn't work now, for instance, so I have to go find that. You know–stuff.

Now FRIDAY RECOMMEND: If you're nice in your language, you might not like this site. I just discovered it for myself, and I think it's brilliant. It's called Terrible Minds, and this is a brilliant post about why you don't want to be a writer. Really. Like the man says, "Save yourself."

WRITING PROMPT: Are you not listening? How can I give you a writing prompt when I just WARNED you? Oh, all right: A character warns another character against doing something, to no avail. Does it turn out well or ill?

MA

I Bite A Pig and Buy A Laptop

You think I'm kidding, don't you? Well, yesterday, I met my friend Jane (Hi, Jane!) in Louisville at Cubana restaurant (Caribbean, Cuban, Latin American).

But on the way, I stopped at Office Depot and bought a new laptop! My beloved Linux desktop has gone all wonky and I haven't yet figured out what to do for it. Meanwhile, I've been using my old laptop and it just isn't cutting the mustard as a full-timer. So Charlie says, "Why don't you buy a new laptop?" And I'm like–Oh, I'm not like anything, 'cause I'm in the car on my way.

So a very nice man named William Powell (Hi, Mr. Powell!) listened to what I needed and recommended this HP G62-340us Notebook. So I got it. So far, it's plenty fast to suit me. Drawbacks: the right and left clicks are harder than I'm used to, so I need to get used to that; the touchpad knows I'm touching it even when I don't intend to be touching it. If I typed the way Mrs. Crosby-Lambert taught me, with my wrists elevated, this wouldn't be a problem, so perhaps I'll relearn the proper way to type. also, there's a touchpad lock for just this very same sloppy typing stance, so I can cheat.

Laptops come pre-loaded with all kinds of come-on crap–programs that expire, hoping you'll like them so much on trial that you'll cough up the dough to own them, for instance. I paid extra to have all that stuff scraped off. And guess what? Office Depot loaded a couple of their own bits. Shortcuts to help (for a price, Ugarte, for a price), so I can live with that. I'm using it, now. LIKE!

Then on to Cubana. I couldn't find a website FOR Cubana, and Google street view won't show it (apparently, it's too new), but it's across the street from The Grape Leaf on Frankfort Avenue. Beautiful inside and out, friendly, speedy service, affordable prices for a treat, and WICKED GOOD food. Jane had vegetable empanadas (fried pies) and black bean soup. I had Lechon Asado, which the menu describes as "the famous Cuban pork dish that is marinated in citrus juices, garlic and Cuban spices", congris (black beans and rice cooked together) and yucca. The yucca was kind of like potato. I like potato better. The congris and the pork were DIVINELY good! Four thumbs up from Jane and me (yes, that is grammatically correct). Oh, and my stuff was topped with slivers of pickled red onion–SO good!

Happy day! Now to tackle the desktop Linux.

WRITING PROMPT: Go to a restaurant you've never visited and eat something you've never had. Write about it.

MA

The Non-Picky Eater

I know of two ways to raise one.

The first way is the way our #1 daughter did it. I thought her method was screwy and wrong and it irritated me on her behalf. Here's what she did:

Her baby grew out of baby food and was ready to eat table food. She put him in his high chair with the chair's tray in front of him. She cut up little pieces of all kinds of food and put them on the tray: cheese, raw broccoli, apple, pear, banana, little unsweetened cereals, bits of bread, bits of meat…. Every meal, at least half a dozen things. Every day, she chopped up all these bits of things and every meal, she chopped up more so they'd be fresh and every meal, he had this variety spread out for him. What he didn't eat went into the compost bucket or to the dog. This continued until he was old enough to ASK to eat exactly what his parents were having.

He's 10 now, and he'll try anything and eat almost anything. When he was four, he'd go to a restaurant and order a salad. He comes to us after school on Wednesday, and a couple of weeks ago, I made quinoa with bell peppers and onions and he didn't turn a hair; ate it and asked for more.

The other way is the way I was raised and the way my husband and I raised our kids. Here's how that works:

Make balanced meals every night. Force your children to try everything and to eat whatever they serve themselves. Make them very picky, and make every meal a battle of wills. Make them glad when they eat without you, so they don't have to eat what you tell them to. Hope for the best. MAYBE, when they get out on their own, the variety they faced when they were little will appeal to them, when it isn't being forced on them.

Oh, here's a third way, the way my husband was raised:

Be so poor, the kids eat whatever is put before them, and glad to have it.

All in all, I recommend method #1.

WRITING PROMPT: Write a character who is a very picky eater. Send him/her to a restaurant.

MA

Fun With Headlines

I got very excited last Friday, when I turned to the Indiana section of the Courier-Journal and saw:

Fix for 'stupid' ID law advances

I was like, "It's about time! Do they have to show it to you if you ask for it, or do they have to wear it clipped to their shirts, or what? This is going to save everybody so much time and aggravation!"

Imagine my disappointment when I read the article and found it was about revising a bill requiring everyone buying alcohol to show ID, no matter how old he or she obviously is, and calling the bill as it stands stupid.

Alas.

In the first place, it's been a long time since I was carded, and I rather enjoy it. In the second place, I was really looking forward to the convenience of stupid IDs.

~It's Tuesday, and I'm posting at Fatal Foodies with an illustration of how I use food history books to inform my writing, an expansion of my post here yesterday.

WRITING PROMPT: Pick a headline and think of more than one way it could be interpreted.

MA