DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 67

Chez Moi: Leftovers.

 

I’m still brainstorming this dang cookbook.  I’m torn between thinking it’s genius or it’s idiocy.  Story of my life, right?  Who needs to be told to use up leftovers?  I did.

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Leftovers.

In theory, you’ll eat them later and they will taste just as good as they did the first time.

I hate that theory.  Pfui!  I spit on that theory.

There are a few things that are good as leftovers:  pizza and fried chicken are good.  Mashed potatoes, good.

Half a soggy sandwich in a takeout box, not good.  That cooking experiment where it went okay and then you dumped everything into a container and threw it in the microwave but now you’re afraid to eat it.   Not good.  The perfectly grilled steak that you brought home from a friend’s house that now is covered with some kind of coagulated grease and takes like leather when you heated it up again.

Tragic.

Okay.  The thing is, you were probably raised like me, with the idea that you could just throw leftovers in the microwave and have them be magically all better. And you never really learned how to deal with them otherwise.

I’m going to say this, and it’s going to make me sound like an idiot to some people, but it needs to be said: before there were microwaves, people had waaaay more interesting, tasty ways to deal with leftovers.  They would cook things in order to have the leftovers they needed to make something else.  

I bet you could never imagine saying “Oh, yay, leftovers,” but that was how these pre-microwave savages operated: deliciously.

For example:

Chicken pot pie is a way to use up leftover roast chicken.  Same for chicken salad.
French toast, croutons, the breading crumbs on a lot of deep-fried dishes, bread soup, bread salad–all ways of using up stale bread.
Fried rice.  Oh, how I love you, fried rice.
Broth.  All broths are just ways of using up leftovers.
Burritos?  Leftover roast meat, rice, and beans.
Dim sum: leftover bbq pork, shimp, veggies, and more.
Even the classic roast beef au jus is just a way to use up…roast beef.

There are probably a thousand other tricks that we’ve been losing out of our cooking repetoire, because of microwaves.

However, there are some new tricks that we’ve made up, because of the era in which we grew up (and went to college).  Here’s one:

Kitchen Sink Ramen (Pan-Asian Version)

Prepare a package of ramen following the package directions–or however you see fit.

Add a half-cup or so (total) of the following:

Protein that isn’t a) nasty-smelling or b) covered in dairy products
Ditto for veggies.
Nuts.
Peanut butter.
Pieces of fruit (because sweet and sour is a thing, right?)
The little side dishes of whatever came with your takeout (no dairy).
I advise against adding other types of starch unless you’re desperate.  Leftover starch can quickly turn into mush.

Supplement with a couple of tablespoons of the following flavor-boosters (mix and match at your own risk):

BBQ sauce.
Hot sauce.
Lemon/lime juice.
Sweet/sour sauce.
Salsa.
The packets of whatever came with your takeout.
Soy sauce.
There is, in fact, a world of Asian sauces to explore.

And, as with almost any type of dish designed to use up leftovers, you can always top it with a fried egg, and it’ll be brilliant.

Variations & Further Research

Rice + leftovers + soy sauce + egg = fried rice (or bimbibap).

Potatoes + leftovers + beef broth + onion = hash (e.g., corned beef hash).

Macaroni + leftovers + cheese + milk = deluxe mac’n’cheese.

Rice + leftovers + tomatoes = Spanish rice (a knockoff version of paella by the way).

Beans/lentils + leftovers + broth = bean/lentil soup (in fact, most non-classy soups can be treated as a repository for leftovers).

Leftovers + bread crumbs + eggs = croquettes (ham croquettes, salmon patties, crab cakes, mac’n’cheese balls, etc.).

Leftovers + sour cream/mayo/plain yogurt + green onions/jalapenos/lemon = dip (onion dip, artichoke dip, shrimp dip, roasted red pepper dip).

Dessert + oatmeal + yogurt = parfait.

Leftovers + hotdogs + sauces and raw onions = yum (chili dogs, anyone?  how about kim chee dogs?).

Something that I’ve been noticing is that a lot of the things we buy or make from scratch are really meant to absorb leftovers, but people don’t necessarily write down recipes that start out with “first get your leftover chili…” We’re losing touch with what, exactly, we can do with leftovers and how fundamental they are to a lot of home-cooking dishes that never really got written down.  Everyone thinks, “Crap, who wants to see a recipe for ramen with stuff in it?”  But that’s how classic dishes get made: people looking to stretch their budget take the cheapest ingredients around, add all the leftovers they can gets, and use a couple of tricks to make it actually taste good.  Look up the history of a lot of traditional dishes, and you’ll find a hidden stash for leftovers in it.

Your Go-To Leftover Dish

What about you?  What if you don’t like ramen, or you have a lot of dairy mixed in with your proteins and veggies?

Here’s my suggestion:

Figure out your favorite cuisine.  American, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Greek, what have you.
Do a search for “[Name of Cuisine] leftover recipes.”
Because of the power of the Internet, you will strike gold.  LOTS of gold.
Pick a dish that you really, really like.  And always have the stuff on hand that you need to make that dish, other than leftovers.  I mean, write it on a permanent grocery list and tape it to the inside of a cabinet, so when you go out for groceries, you take a quick look and make sure you have all the stuff you need to make your leftover dish.

The Pantry

As a matter of fact, identifying your favorite cuisine can have a side benefit, too.  While you’re on the Internet, do a search for “How to stock a [Name of Cuisine] pantry.”

In a lot of cookbooks, you’ll see a section about how to stock your pantry, based on whatever the cook’s idea of what should go in it, but they don’t necessarily address the reason for having a pantry:

A pantry is a collection of stuff that makes leftovers taste good.

Okay, to an overachiever cook, it’s really a collection of items that you use in all your cooking.  But for our purposes, it’s really just a storehouse of what you need to get by with your leftovers.  So when you’re building your initial pantry (or taking a look at your overstuffed pantry and trying to figure out what you really need), look at your favorite leftover recipes, and prioritize the stuff you need to make it.  That’s your pantry.

Other Tips for Leftovers

When you throw the leftovers in the fridge, don’t mix everything together.  It’s easier to adapt leftovers when they’re in separate components.
It’s okay to throw out wilted bread, lettuce, and veggies and just eat the meat.
The mix seems to run about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of cooked starch with about 1/2 cup of other stuff, with a bunch of flavor-boosting sauces and possibly an egg on top.  (Of course there are exceptions, like dips.)
When you are making something basic, like roast chicken or mashed potatoes, make a lot of it.  Because you’ll be using some of it for leftovers later.
I’m not going to lecture you on food safety.  I’m no expert.  But store your food safely.

If you liked this blog post…consider signing up for my newsletter or check out a free copy of the first episode of Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts.  I have other (much older) foodie posts at http://foodie.deannaknippling.com.  Thanks!

 

 

 

 

More on Character.

 

Lately I’ve been working on endings and realized that I’ve been using my talents against myself: I get to the climactic battle scenes, and I end up so excited to find out how everything wraps up that I rush through them and leave out the details that make resolving a battle so satisfying.  Ack.  I hate it when other writers do that: I quit reading Fables by Bill Willingham because he pulled a couple of rushed endings on me. I have a thing for endings.  At any rate, I caught myself doing it more than once, and spoke sternly to myself.  It’s going to take a while and a lot of practice to weed that habit out, but it’ll come.

At least, my subconscious thinks it will.  It has moved on (or returned?) to character since then.

I’m working on a difficult ghostwriting project.  It’s awesome, but it’s difficult:  I’ve been fighting with the characters, trying to make them make sense.  They haven’t been working, or at least they haven’t been working in the form that I’d given them.  They feel flat sometimes, like they are only performing actions because I tell them to, not because they have a particular drive to do it.  Fortunately, the client let me take a break recently, and now that I’m back, I’m seeing the characters with fresher eyes.

1) The character I thought was a bad girl isn’t.  She’s a tragic figure: the one thing that makes her special is that she takes all the crappy stuff she goes through in life and turns it into art.  Then, suddenly, she gets more power than she can handle and can’t control it anymore, and instead starts lashing out.

2) The character I thought was an emotionally complex adult isn’t.  She has one strategy:  run at it headlong and make it fall over.  I was initially confused about this, because in the opening, she’s trying to be tricky (but failing miserably at it).

3) The character I thought was good and righteous–which is HARD to write as a character, because characters have to keep falling on their face somehow–is really just kind of compulsive about fixing things.  When something is broken, he attempts to fix it.  Sometimes he breaks things even worse in trying to fix them, and sometimes he just arrogantly decides something is broken and “fixes” it.

4) The character at the root of all this, I don’t have him.  I thought I had him.  I kept thinking of him as a chess player playing the longest of long games.  A kind of ultimately noble character that can look good or evil, depending on how he’s currently reaching his goals.  But that’s an exterior view of the character, not something I can pull on like a second skin, not something I can empathize with.

What I’m starting to suspect is that he’s driven by a fear of perfection.  He admires things that are broken, yet still functional.  He is perfectly willing to break something in order to make it more functional, or to otherwise achieve his goals–being broken isn’t something to be feared, but to be embraced.  He’s startled by reality sneaking up on him; he doesn’t really get that he’s participating in all this; he thinks he’s above it.

In the end I think I might relate to him most of all, but it’s a struggle at the moment.

The main thing that I pulled out breaking down my character choices was that there’s a difference between seeing the choices from the inside and the outside.  Which seems like a no-brainer in theory but is a bitch to sort out in practice.  For example, I kept circling around #3 as “wants to make the world a better place.”

This is not an effective character choice.  Because how you’re going to make the world a different place is so up to interpretation as to make the statement useless from a writer’s perspective.  You can’t check where you’ve jerked the character off the rails with a statement like that, and the problem was that I kept jerking the character off the rails, and it was leading him to yawn-worthy places.

Now, to see the world from his eyes, I’ve been going, “What’s the system here?” and, when he has that figured out, “How can I fix it?” He doesn’t ask, for example, “Should it be fixed?”  Nope, he just identifies the system and fixes it.  If he hasn’t fixed it, he’s going to pick at it until there’s something to fix, and then he’s going to fix that.  If he’s fixed it, then it’s fine.  Can’t you see it’s fine?  Fine.

You can a) see where this might be easier to check whether you’ve done it than “make the world a better place,” and b) create dramatic @#$%-ups, I mean, tension.

Additional work will be required.  Yay!  I’m learning more about writing.  Boo!  It’s a pain in the ass…

If you liked this blog post…consider signing up for my newsletter, which I will send out soon, or check out a free copy of the first episode of Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts.  Thanks!

 

 

 

Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, Ep. #5

Alice popped up like a jack-in-the-box, took hold of the Rabbit’s ear nearest her, and cried, “Let’s pretend you’re a stew!”

Now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo, with Apple not yet up.

Ep #1: blog, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, and more.  Free at the blog, Kobo, B&N, Apple, and Smashwords links; Amazon is hanging in there at $0.99.

Ep #2: Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, Kobo, and more.

Ep #3: Amazon, Smashwords, Gumroad, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and more.

Ep #4: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, Apple, and more.

—

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards:  to separate the infected from the whole, to  control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day.  Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson:  one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics.  He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories. He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own…

…one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode #5: The story continues.  The story-Alice behaves in a less than ladylike manner, and meets a Cat.

If you would, kindly take a look at Episode 1.  It’s free!  Except at Amazon. Because.

What to write next?

Writer housekeeping post!

I’ve been looking at some big-picture stuff over the last few days. This involved sorting through my Goodreads books and tallying up what I read. Because it did.  Because what I think is my sweet spot for reading/writing probably isn’t what I think it is.

This came up in a discussion with Annie MacFarlane, sort of.  She was (as usual) hounding me for not being commerical enough.  She is unabashedly commercial, so she’s kind of biased.  But then she said something that stuck with me.

“De, I want you to be like Susanne Collins.  She wrote some other stuff before she got popular.”

She said it better and more earnestly than I can report here.  It cracked me up.  But then I got to thinking about it:  Scott Westerfield?  Wrote some really weird stuff for adults before he hit on the Uglies series.  JK Rowling?  Didn’t start out writing Harry Potter.  (When you think of all the classic crime writers who started out writing lurid dime novels, it’s kind of funny.)  And so on.

Maybe what I think as my niche isn’t really my niche, you know?  Thus Goodreads, because I’ve been tracking all my books there for several years now.

Here’s what I got

1) I read a LOT of freakin’ graphic novels. But I’ve never written one. My drawing skills just aren’t up to that level, but clearly I should at least try writing one. SO! If you are an artist and wants someone to write you a graphic novel on the dirt cheap, contact me. Will work with your idea or provide one, short length preferred at this point.

2) I also read a LOT of historical romance novels. I have one where I wrote myself into a corner…I may just need to abandon that one and try something else. I have a contemporary comedic romance that needs editing but is merry and sweet and fun. I should get that done.

3) Clearly I am being pulled toward crime (as a genre). I’ve read a lot of Hard Case Crimes lately, and a ton of Westlake/Stark. I’ve been writing some, too, but for a middle-grade ghostwriting project–very nearly thrillerish stuff, 25K and more plot than anyone but Patterson could shake a stick at. I really like doing it, too.  Caper, caper, caper.

4) If I don’t include graphic novels, I haven’t read a lot of SF/F/H lately. If I do include graphic novels, I’ve read a lot of SF/F/H lately. The fiction runs to: epic fantasy (including grimdark), YA fantasy (both high and contemporary), and horror (and more weird fiction than I expected).  My trend of not reading a lot of SF really is there.

5) I snarf up good swashbuckling whenever I can get it, and when I reread something, it’s either Terry Pratchett or swash.  This includes middle grade, YA, and adult swash.

6) I want to write pulp with a fantasy adventure flavor.  I don’t really read it, though, and my pulp novel has officially kicked my ass.  Maybe I get to try something else instead of beating my head in over it.

Which leads me to think:

a) Leaving out the whole graphic novel business, I should write a fast-paced swashbuckling romantic historic fantasy novel centered around a crime or caper, instead of short horror/dark fantasy stories.  Scott Lynch and Stephen Brust have already done that.  I have met the Buddha.  Now I must kill the Buddha.  En garde!  Sure would help if I could fence.

b) I have a SF serial that was over my head that I started and should look at again.

c) I need to get that romantic comedy out.  As well as a bunch of other things.  Le sigh…

d) I think I like horror more than I do?  Horror and noir stand out beautifully in my mind, but they aren’t my day-to-day reading.  I think of horror as my “literary treasure” genre, I think.  Maybe it’s just what I’ve been reading, though, which is a lot of short stories that are these perfect little gems…

e) To me, swashbuckling isn’t just pirates and swords: it’s a devil-may-care attitude with a headlong adventure, and a political antagonist that can only be defeated by trickery and sharp objects.  Could be western swash, could be crime swash.  All good.

e’) I think that’s why I’m currently stalled out on Arrow.  I like it, I love the characters and the writing, but I’m still in Season 1, and…I was hoping for more swash.  The devil-may-care, where is it?  Even the playboy son of the bad guy is trying to settle down.  I’ll get back to it, but I really hope someone tells me that increased levels of swash will be provided sooner rather than later.

f) As Ray gets older…I wonder if I’ll lose middle grade as a genre.  I hope not.

At any rate, I need to let it gel for a while before I start brainstorming ideas.  There has been a viewing of The Princess Bride lately, and that could be skewing things.  Also, I have a ton of current projects that need to get OUT THE DOOR before I should start something new.

Let’s see how long that lasts…

Subconscious: “But I could be skewering people.”

Me: “True…”

 

 

The Subconscious & Writers’ Block

So lately I’ve been rambling a lot about my subconscious.  A lot of the time, I feel like my inner life is stronger than my outer, self-aware one.  If you’ve read Sandman, it’s like Delirium driving the car while Matthew the Raven screams “Drive on the right!  Drive on the riiiiiight!”

Lately, my subconscious has been jerking me around with what I can and cannot read.  Can read:  All the Donald Westlake.  And Hard Case Crime novels.  Can’t read:  Charles Dickens.  And a lot of other writers whom I won’t mention, in case someone tries to patiently explain to me how wonderful they are.  Okay, one example.  Liz Williams.  She writes Asian-themed SF.  I can’t read her.  I recognize that the opening of Snake Agent is a thing to be appreciated.  But right now?  I don’t get to read it.  I have dozens of authors like that, I start to read, and every paragraph I find myself mysteriously doing something else, like the dishes.

Another example:  I have a music box on my desk.  It’s a cheesy unicorn statuette that play Camelot or something.  I usually don’t even notice it’s there.  Every time I see it, I think, “That’s is so cheesy.  I should think about taking that to Goodwill someday.”  And then I don’t see it for a couple of weeks.  My subconscious, that is, my inner two-year-old, likes that cheesy statuette.  It doesn’t want me, my conscious, to do anything to it.  So it edits it out of my reality.  I can still see it, especially if I glance at it out of the corner of my eye, but the thing has a Somebody Else’s Problem* field on it, and most of the time it’s just gone.

But the relevant item here is that, through writing morning pages/journaling and other techniques, I’ve realized that it’s pretty pointless to fight my subconscious.  It is going to accomplish what it sets out to do.  All I can do is get it to drive on the right, so to speak. Mostly.

The benefit is that the more power I invest in listening to my subconscious, the more I’m surprised by what I write.  Maybe not surprised by the general outline of the stories, because I’ve observed patterns on how subconscious likes to see stories go, but in the fine details.

Also?  I don’t get writers’ block.  I just don’t.

I have days where I don’t write because I am doing something else, or that I write something completely different, or that I’m not supposed to be writing, and that’s what I do anyway, is write.  But mostly I just sit down and write.

Because I don’t screw with the inner two-year-old.

I don’t tell it that it can’t do what it wants to do.  If it is bound and determined to try something, I let it.  If it wants to abandon a project, I may or may not let it – but I don’t force it forward.  I go exploring and journal about why I don’t want to finish something, and I find out what I, Mamma Consciousness, can do to take care of that reason.  Sometimes it’s because I need a writing technique I don’t have yet – I’ll go study that technique.  Sometimes it’s because I’m afraid of people’s reactions – I’ll walk myself through the worst-case scenario and how to handle it.  Sometimes it’s because it feels wrong – I’ll back up a couple of paragraphs or a page or two, delete, and ramp up at it from a different direction.  But sometimes it’s because I’m forcing myself to do something to make someone else happy.  And then I’ll just let it go.

I don’t yell at myself not to write fan fiction.

I don’t yell at myself to write something saleable.

I don’t have a hissy fit at myself over grammar and spelling–the underliney things on Word are turned off.

I listen to music, or I don’t, or I listen to the same song over and over again.

I change the routine to fit what the day needs.

When I’m depressed or anxious, I take care of that.

I monitor my physical needs and take care of those.

If I make plans and then get bored with them, buh-bye plans.

Now, if I were the kind of writer who didn’t crank out a ton of words, this wouldn’t work.  And of course YMMV.  For example, some people are motivated by deadlines.  I am both motivated and undermined by deadlines–so I try not to get close to them, because when they hit, I’m so anxious that it’s hard to write at the top of my game.  And usually avoiding work means that I’ve put myself in a situation where my conscious self says I must do something, and my subconscious self says I can’t, and I have to stop and think about that anyway.

My subconscious is the boss.  I don’t like it.  I actually tried to not write that sentence several times before I let myself write it. But that’s what needed to be written, and I wasn’t going to get to write anything else until it was done.  I’m like the secretary.  I can try to keep the boss on schedule, but sometimes it’s a struggle.

So.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re suffering from some serious writers’ block–you might want to stop forcing yourself to do things, and instead do what it is that you want to do, whether it makes sense or not.  It’s taken me a while to sort this out, but as I stopped forcing and started letting, writing started to get easier.  I still have to provide some structure–and I still have to put Butt in Chair, Fingers on Keyboard–but I don’t dread sitting down to write.

Because I know, I mean, I really know, that it’s going to be fun.

 

*Douglas Adams, from the Hitchhiker’s series.  The SEP field doesn’t make things invisible; it just makes it highly unlikely that anyone would ever want to look at them.

Clothing Manifesto

I just turned forty.

It’s freeing.

As in, “I don’t have to put up with ______, I’m forty now.”

So here it is, my no-guilt, I’m-forty-now clothing manifesto:

Clothing that looks crappy on me is crappy clothing.
There is nothing wrong with my body.  There is something wrong with deliberately making clothes that do not flatter.
Any clothing that prevents, restricts, or discourges functionality is crappy clothing.
Clothing that hampers my functionality does not “look good.”  It looks like sexism.
I do not need to look “feminine” to look good.  “Feminine” means lacking muscle tone, lacking freedom of movement, providing easy access to stuff we generally don’t want handled in public, and often providing lots of floppy cloth/jewelry bits that are easy to grab on to in case I need to get the hell out of a situation in a hurry.
I don’t need to be uncomfortable in order to look good.
Clothing is a language, and I don’t have to censor myself if I don’t feel like it.
Mirrors at clothing stores are warped and have the crappiest of all possible lighting.  They are not there to make you feel good about yourself.  They are there to keep you addicted to chasing the shopping experience, which will somehow “fix” you, even though it’s deliberately designed to make you feel bad about yourself.
It is not a point of pride to be able to run/fight in high heels, tight skirts, corsets, etc.; it is Stockholm syndrome.  And my ass looks mighty fine without five-inch stilettos, thank you very much.
That being said:  if you want to wear heels and corsets and whatnot, that’s your lookout.  Because I will back your choices up.  Unless you start giving me crap about mine.
I will not, conversely, hassle other people to back up my clothing choices.  There is no need for me to get anyone’s approval but my own, whether or not it makes my ass look fat.  Compliment me if you like, but I didn’t dress this way to make anyone but yours truly happy.

Pants that automatically give anyone who isn’t a stick a muffin top.  Pants and boots that don’t leave enough room for our calves.  Fake pockets.  Skintight pants that don’t stretch, so we can’t bend over.  Dresses that constrict freedom of movement.  Heels that require immaculate balance and posture while screwing up our tendons and giving us corns.  Thin “dress” clothing in winter.  Purses designed to give us health problems as well as carry around solutions to every other person’s possible problems.  Sleeves that bind if we have any arm muscles.   I mean, any.  Shirts so short that they automatically bare our midriffs if we do anything other than walk or sit.  Shoes that pinch our feet to make them look more narrow and pointed at the end.  Shoes that pinch our heels so the shoes don’t fall off.  Shoes with no traction on the soles.  Shirts cut so that we can’t have shoulders, arm muscles, or bosoms.  “Large” sizes that are smaller than “women’s” sizes.  Models with no muscle tone.  Itchy fabric, especially lace edging on bras to make them look more “feminine.”  Bras that have no appreciable relationship with the size stated on the band.  And so on.  Take a look at any given piece of women’s clothing.  Does it say, “Looking good for other people is more important than your comfort.  Be weaker.  Be smaller.  Be slower and easier to catch/beat up/rape/steal shit from”?

More than likely, yes.  Which is why I’m forty and and have to make a manifesto saying, “I get to wear clothes that don’t put me at a physical disadvantage in any given situation.”  Because the default is otherwise.

 —

Oy!  It’s exhausting writing good content all the time.  Subsidize my nap and chocolate addiction by checking out my latest release, Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts.  It’s a story about Alice and the gentleman zombie who tries to help her overcome the Victorian mores she’s surrounded and trapped by.  You can read the first episode for free.

Writer Process Blog Tour

Thank you to Lana Williams for inviting me to join this blog tour on writing process.  HER blog post or this tour is here, at LoveHistoricals.com.  Lana is a consummate historical romance writer, and her blog posts are always a crackup of weird historical facts.  Her latest is a Victorian romance called Unraveling Secrets.

As for me…

1.  What am I working on?

I have a couple of ghostwriting projects I can’t say much about, other than that one’s a middle-grade and another’s a YA.

But because I have to write my own fiction from time to time, I’m also working on a pulp dystopian novel called The Sirens of Titan about a man who suspects he may have destroyed the world before he lost his memories…and who may have to do it again.  There are Nazis, alternate dimensions, trees out to destroy what little remains of civilization, weird paranormal powers, and extraterrestial nanotechnology that threatens to invade the Amazon jungle.  Because I said so.

2.  How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I feel like a lot of SF/F/H has become fairly rigid, with SF in one box and F in another, and H in a more gelatinous third (horror seems to cross genres more easily than either of the other two).  I wanted to write something just for the pure fun of it:  recklessly over the top.  Ironically, it turns out that writing recklessly over the top pulp fiction is much, much harder than writing within a box, and this is probably my sixth major restart of trying to write Sirens.

Otherwise, most of what I write is set apart by my focus on issues of bullying (in my kids’ middle-grade fiction, under my pen name De Kenyon) and on disparities of power (in my adult fiction, under my own name, DeAnna Knippling).  Lately I’ve been dwelling on the issue of how we invest our belief, and what happens when we hand over our personal strengths in the name of the greater good.

3.  Why do I write what I do?

The simple answer is that I was bullied as a kid, and was able to save myself from even worse damage by finding answers in books:  I want to write books that help people find answers to the same kinds of questions I had.  We don’t have to be corralled into the same boxes that our parents and families were.  We do have to accept personal responsibility for our strengths–we can’t just live as victims, even though taking on agency for our own lives makes things far more complicated.  We can forgive; we can fight to keep a cycle of violence from recurring, for example, by observing how calling ourselves weak makes us act in horrible ways toward others.  We can choose not to get caught up in other people’s cycles of hatred and violence.

Of course, a lot of the time I do this by throwing the reader right into the middle of those cycles.  I’m not a gentle writer.

4.  How does your writing process work?

Usually I sit down and figure out what’s been on my mind a lot lately, then start brainstorming.  I try not to go with the first thing that crosses my mind, which is difficult sometimes.  Then I start writing.  Lately I’ve been drifting away from my long-standing outlining fetish.  I find it pretty interesting to see where my imagination takes me.  I’ve overanalyzed pretty much any given aspect of stories for a long time, so it’s refreshing to just let go of all that.  Sometimes it means I end up making extra work for myself, but I’ve accepted that risk.

5.  Who’s next?

Please join Becky Clark:  She writes funny novels.  Her new cozy mystery is BANANA BAMBOOZLE, in which drunken Cassidy Dunne sees a girl she’s convinced is her niece.  Problem is, her niece has been dead for fourteen years.  Sit back, relax, and drink in this cocktail of fun!

My latest release is Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, a serial set in a Victorian London in which the zombies have been civilized…mostly.  It’s a historical dark fantasy about a little girl trapped in her society, and the man who tried to give her the key for getting the better of it.

Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts #4

Now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo, with Apple not yet up.

Ep #1: blog, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, and more.  Free at the blog, Kobo, and Smashwords links; the others will follow.

Ep #2: Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Gumroad, Apple, Kobo, and more.

Ep #3: Amazon, Smashwords, Gumroad, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo, and more.

But Mr. Dodgson did not answer; perhaps, Alice thought, because some feelings were too scattered to be packed neatly together into a single word, and ought to be left as a kind of shambles.

With the invention of a serum that prevents most people infected with the zombie sickness from becoming raving cannibals, Victorian society finds itself in need of more standards:  to separate the infected from the whole, to  control when and how the infected can come into contact with the pure, to establish legal contracts, precedence, employment, and more, with regards to the walking dead.

The very backbone of the British Empire is its standards.

The middle daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, Alice Liddell, finds a certain lack of charm in the standards she must follow, with increasing strictness, day after day.  Wild and rebellious, she battles her father’s cold discipline, her mother’s striving to hide her middle-class origins, and the hollow madness of the world around her, in which the teetering Empire desperately pretends that nothing is, in fact, the matter.

Enter Mr. Charles Dodgson:  one of the chaste Dons of Oxford, married to his mathematics.  He charms Alice and her sisters, often taking them on walks and boat rides (chaperoned, of course), and telling them jokes and stories.  He is twenty-four when he first meets them.

And he is dead.

Turned in a tragic accident at Rugby, Charles uses the serum to keep him from the ordinary sort of madness that affects zombies.

But it doesn’t affect the elegant madness of his brain.

And one day, as he sees Alice struggle against the chains that constrict her, chains so similar to his own…

…one of his playful stories becomes something more.

Episode #4:

The story continues.  Mr. Dodgson, under the watchful yet ignorant eye of his friend, Mr. Duckworth, shreds society as a kind of madhouse.  Alice begins to suspect that this Underland lies all around her…

I ask you to kindly take a look at Episode 1 if you’re interested (it’s free, except on Amazon and B&N, because that would be too easy.  [Glares at her distributors]).

Update:  Ah!  In case you’re curious, the picture shows Edith, Lorina (Ina), and Alice, as taken by Charles Dodgson in 1859.

Coming soon…

But Mr. Dodgson did not answer; perhaps, Alice thought, because some feelings were too scattered to be packed neatly together into a single word,

and ought to be left as a kind of shambles.

Yep.  Finally getting back on track.

 

@#$% Joseph Campbell

Right, culmination.

Who likes Joss Whedon stuff?  Raise your hand.  (Sorry, I just got back from PPWC, and I’m still in audience participation mode.)

Who likes…The Hero’s Journey?  Joseph Campbell et al?

My idea:  Joss Whedon is not writing straightforward Joseph Campbellian stories.  Also:  I am sick to @#$%^& death of straightforward Campbellian stories.

My history:  I have never really grokked Campbell.  I have gone to the classes and read the books (including the ones that are meant to reframe the journey from a more feminine perspective), I have done the outlines.  The closest I can get is Save the Cat, and even then I had to strip the more accepted outline down to a few points (opening, fun & games, reversal, bad guys close in [including moment of death], storm the castle).  So, yes, I know me some Campbell.  But I can’t write like that.  No worky.  I tend to go more with the seven-point plot outline, because then I don’t have to actually plot unless I feel like it or I hit a flabby spot somewhere.  Also, I tend to write to my strengths (ideas! all the ideas!) and seven-point makes me think in terms of character.  It shores up my personal weaknesses.  Okay?  Okay.

Recent events: I started picking apart Shadowmarch by Tad Williams.  (No, I won’t shut up about that book anytime soon.) Taking a look at the series, you have to stretch awfully damn far to get to the point where you could say that it follows a Campbellian story arc.  Then I started thinking in terms of how stories are built around different arrangements of characters and realized that Joss Whedon’s specialty is the Scooby Gang.  Then I went to PPWC and had a squee moment of listening to Chuck Wendig, Patrick Hester, Jim Hines, and @#$% I don’t know who else, possibly me, and they were bitching about Campbell, too.  I felt vindicated, after years of listening to people tell me to just open a little wider and suppress my gag reflex a little more, to try to choke down some Campbell, because if you don’t know Campbell, the implication goes, you don’t know story.  At the PPW member’s night on Monday, someone was talking about her novel and asking how to write the synopsis if there is no main character.  And we graciously told her how stupid she was for not knowing that really she did have a main character, she must, because all stories have a main character.  Which I now feel kind of weird about.

Finally, the cast list for the new Star Wars came out.  And there were two chicks and one black guy sitting in the center circle, and Stephen York put up a couple of really telling posts about his problems with the Star Wars universe.  (First post, second post.)

And by the time I got done with his second post, it hit me:  there are no women with agency (Leia gets rescued…not once but twice), no people of color with agency (Lando?  Bends over and takes it up the Darth), not even any alien races with agency.  Not even droids with agency.  Not because Lucas is racist or sexist (no idea, suspect probably not), but because that’s the natural story format of a Hero’s Journey:  there’s one hero, who fits the sociopolitical norms, who, because he fits the sociopolitical norms, is able to both change himself and change society.  You could even say that the natural age range of a Campbellian story is 18-24, the coming-of-age age.  In order to tell a proper Campbellian story, you need to be a) racist, b) sexist, c) agist, and d) biased against more than one single person on the “good guys” side having true agency in the story.*  Mano e mano.  In the end, even Han Solo is just there as an alternate Luke ego, because nobody would believe Luke could be everywhere at the same time.  Really, if it could be done, all Campbellian stories would be about one single character who played every single role in the story, from spear-chucker to Darth Vader.  Campbellian stories are about aspects of our character being split out and externalized.  So, really, it shouldn’t be any big surprise that it’s hard to write anyone in a Campbellian story where everyone in the story isn’t, essentially, the same.

Now, Campbellian folks argue all the time that all stories are Campbellian stories.

But isn’t that massively @#$%^& up?

“Hey, there’s only one story, there’s only one pattern that stories follow, and what you should really do is force your story to fit that pattern, even though, ha ha, it’s impossible that you could tell any other story, because there’s only one story, etc., etc.”

If every story were naturally a Hero’s Journey, then we wouldn’t have to try so hard to learn how to tell that story, would we?  And maybe, just maybe, those of us who struggle so hard to tell that story are trying to tell something else and are sick to death of being told that we’re deficient storytellers because we don’t fit that mold.

Now, Imma bring Joss Whedon into it.

Who is, say, the main character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?  Good!  Got it in one.  What’s her character arc?  Her major change?  Well, she totally makes this major change (in the series) from being an airheaded valley girl to being savior of the world!  Wait, that was the movie, and it was kind of a ridiculous comedy.  I mean, girl vampire slayer, amirite?

Okay, so Buffy in the series goes from becoming a female badass to being…a female badass.  I mean, she goes from being testy and direct to being…testy and direct.  Wait!  She goes from learning that she has to have a team in order to succeed…to learning that she needs to open up the scope of this whole “team” thing.  Okay, she doesn’t really change.  What happens to Buffy is that she goes from being one person who tries to do it all…to facilitating for a lot of people all working together.  Buffy’s status isn’t guru.  It’s team lead.  Same pay scale, more experience.

Here’s another hint that perhaps Whedon isn’t using the Campbellian structure here:  Giles?  You know, that mentor guy?

Doesn’t die.

And, not only does he not die, he’s shown to be completely wrong more than a few times.  And he ends up flying in the face of his mentors more than a few times, too.

Wait, wait.  There’s more.  The main character of the series has an opposite-sex friend with whom she does not have sex.

Now, Joss Whedon isn’t afraid to play with the Hero’s Journey; see The Cabin in the Woods.  (I have issues with the ending, but okay, see it anyway.)  Main character (female) goes from being weak virgin to (spoiler) aiding and abetting in the end of the world.  

Tell me what the Hero’s Journey is in Firefly.  Tell me the radical change that Mal makes in his character.  Tell me how essential it is that his huge emotional change drives the plot of the story.  You know who has the transformational character arc in Serenity?  The bad guy.  Campbell practically lays down the law that the bad guy is a kind of shadow of the good guy, a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t go through a transformational character arc in a story.  And Whedon just kind of goes, take that, Campbell scholars!

Remember, every story is Campbellian, to someone who likes Campbell.  It’s a monomyth: one-story.  There can be only one.

Thus:  I am done worrying about Joseph Campbell.  I never really felt it.  And, you know what, that whole “mono” part of the “monomyth” is bullshit.  I’m not saying don’t tell a Campbellian story.  Great!  Fine!  Have fun!  Subvert away!

However,  Joss Whedon doesn’t have to use it if he doesn’t feel like it.  So I don’t either.

Nyaa.

 

 

 

*Isn’t it possible to have a Hero’s Journey featuring a woman, person of color, non-cisgendered, non-normative character?  Sure.  But the main point of the Hero’s Journey is that the hero comes back with something that both benefits him and his society.  When a woman returns with that elixer, who the hell can she give it to?  Her mom.  Her sister.  She can’t benefit society, only that section of society that isn’t higher up on a ladder than she is, and she can never truly hit the top of that ladder unless it’s a matriarchal society, which doesn’t resonate here an now.  A lot of the time when you see powerful books that have a hero-like journey without the main character being normative, you see either a tragedy (a figurehead on a throne or the main character is actually a very sympathetic villain [cough Mists of Avalon cough]) or the character “sacrificing” themselves for the good of society, which conveniently gets them out of the society’s hair (why do the minority characters like Dobby always have to die/fade out/get disenfranchised towards the end? Because they disrupt the monomyths of society, duh).  Nothing really changes in the so-called “feminine” hero’s journey.  And if it did, it would only create a society that reflected that main character: their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.  I suspect that for people who can only imagine one story framework, it becomes of vital importance to defend their primary place in the monomyth, because if someone else wins, they must, of necessity, make everyone else lose status.  That’s monomyth for you.  The Scooby Gang seems to be a better framework for plurality.  Or triads of ego/id/superego.  Or soap operas.  Or buddy stories.  Or even non-Campbellian heroes, like freaking Conan.  Tell me that Beowulf is a Campbellian story, all about how B. has to learn a major life lesson in order to defeat his foe.  Just tell me how Campbellian structure is a one size fits all…