I’m not on Reddit (wouldn’t have the first clue where to begin), but I kinda feel like this belongs on the “Humanity, fuck yeah!” board.
Jalopnik: Heroic Driver Sacrifices His Tesla To Save Unconscious Man In Runaway Volkswagen. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwp8v2szk
So, saw this on Passive Voice the other day and thought I’d share. We… may need two.
https://youtu.be/34I27KPZM6g
Good morning!
Episode 3 of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall is now live for your enjoyment!
If you like what I’m doing here, it would really mean a lot if you went over and took a look at my Patreon page that just launched this morning. My writing is my job and my business, so your support means I’ll be able to keep writing my stories.
In other business news, I’ve made it through all the comments I had on Advent of Ruin, so when I’m not working on my buffer of serial chapters I’ll be preparing that file to go up on Kindle. My goal is still to have it ready by 3/1.
EDIT 2/17/2016: I’ve rearranged the site somewhat and updated the link above accordingly.
If you haven’t somehow already seen, chapter 1.2 – Aftermath is now live. Enjoy! Feel free to tell me what you think, or tell your friends, or I suppose tell nobody, but that leads to sad writers.
EDIT 2/17/2016: I’ve rearranged the site somewhat and updated the link above accordingly.
So I was scanning through my news feed on my phone this morning, and I stumbled across an article on Slate called “Is My Novel Offensive?“. Now, this being Slate, my first reaction was to mutter sarcastically something along the lines of “isn’t everything?” But I clicked through to read it.
Apparently, in addition to beta readers and copy editors and everything else, there’s now a push for authors to employ “sensitivity readers” to avoid the sort of micro-aggressions that are turning college campuses into some of the least free-speech-friendly places in the country.
This can only end well.
Once I got done face-palming and managed to accept that yes, this was really happening, and I probably should have expected it sooner or later, it occurred to me I probably ought to say something about why this is a bad idea.
Most obviously, it strikes me as the sort of thing the beta readers you already have should catch. To use an example from the Slate piece, the idea that frats are perceived differently in historically black colleges strikes me as basic fact-checking.
This is part of why I prefer to write in created worlds. The rules of the world are mine to determine, and I can pull as much or as little from the real world as I want – so long as it is consistent with what has gone before in that work.
On a deeper level, I can’t help but see the push for sensitivity readers as yet more encouragement for self-censorship, and self-censorship is creative suicide. If I, as an American of northern European descent whose family emigrated in the 1600s and who grew up in rural Idaho, was only allowed to write about people like me, neither the Qaehl Cycle nor The Adventures of Einarr Stigandersen would have ever come into being.
You see, the world of the Qaehl was inspired by a single class I took in college on the art history of India. I was fascinated. The art, the sculpture, the music, the mythology, the melting pot of societies (don’t believe me? If you can get your hands on it, John Keay’s India – A History is a fascinating read. Or the Bollywood movie Jodhaa Akbar makes for an entertaining introduction.) – gave my inner creative self lots of room to play. By 2008, when I was brainstorming the first iteration of this first book, I was beginning to tire of fantasies after the mold of Tolkien, where the settings had been becoming more and more generically European and the subject matter had been getting progressively darker.
Yes, this is where I confess that I can’t read Game of Thrones. I got halfway through the second book and decided it was just too much. Meanwhile, I’m impatiently waiting for book 3 of the Stormlight Archives, so it’s not a matter of length.
What about Einarr? That world came about when I decided I wanted to do a pirate story, but at a lower tech level than you usually see, and I wanted art to be magic. (Quite literally. I may post more about that later, depending on how my Patreon goes.) If I wanted to do pirates, and I wanted to get away from the rum-running scoundrels of the Caribbean or the Letters of Marque of the renaissance, Vikings gave me the most room to play (because come on, Norse myth is badass).
But, you’re about to object, those are your people!
No, they’re really not. Wherever my ancestors came from (mostly the British Isles, but there’s a fair bit of Germanic and Scandinavian in there, too) I’m an American, and what little experience I have on the water mostly comes from paddling around in our family’s canoe when I was a kid. Furthermore, I’m a girl, and a tomboy-ish one at that. Based on that, what gives me the “right” to write about a 20-something dispossessed Viking prince? I’m separated from his likely mindset by culture, gender, and hundreds of years. But Einarr could never have been “Einara.” (Although that is a cool name that I may have to use elsewhere.)
Caveat: none of this is to excuse anyone trying to write from their research. Research is what allows your world to be internally consistent. I just can’t imagine that encouraging yet more paranoia about offending people will have a good effect on the stories we try to tell. Or that “teachable moments” are an unmitigated good in fiction. If I wanted to be preached at, I’d go to church. You can’t control how other people react to your work, which means that your best bet is to tell a story, and make it entertaining, and let your views come through naturally – without forcing them. Let people decide for themselves. You get better results that way.
Speaking of, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I’ve got the first chapter up of Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotünhall posted. Chapter 2 goes up tomorrow. I’m getting ready to launch a Patreon page, so if you like what you read I hope you’ll consider funding more. I’m not going to pound that drum too loudly in this space, but there’s not much point in doing it if I don’t tell anyone it’s coming. Now I need to get a couple administrative things out of the way so I can get back to the fiction.
Why, you may be asking yourself, would anyone bother making this from scratch when a box is just a buck? It’s a rice pilaf convenience food.
My first answer is to point you at the list of ingredients for their flavor packet. This also allows you the option to either brown the broken vermicelli before you add the rice or omit it entirely for gluten-free.
DH has a couple favorite meals from childhood that require chicken Rice-a-Roni, so this is what I came up with so that I can make them without the ingredients list making me blanch.
Serves: 2
Melt your butter or ghee (or other oil of choice) in your skillet of choice. Add the broken vermicelli noodles and sautée until they begin to turn golden, then add the rice and sautée briefly. Add chicken broth, onion powder, salt, pepper and parsley flakes and bring to a low boil. Cover your skillet and reduce heat: simmer 20-25 minutes, or until rice is done.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m sure you could use beef or vegetable broth instead. If you play with it, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear how it comes out.
In about a week and a half, I should be ready to launch the first book of The Adventures of Einarr Stigandersen. If you like Vikings, pirates, magical quests, and pulpy adventure fiction, you might want to come check this out.
Posting schedule will be Tuesdays and Thursdays.
After what feels like a long couple years of day-jobbing, finally there’s some interesting stuff going on around here again. This last fall DH moved departments and got a nice raise out of the deal, so now I’m back at home to do writing and household projects.
Looking ahead, early next month I will begin posting episodes of The Adventures of Einarr Sorensen, which you can think of as Viking pulp fantasy. If that sounds like your cup of tea, keep your eye on that space. (I’ll also be sure to announce it on Facebook and Twitter, if you happen to follow me there.) There will be new chapters every Tuesday and Thursday.
In the beginning of March, my debut novel Advent of Ruin should become available on Kindle – and quite probably elsewhere, unless the lure of KULL proves too strong. Or are they calling it KDP now? Either way. There will of course be a more formal announcement on that as launch day approaches.
On the home front, I feel like I have lots of catching up to do. Last spring I painted our hallway. At some point in the near future I need to get the living room, and then decide on colors for other rooms.
What may come before that, though, is that DH and I have talked about putting in a vegetable patch in our (kind of tiny, very sloped) back yard – which means planning how I want to build my beds! I’m thinking stacked boxes near the back door for herbs, a garden wall for leafy greens (probably nothing that fancy), and then maybe a raised bed or two. Does anyone have any clever ideas for building the wall and not wrecking siding?
I haven’t really done a lot of sewing over the past year, except that I’m learning to quilt, but yarn work is another story. Right now I’m trying to use up some of my stash, since it’s a little… okay, maybe a lot, out of control. Current projects: a Raglan sweater using some discontinued bouclé yarn, and hand-quilting my first project (because I can sit at my writing desk with a needle and thread but my sewing machine requires dedicated time).
So, last March DH and I went Primal. Then summer hit, and convention season, and we’re still not back on the wagon, but that’s really beside the point.
The point is, after much trial and error, I have finally figured out how to do a pie crust without wheat flour. This is inspired by PaleoSpirit’s Paleo Dinner Rolls.
If you don’t do dairy, I’m sure ghee would work just as well. Substitute other fats at your peril: I’ve only ever tried this as written, and a lot of healthy fats have their own distinct flavors.
Makes: 9″ pie crust
Ingredients:
- 1 cup tapioca flour/starch (arrowroot powder would probably also work)
- ¼ cup coconut flour
- ½ teaspoon sea salt
- ½ cup butter, melted and still warm
- 1 large egg
- 3 tablespoons coconut sugar*
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix coconut flour, tapioca flour, salt and sugar in a bowl until well combined. Add the melted butter and stir until the mixture begins to resemble coarse crumbs. Mix in the egg.
Roll out your crust, or press it into your pie plate. You may need to let the dough sit for a while to allow the coconut flour to absorb enough moisture. Bake for ~12 minutes, or until it is just beginning to brown.
*I find this a little two sweet on its own, but it’s just fine once the pie is filled. I liked it with no added sugar, but DH found it sour. Your mileage may vary.
Pictures to follow, after I make our Thanksgiving pumpkin pie tomorrow.
UPDATED 12/10/15: Success! A primalized pumpkin pie that tasted like a proper pumpkin pie! For the filling, I changed out the sugar in the basic Libby’s recipe for half honey, half maple syrup. Can’t help you if you don’t do dairy, sorry, although I pinned one that used soaked cashews and would have been really good with less (no?) allspice.
Used this same recipe to make a cheesecake crust last weekend, loosely following the instructions at Cooking for Engineers. DH says it may be the best cheesecake I’ve ever made. Added a half-teaspoon cinnamon to the crust, left out the flour in the filling entirely, subbed apple cider vinegar for lemon juice, and swapped out the sugar for 3/4 c each of (local, raw) honey and (real) maple syrup.
Ever since Gen Con things have been pretty topsy-turvy around here, mostly due to transportation-related issues.
I picked up a temp job literally the week after GenCon, which at the time was nice because more money, but very soon became necessary because – you guessed it – more money. Early in October, DH was driving to work in the morning when his old Dodge Neon quit accelerating on the freeway. No accident (thankfully), but after having AAA tow the car to our mechanic, we found out the car was essentially unfixable. Timing belt, of course.
By the way, our AAA membership paid for itself at least three times over this year.
So. For the month of October, we car-pooled in my rickety Daewoo. It had developed a bit of an old-car rattle, but nothing I thought was too critical.
Wrong. Last week of October, we started having to add coolant basically before every trip. And then, in the first week of November, the rattle gave way and that car died. That weekend we signed the paperwork to lease a brand-spanking-new Toyota Corolla, which is a good car with lots of amenities, and we continued to carpool and suffer 10-12 hour days.
Last Thursday, I wrote a guy a check for this beauty. Please excuse the poor picture quality: it was snapped in the garage the same night I bought it, and neither cropping nor adjusting the levels seemed to do anything for it. She’s a 1992 Honda Accord Coupe (I always think of cars as female, it’s just a thing), and I’ve been calling her Falcon. I kinda love driving it, which is a nice change, and since it’s a Honda with less than 150k on it, I can probably drive it until I’m sick of it. Which is also a nice change, because as I may have mentioned my last car was a POS Daewoo.
Which means that we now have two cars again. Happy New Year to me!
In other news, I believe I mentioned back in April that I was submitting Advent of Ruin to my first-choice publisher. Back in October, I got an email from them saying that my manuscript had been “selected for closer consideration.” I got this email at the office, and so I spent the rest of the day trying very hard not to squee out loud. So that was some good news to come out of the fall. Hurdle one, cleared! Which of course makes it that much harder to wait to hear on the next hurdle.
Because I’ve spent the last 2 1/2 months carpooling, and thereby being out of the house for obscenely long days, there isn’t actually a lot else to update you on. I did discover just this evening that a standard-size pillow case can, with about 5 minutes worth of work, be converted to fit a king size pillow. I’ll post a quick tutorial next time I do it, if anyone wants one.
On the gaming front, for those of you who may have been following my Kasumi posts, those stopped primarily because we suffered a TPK (Total Party Kill) and I had quite a lot else going on at the time. My current character is a Monkey by the name of Toku Ren, who is a much more stable character than Kasumi ever dreamed of being. I can continue posting the Kasumi writing if people are interested, but this summer the blog was in danger of turning into just another gaming journal.
At any rate, I hope you all had a Happy Holiday – whatever you happen to celebrate. Now I need to get back to prepping for New Years, which we were contrary enough to pick for our big one.
