Mapping

I don't head out into the wilderness without a map. Well, I did once in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and, despite having a good sense of direction, got totally lost and was lucky to find my way back before nightfall. I remember being confused, a little freaked out and yet still hopeful that I'd stumble across something familiar.

That one time was enough for me to learn my lesson about the importance of maps.

So why has it taken me so long to figure out that I need a map for my writing?

I guess I thought that I knew enough from all my years of endless reading and class attending. But plot structure does not come via osmosis and I'm discovering that the way I've been writing is the equivalent of a hand drawn map on the back of a napkin when heading into treacherous territory. Because really, is there any territory more treacherous than my thoughts? (For those of you who have happy relationships with your thought processes, more power to you. However, my thoughts and I battle each other regularly.)

I recently had this "ah ha!" moment and have put the brakes on the work I've been doing on my book. In the week or so before the "ah ha!" I spent way too much time navigating, getting lost, moving chapters around, questioning turns in the plot and screwing up.

It was not the most satisfying week of work. In fact, I was a big time grump.

But now I know it was because I was lost. And yes, the feelings were remarkably similar to what I felt when lost in the forest except for the fact that it was all happening inside my head and I had plenty of tea and cookies* on hand to help me feel a little better.

So I'm backing up. I've pulled a few books that I admire off the shelf and I'm mapping them.** I'm re-reading them for structure and charting their movements chapter by chapter. And then I'm going to use them as models to map my own book. I can now actually say that I'm looking forward to trying again with my map in hand. It's kind of like getting myself psyched up to climb a challenging mountain, but I won't be going up it empty handed this time.
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*Speaking of cookies, I thought I made good chocolate chip cookies, but the newest chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cook's Illustrated in which you brown the butter before making the cookie batter, is amazing.
**One really good side effect of the mapping project is that I've discovered the central idea for my next book and plan to have a map in hand for that one before NaNoWriMo rolls around.

Writing Goals

It's hard when you are working on your first novel* to know what is a reasonable amount of time in which to set your goals. There are people like Joyce Carol Oates who crank out amazing prose at a rate that makes normal humans just want to give up and crawl into a cave. There are other writers who taaake-theiiir-tiiiiime and either do or don't feel bad about it. I'm still trying to figure out where I fall on the writing speed continuum.

I had a hard writing month in April. Not sure why--the weather was glorious so I can't use the excuse of seasonal lethargy. But maybe I can blame the lilacs for distracting me! No, seriously. I went through a couple of weeks in which my writing self-esteem took a nose dive and I thought, with some degree of despair, that I'd have to chuck this baby out the window.

I'm still not quite sure how I dragged myself out of this pit. I cooked a little, I knit a little, I tried to remember that I'm not totally incompetent at everything I do.

Here's what I'm planning for the near future in the writing department:

Summer is going to suck as far as writing time goes. I'm looking forward to some of the stuff I have planned to do with my critters**, but realistically I'll probably only get one morning a week to really be able to write. That means that I need to have a good intact draft done by June 18th (the critter's last day of school and my 41st birthday) with an organized to-do writing list of stuff that could, conceivably, be done with half a brain while simultaneously officiating a super-squirter showdown (typing on the lap top through a clear plastic bag, perhaps). That means it is more important to crank out that missing chapter now than to dig through the first 10 chapters checking for contradictions. The latter is something I could conceivably do with the critters in the immediate vicinity--the former is not.

Also over the summer I am going to get over my fear that the first person who reads this will look at me with pity and say "This is how you've been spending your time?" So I'm starting safe with my dear husband whose continued gainful employment has allowed me the time to pursue this project (I am still in awe of the fact that he likes his job and they like him and, oh yeah, they PAY him too!). Then after him, I want to find some other people--critical readers, fellow writers--who can be my early readers. Anyone out there who is interested in reading and constructively commenting on my YA/Middle Grade (still not sure which) fiction with a fantasy bent?

After I spend the summer with the above two projects (working on the to-do list and absorbing feed back on the project) then in September and October I'll plan for a big overhaul.

Hopefully this will leave me with a submittable draft that I can shop around to agents and will leave my brain somewhat liberated so that in November I can do NaNoWriMo and work on a completely new book. Maybe a different genre or age range or even (gasp) non-fiction.

Aggg. It's scary just writing this stuff down because that means people will feel like they can ask me about the progress I'm making toward these goals. If you do see me, and venture to ask, and I turn pale and look like I'm going to faint, please administer beer. A nice hoppy IPA should bring me back around!

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*Well, the first novel that I actually think I'll finish and try and pitch. There are at least two that I've started and worked on, one for a considerable amount of time, and then decided to chuck.
**Which is the topic of another post in which I will be trolling for ideas to add to my "how to stay sane and maybe even enjoy yourself" list.

Fiona's favorite

Based on how much I bitch about my kids' lousy eating habits, what am I doing promoting anything that appeals to them? But the one area in which they don't drive me totally nuts is Middle Eastern food. We may have crap Thai and mediocre Vietnamese around here but the Lebanese food can not be beat (well, except in Lebanon...). When the boy critter was just a babe he sucked hummus (aka white velvet) off his pudgy little fist though, before you ask, sadly he no longer eats hummus...but he and his sister do eat copious quantities of lamb!

Since I can't afford to take them out for kofta and shawarma every week, I had to come up with a home version. Into the base of ground lamb goes some fine chopped onion, pine nuts, allspice and cinnamon, parsley, salt and pepper.
I make Brian squish it all together and shape it into patties. It's nice to delegate the icky part of the recipe.

Then I pop them in a non-stick or cast iron pan and cook away:

There's a lot of fat in most ground lamb*, but a lot of it also stays in the pan, not the patty.

Then serve it with your favorite Middle Eastern sides and accompaniments:

Tahini lemon sauce, chopped salad with sumac lemon dressing, red lentil soup, homemade pita and "Fiona's Favorite" lamb patties.

I couldn't stand the thought of going to the store (sometimes I suffer from severe retail aversion) and it was a good thing too because tonight I discovered that making your own pita is really easy and really good. I followed this recipe from the blog, Brown Eyed Baker, though as a lazy person, I let my Kitchen Aid do all the kneading. Since we were heading down to the FestiFools parade and this outing would interrupt the regular timing for the second rising, after I weighed and shaped the individual dough balls, I set them on a parchment covered baking sheet and loosely covered them with plastic wrap before sticking them in the fridge. When we got back, they rolled out nicely and puffed up when I baked them on the pizza stone. And the sensation of popping a lamb patty into a fresh, warm pita? Fantastic!

Fiona literally started jumping around the house with excitement when I told her I'd be making lamb patties for dinner tonight, and for a kid who is indifferent-to-hostile to most dinner foods, that is something to see.

Lamb Patties
feeds 4

1 lb ground lamb (can also use ground beef if you are not fond of lamb, though Fiona will think you are crazy)
2 T toasted pine nuts, chopped fine (or toasted almonds)
2 T onion, chopped fine (about 1/4 of a small onion)
1/2 t cinnamon
3/4 t allspice
1 t salt
1/2 t ground black pepper
1/4 C chopped parsley

In a bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well until evenly combined.

Take heaping tablespoons of the meat mixture and roll into balls, then flatten into patties (12 total, 4 per person). Or divide up into 8 larger balls (like Brian did tonight) and give out 2 per person.

Pan fry in a non-stick or seasoned cast iron skillet until browned on both sides and no longer pink in the middle.

To serve, stuff patties in a pita with tomato, cucumbers, lettuce and tahini lemon sauce or hummus.
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* The leanest ground lamb I've found has come from the folks who sell it frozen at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market. They aren't there all weeks, but when they are I try to pick some up.

My head just exploded*

Both kids just ate red quinoa and a small bowl of lettuce** with their dinner. I'm squinting, but there may be a little light at the end of this hellacious crappy-eater tunnel.

*The boy critter's phrase for being flabergasted.
**ok so the lettuce was iceberg. Plain. No dressing. But I ate plenty of iceberg as a kid and I'm going to think of it as a "gateway" salad vegetable.

Toile rescue

We moved our Alesis keyboard out of our living room and into the boy-critter's room, since he is the one who uses it most (recent repertoire alternates between: Bach minuets, The Who, Regina Spektor*, and his old stand by, Animusic). I discovered that my 9 year-old has very little appreciation for the efforts I put into the subversive toile keyboard cover. I kept finding it in a crumpled ball on the floor, hanging with the dust bunnies.

So I pulled out some natural canvas, made a (boring) keyboard cover that won't make me wince when I find it abused and rescued my toile. Last week I got some black velveteen, cut up the toile and made two couch pillows**:
So now I can hang with my aliens while watching TV.

But there are some places in the toile that are calling for more embellishment and I am trolling for ideas. Here are the locations that I want to corrupt:

Washing Lady

Empty Tree

Lady with a Rake

I'm trying to figure out if I can turn that rake into a pitchfork somehow; that, plus some devil horns and a tail could work.

Ideas? Tell me in the comments.
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*After a few week's worth of practice, I can now listen to the boy critter sing the "I've got a perfect body" line in "Folding Chair" without collapsing in giggles.
**By "made couch pillows" I mean that I attempted to sew two squares together with a zipper and only had to rip it out and start over twice!

Another hat

For those days when a fish-on-my head is not the look I'm going for, I made this Floppy Fair Isle hat. It was really fun to knit, I made it all from yarn in my stash (which gives me a thrifty thrill) and it is nice and loose, so doesn't create horrible hat head. I only used four colors of yarn, rather than the five called for in the pattern because the other worsted weight yarns in my stash clashed, but I think the colors and patterns turned out fine with four.

This hat works great for me, but I have a big head and thick, curly hair and I can imagine this hat being way too big and sliding over the faces or off the back of the heads of people with a smaller noodle circumference or who have fine, silky hair. As the name says, it is quite floppy, so much so that Brian commented that it would be a useful hat to wear when produce shopping in case you need a place to store an extra cantaloupe.

I'd love to make another one of these for someone, but need to find a big-headed, big-haired recipient who is fond of cantaloupe.

The pattern can be downloaded here.

Valentine's Day Breakfast

Breakfast for my sweetie.

It grossed me out to be molding hearts out of pork sausage first thing in the morning but hey, I did it for love. The girl critter stuck the toothpicks through to make them look like Cupid's arrow which made for authentic looking hearts, but slightly dangerous eating.

In the past, I've free-handed shaped pancakes, but this time I pulled out some cookie cutters and sprayed the hell out of them with cooking spray.
Flipping was a little tricky because it involved working the spatula under the pancake and using tongs to remove the cookie cutter before flipping the pancake.

Ta da!

It helps to use a thick pancake batter so it doesn't seep under the edge of the cookie cutter and luckily my standard go-to pancake recipe fits the bill. It makes thick cakes and there's just enough batter for each of us to have two decent-sized pancakes.

Sour Cream (or Yogurt) Pancakes

1/2 C white whole wheat flour
1/2 C all purpose flour
3 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1 T white sugar
1 C milk
1 egg
1/4 C sour cream or plain yogurt
1/2 t vanilla
2 T canola oil
some blueberries or mini chocolate chips (optional)
a little powdered sugar for dusting on before serving (optional)

Mix all the dry stuff in one bowl. Mix the wet stuff in another. Add wet to dry and stir until just combined. Cook the way you would any normal pancake.

The friend that gets you through it

I don't want to return this book to the library. It would be like dumping a friend after they got you through a rough patch. And oh my, have I been through a rough patch. A big old comeuppance.

For those of you who have tolerated my comments these past few winters about how healthy my family has been (despite my kvetching about my kids' crappy diet), today is the day you can sit back and say HA! Because the nasty, nasty norovirus hit us and hit us hard. And that is not a virus that you expose your friends to unless those friends are made of paper. But if your friend is The Art Student's War, by Brad Leithauser, then maybe you will get through without losing your marbles (while you continue to lose your lunch).

I won't go into the fascinating details of all the puking and mopping and digestive discoveries we have made over the last few weeks (except for this one--it is way better to puke up ginger ale than to have the dry heaves. Nuff said.) But I feel like I've been through the wringer and without this book I'm pretty sure I would have also gone crazy. Or more accurately, crazy in a lasting, she-might-not-be-ok-until-Spring kind of way.

This is a wonderful book (though I realize I've now wrecked it by making you associate it with puking...) that managed to distract me from my misery. It is NOT a fast read which is particularly good when you are not recovering quickly. The prose isn't impenetrable, but it is rich and layered and you want to savor the observations. It doesn't have a driving sense of plot--it is gentler than that and will wait patiently while you collapse and moan for a while.

The title seemed very accurate for the first part of the book, where we are following Bea Paradiso from her art classes in Detroit to her USO volunteer work sketching wounded soldiers. Her artist's eye is a wonderful perspective from which to view the strange vibrancy of Detroit in this period. When I moved into the second half of the book which takes place after the war, where Bea is married with kids and rarely has time to do any art, it wasn't immediately clear why the author had chosen the title. But it made sense in the end. The war defined who she was for her whole life--it wasn't just an episode that took place and then was in the past. The fact that she was an art student during this momentous period in which she defined herself and became aware of who she was gave the title a poignancy. She may never have become a full-fledged artist, but she will always have been an art student during the war.

I think this book would have a whole other level of richness and meaning for people whose parents lived in Detroit in this period. By the time my family moved to Michigan when I was 7, Detroit was post-riot and not a place we went except to scurry inside the DIA or some such cultural institution and then scurry back to our safe little enclave. I occasionally got a glimpse of people's affection for the city through some friend's parents who knew the old Detroit. I remember being taken to Eastern Market for the first time on a Saturday by a friend's family and being awed that such a teeming, alive place with amazing food (yes, I liked food a lot even back then) existed in a place I had heard referred to as a wasteland on weekends. I particularly appreciated the fact that the author, who clearly loves the city, does not overly romanticize it. He lays down the sources of the later riots, shows the bubbling ethnic mixture of the city and how the war both led to prosperity and excitement and also set down certain patterns that were later to explode.

For those of us interested in Detroit's future who weren't around for Detroit's past, this book is a very helpful way to envision the uniqueness that Detroit offered--it really wasn't like any other city I've ever heard of or envisioned--and to try and see how the best of this past can fit into its future.

And now, since I still have a cough and thus can allow myself to sit for another couple of hours, I'm going to go watch the new PBS documentary Beyond the Motor City.

The picky eater chronicles continue...

Photo from Wikipedia

Yesterday Ian got a good firm talking-to by his doctor about diversifying his eating choices so after the appointment we headed to the produce section of the grocery store for each kid to pick out a fresh fruit or vegetable they don't usually eat (which leaves pretty much everything but the apple aisle in play for Ian with the carrot section added for Fiona).

Ian picked out a big hunk of watermelon and Fiona picked out a star fruit. I don't know if there were any two fruits more out-of-season and non-local that the kids could possibly pick, but one battle at a time.

And through a great deal of wheedling, I got Ian to try the star fruit--and he liked it! And not for the novelty shape factor (which is why Fiona chose it--she took one bite and looked like she was going to hurl). Both kids ate some watermelon at dinner and Fiona even asked for seconds.

This small success balances out the fact that when Ian tried a spoonful of my red lentil soup on Sunday, he ran to the garbage can, spit it out and rinsed out his mouth with water at the sink with a great deal of theatrical spitting.

Happy Chunky Soup!

No photo for this recipe because I have discovered that next-day lentil soup is one of the uglier things on the planet.

But don't let that bias you against this recipe!

After devouring two bowls of this chunky sausage, lentil and spinach soup last night, I told Brian that I think this may be the first hearty, chunky soup that I really think is worth crowing about. I've had a number of successful experiences with smoother soups, be they Middle Eastern red lentil, creamy tomato, or other pureed varieties. And chlodnik is chunky summertime staple around here. But in the wintertime hearty, chunky soup department, I've been less successful. I've made edible, but not memorable, soups like minestrone, white bean and ham, or split pea. And they were ok, but nothing to rave about. It was more like the ingredients happened to be hanging out together, but didn't really meld into something more than their parts.

This soup is rave-able. It has a great balance of flavors that really complement each other--the vinegar at the end brings out the best in the lentils (like a good French green lentil salad) and the ketchup gives this just enough sweetness that it sets off the sausage flavor. The spinach makes you feel like maybe this isn't entirely bad for you. We had it with some homemade garlic bread--a half loaf of Zingerman's Italian bread sliced thick, brushed with olive oil that had a clove of garlic crushed into it and sprinkled with a little cayenne and fresh Parmesan cheese. Then the loaf was reassembled, wrapped in foil and heated in a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes. You could also add a salad but since we were in hunker-down-and-try-and-get-through-January mode, we skipped the raw vegetables and just had a second bowl of soup.

And if you want a photo before you'll try the recipe, go to the Food52 blog (which I only recently discovered) and look at their pretty picture. I read through their recipe and used most of the same ingredients, but didn't really follow their instructions (which seemed focused on making it fast--since I made it in the morning that wasn't really an issue for me).

Lentil Sausage Spinach Soup
adapted from antoniajames recipe on Food52


1 large Andouille sausage (mine was about double the length of a normal sausage link)
1 smaller non-smoked sausage, Italian or something like that
1 T olive oil
1 large yellow or white onion, diced

4 cloves of garlic, chopped
3 carrots, diced
3 stalks of celery, diced
2 bay leaves
1/2 t dried thyme
1 and 1/2 cups French green lentils
1 can beef broth
1 can chicken broth
2 C water
3/4 cup sturdy red wine
3 tablespoons ketchup
2 packed cups fresh baby spinach
1/4 cup chopped parsley
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 T red wine vinegar

In a big soup pot, heat the oil and cook your sausages (may want to add a little water to steam them so they cook through without over browning). Once the sausages are cooked through, remove them from the pot and set aside. When they've cooled a little, slice them up.

In the same pot, saute the onion and garlic on medium heat (you may need to add a little more olive oil--it depends on how much fat your sausages gave off) until onion is translucent. Add celery and carrots and cook, stirring frequently so nothing burns, for another couple of minutes.

Add your bay leaves, thyme, the lentils and all the liquids (broths, wine, water). Crank up the heat and bring to a boil, then simmer for about 1/2 an hour until the lentils are tender.

Season with the ketchup and salt and pepper.

Before serving, add back in the sausage slices, toss in the spinach and parsley and heat through. Stir in the red wine vinegar right at the end.