What’s a movie you thought that you would hate but ended up…not hating at all?
Makin’ Meatballs
Food has become a bit of a challenge here at Casa Jaquandor of late, as The Wife has found it necessary to adopt a gluten-free diet. For the most part, we find that eating gluten-free is not that hard, as long as you are (a) diligent in checking the ingredients of what you eat, and (b) curious and willing to explore foods you’re unfamiliar with. The Wife is very wide in her tastes and willing to try new foods, so while some favorites have slipped beyond our grasp, we’ve found other things to eat and we continue to look for ways to get back some stuff that’s been ruled out. (I, personally, am not on a gluten-free diet, but it’s often easier to just go that way, simply because it seems silly to make two meals every night.)
Anyway, one thing we’ve been stymied on is meatballs. We’ve always loved spaghetti and meatballs. We have found gluten-free spaghetti, but gluten-free meatballs have been a bit more difficult. So I figured it was time to take matters into my own hands.
Now, meatballs are one of those things I’ve always thought I should be making myself anyway, but never did because I was just lazy about it. This was the time, though, so I bought a package of hot italian sausage links and removed the meat from the casings. Then I mixed the meat by hand with a cup of gluten-free panko crumbs, about half a cup of grated Parmesan, two eggs, and about a half cup of milk. After that, it was a simple matter of shaping the meatballs and baking them at 400 degrees for about twenty-five minutes. The result? Wonderful meatballs that The Wife can eat! We had a few of them for dinner, and now the rest are in the freezer. (My total yield was about 36 meatballs.)
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So you’re going to be a spaceman!
When I was a kid, my dream was to be an astronaut.
Not terribly unique, as kids dreams went, in my generation. The space program had lost a bit of its momentum in the mid-1970s, but the moon landings were still fresh in memory, and in any event, a movie came along in 1977 that made space a going concern for an awful lot of young’uns, myself included. So in my first few years of grade school, I read a ton of space books. I remember very few of them, but I learned a lot from each. One of them that I do remember, quite strongly, is a book by an author and illustrator named Jeanne Bendick, called The First Book of Space Travel. The book came out in 1953, which means that when I read it in first grade (1977), it was 24 years old. And more…the book came out four years before Sputnik flew.
The book was mentioned a while back on the wonderful blog and everything else too. Seeing these images again after so long takes me right back to thumbing through this book while sitting in Mrs. Smith’s classroom at Witch Hazel School. (When I should have been working on my assignments…sigh….)
I need to track down a copy of this book! Why it’s not in my personal library already, I’m not really sure.
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A brief manifesto….
I created this the other night:
This is part of my newer way of thinking, part of which is my newfound aversion to snark. I fully accept that I’m a strange person, and I’m fine with it. Embracing the weirdness seems a lot more productive and likely to produce longterm fun, for me, than trying to aim for some level of conformity that has never much produced large dividends anyway. I could pretend to be a normal person with a normal haircut and normal clothes and normal hobbies, but as they always say on Aaron Sorkin shows, I haven’t got that kind of time. Give me long hair, bib overalls, spaceships and ghosts and wizards, and a pie in the face any day.
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Sentential Links
Time for LINKS!!!
:: It’s that great moment of seeing something you loved when you were younger and haven’t revisited for a very long time and finding it holds up even better than you thought. (I was a bit older when Pulp Fiction came out, but it’s still one of my favorite movies. I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw it…in a theater all by myself, because it was brand new and word-of-mouth hadn’t started building yet.)
:: How does the play weather a fourth reading? Excellently. It was wasted on my teenaged self, but it was a revelation when I taught it to my son in 2003 and again when I brought it to my daughters in 2009. (Ah, Julius Caesar — the play that started me on the road to thinking “Hey, maybe there’s something to this Shakespeare fellow after all!” We read it in tenth grade, and we focused on all the usual stuff: Brutus and Anthony, Caesar’s arrogance, the Ides of March, “The good is oft interred with our bones”, et cetera. But when I re-read it last year, what struck me between the eyes was a brief and horrifying scene when the Roman crowd, whipped into a frenzy, kills an innocent poet who just happens to have the same name as one of the conspirators. I don’t recall my tenth grade teacher making much of Shakespeare’s cynicism regarding the malleability of mob opinion, but that’s what I think about now whenever I think about that play.)
:: And all this puts me in mind of the young man I used to be and somehow lost track of.
I miss him. (I think that everybody has this moment at some point in their lives. The sooner we realize that the young guy is still in there, the better life gets.)
:: Not only did he publish without me, he got a patent on the idea as well. He did include me in the acknowledgements, but in science that’s worth exactly nothing. (I’m often glad I didn’t end up in academia.)
:: You know what I think? I think wasted potential is a lot scarier than feeling overwhelmed. There is no monster greater than regret. I wouldn’t wish it on any one. (I could not agree more, and I have a post on this topic on the way!)
:: But what kind of a place is it, that people are armed to the teeth, and terrified at the prospect of home invasion? What does it mean to live in a country that was, for generations, defined by institutionalized racism? Is South Africa really just Texas with a Dutch accent? (I said that I‘m not snarking anymore. I didn’t say I wouldn’t occasionally link other people’s snark!)
More next week….
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Answers the Fifth!
Another post or two, and I should be able to put Ask Me Anything! February 2013 to bed. Huzzah! (And remember, folks, you don’t have to wait for February or August to ask me anything. I’m always on the prowl for topic suggestions!)
My friend and writing cohort (and Princesses beta-reader) Lynda asks:
When going back to edit your writing, how do you determine what to keep and what to weed out?
My first goal when editing is to look for needless words and get rid of them. In On Writing, Stephen King says that the formula for the second draft is “1st Draft – 10%”, and I tend to agree with that. I like long, wordy books, but not too wordy. Of course, what counts as being ‘too wordy’ is open to debate and opinion, but in general, I really try to tighten up the prose when I start editing. Adverbs? I try to use as few as possible to begin with, and the ones that remain usually perish. Overly long descriptive passages get on my nerves, too, so I try to cut those down as much as possible. And then there is the fact that I can really be repetitive at times in my writing. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it’s a combination of two factors: first, that I don’t always recall what I’ve written before, and thus stand the chance of writing it again; and second, because I suppose I feel a certain amount of insecurity that the reader isn’t going to understand what I’m really getting at unless I pound the point home with a ball-peen hammer.
What I find myself doing, often when editing, is reminding myself that you gotta trust the reader to understand. This is where beta readers come in so handy, and I really wish I’d been using them more in my previous writing projects. When a beta reader comes at you with a question of the “I’m not sure what’s going on here” variety, that’s a red flag. And if more than one of your beta readers questions you on the same point, than that’s a red flag accompanied by sirens and guys shooting flares into the sky and your wife screaming “Stop the car, Frank!” in your ear. (I know my name’s not Frank. Deal with it!) Luckily for me, that didn’t happen much with Princesses, and I had six people read that thing, and I chose six folks whose tastes I can be fairly assured vary somewhat across a number of genres.
That’s the mechanical stuff. Sometimes I’m looking to tighten up pacing or eliminate general flab, and make the book or story flow better. How do I decide, then, what entire scenes to cut? Well…that’s a bit tougher, and it relies on trusting my own instincts when it comes to the storytelling. The question I always end up asking myself is this: Does the reader NEED to know this in order for the story to make sense? If the answer is ‘No’, then it’s not necessarily a slam-dunk that the passage is to be cut, but that is an indicator that maybe I can lose it.
In the specific case of editing Princesses, I had a lot of flabby material toward the front of the book, of the ‘establishing the setting’ variety, and based on feedback, I cut a lot of that in the edits. I also added in a couple of brief scenes in order to strengthen the flow and establish the characters more than the setting. That’s another good point to keep in mind: material that strengthens the characters tends to have a longer lease on life than stuff that’s just there because it’s cool or whatever. Of course, you have to have a relatively liberal notion of what a reader ‘needs’ to know, because if you really make that rule a harsh one, you can go too far the other way. And that’s no good. Unless you’re Hemingway. And you’re not.
There was also one scene in Princesses that I came this close to scrapping completely, simply because it didn’t really move things along — and in fact, I still don’t think it moves things along. But I left it in, because one of my beta readers praised that particular scene for entirely different reasons. So I kept it, on the basis that once in a while, it’s OK to have something happen just because it’s kind of cool.
My friend (and political soul-mate — HA!) Scotty asks:
“Into Darkness”-excited or no, Imax or no, and who’s the villain?
No, no, dunno. Next!
OK, more detail. Star Trek Into Darkness comes out this summer. Am I excited? Not really. As I’ve said a few times, in this space and others, I liked the first one, but mainly because I like explodey spaceshippy stuff. As Star Trek, it was a train wreck, and as science fiction, it was utter crap. But it was slickly made and fun to watch and I liked the cast, so I’ll see the sequel. But ‘excited’? Not really. I won’t see it on IMAX, either, just because I have a feeling the sensory overload of seeing a movie like that on so huge a screen would not be terribly pleasant. I like a standard movie screen just fine, thank you. I like IMAX movies, but ones that are specifically made for that format.
And the villain? I have no idea. I do think that Khan would be a staggeringly unoriginal and uninspired thing to do. So would Gary Mitchell. I don’t know what they’re up to, but on the basis of the first movie and the trailers for this one, I’m not holding out hope for any sense of originality whatsoever. If JJ Abrams is gonna direct Star Wars Episode VII, I’m glad that he’s not bringing his Trek writers along for the ride.
Still more to come! Progress is being made. I think. (Unless you folks sneak in any questions after the fact….)
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The Time Has Come!
Yup…it’s time to start working on the sequel to Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). I’ve just found getting back into Deliverance, eh? a bit of a slog, for a number of reasons. First, as I’ve mentioned before, it was just a mistake to get away from that story for as long as I did. The momentum really flagged, and it’s very hard getting back to something in progress when the brain just isn’t there. Second, a byproduct of that is that my head kept right on working on notions for the Princesses sequel, and now the story has crystallized enough that it’s just starting to burst out of my head. I figure I need to listen to that impulse, and I also figure that if I start now, at 1000 words a day, I should be able to generate a first draft by fall of this year. That way I can have the decks cleared by November, just in time for this year’s NaNoWriMo, when I hope to tackle another story idea that’s been bouncing about my head for a long time.
What does this mean for Deliverance, eh and The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy? Both are back-burnered…but neither one forever. I’m not turning from them because I dislike those stories. I’m turning toward the one that I need to write the most. Which means it’s time to see what those Princesses of mine have been doing, whilst in SPACE!!!
(And no, aside from the one rejection, I have not heard a single thing more from any of my current queries. More queries are going out, though. There’s an agent for me out there, and I will find them! No matter what occurs!)
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: If you don’t like insects (or art), don’t watch this video.
:: Leonard Bernstein rewrites Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. If you’ve read Bernstein’s brilliant and indispensable The Joy of Music, you’ve already read the transcript of this old teevee program, but to see it is amazing.
:: Like puzzles? As in, physical, mechanical puzzles? Puzzle World is for you. (Ignore the comic sans, if you can. Lord, I detest that font!)
More next week!
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Saturday Centus (Sunday edition)
I looked at the ramshackle contraption as Pa put the finishing touches on it. He was ready to light the fuse.
“Oh my God, you really think this thing’s gonna fly?!”
“Simple physics, m’boy! The fuel burns, the exhaust shoots out the bottom, and the rocket goes up!”
“Your fuel is gasoline!”
“Burns nice! My Ma always told me, ‘Use the right fuel’.”
I shook my head. “My Grandma always told me that you’re an idiot.”
Pa laughed as he lit the fuse.
An hour later, the fire department has a whole new story to add to the rest. And Pa’s hair grew back, eventually.
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EXTERIOR: Suburban Buffalo — KFC — Afternoon — Winter.
Two cars pull into the KFC parking lot. One pulls right up to the door; the other parks a bit farther away. A short, squat WOMAN in a brilliant sky-blue winter coat and her SON, a young man of about 20, get out of the first car. The young man is dressed in the standard Buffalo attire of jeans that aren’t really any color anymore, a jacket that isn’t any color anymore, and a utilitarian haircut that screams of ‘cut the parts that stick out below the edge of the bowl I’ve placed on your head’. From the other car comes a long-haired GENTLEMAN, decked out in a black flannel-lined shirt under a spiffy pair of Carhartt overalls. We can tell by looking at the GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS that he is a fellow of elegance, reason, and is generally a fine person to know. They enter the restaurant, whereupon the GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS hangs back to examine the menu. Meanwhile, the WOMAN and the SON walk right up to the counter, where the ORDER TAKEN is a crisp-looking teenaged boy in a clean uniform.
ORDER TAKER: Welcome to KFC, may I–
The SON’s cell phone rings loudly. His ringtone is a rap tune with the words ‘bitch-ass ho’ a lot.
ORDER TAKER: –take your order?
SON: (into phone) What? Yeah. Yeah, I love you! But I can’t talk about this right–
WOMAN: Yeah gimme a six-piece a’chicken.
ORDER TAKER: Original, crispy, or the other one that nobody orders? [EDITOR’S NOTE: He didn’t really say this! I just don’t recall what the actual third option was.]
WOMAN: (to SON, without turning to actually face him) You want original or crispy?
SON: (into phone, completely oblivious of his mother addressing him) No! No, don’t do that! DAMMIT! I said I love you, why you gotta make this so–
WOMAN: (louder, still doesn’t turn around) You want ORIGINAL or CRISPY?
She turns to look at the SON, who is facing the pop machine.
WOMAN: Give him Original.
ORDER TAKER: All right, what sides?
WOMAN: Sides? Whassat salad stuff with the dressing?
ORDER TAKER: Cole slaw?
WOMAN: Yeah! (loudly, to SON, again without turning, again without the SON realizing he’s being talked to) Cole slaw? You like COLE SLAW?
SON: Oh, you can’t be f***ing SERIOUS! I swear if you–! Yeah, yeah….I said I love you! I said it! What more do you–!
WOMAN: Cole slaw. And fries.
ORDER TAKER: You mean potato wedges?
WOMAN: I got fries last time!
ORDER TAKER: (somehow miraculously keeping his composure, given how young he is) We replaced the fries with the potato wedges.
WOMAN: Oh.
The GENTLEMAN in the overalls, who is diddling with his own cell phone in an effort to look like he’s not actually hanging on every word of the morality play unfolding, raises an eyebrow at the ease with which this kid has sold the lie.
WOMAN: Yeah, gimme the wedges. And a drink. (louder) You wanna drink?
SON: (still into phone) Babe, I gotta go. We’re in line. KFC. I know you don’t like KFC, but what do you care, you’re working!
WOMAN: No drink for him.
Now he turns back to face his mother, rolling his eyes and making that ‘flapping jaw’ gesture with his fingers to indicate that the girlfriend or whomever on the other end won’t shut up.
ORDER TAKER: That’ll be $12.42.
WOMAN: Here. (hands him a twenty)
SON: I gotta go! We’ll talk about this later. Just call me back in half an hour. Just call me back. Call me back! Half an hour! Yeah! Love you, call me back, half hour, bye! (hangs up) What are we eating?
WOMAN: Chicken.
The GENTLEMAN in the overalls bites his lips together to keep from laughing out loud.
SON: Did you order the Chicken Bites? [EDITOR’S NOTE: “Chicken Bites” are apparently the replacement for the old “Popcorn Chicken” menu item.]
WOMAN: You didn’t say nothin’ about Chicken Bites!
SON: I want Chicken Bites. Got more money? I’ll order ’em.
WOMAN: Yeah, here’s five bucks. It’s all I got. But wait for that guy. You shoulda been ordering with me.
SON: I tried! Bitch wouldn’t hang up!
WOMAN: Don’t call her ‘bitch’, she’s datin’ your ass.
Now the GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS is scratching his neck so he doesn’t have to face these folks.
WOMAN: Get outta the way. Let that guy order.
They look at the GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS, who realizes what’s happening.
GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS: Oh, go ahead. I’m in no hurry here.
SON: Thanks! See, Mom?
The Son turns to the ORDER TAKER.
ORDER TAKER: Welcome to KFC, may I take your order?
SON: Yeah, I want some Chicken Bites.
The Food Guy from the back of house comes up to the counter with a tray.
FOOD GUY: Order #273? Six-piece?
WOMAN: Yeah.
She grabs the tray and goes to a table in the dining room.
WOMAN: (calling to SON) I’m sittin’ down now!
SON: (without turning around) Yeah! Chicken Bites. Uh…large.
The GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS glances up at the menu board and notices that the Large Chicken Bites is more than five bucks. In fact, even the Small, with sales tax added on, will be more than five bucks.
WOMAN: (now talking loudly to no one in particular) Awww, shit! They only gave me one plate. How am I supposed to eat!
The GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS brushes a fuzzy or something from the bib of his overalls, trying not to focus on the ‘How many plates does one woman need to eat a meal at KFC?’ question.
ORDER TAKER: A large Chicken Bites is $7-something.
SON: Ummmm…
He starts fishing in his pockets, but it’s clear that the five in his hand is the only money he’s got.
SON: Make it the small, then.
ORDER TAKER: OK…that’ll be $5.sixty something.
SON: Ummmm….
He is realizing that he doesn’t have enough money to pay even that.
SON: Hey Ma–
WOMAN: Tell them to gimme another plate!
SON: You got anymore money?
WOMAN: Nah I gave it all to you! Tell them gimme another plate!
Nevertheless she gets up, returns to the counter, and hands him a twenty. Then she returns to the table.
WOMAN: I still need another plate!
Now she’s yelling loudly enough that the FOOD GUY in back can hear her, and he is scrambling to bring up a plate.
ORDER TAKER: All right, here’s the change. And here are your Chicken Bites. And here’s the–
WOMAN: I need another plate!
ORDER TAKER: –other plate for her.
SON: Ma! Stop!
He holds up the plate for her to see. She calms down. The GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS, still wondering why she could possibly need TWO plates, waits until the ORDER TAKER acknowledges him.
ORDER TAKER: Hello, welcome to KFC. May I take your order?
The GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS notices the look in the ORDER TAKER’s eye, the look of prayerfulness in hopes that no one quite that crazy comes through the line for a while. He also notes that this fellow has to start every single interaction with a customer the exact same way, no doubt because ‘market research’ has shown that what customers want to hear in a restaurant is a personality-free, standardized greeting.
GENTLEMAN IN OVERALLS: Sure. I’d like a–
FADE OUT as life returns to normal at KFC.