Category Archives: Food

Salad dressing

16 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Salad

≈ 2 Comments

I eat a lot of salad. If you’d said that to me three years ago, I would have envisioned “a lot” being a reasonable amount of salad, maybe a side salad with dinner most nights, with a couple of meal salads for lunches. But no, I mean A LOT of salad. On average, two of my meals every day are probably salads. I have an entire theory of salad creation that I developed a while back and my salads are full meals. Also complex, interesting, and often weird. And surprisingly enough, I’ve started to get bored with them.

I’m not even sure how it’s possible to get bored when we’re talking about so many different kinds of food. For examples, here are some of the salads I’ve eaten in the last week:

    1) Mixed greens, honey smoked salmon, radishes, cucumbers, black olives, avocado, balsamic vinegar.
    2) Mixed greens, roast beef sliced thin and rolled, carrot rounds, cucumbers, avocado, balsamic vinegar.
    3) Mixed greens, turkey chunks, fresh mango, dried apricots, avocado, dressing made of balsamic vinegar mixed with peach honey mustard.
    4) Mixed greens, topped with chicken mixed with capers, avocado, a little olive oil, and avocado chunks.
    5) Shredded cabbage, shrimp sautéed in garlic, nectarine, red onion, avocado, cilantro, dressing of lime juice, white wine vinegar, olive oil and a little salt.

See the impossibility of being bored? And yet… there starts to be a sameness. I’m sure I had #1 at least three times, I know I’ve had #3 twice (and it’s new to my rotation), and I didn’t include the “mixed greens, hamburger, avocado” that I ate at least three times.

Thus, I am now discovering the virtues of salad dressing. For a long time, the majority of my salads have simply been topped with plain balsamic vinegar. But when I was fretting over my sense of salad boredom, I realized that the best salads, my favorites, are the ones with more interesting dressings. And the great thing is that an interesting salad dressing is ridiculously easy to make. Most of mine are just a form of vinegar (often balsamic, but sometimes red wine or white wine) and potentially a little olive oil mixed with a flavoring: i.e., jam, jelly, mustard, chopped herbs, garlic, sometimes a little salt or pepper.

But the internet is providing me with lots of interesting potential new options. So, collected here for my future reference:

    1) shallots or green onion
    2) lime zest or lemon zest
    3) parmesan cheese
    4) feta cheese
    5) minced jalapeno pepper (hot sauce might be tasty, too?)
    6) minced red onion
    7) mayo! or greek yogurt — creamy dressings sound quite easy, actually
    8) nuts — but most of those recipes require a blender, maybe I could mash the nuts with a hammer, instead?
    9) olives — also the blender problem, but maybe I could mince the olives? on the other hands, lots of my salads have olives, not sure I need them in the dressing
    10) truffle oil or flavored oils? — a great idea, but probably not going to work well in my future minimalist life
    11) sweeteners — honey, maple syrup
    12) cumin? maybe for a salad with roasted vegetables?
    13) orange juice or other juice
    14) relish
    15) any pureed fruit
    16) ginger
    17) soy sauce
    18) fish sauce

Most of the time, I don’t actually follow recipes because most recipes make enough that I’d have to throw out a lot or eat the same salad many times in a row. I just mix up a teaspoon of something with a tablespoon or so of vinegar and add oil only if it looks like it needs the oil. But I suspect with some of these (cumin, fish sauce, anything with mayo), I’d be a lot better off if I got the proportions right. Still, I’ve gotten so many interesting new ideas that I’m quite looking forward to my next few meals. I wonder if a cumin cranberry dressing for a salad with turkey chunks would taste good? I bought a big piece of turkey at CostCo the other day and I’m going to be eating it for many more meals this week. I’ll have to give it a try.

In other news… Orlando is a weird place to live this week. It’s a big city, but a small world and it feels like everyone knows someone affected by the tragedy. I’m trying to stay off social media, having unfriended a couple people for the first time ever, and trying to avoid the news, too, after Sunday’s binge, but it’s impossible not to be aware of the emotion in the atmosphere. But the sun is shining and the weather is lovely and Tuesday we had a huge rainbow of which this is not a very good picture…

Rainbow

Rainbow

… and on we go.

Grace as needed

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Depression, Food

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, ,

I’m not sure why I woke up in a bleak mood this morning. Nothing went wrong, nothing bad happened, and yet my old enemy depression grabbed me by the throat and started beating me up.

To this level: I opened the cupboard to get the coffee and somehow knocked a glass out. It shattered on the granite countertop and I sighed and decided to finish making coffee before cleaning up. And in the 90 seconds while I scooped the coffee and ran the water, my brain kept cycling around the question of whether I could kill myself with the broken glass but still somehow make it look like an accident. I’m not suicidal. I have no intention of killing myself. But that thought process is known as suicidal ideation and it’s one of the deepest and most frustrating symptoms of depression for me. I finished making the coffee and I cleaned up the glass carefully and I fed the dogs and I tried very hard not to hate myself.

And then I opened Facebook and read this post from Anne Lamott. And you should absolutely go read the whole thing, because it is so worth it, but this line — “The author might mention in passing that we get to start a new, sillier, more self-forgiving day whenever we want to.” — that line is the gift of grace that I needed this morning.

(Really, go read the whole thing. I want to quote it all. And then read the comments, because many of them are lovely and moving, too.)

Today, I am going to be silly and self-forgiving. And I’m going to write a lot of good words, and maybe I’m even going to hunt down some Valentine’s Day chocolate (or other chocolate, I’m not picky).

And on a totally unrelated note:

stuffed acorn squash

Acorn squash stuffed with stuff

Yesterday’s invented recipe was acorn squash, sprinkled with ginger and cinnamon and roasted, then filled with a mix of apple, red onion, cucumber, dried cranberry, and diced chicken apple sausage. I think it would have been better if I’d used celery instead of cucumber and heated up the filling, plus the addition of some toasted pecans and goat cheese would have been amazing, but I want to save it for future reference anyway. Delicious, healthy, filling, and even AIP.

Friends and food

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Food, Personal, Pets, Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

A friend dropped by the other day around eleven and we walked the dogs together. When we got back, I invited her in and offered her lunch. She did that polite demurral thing, but when I said, “Really, I’ve got plenty,” she accepted. I made us salads — mixed greens topped with chicken apple sausage, sautéed onion, apple, and toasted pecans. And on mine, a little goat cheese. She doesn’t eat dairy. Plus, balsamic vinegar. That’s a normal lunch for me, and it was no big deal to make more, but she raved about how delicious and healthy it was.

That evening, another friend stopped by to show off his new purchase — the batmobile of motorcycles, a Victory motorcycle, I’m going to say this one. It was gorgeous. I’d been in the middle of cooking dinner, so I invited him in. He said, “Are you sure you have enough?” and I said, “You might have to eat something more later, but I’ve got extra.” He came in and I chopped up some more squash and made salads that I hadn’t been planning to make, so we had steelhead trout marinated in soy sauce (gluten-free), sriracha, and lime juice and sautéed, with yellow squash sautéed with ginger, plus a salad of mixed greens, celery, radishes, and a peach honey mustard vinaigrette. He said it was probably the first salad he’d eaten in a month and the best meal he’d had in a while.

Yesterday, my same dog-walking friend came by early and walked the dogs with me again — she likes the exercise and B is much, much better at walking when there are two of us for some reason. Maybe because I can really leave him behind when someone else is holding his leash and so then he hurries to keep up? But I had coffee already made, so invited her in and made us breakfast. (She again said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” to which I answered, “I have bacon.” :)) We had eggs, scrambled with onion, spinach, cilantro, and avocado and cooked in coconut oil (to avoid the dairy), with the bacon on the side. The eggs were actually seriously delicious. Great combination of flavors, and the coconut oil worked really well. It’s a different flavor than butter would give, but a tasty flavor.

Anyway, that day — well, or 24-hour period, since it was really one day to the next — that day was once my fantasy. When I started learning how to cook, it was mostly so that I could feed myself, but there was also a wistful daydream associated with it of being able have someone drop by and whip up a meal for them in the kitchen like it was no big deal. To have a friend over and feed them without having to plan, without having to run to the grocery store or buy ingredients. To open the refrigerator and say, “what can I make with what I’ve got?” and have the meal turn out as delicious and interesting as if I was in a restaurant.

It’s taken me seventeen years or so, but I wish I could go back in time to my younger self, the me that was going through a divorce, alone in a dive-y apartment with a three year old, feeling overwhelmed and grief-stricken and angry, angry, angry, and thank her. The decision she (I) made to learn to cook was made out of frustration and financial insecurity and loneliness. I knew that if I was ever going to be the parent that R deserved, I needed to be able to feed him more than pasta and fruit. But what a good decision it was.

Edited to add: my friend Tim congratulated me on this moment by saying, “Congrats on adulting to the extreme,” which made me laugh. It is the perfect summation of how I feel.

Can’t miss reads

07 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Appetizers, Personal

≈ 4 Comments

One of the sort of exciting, sort of traumatic elements of switching computers — including switching operating systems, web browsers, and storage systems! — is the opportunity to recreate my computer world. It turns out that my former RSS reader doesn’t work in Chrome. This is not so much of a problem really — I wasn’t all that fond of it and I’ve thought for a long time that I should switch to another one. But it’s tough to get motivated to switch something so basic because, ugh, what a lot of work. It’s so much easier to just stick with the familiar, even when the familiar is not so satisfying. But now I have no choice. The question is: do I keep the old computer open while I copy each and every blog over to the new system or do I just start with the few blogs that I remember and let my RSS feed once again evolve organically? Honestly, it feels like a serious dilemma. I haven’t made a decision, but I suspect that not making the decision will turn out to be a decision.

The new RSS reader, feedly, currently with only two blogs in it, seems quite nice, though. I particularly like the simple way that you add new blogs: they get a little icon in the bottom corner that lets you click and add them to the feed. Huh, I should probably check and make sure that my blog has said icon for other RSS users.

But the real question ought to be: what are the two blogs? If I can only remember two blogs off-hand, they must be my favorites, right? They are The Passive Voice, to my mind the single essential self-publishing news site (because he’s a great compiler of other people’s important posts), and Captain Awkward, a great and interesting advice site. I’m sure that I’ll be adding other blogs as I remember them and miss them or stumble across them again, but those are the two that apparently are my “can’t miss” reads.

In other “can’t miss read” news, Robin McKinley has Kindle books on sale for $1.99, including her classic retelling of Beauty and the Beast, as well as Sunshine, the only vampire book that I’ve ever loved. (Vampires = overgrown mosquitoes. Yuck.) If you haven’t read these books — well, any of the books that she has on offer for $1.99 — it’s a wonderful opportunity. And if you have read them, it’s a great chance to add the ebooks to your collection. I’ve been ruthless in paring down paper books in the last decade, but I still own all of the books that she has on sale and yet I bought each and every one of them because I was so pleased to have the chance to get them in ebook version. Then, of course, I wasted my entire afternoon reading. But you should do the same. 🙂

Motivation

22 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Food, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Sometimes it’s so hard to open up the file and start typing. I wish I knew why. I read The War of Art recently, subtitled “Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles” and about all I can remember from it is a sort of religious idea of creativity, with Resistance being the devil’s handiwork. More or less. Really, probably less, I’m totally reading into it. But I remember nothing that tells me why I experience such resistance or what to do about it. Except, of course, to just open the damn file and start typing.

A few weeks ago I was on reddit and a cover designer posted a $30 cover offer for NaNo. On a total impulse, I took him up on it. For, of all things, A Lonely Magic. This will be the… fifth cover. I had to count on my fingers. Ugh. I should stop blaming the cover for the book’s lack of success — I worked in the business long enough to know that some books just don’t sell. Wrong time, wrong book, wrong opening, wrong blurb — it’s impossible to know why. It’s just the nature of the business.

But my Law of Attraction friend told me that I needed to be positive about the cover, to send out vibes into the universe that said “sparkling and magical” and to have faith that the cover would be, finally, the cover of my dreams. It would help, I suppose, if I knew what my dreams were. Anyway, I got a first design yesterday, and then a second pass at that design in the evening, and I’m actually rather impatiently waiting for the third pass. It’s different. I have no idea whether it will sell any books. But I’m definitely pleased with my $30 investment. (I’ll post it, obviously, when I get a final version.)

And now I should stop letting my Resistance run away with me. Yesterday I didn’t write a single word on Grace and today I need to do better. As well as doing all those chores I didn’t get to yesterday, including getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, four days in advance! But I like to make it easy on myself by having almost everything prepped in advance. Last year, there were nine of us, and by the time people arrived, I had the kitchen close to clean, and by seven PM, it was back to normal. I aspire to do the same this year, with ten people, which means planning. But this year it ought to be really easy — I’ve got people bringing stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, rolls, and two kinds of dessert. I’m on turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy, but will probably add brussel sprouts and maybe salad, just to give myself more to do. Hmm, maybe I’ll make an appetizer? But I already know that my guests are happy as long as the turkey, stuffing, and pie are there, so I don’t really have much to worry about.

Resistance is writing about Thanksgiving dinner when I should be writing Grace. But if you know of any interesting Thanksgiving appetizers, please share them with me!

Stew(ing)

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Food, Grace, Randomness, Stew, Therapy, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Along the way of writing A Gift of Grace, I had an idea that raised the stakes, which I approved of, and so I intended to use it. I’m finally at the point where I need to write it and it doesn’t have a secure foundation. That means I should go back and write that secure foundation in, but the very thought makes me want to stab myself. Hari-kari? Was that the ritual suicide that involved ripping open your guts? I should go look it up, but I refuse to succumb to the lure of random internet research today.

I’ve been working on this book for almost a year now — I started it as last year’s NaNoWriMo — and I am not going to start revising it until a first draft is finished, even if my draft readers are going “huh? what? where did that come from?”

I also realized yesterday that an element of the story that was always clear to me is never once explained to the reader. It is a bit much to expect the reader to read my mind, and so that also makes me want to go back and revise. But no. No, no, no.

This is the question I’ve been stewing over and this is the decision made. But the process of fretting about whether I should revise made me think about the word “stew” when it equals worry. It suggests that worry is a process of cooking, as if there’s heat to the idea of worrying. Not a lot of heat, not a boil, but a low heat.

When I was working on becoming a therapist, the kind of therapy I wanted to practice was called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. One of the things I liked about ACT is that it teaches techniques that… well, felt more in line with my experience of the world. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is probably the most commonly-used type of therapy today, teaches people to look at their thoughts, logically analyze them, and reject the bad ones. So if you’re feeling self-loathing, a CBT approach would be to look at the good that you’ve done in the world, the people that care about you, and remind yourself that you’re a good person who is loved.

It does not work for me. My thoughts are great at telling me that I’m fine, but my feelings let me know that actually, I’m just lying and not very convincingly. I can think as loudly as I like, as positively as I like, but it doesn’t change the underlying feelings. ACT instead says, yep, that’s a feeling, embrace it, this is the way you feel, and now move on, what can you DO that will help you feel better? Not what will you think, because thinking isn’t the problem, but what action will you take? And in that “embrace the feeling” stage, there are exercises to do, specific techniques to let yourself experience pain, feel it, and let it go. You don’t do the exercises to escape from the pain (known as experiential avoidance in ACT and considered not helpful) but to allow yourself to feel the pain. Anyway, after turning this into a very long story, I’ve decided to work on developing a stewing exercise, where I let myself ruminate and worry, in fact focus on my worrying instead of trying to escape from it, while I visualize my worries slowly cooking and breaking down. Worry stew. Maybe not delicious, but the imagery is so satisfying somehow.

My second reason for thinking about stew is that CostCo had fresh cranberries yesterday and so I bought meat to make stew. (This seems like a non sequiteur but cranberries are a fantastic ingredient in beef stew — they add a delicious tang and a beautiful color.) This morning I realized that for various reasons, namely a commitment to make pot roast on Sunday, I should either make my stew today or freeze the ingredients until sometime next week. But eh. I was not in the mood. So I made a lazy stew — no flouring and browning the meat, no deglazing the pan with red wine, no fancy stuff, just throwing some raw ingredients in the crockpot and hoping for the best. Ingredients: carrot, parsnip, celery, onion, three cloves of garlic (peeled, but not crushed), dried parsley, dried rosemary, fresh cilantro, salt, 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar, 2/3 cup of chicken broth, stew meat. I’ll add the cranberries about an hour before I want to eat. If it works, I’ll be pleased, because it seriously cuts stew-making time and effort down to… well, I had everything in the crockpot before 8AM, with time to eat leftover coconut curry seafood stew for breakfast and still be at my computer by 8. Fingers crossed that lazy stew tastes good, though. I will be seriously annoyed with myself if I’ve wasted my stew meat with something that I don’t like enough to eat for three days.

Autumn arriving

02 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Boring, Editing, Food, Swimming

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

It felt like fall today, so I made myself winter food for breakfast: veggie hash, which is basically just whatever veggies I have available, chopped up reasonably small (for fast cooking) and sauteed, with some protein source mixed in. Today, it was acorn squash, sweet potato, carrot, parsnip, bok choy, and red onion with bacon. Some spices — garlic-salt and ginger — while cooking. At the last minute, I added half an avocado because I had two that are ripe. Wow, the avocado just made it. It added a touch of cool creaminess, but the heat of the veggies was enough to soften it, so all the veggies became lightly avocado-flavored. That sounds weird, but it was delicious.

In the last four days, I have edited 150,000 words. (Mostly not my own words.) I am seriously wiped out. Editing is such focused work. But I enjoyed it. Most of all, I enjoyed going over to a friend’s last night for our weekly writing get-together and getting to be back in my own world again. Spending my day hours editing made my evening hours of writing all the better.

I haven’t thought much about editing as what I should be doing to make money while I write for fun, but now I’m considering the idea. I thought I was so burned out on editing that I would never go back, but… well, I don’t know. Maybe.

Yesterday, first day of October, I stretched my lunch break to two hours so that I could spend one of them floating in the pool and reading a book. I think this is the first time that I’ve still been swimming regularly as October begins. This year I saw maybe two love bugs, that was it. Usually by now we’re infested with them. Maybe the summer was too wet? But I’m grateful for the last lingering days of enjoying the water.

This feels like a very boring blog post, but I’ve got a bunch of businesslike things to do — making a new box set, pulling The Spirits of Christmas from non-Amazon sites, downloading a translation, writing a book description and a forward — and I’m feeling so fried from the editing that I’m avoiding all those things. Plus, avocado in veggie hash & swimming in October are things I want to remember, and blogging works that way for me. But back to work I go…

Dyslexia

02 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Personal, Salad

≈ 8 Comments

Once upon a time, I started this blog to write about dyslexia and learning disabilities. At the moment when I discovered blogging, my whole life was pretty much about being the parent of a kid who had been diagnosed as severely learning disabled.

I never did write about that much.

It’s not that it didn’t affect my life. All of the choices that I made between 2004 and 2013 or so were about what I thought was best for R. Sometimes those choices were really hard. Leaving California — well, I don’t know how many people can really appreciate what it’s like to say that the number one priority in your life, the thing everything else gets subsumed to, is that your kid learn to read. Moving across the country wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t afford the kind of intensive private school that I felt he needed in CA, and I could afford it in FL. It wasn’t an easy decision. I did it anyway.

And making choices that your kid hates — well, that’s not a ton of fun, either. I will never forget the bitterness in his voice when eleven-year-old R told me that people come to Florida to die and asked me how soon I expected that end for him. I mean, I do have to laugh at the memory, but it was pretty darn harsh at the time.

R has always hated, never gentled into, his diagnosis. I can’t blame him — some of the early stuff around his struggle to read was just so miserable. Summer camp one year — ugh, I can’t even go there. We’ve had a bumper sticker on the car, Dyslexics Have More FNU, since 2004, and yet that has always been plainly not true. Also slightly annoying because “fnu” shows dyslexia in its reality but “FNU” does not. Lower-case u and lower-case n are, in fact, the same letter to a true dyslexic because the difference between them is insignificant in three dimensions and yet the same can not be said of N and U. The person who typed the bumper sticker didn’t get it, but hey, I was desperate for a little positivity at the time, so I didn’t argue.

Anyway, last year (hey, this story really is getting somewhere, who knew?), R applied for a scholarship for students with learning disabilities. He discovered it himself, did the work to apply for it, got recommendations from teachers, contacted me to send his test scores to the disabilities coordinator at his school, did the whole thing. I was so proud of him. He’s been tested multiple times over the course of the past decade and every time the results have been the same — wow, this is a seriously bright kid with some severe issues. And you know, when you are that kid, that result kind of sucks.

He… I wouldn’t say he hides it, but he definitely doesn’t talk about it and when I tried to get him to be proactive about working with his college for accommodations, he totally shot me down. Legally, his level of disability entitles him (or at least did in the past) to audio books and I’m sure he could get any accommodation he wanted — more time on tests, an aide to read to him, whatever — he’s got the history and scores to support that. (I’d been warned about how difficult it would be to get him help but literally, on his first IEP, he qualified for an aide in the classroom — that’s how significant his issues were.) He didn’t want any of that and didn’t use any of it.

But he did apply for this scholarship.

We didn’t hear anything. Nothing, nothing, more nothing. Until today.

And it’s weird to talk about money in public and so I’m not going to, but… they gave him our contribution for the year, or close to it. And… I am so incredibly proud of him. I don’t even… it’s not just about the money, although the money is fantastic. Beyond fantastic. But it’s about self-acceptance, about finding the positive side of something that sucks, about making the best of your weaknesses, about compensating… I don’t even know. I do know that I’m super tearful, which is probably silly, but also that this is the reason I have a blog, to save this memory, because ten years from now, I have no idea what book thing might or might not be important, but I do know that remembering this incredibly surreal combination of delight and pride and … well, more pride… it’s going to be the day that I want to remember in 2025.

Way back in 2004, an educational psychologist said to me that it would be okay if R never learned to read, that he was fortunate to live in an age when technology could compensate, and I smiled politely and thought privately, my kid is going to read if I have to sell my soul to make it so. Because I want him to have the joy I’ve had in books more than anything else I could give him. Over the years, I’ve had to figure out that okay, maybe books aren’t the whole universe. Maybe it’s okay if he gets story through television or games instead of text. Maybe it’s okay if he doesn’t love to read. But here we are — and he does love to read. And although he’s still dyslexic to the core, it isn’t stopping him from busily confronting gender inequality in academia and studying medieval Italian city states.

I am so proud of him.

Salad of the day: totally luxe. Mixed greens with dates, goat cheese, pecans, smoked trout and balsamic vinegar. Creamy, crunchy, sweet, tangy, salty. Perfection. Except for the part about me needing to eat less sugar, less dairy, and no nuts. Sigh.

Pottery

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Salad, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Two random stories are percolating* in my brain today, doing that coffee bean and hot water thing where alone each story is what it is but together maybe they make something better, maybe even something caffeinated and delicious.

*Percolating felt like a thesaurus word, the kind of thing I come up with when I’m over-tired and trying too hard, but in fact, in this case, I really mean it. These two stories are turning into coffee in my brain.

The first was Is $500,000 the new midlist? from Rachel Aaron. I know that it’s meant to be inspirational, that it’s meant to drive writers to believe that we can make it, too, that a living wage (plus a whole lot more!) is within our grasp, but… well, I found it depressing.

A short and personal digression: this weekend I had a lovely lunch with R. He has ruled out a semester abroad for his junior year because it will cost too much, making the third time recently where we’ve had a conversation about money where it’s clear that he’s worrying a lot. I said to him, “I could get a real job again,” to which he said, more or less, “No, this is my choice, I’m not willing to spend that much money for that experience,” but this perhaps explains part of why discovering that I’m nowhere close to the “new midlist” was more depressing than inspiring.

The second story showed up on my tumblr feed, and I’ve seen it before, but somehow today it clicked. It’s a parable about quantity vs quality, generally sourced to a book called Art and Fear. I haven’t read the book, although clearly I should, but the short version of the story is that a ceramics instructor splits the class into two groups. One group is being graded on the quantity of their work; the other half is being graded on the quality. At the end of the semester, the best work doesn’t come from the people focusing on quality but on those focusing on quantity. They produced more work and sure, maybe their first ten pots weren’t as good as the single pot created by the quality-oriented students, but their hundredth pot was distinctly better. That’s paraphrased, but the rough idea.

So my coffee thought — I need to go back to writing fast and letting go, the way I did when I was writing fanfiction. Not because I want to deliver dreck into the universe but because I have two goals and those goals — well, they’re the coffee. My first goal is still to improve, to become a better writer, but I need to believe that I’ll improve faster purely by writing more words. The second goal is to be able to learn a living at this, which also means writing faster. The new midlist author has published 12 books in her three years, compared to my three.

Now the question becomes — how do I do that? The first step, I think, should be starting to post my daily work on fictionpress again. It’s not going to be polished, it’s going to be the first outpourings, the 1000 words that circle around what I want to say and fumble toward some action, where the characters babble on and digress and weave back-and-forth. But that’s okay, because the more words I write, the more I learn, and the better the stories become, one way or another.

Yesterday’s breakfast: spinach salad, with chopped-up Gala apple, slices of chicken sausage, roasted brussels sprouts, and shredded Irish white cheddar cheese, topped with balsamic vinegar. I’m paying the price for the cheese in congestion today, but it was worth it.

Summer’s End

22 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by in Florida, Food, Salad

≈ 2 Comments

R headed off to school this week. That means summer’s over, right? But the Florida weather promptly rewarded me with the two nicest days we’ve had all summer long. Swimming was finally the kind of joy that it usually is in June, where the water’s warm and the sky’s clear and paddling around aimlessly feels luxurious.

I savored it, because obviously there’s not going to be a lot of those days left this year. Usually sometime in September the bugs get insane–it’s mating season for something we call lovebugs and if you try to sit outside, you wind up with them crawling over you by the dozen. Even when swimming you get bugs in your hair and face. And they die after they mate, so their little black bodies pile up everywhere. It only lasts a couple of weeks, but it marks the end of swimming for the year. This year is the first year that having a pool has felt much more like an expensive burden than a pleasure, so I’m glad to have had at least a couple nice summer days.

And I used them well. I took the computer and my laptop outside and alternated writing sprints with dips in the pool. It reminded me of how I wrote Ghosts, which was mostly written on the back porch, and made me wonder why I stopped doing that. I think because I have a different laptop now and its screen is less tolerant of sunlight than my old computer. And its battery doesn’t last so long. Oh, and for a while back then, I actually had a desk on the porch. Anyway, I don’t really know the answer, but it’s a good way to write. I’ll be headed out there again today, I hope.

The slow progress on Grace continues — still slow, but still progress. I’m at a point this morning where I’m thinking a) so far this book is nothing but conversation, is that a problem? and b) the current conversation that I need to write is really complicated, that’s a problem. But I’m reassuring myself by remembering that my beta readers are terrific and helpful and they’ll be honest with me if it’s too complicated. Not that I’m letting anyone read it at the moment, but eventually I’ll be looking for beta readers.

I released The Wedding Guests as a stand-alone story this week. I’ve got a bunch of bookmarks to give away which I intended to do at the launch, but… I was too busy. Maybe not literally busy, but I read a great article about emotional labor recently and it resonated. Not in that I do a lot of emotional labor in relationships — I think I’m pretty terrible at it, actually — but sometimes doing our own emotional labor is hard work. Anyway, I aspire to get organized about a bookmark giveaway, but I’m not going to think about it again until after Labor Day when the summer is truly over. Today and tomorrow and the next day and the next, my focus is going to be on writing Grace, eating well, doing yoga, and savoring the summer’s last few days of beauty.

Today’s meal plan:
Breakfast: Salad of arugula, avocado, strawberry, and smoked trout, topped with balsamic vinegar.
Lunch: Salad of cabbage, cilantro, red onion, avocado, mango, and garlic-sauteed shrimp, with a dressing made of lime zest & juice, pressed garlic, salt, and coconut oil. Possibly, if I’m feeling daring, a little hot sauce, because giving the shrimp a bit of a kick is sometimes worth the nightshade hit.
Dinner: Salad of mixed greens, orange segments, thinly-sliced pork chop, toasted pecan bits, and goat cheese, with a dressing made of lemon juice, olive oil, chopped mint, honey, and maybe a little white wine vinegar if needed.

Sometimes I think I should eat something other than salad. I did last night: baked pork chop and roasted brussels sprouts. It was good enough, but not great. I wished I was eating salad of mixed greens, honey-smoked salmon, radishes, cucumber, red onion, & kalamata olives, topped with balsamic. Such a specific wish, but while I was eating I was thinking about the perfect salad and that was the one I came up with.

All right, time to write. Grace’s difficult conversation isn’t going to write itself!