Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Sarah Avery's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 24th, 2012
1:51 am	What Kinds Of Recommended Reading Lists Would You Be Interested In? School book fairs are weirder than they used to be. I accidentally volunteered to run the book fair for the Montessori preschool Gareth goes to, and it turns out there's a major online component. Who knew? So for a few days (June 3-7th) after the in-store part (June 2nd), if you use the magic voucher number we got from Barnes & Noble (10770006) with your online purchases, some tiny percentage of the total will go to The Unitarian Montessori School. We could really use it, because the safety codes for school playgrounds just got updated, and now there's a lot of equipment we need to rip out and replace. I'll be posting some lists of favorite books on each of those four days--lists with observations about why I think each book is cool, as well as the obligatory links to B&N. So, if there's some particular subject or genre you'd like to see me pontificate about, I take requests. Will Pontificate For Playgrounds! Here are some lists that are kicking around in my head: awesome fantasy novels you've probably never heard of, homeschooling, parenting/child development/early childhood education, and, of course, writing. For each of those lists, there are at least a few regular readers here who really, really want to know more and don't have a starting point. Then there are some lists that would be interesting to me that I assume would have no takers--but maybe my assumptions are wrong. Seriously, would any of you want to know more about Modernist poetry between 1913 and 1963? Because if nobody speaks up for that one, I'm nipping it in the bud. I'm hoping you guys will recommend some books to me, too. There are a lot of subjects I used to keep up with before I had kids that now I'm totally out of the loop about. I considered putting Paganism on the big list in the last paragraph, but I stopped keeping up with new books about that most of a decade ago. As in, Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon is still on my To Be Read pile, bumped to the bottom when I was finishing my dissertation, back in that other life I used to live. Suggest away, dear ones! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
12:25 am	"And Sir Isaac Newton Lived Happily Ever After" Dan's set of famous scientist finger puppets has seen a lot of use lately, with the result that Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Isaac Newton have become the major figures in the Grand Guignol of my kids' daily entertainment. Conrad finds it especially hilarious when Isaac Newton boasts of his accomplishments to an audience of admiring beanie babies. (I had to crib my description of Newton's CV from Neil DeGrasse Tyson's charming summary.) Gareth demanded that I give a performance for Dan this evening: "Now say the part about, 'And then I turned 26!'" The sentence that titles this blog post is entirely Gareth's invention. He likes to tack it onto the end of the discovery of gravity. Conrad discovered verb tenses just last week. He narrates what he's doing a lot, so we got to listen to his thought process as he chased a helium balloon around the living room: "Get boon, get boon, get boon. Got boon!" He was so surprised at what he'd said, he let go of the balloon string to concentrate on repeating himself. I understand calculus about as well as he does, but I know a developmental leap when I see one. (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 27th, 2012
10:20 pm	Fun With Anxiety Dreams, Again The Hunger Games surprised me--the book and film both. The film was a distant second choice when Dan and I arranged our date night too late to see John Carter [of Mars] in the theater, but our distant second choice really blew us away. I burned through the first novel as soon as I could get my hands on it, and am halfway through the second. My brain is working on a blog post about how Suzanne Collins twists and sometimes inverts the current conventions for the blockbuster novel. Shh, don't tell anybody, but there's a lot of subtle brilliance hidden in that rollicking adventure story. In the meantime, my brain has amused itself by playing me a Hunger Games/academia mash-up anxiety dream: The social sciences departments at Rutgers held a secret gladiatorial competition among grad students. Apparently the founding faculty members in those departments spent too much of the 1920's reading The Golden Bough, and so instituted a formal system for scapegoating and sacrificing one student a year from each of their graduate programs, to ensure their funding and prestige within the university. In this nightmare, I was a dissertation-stage student in the Anthropology Department. Actually, that would be a nightmare in itself, even without the human sacrifice part, but my unconscious mind likes to go for broke. As the lone anthropologist among the chosen gladiators, I was the first to recognize our situation for what it was. There we all were, pale and bespectacled scholars baffled by the bladed weapons on offer in the arena. The faculty and administrators loomed above us, barely visible past the glare of the stage lights, as I shouted at the tribute from Sociology and the tribute from Economics, "Don't you get it? Don't you people read James Frazer?!" The guy from Linguistics cut his own finger off trying to pick up a punch-dagger, to uproarious cheers from the stands. I surveyed my fellow departmental tributes and was heartsick to discover one was a younger cousin of mine. "Why are you here?" I demanded. "I told you what grad school was like!" That was when the comedy overpowered the anxiety enough to wake me up laughing. Thank goodness. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
12:01 am	The WOW Book "Real grown-up writers need to think about that, too," I told my oldest niece when she explained her WOW stories. Her first-grade teacher asked her to keep a notebook and write to the following formula: a character Wants something, encounters an Obstacle, and somehow Wins. Any character, desire, obstacle, and win will do. I'd never heard the beginning-middle-end recipe put quite that way--I prefer the Somebody Wanted But So Then formula over here, but then, I've never taught professionally with kids younger than 13. "Once upon a time, there was a dog named Ella, who wanted..." Kate got stuck there for almost half an hour, in her first-ever experience of writer's block. "Ask your Aunt Sarah," everyone told her. "This is her kind of thing." And it was. "Who wanted...to be president?" I proposed. "To play outside," said Kate. "On Mars?" "In the backyard." She recorded it carefully in her composition notebook. "At chess?" "With a ball." So she's writing mainstream literary fiction, and I'm a cheery genre hack. At least (A) I got her unstuck, and (B) she kept faith with the story she wanted to tell. Maybe if I started keeping a WOW notebook, myself, I'd learn how to write short stories that are actually short. Maybe this is how other people get their stories to weigh in under 5,000 words. And wouldn't that be a handy skill in my line of work? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
12:02 am	Now Entering The Age Of Fairy Tales "Tell me the one after Jack and the Beanstalk," says Gareth after the fourth fairy tale of the night. "When I'm telling them from memory, there's no set order," I say. "The next one can be any one you want." This is a big deal. Four years of having to cajole him into accepting a new song, new book, new Backyardigans episode or whatever, instead of one he already knows by heart, have worn me down. I hardly know what to do with this sudden insistence on a new addition to the repertoire every night. Thursday, I got halfway through Puss in Boots before I realized I had no idea how it ended. Tonight, I plunged into the Twelve Dancing Princesses, knowing full well I had a gigantic blank spot in the story that I'd have to fake my way through. Gareth is a friend to princesses everywhere, and has been practicing to fall in love for some time, so I shouldn't be surprised that he likes the happily-ever-after stories. They're fascinating puzzles to him. He asks as many questions about courtship as he does about the orphaned and half-orphaned conditions of the protagonists. Stories of bodily transformation sometimes drift right through his filters, and sometimes freak him out completely. When I got him the Disney Beauty and the Beast, he loved it right up until the moment when the beast regains his human form. "Stop the video!" Gareth wailed. When he braced himself for the rest of the film and allowed me to get to what I'd thought of as the happy ending, he sobbed the whole way through it. I was totally unprepared, because he'd had no trouble with The Princess and the Frog. "In your version of the story," I assured him, "the beast can stay in his beast form forever." That seemed to help. He asks for kisses now to break spells. That's what kisses are for. You should have seen the look on Gareth's face when Dan said, "Yeah, the time that evil sorcerer turned Mommy into a hedgehog, a kiss cleared it right up." He could read Dan's playful tone clearly enough, but for just a moment, he really didn't know what world he was in. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
1:25 am	Why I Need A Flock Of Aquatic Sheep Gareth wanted to know all about dog breeds. Dogs are kind of confusing--all one species, but with different features clustered differently so they don't look like one. For a kid who watches Dinosaur Train and has started analyzing every animal he comes across to determine whether it's a carnivore or an herbivore, solving the dog mystery is a big deal. So we talked about domestication, human manipulation of our companion species' DNA, the kinds of jobs dogs can do, and how much dogs usually want to do the jobs they're bred for. Dogs from sheepherding breeds tend to be deeply unhappy unless they're allowed to herd something. Dogs bred for aquatic work are miserable if they don't get to play in water. And Gareth, who is aware that dog breeds can be crossed, added matter-of-factly, "So if we got a cross between a sheepherding dog and a water dog, we'd need to get water-sheep for it to herd." (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 26th, 2012
1:22 am	In Which I Join LibraryThing and Shelfari, And My Head Explodes From Social Networking My publisher's promotional guide is going to be very useful. When I have uninterrupted computer time but not enough free brain cells for writing, I work my way through the more mechanical of its suggestions. I don't need the full range of my abilities to create a username and password for yet another social networking site. What I'm going to do with all these social networking sites once I've caught them is another question entirely. Fortunately, there's some lead time before the book comes out, so I have a chance to find my footing. Are any of you on LibraryThing and/or Shelfari? Any suggestions for how to make the best use of them? For that matter, I've had an account on GoodReads for a couple of years, and haven't used it since about the second week I had it. With all these apparently obligatory forms of promotion, I must be the one using them. I absolutely cannot afford for a dozen or so networks to be using me. The more strategic of the promo guide's suggestions will require more full engagement of my brain. Those will have to wait until the manuscript is delivered. Soon, soon! The manuscript is so close to done now. I will try not to think about how long it's taken me to get this far, or how much faster I could write before the kids were born, or any of that counterproductive stuff. Full speed ahead! (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
1:19 am	In Which A Drag Queen One-Ups Dante I'm rooting for oneminutemonkey's anthology, Scheherazade's Facade, and its Kickstarter campaign. He's been in editorial limbo much the way thunderpigeon and I have with our Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic anthology--he started the project under the auspices of a respected small press that put out beautiful books, and then the press couldn't bring it to market. These are hard times for small presses. It's an amazing anthology, not least because it has David Sklar's amazing story "Lady Marmalade's Special Place in Hell" in its table of contents. "Lady Marmalade" alone is worth the price of admission. It's both hilarious and heartfelt, with a take on Hell that deeply understands Dante and all the authors who've felt compelled to follow Dante's footsteps into that particular underworld--especially the ones who climbed back up with dissenting maps. Despite the fact that my two children were climbing bodily all over me while I read it, I literally could not put this manuscript down. And I mean literally literally. Michael M. Jones's book was already in Limbo when our Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic anthology was consigned there. He has been good company here at the outermost threshhold of Hell. It looks possible that the Trafficking/Magicking anthology may escape to something better. I'd love to see Scheherazade make it out, too. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 19th, 2012
11:56 pm	Are Any Of You Using Triberr? How, and For What? Some of the broads on the Broad Universe listserv are saying Triberr is immensely useful, but I haven't yet figured out why. I've registered for it--I've taking to registering as early as I can for whatever new social networking site comes down the pike, so the other people with my name don't get there first. Whether I'll actually invest time in it remains to be seen. I registered for Pinterest, and that was fun but problematic. Actually, it was more addictive than most social networking sites have been for me, and I was just beginning to think I should back off from it, when a probably unnecessary kerfuffle about their terms of service went viral. I didn't secede or delete anything I'd pinned there, because as far as I can tell, leaving now wouldn't get me off the hook for stuff I'd already pinned if it turned out that fair use wouldn't protect me. But I've resolved from now on to pin only images that have the most open forms of Creative Commons license. I'm still not sure Pinterest will actually do me any good as a promotional tool for my writing, and if it's not good for that, I'd rather use the time it takes up for, well, writing. So if Triberr's just going to be a variation on that theme, I might as well start protecting my writing time from it now. Is there any reason I shouldn't? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 9th, 2012
12:43 am	"Cheerleaders Frequently Come Up In Case Histories Of Mass Psychogenic Illness." The vestige of my fourteen-year-old former self pops up, as in Hollywood's angel-and-devil-on-shoulder dialogues, and she chuckles with vindication at the words above, which turned up in this article about an outbreak of mass hysteria. There's a lot of sadness in that story, I point out to my fourteen-year-old self. "It could have happened to us," I remind her. "We were too socially marginal to catch a mass psychogenic illness," replies Sarah circa 1984. "To catch conversion disorder from the Queen Bee you curry favor with, you would first have to curry favor with a Queen Bee. We would sooner have burned down the school, except that would have required looking up from whatever we were reading." She could be a real a brat, that old self, but she's not always wrong. Okay, maybe I could have resisted an outbreak with a cheerleader for its Patient Zero. But in one of my favorite episodes of Radiolab (which is the best of all possible podcasts), there's that piece about the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, and the description there is of an utterly pervasive mass hysteria. I speculate that there was no equivalent social status to Geek in rural Tanzania in the early 1960's, but if there were geeks in Tanganyika, they were probably laughing along with everybody else. All this comes up because one of my back-burner writing projects is an essay on the question people love asking of homeschoolers: What about socialization? I may have something original and useful to add to this topic, despite the fact that nearly all homeschoolers in America have to field that question (and many of them have posted or published their thoughts about the experience), and despite the fact that my kids are not yet of school age. But I'm not going to write that essay yet--no, definitely not--because I have other writing obligations that must come first. My bratty fourteen-year-old former self wants to say, "What about socialization? Yeah, what about it? I served my sentence in public schools, and I'm not exactly a paragon of socialization, am I? I'm the walking wounded, here. You can't write me off by saying my future 42-year-old self turned out okay. Every useful thing she knows about social skills, she had to learn by unlearning her entire school experience." She's got a point, but even in a Seurat painting, a point is not the big picture. So I read, among other things, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World. Though my own kids are boys, I have three nieces and an endless succession of students, and I would like to have a clue about what they're up against. Whatever it is, it'll be different from what I saw in the mid-1980s. Wiseman describes a social order of brutal stratification, brutally maintained by those at the top, and brutally resisted by those unable to settle for less. In her account of things, teenage girls regard their status relative to one another as the measure of their human worth and of their odds of literal survival. Protecting their status from attack is so all-consuming a project that they rarely have energy left to care about anything else. Perhaps the most crazy-making part is that the fastest way to lose status and friends is to admit to having a hard time: "In girl world, everything must appear effortless." That sentence was the first thing I thought of when one of the girls in the Times article insists that she was not under stress when she took sick--insists to the point of saying her mother's long series of brain surgeries was "a walk in the park." Is Wiseman right? I have no idea. I spent those years of my life misdiagnosed with a terminal illness, so my take on all that stratification was, I'm going to be dead in five years, and you want me to spend what time I have left fretting about how my shoes affect my image? Seriously? My disdain for normal status markers--and I confess, it was disdain--was infuriating to the normal female classmates who wanted to solidify their social positions by attacking mine. According to Wiseman's interpretation of girl world, those girls may have been suffering just as much from feeling their status threatened as I was from being misdiagnosed with a nonexistent spinal cancer. Okay, maybe. Let's go with that, because then I can feel all gracious toward those people now. Anyway, I had a handful of amazing school friends, of both genders--well, more than both genders, though I didn't know at the time--and instead of gossipping about the mainstream social structure at our school, we talked obsessively about all the stuff geeks talk about. Books, science, films, games, how to survive various technological and fantastical apocalypses, politics, religion. Does that mean Rosalind Wiseman oversimplifies the kids she studies and teaches, or does that mean we were demographic anomalies? What I can say about Queen Bees and Wannabes is that, if Wiseman is right about the unrelenting, overwhelming stresses that come with being a normal teenage girl, then the amazing thing is not that epidemiologists think there are (according to that NYTimes article) hundreds of outbreaks a year of mass psychogenic illness in the United States, half of them in schools. The amazing thing is that such outbreaks are not happening every year, in every school. Snarky young 1980's-me insists on adding, "Maybe they are." (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
1:59 am	Language Explosion Though he still sometimes sounds like a Dadaist poet, Conrad has mostly moved from babble and single-word utterances to two-word sentences that make sense in context, with occasional forays as long as seven words. He's collected enough nouns that I no longer keep track of how many words he knows. The weird thing is how many sentences he can make with his tiny repertoire of only five verbs: Want Go Get Have Bite And that list tells you a lot of what there is to know about 18-month-olds (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 25th, 2012
2:36 am	A Room Of One's Own* (Some Restrictions Apply) I gave up my study when Gareth was born, and I moved all my books and filing cabinets and writing apparatus into a much smaller room. Which was fine, which had been the plan ever since Dan and I bought the house. And the bigger room had filled up with clutter so completely that the amount of functional work space was not that great. Four years later, I'm finally getting settled in the smaller room. Why? Because Conrad's crib is now in it. As long as nobody was contesting my claim on that territory, I could live with it being so packed full of books and papers I didn't have time to cull that it was impossible actually to work there. I could live with having to flee the house for a cafe to do whatever writing got done. But now that the room is in danger of becoming the baby's room, I'm putting it in order. Once he consistently sleeps through the night, we'll be moving him in with Gareth, and that study will be mine again. Mine! Bwhahaha! My best idea so far in this project has been to get rid of the desk altogether. I work in my lap, and have for years. I've been culling books, papers, objects, all ruthlessly. Conrad is tall enough now to reach over the headboard of his crib to pull books off my bookshelves. And why not? He watches his mommy pulling books off those shelves every day. When he wakes crying in the night, I come in and find that he's surrounded himself with yet another range of books I didn't know he could get at--Gower's Confessio Amantis seems to be a recurring favorite, who knows why. The other night he was really inconsolable. What did I find in his crib but a biography of Sylvia Plath. "Well, no wonder," I said. "If I were reading that at three in the morning, I'd be inconsolable, too." He'll be waking soon, needing something or other. Here I am in the living room, working in my lap, waiting for someone else to need me in a room that is sort of my own. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 17th, 2012
1:26 am	What Are Pinterest And Diaspora Good For? I joined both without a specific use in mind, mostly to snatch up some approximation of my own name before all the other Sarah Averys got there. At Pinterest, as at Twitter, I am SarahAveryBooks. At Diaspora, for once, I seem to have been the first Sarah Avery to the party. (One day my kids will thank me for their unusual names.) It's totally unclear to me how I will end up using these social media sites, or even whether I'll use them beyond a couple of weeks to poke around. I barely use Twitter, except to broadcast livejournal posts. On the other hand, when I started at livejournal, I genuinely thought I'd only be using my account to comment on other people's blogs. You never know. So, are any of you guys at Pinterest or Diaspora? What are you up to over there? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, February 13th, 2012
12:42 am	It's Official: Rugosa Coven Novellas Will See Print! Now that the ink is dry on the contract, I can finally announce what I've been talking around since November: Dark Quest Books has picked up the Rugosa Coven series, and a print volume will collect Closing Arguments, Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, and my nearly-completed work in progress, tentatively titled And Ria's from Neptune. The electronic editions of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks will be re-released soon, possibly as soon as March, thanks to Drollerie Press's gracious parting decision to give its authors rights to all formatting and cover art. The Ria story is very close to complete now, and I've run about a third of it by my fabulous critique group, Writers of the Weird. As soon as I have a projected release date for the paper edition, I'll post about it here. Life is very, very good. (27 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
12:36 am	You Ain't Never Heard Vivaldi Red Priest's rendition of The Four Seasons is one of the happiest things going on in our house these days. The first time I played it, the quartet's exuberance was so overwhelming, my kids raced for the bin of instruments and broke out the recorders, kazoos, and water flutes to tweetle along. But it wasn't enough to keep up. Even more woodwinds! We had to find Dan's pennywhistles--early in our marriage I gave Dan a bouquet of pennywhistles, one in each key, for a Valentine's Day present--and soon each kid had a pennywhistle in each hand, while I tried to show them how to play two at once. This may not be everyone's favorite way to listen to classical music. I wish to add that we have managed to overcome our initial ecstatic reaction enough actually to listen quietly, at least for a few minutes at a time now. From a four-year-old and a toddler, that is another kind of extraordinary endorsement. The thing is, my kids had heard other versions of The Four Seasons before. Just try to go a month without hearing it. It'll turn up at a restaurant, a grocery store, in commercials, at weddings, as background music for your local NPR affiliate's beg-a-thon. There is no escaping Vivaldi. Plus, we have occasionally listened to more standard recordings on purpose at home. But if you haven't heard Red Priest's version, you ain't heard nothing yet. I can well believe it when their liner notes say, Red Priest is the only early music group in the world to have been compared in the press to the Rolling Stones, Jackson Pollock, the Marx Brothers, Spike Jones and the Cirque du Soleil. They also quote some music historian who describes Vivaldi's own performance style by calling him the John McEnroe of the baroque. (Vivaldi, a redhead and ordained, was the original red priest, Il Prete Rosso, and a real bad boy on the violin.) Nothing I can tell you about the details of the recording can either prepare you or spoil it. Just go listen to this birdsong-saturated excerpt from the Spring movement. Our birds are back from their migrations, our snowdrops are up, and our daffodils are sending forth their first shoots. The kids come in to warm up from playing in the yard, and they'd rather hear the music Conrad calls "Tweet!" than even the cannon-rific 1812 Overture, usually known around here as "Boom Clang!" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
1:27 am	Godzilla Frittata Not in the sense of having Godzilla as an ingredient, of course. That's a recipe you could only make once, so there would hardly be any point, aside from historical interest, in posting it online. Okay, maybe bragging rights, but as you will see, this post is not a brag. It's a not-quite-recipe for a frittata that's mutated to the point of becoming vaguely Japanese. Some twenty years ago, I found myself unexpectedly in possession of several gallons of cooked rice. I had wildly overestimated how much uncooked rice I would need to put in the pot to feed fifteen people, and after the meal our leftovers still filled an old style soup-kettle. What can I say? I was an undergrad at the time. Over the next week, my housemates and guests and I added the rice to every recipe we thought might withstand it. None of us were very accomplished cooks, and I was the lamest of us. radiotelescope probably remembers the time I thought I'd baked my watch into a casserole. Eventually we got so sick of rice we pitched the couple of gallons we had left. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure we'd still be picking at it to this day. The one trick that stuck with me from that week was a sort of inside-out version of fried rice, an omelette-like thing featuring an almost foolproof combination of soy sauce, fresh ginger, garlic, and sesame oil, along with leftover rice and beaten eggs. Some years later, when I'd had a little more book-learning and practice as a cook, I became enamored of frittatas, mostly because they're fast. I'm quite good in the kitchen now, as long as I don't have to do more than 20 minutes of hands-on work. If a recipe requires 20 minutes of touch time, I get to thinking about my mortality. As in, one day I will die and leave a dozen books unwritten that I might have finished, and they'll be unwritten because I was burning up my mortal hours stuffing poultry. Down with poultry! At about minute 20, I start getting restless. At minute 30, there's profanity, even if the kids are underfoot. Beyond minute 30, it really ain't pretty. So here's how I cook Godzilla Frittata: Look in the fridge and discover that key ingredients for the other meal you had planned to cook have spoiled. Swear vociferously. Discover a tupperthing of leftover rice. Throw together the red bells you forgot to put in the tagine yesterday, the shiitakes you probably shouldn't have splurged on at the farmers' market, and the questionable looking scallions so old you weren't sure you really remembered buying them. Clean. Chop. Toss around in some sesame oil over medium-high heat with a couple of minced garlic cloves and some grated fresh ginger. Add a little olive oil to tone down the sesame. Beat some eggs with a glup of soy sauce. Sniff. It should probably smell more strongly of soy sauce than that, so glup a little more in. Your kids won't eat it anyway, so you might as well hit it with a shot of tabasco. Follow the half-remembered directions for frittatas from your disintegrating copy of The Joy of Cooking. (Not your husband's disintegrating copy, on the cover of which only the word Joy is still legible, because all the other words are burned off under the spiral imprint of a long-ago electric burner. His copy is of the wrong edition.) Is there still some cilantro left from the garnish for yesterday's slow-cookered tagine? Thank goodness. We're now at minute 20, and if you had to start plucking the leaves off the cilantro stems, you might start swearing again, and here are the kids underfoot just in time for you to fend them off from the broiler while you finish the custardy center of the frittata to a golden brown. Get the pan to the table at minute 28. Be astounded at how good the results are. I would never have invented Godzilla Frittata, except for the small problem of my being Godzilla. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 16th, 2012
12:34 am	Lady Gaga Octopus Flashbacks Watching Lady Gaga's New Year's performance with my 80-year-old grandmother was surreal for so many reasons, not least that her evening's celebratory television diet started with a Lawrence Welk New Year's special from 1970. I'd never seen the Lawrence Welk Show before, but wow, it lived up to its reputation for nightmarishly laminated perkiness. "I used to think he was so handsome," sighed my grandmother. A few hours later, when Lady Gaga took the stage in Times Square, my grandmother squinted at her television. "What is that?" And if you caught any of this performance, you were asking the same question, possibly with the addition of expletives. Weeks later, I can't get the image of that octopus headdress thing out of my mind, thanks to this excellent song by my kids' favorite singer. Oh, give it a shot. It's mighty catchy, and thanks to the Photoshop-like powers of your imagination, you get to picture Lady Gaga's grotesquerie completely subverted by the whimsy of Laurie Berkner. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 15th, 2012
11:51 pm	Caption The Best Luge Photo Ever This photo is plenty weird already, but it seems to call for an even weirder destiny. Captions, anyone? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
12:46 am	Post On Promises, Process, and Progress at Black Gate Blog At editor John O'Neill's prodding, I made a New Year's resolution to post more often at the Black Gate blog, so I started with a post on New Year's writing resolutions. A lot of the post is about three of the books that have helped me most in developing a wide repertoire of writing habits. (Thanks, by the way, to showingup, who requested more posts on process. I enjoyed writing this one.) (Oh, and that good news that's not quite announcement-ready? It's still not announceable yet, but still probably on the way. And now back to my tentative deadline.) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
2:22 am	Nine days of holiday road trip with two tiny children, and what was the most relaxing day I had in all that time? The day I spent at a crowded children's museum, surrounded by a few hundred happy, boisterous kids. That was the only day when my own offspring were neither surrounded by their elders' priceless fragile heirlooms, nor being nipped and jumped on by little dogs. (At least the dogs were in an otherwise child-friendly household.) Gareth decided the museum's train took us to Newfoundland, so he could go hear Great Big Sea play live. He wanted to marry the girl he met in the big 19th century play kitchen. Conrad toddled after, wanting to do whatever his big brother was doing. (They're already flirting with the same girls, though so far they don't seem to have attached their sibling rivalry to that enterprise. Today Gareth declared, "I want to be a daddy with the girl we met at the mall," so I'm trying to be ready for anything.) Gareth tried to name every fish in the aquarium, while Conrad signed fish in ASL again and again. There are plenty of fish in the sea, my loves, and no need to break anything. (3 Comments |Comment on this)