Did I miss something?

I just purchased a product that bills itself as being "natural walnuts". Have I missed all the artificial walnuts that must, clearly, be out there?

Getting ready for Conflux.

I'm getting ready to head to Canberra on the weekend for Conflux, an annual conference (mainly) for writers and writing hopefuls interested in speculative fiction. Last year, I arrived on the figurative doorstep knowing no-one, recognizing very few names, and holding a very meagre portfolio of spec fic indeed. This year I'll be among friends, I'll be able to at least drop a name or two myself, and I'll have quite a few stories in the electronic trunk (many of which are out in the world seeking their fortune, and one of which actually won this year's Conflux short-story competition and will appear in the conference booklet, woo-hoo!). So I suppose I'm no longer a Wannabe, although I'm not sure yet that I've confidently assumed the title of an Is. Still, it's an interesting indicator of some genuine progress in my writing career, which is heartening.

Best of all, though, is that this year my daughter Margaret will be attending as well. Nearly 12, she's an alarmingly competent and entertaining writer; she keeps me on my toes. She's ready to show up at Conflux and listen and learn. She's cool.

If you're going to be at Conflux this year, post a comment here or email me and let me know how I can find you. (The Friday-night opening ceremony is probably the best place to start.)

Remind-aarrrrr!

Tomorrow (September 19) is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Aaaarrrr!

Start small, if you're self-conscious. Just once, answer the phone like this: "Ahoy, me hearty!" If you want to expand on that, there are plenty of tips on the Talk Like a Pirate site (see their how-to page).

Why talk like a pirate? There is, and I quote the organizers here, "no point".

Wow. Humanity is COOL.

This host, blogger.com, has just launched an absolutely spellbinding site: play.blogger.com. It's a real-time slideshow of the photos people are posting to blogs RIGHT NOW. It's...it's unbelievable. Watching the images go by, image after image after image, loves and passions and sudden interests -- if you don't marvel at the wonder that is each human being, then you never will.

Hyaa! Hyaaa!!!

I'm working on a piece right now that JUST WON'T FINISH! I poke at it with this stick and that stick, trying to find one that will intimidate it into rolling over and DYING, but it just won't oblige. I'm about to start HITTING it with the sticks. (After all, what's 20+ years of martial-arts training for, if you can't apply it once in a while?)

Thing is, this piece is just lying there, panting wanly. So obviously not finished. But how to dispatch it, once and for all? HOW? HOW???

Update on yesterday's Writin' Rations™

Turns out yesterday's pasta dish is so popular, people keep going back for seconds. So it does not deliver sixteen person-meals; more like ten or so. Still, it works out to less than $2 per meal, even including the seconds. And nobody has to cook tonight.

More Writin' Rations™

Man, this is a good feed:

Heat the oven to about 325F/160C. Boil up a package of pasta (one pound, 500g, more or less). Mix it with a pint (500g) or so of ricotta, two cups of chopped peppers (capsicum) and tomatoes (total of two cups, although if you have a baking dish big enough, I suppose there's no reason it couldn't be two cups each), and two cups or so of spaghetti sauce of your choice. Place into the baking dish and top heavily as you would a pizza. I used mozarella, pepperoni, and grated fresh parmesan, and lots of each. Bake until very toasty and brown on top and you hear a vigorous sizzling noise from the baking dish when you open the oven to check. (Check at a half hour and then make your decision as to whether it's toasty and sizzly enough.)

This will make enough food for three or four people, two meals a day, for at least two days. Let's see, that's...16 person-meals. Perhaps more, if any of the people are little and/or consume smaller-than-average quantities. Fairly cheap, too, if you just get supermarket ricotta and parmesan, and not the really expensive stuff from the Italian deli down the road. (Don't be ridiculous. Of course there's one near you. If there isn't, move.) And just think of how delicious this dish will be with the expensive stuff from the Italian deli down the road.

Ponder. It's a good word. And a good thing to do.

Many, many years ago, my college housemates gave me a fountain pen. It was solid, well-made, and elegant and spare in style. I loved it. But for a while, instant expedience became more important to me. My writing dreams, which the pen symbolized for the givers as well as for me, retreated further and further away as I focused on my workplace jobs, one after the other. The pen came with me wherever I moved, and I always knew where it was, from apartment to house to apartment to house. But I didn't use it. It was big to carry around, unsuited for scrawling at awkward angles in meetings and conferences, heavy to use when I was in a rush. And there was always the threat of leakage. (Although, to be sure, it leaked a whole lot less than the cheapie fountain pens I was so fond of in high school.) At any rate, it languished, loved but unused, for years.

However, my family has agreed that they will support me as I pursue writing full-time. As a result, the pace and quality of my life has changed radically. I write. That means I spend large amounts of time thinking. Stalking possibilites through a forest of paths, stopping and listening for snapping twigs to tell me where to go next. I have time to breathe, and to savor breathing, and to put deliberate care into what I do.

And so it was, a few weeks ago, that I got out my fountain pen and began to use it again. I'm predominantly using it in my journal, one of the incredibly trendy Moleskine notebooks -- a trendiness that crosses depressingly often into the realm of wankery -- but I have to say it's a damned good notebook. There are plenty of fan sites, like this one, and though most of them give the impression that they know just how wanky it is to so revere a notebook, there are a few that go a bit further than I would. Although I have to say that I do really love how the two -- the fountain pen and the obscenely expensive notebook -- feel when I'm writing. And because the aesthetics of it are so satisfying, I tend to use my journal more. Which encourages me to ponder. And pondering is a good thing for a writer to do. It's like blogging. Only not as wanky.

House guests.

There's a point in every story or play I write where the characters start to feel like house guests who have stayed just a day or two too long.

(Note to all my friends who have stayed with me: this is not aimed at you.)

Another take on geekdom.

My friend Rod (bloglink at right) discovered another geek/nerd test, which pegged me exactly:

On foot.

We've been having to re-learn this week how to cope with being carless. Not careless, carless. The car's in the shop until at least Wednesday, which will make it a week and a half of coping without a car.

Oh, there have been other carless times in our lives, to be sure. I spent from age 17 to age 24 without a car, and managed pretty well (of course, I lived in a major metropolitan area just steps from the Metro and the bus, and with an airport and a train station easily accessible by public transport, and my job only a half-hour's walk or so from my apartment; and I had a bicycle and was fit enough to use it). And for the first four years of our daughter's life, we had no car. Baby Margaret became a very fit little thing, because once she could walk I pretty much refused to carry her, and the stroller created more problems than it solved, all things considered.

I actually got an article published during that time, the we-have-a-baby-but-no-car time, about arranging your life to cope without a car. As I recall, the article made a few cogent points: you need to plan very carefully, have backup plans, get enough sleep, eat properly (walking when carrying lots of groceries or a child who is legitimately at the end of her stamina is hard work), and not be afraid to accept the generosity of your friends and neighbors in times of transportation need. All this advice, I'm pleased to say, is borne out by this current visit back to simpler (that is, more impoverished) times.

Luckily, it's only a visit. We do get by with only one car, but we really rely on it to manage three hectic schedules, as a general rule. It takes 20 minutes to get to Houston's job by car; over an hour by public transport, if you make all the connections just right. If there's no bus route to the exact place you need to go, it can take over two hours just to go 10 miles. Sure, this way has less environmental impact, but there's a reason people love to drive.

Now, here's a radical thought: when I lived in DC, I almost never felt the lack of a car to the degree I'm feeling it now (of course, it's been raining for a solid week here in Wollongong, which it seldom does in DC, so that may have something to do with it). Anyway, the reason I could cope for the most part fairly easily was because the public-transit system (for all they complain about it) really is very, very good. Wollongong's is utter crap. Utter crap. And bloody expensive with it. It can cost me a bus fare of about $5 to get into the main part of Wollongong from where we live, and if I want to transfer to another bus, another full fare. Yes. That's right. No transfers. There is one train line, and it runs north-south. If I want to go west of the train line (there's not much east of it except lots of salty water), yes, another full bus fare. The buses, if you're lucky and time it exactly right, can sometimes be only 20 or 30 minutes apart. Most of the time they're an hour. Sometimes more. And they don't run late at night.

I want our car back. And the rain is not stopping. An umbrella is cheaper than a car, but it's not a substitute.

Chicken soup for the cold.

My husband has a nasty upper-respiratory-tract infection at the moment, so I made him some medicinal chicken soup. Now, people will tell you, oh, you must make chicken stock this way, or oh, you must make it that way. Baloney. Put a chicken carcass or two in the pot (you may, as I did, have them stashed in the freezer from the last time you procured a store-bought roasted chicken) along with onions, ginger, garlic, whatever. Boil it up for a while. Serve it to someone you love.

That's it.

It really cheeses me off when people make up rules that don't need to exist, for the purpose (it appears) of being able to feel smug and feel like I'm Right And Everyone Else Is Ignorant. Okay, sure, this may actually be a pleasant feeling. But that doesn't make it good for you. Or, might I add, for the people around you.

Heresy.

I'm in the process of finishing a Neil Gaiman book that I just don't like. Neverwhere has some lovely imagery, but the characters are tiresome, the writing lacks subtlety, many plot elements and character reactions are trite, more than one major character lacks any clear motivation, and it just drags on...and on...and on....

There. I said it and I'm glad I said it.