Whew.

A new story up at dryastheremainderbiscuit

Because I only have two thousand more words on my NaNo opus to write before midnight, I'm spending part of today catching up on a bunch of loose ends. One of those is posting a new story, "In the Toolbag," to my story blog, Dry as the Remainder Biscuit. It's very short, and you may enjoy reading it. Please go check it out!

It's official: I'm brilliant.

Picture the scenario: leftover pumpkin-pie filling. Runny, perishable, but oh so delicious, way too delicious to waste. What to do? What to do?

Solution: last night I baked it gently in a little baking dish in a water bath, as you would a custard (which it is, anyway). I covered it and stuck it in the fridge, there to languish overnight. This morning I dashed out to the grocery store (lest you worry overmuch about my carbon-emissions extravagance, I combined several errands in the one trip) and got (among other things) a packet of frozen sheets of puff pastry. I let it thaw, cut each piece into triangles about, oh, maybe four inches on a side, spooned a teaspoon or so of the cooked pie filling into each one, crimped the edges but good, and baked them at a very high temperature until they were brown and all puffy like it says on the package.

Oh, my, are they good. (In the photo, you can see the pumpkin oozing out of one or two of them because I didn't crimp all the edges to "but good" standard; however, that adds character to the shot. I should be a food stylist maybe.)

Then, as often happens with the best-laid plans, I found I had two sheets of the puff pastry left over. What to do, what to do?

Cranberry pastries!!!!!

Using the same construction methodology, I placed a dollop of cranberry sauce in each triangle. Those are still waiting to be baked, so I haven't eaten any yet, but I bet they'll be good, too. UPDATE: Yes. Yes, they are.

I bring you this "Imaginative Things to Do With Leftover Stuff" episode as a public service. (Alas, it's too fiddly to qualify for Writin' Rations™.)

Where I'll be for a fair bit of the weekend

I will be at Sydney Freecon, which is a completely free little con that takes place (this year at least) in the Bankstown library. (I can think of no better place for a science-fiction and fantasy con than a library, myself.) The organizer says, "This location is a two-minute walk from Bankstown Railway Station, toward Keating Park, the Bankstown Court complex and the Town Hall."

The con will have three sessions: Friday night, November 27, from 6 to 8 p.m; Saturday, November 28, from 8:30 to 4; and Sunday, November 29 from 1 to 4.

There is no entry charge!! This, again, from the organizer: "Why is it a Free Event? Because the Sydney SF fans who gather each year to hold the Freecon believe that SF is best when the imagination is FREE!" Who can argue?

A number of way-cool writers are scheduled to speak; here's a list:

Alan Baxter - RealmShift www.alanbaxteronline.com
David Ko Chin
Louise Curtis - Daylight (a twittertale) http://twittertales.wordpress.com
David Dale
Terry Dowling
Dr Van Ikin – The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Kate Forsyth – The Puzzle Ring www.kateforsyth.com.au
Pamela Freeman – Full Circle, http://www.pamelafreemanbooks.com/
Richard Harland - Worldshaker www.richardharland.net
Duncan Lay - The Wounded Guardian Blog: www.duncanlay.blogspot.cpm
Lewis Morley & Marilyn Pride – “The Peregrine Besset Omnibus" and "Red World Holiday"
Gillian Polack – Life Through Cellophane www.Trivium.net/gillianpolack
Stella Tarackson

There is also a short-story competition, voted on by the attendees.

If you've got some time this weekend, and are in Sydney (or can bend time and space in order to get there), please consider dropping by. You can't beat free for an entry fee.

Oh, well.

For the first time in the three NaNoWriMos and two Script Frenzys I've done, I am virtually certain that I won't be able to get the required amount of wordage to win by the end of the month.

The good news is, I'm flinging loose ends and red herrings around like a mad thing, and in my experience nothing is better for keeping writing going than a room full of flailing loose ends and rotting red herrings. And it's all mulch, compost, call it what you will, for when I go back and start trying to make sense of this year's book.

The other good news is, it's a lot of words — over 23,000 at this writing. That not only gives me a good base for the book, it is toning up my writing muscles like you wouldn't believe. And, as this year has been a challenge in so many ways, I haven't gotten the wordcount I wanted. It's more than time to build up my somewhat atrophied writing muscles.

Moreover, it's good to be playing a game I love with a lot of cool people — some I know in person, some I don't. There's a group in the forums I will never, ever meet in person, but when I need cheering up or cheering on, they're invariably there. And they always save my favorite chair for me in the virtual coffeehouse. The real-life people, too (hello, my metameta friends!), are cheering me on. And I'm cheering all my writing buddies on in turn — RL or virtual, doesn't matter, they're all cool and I want them all to succeed.

So, while I'd like to win this year, and I may not win this year, I'm still glad I'm doing NaNo.

Do you think I can manage a couple of five- or six-thousand word days in the next week or so?

You can read a story of mine at Shades of Sentience

Well, this is just cool: the lovely folks at Shades of Sentience have made my story "Loving the Gorgon" the inaugural piece of orginal fiction on their very interesting site. You should check it out! (They've also got a Facebook page, of course!)

In other news, my friend Jason has alerted me to the existence of a free e-book on the secrets of getting and staying motivated as a writer: you can download it here.

And finally, one of the coolest things I've ever seen (I think I found it via Boing Boing): a phone/MP3-player charger that generates the power from the motion of your walking/bike riding/etc.!!!!!!!! You can read about it at the manufacturers' site. I may not be able to afford one until the price comes down a bit, but I still put myself on their mailing list for when it enters actual production. (I can dream, can't I?)

What I did today instead of NaNoWriMo

Today the South Coast Writers Centre ran a booth at the Viva La Gong festival. In part it was to promote the Centre, in part to give a few writers a place to promote their own books (alas, not yet relevant to me), and in part to offer a service to the public, whereby they could, for a very modest fee, procure customized writing on demand. A few of us were poised and ready to write poems and stories on any subject, in any genre, for our impromptu clients.

I wrote two stories and two poems. The only parameter for one story was "moving house"; for the other, "science fiction." The poems were a bit more specific. One, heartbreakingly, was requested as a gift for the client's friend, who had recently lost a baby. That one was hard to write.

The other was completely the opposite in tone. There is (you may already know) such a thing as "guerilla knitting": putting hand-knit sleeves and covers and other decorations on unlikely items in the public space. Here's an example from today's festival:



A woman who's intensely into guerilla knitting (here's her blog) handed me a tag with some beautiful little streamers of all kinds of fantastic yarn tied to one corner. The tag read, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." This is a sentiment with which I happen to agree wholeheartedly. I offered to write her a poem in exchange. "About guerilla knitting," she said. "I want a poem about guerilla knitting."

Here is what I wrote:

Guerilla Knitting

It's secret signals, guidelines to coax your dreams into your heads,
into your hearts.
It's strings and yarn tying you to the person next to you,
reminding you
of what you are.

And what you can become.

(As you can guess, I have instantly become completely enamored of the idea of guerilla knitting, even though the likelihood I will ever engage in it myself approaches zero.)

Anyway, the Guerilla Knitter said she loved it, which was really cool. I wrote on the poem that I authorize its reproduction in any form as long as it's attributed to me, so if you dig guerilla knitting, you're welcome to use the poem if it's meaningful to you. Just keep my name along with it, and don't change any of the words (thanks).

Here's me at the booth, being a Writer in Residence (yet another Writing Dream coming true!):



And finally, I can't think of one single thing that isn't made immeasurably better by the addition of kites, and here are some I saw today at Viva La Gong:

A recent Writin' Rations™ I came up with

For true qualification as Writin' Rations™, this dish must be made using some prefabricated ingredients, as much as that fills me with guilt and horror. However, as you know, the rules for Writin' Rations™ are that the dish be quick, easy, nutritionally not so bad, and good-tasting, suitable for busy and distracted writers to make in a hurry and eat without damaging their health. So that's why it requires canned beans and store-bought barbecue sauce. But if you had already received the whopper check for your advance, you could take your time and use dried beans and make your own barbecue sauce. I wish for you this happy circumstance.

Barbecue Beans and Rice

• One large can of beans (my favorite is black beans), or, if you have your advance check sitting cheerily in your bank account, an equivalent amount of dried beans, soaked and cooked to the degree that pleases you
• two cups of raw rice
• one large carrot, or maybe one red pepper/capsicum, or both, chopped into rather small pieces
• one cup (or so) of barbecue sauce
• a half-teaspoon of salt (optional)
• enough slices of cheddar cheese (or enough grated cheese) to cover the top of whatever you're going to bake your rice dish in

Cook the rice. While it's cooking, preheat your oven to about 350F (175C) or whatever temperature you trust for your oven to bake a casserole at. Drain and rinse the beans. When the rice is done, combine it with the beans, the chopped-up veggies, the barbecue sauce, and the optional salt (may want to taste the mixture before deciding to add salt; it depends on how salty the barbecue sauce is). Dump the mixture into a large casserole dish, and cover the top with cheese. Bake until it's sizzling and the cheese is nice and toasty.

It tastes like it's bad for you, but really, it isn't. Except for the cheese (and there's really not much of that per serving), it's low-fat. The cheese and beans add protein. The amount of barbecue sauce (and hence the amount of sugar etc.) per serving is fairly miniscule. And it's got veggies in it! What's not to love???

Alas, I must bid farewell to my brave young writers.

Today was my last session with my high-school word warriors. I've spent the last, oh, six or seven hours (less a brief break to make a very slapdash dinner) going through the final versions of their stories and providing my opinion thereupon to their teacher. It meant that I didn't get one single word written on my NaNoWriMo opus today, but the month is young, and the kids are important.

What I have loved about teaching this workshop:

• Nostalgia for Clarion South and all my Clarion buddies.
• Revelling in all the different writing styles the kids came out with.
• Feeling like each story was a Christmas present to be unwrapped, a mystery, a wonderful surprise, a new jungle or hidden valley or secret cave to be explored.
• Helping new writers allow the thought into their minds that they are, even though new, still real writers, with the right to dream of writing well and getting published.
• Giving them specific, concrete tools and skills to start making that happen.

What I have learned from teaching this workshop:

• You can't transfer everything you've learned over decades of writing in just a few hours, and you have to be okay with that.
• Not everyone who signs up for a creative-writing course is actually interested in writing, and you have to be okay with that, too.
• The ones who do have the spark, the drive, the yearning to write, will be very clear about it.
• Most of the people in the class will choose to politely allow your feedback to slide right on past their stories without visible effect, and you have to be okay with that, too.
• When the kids hand you a big card with all their thank-yous, and they applaud at the end, that's just plain-and-simple fantastic. That's all. Just fantastic.