Oh, well.

It has become clear to me that winning Script Frenzy this year is just not feasible. Not only do I only have nine pages with only a week to go to reach 100, but that week, like the rest of April, is booked solid with other writing projects that have enormous importance to me.

This is the first time in three NaNoWriMos and three Script Frenzies that I won't have won. I'm a little wistful about it, but it had to happen sometime.

However, in other news, I'm teaching another workshop for young writers, writing a hugely elaborate grant application that will in all likelihood come to nothing (but I'll have an outline for a radio play out of it, even if I don't get the grant, so that's okay), editing story recordings for my spec-fic podcast, working on a bunch of pieces of my own, and doing some research into the nature of genre fiction (for my own nefarious purposes). It's a busy time.

So, Script Frenzy, this is officially it for 2010. See you next year.

Writin' Rations™

This qualifies as Writin' Rations™ because it's just so damn easy to make.

Cheese and Almond Biscuits*

NOTE!! All measurements approximate — that's part of what makes this qualify as Writin' Rations™: you just chuck stuff in a bowl!

1/2 cup butter (and only butter will do! Margarine is the devil's own foodstuff)
3 cups white flour (all-purpose/plain)
1 cup whole-wheat/wholemeal flour
1 tablespoon baking POWDER
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups grated cheddar/tasty cheese
2 cups chopped almonds (or walnuts, or hazlenuts, or any combination thereof, really)
A bunch of milk

Preheat the oven to about 375F/190C.

Dump the butter into a largeish bowl, and dump the powdery stuff in there, too. Using a pastry cutter or a sturdy fork, blend the butter and the powdery stuff until it's all like fairly uniform crumbs, rather than lumps of butter coated with flour. (This process is speeded up immeasurably by letting the butter get just a bit closer to room temperature, even though biscuit purists would probably squeal with rage to read this. But this is Writin' Rations™ — if it ain't quick, it don't qualify.)

Dump the cheese and chopped nuts into the bowl and make sure all the bits are coated evenly with powdery/buttery crumbs and it's all mixed up with no clumps of one particular material predominating. This may require a bit of a tossing motion (see? you did need a largeish bowl).

Get your baking sheets ready (I've become a big, big fan of baking paper, as it really speeds cleanup, and, as I've mentioned, speed is one of the crucial elements of Writin' Rations™).

Pour milk into your bowl in one-cup increments and mix quickly and gently until either (1) you have a doughy, somewhat gooey (but not too gooey) mass that holds together and all the dry stuff is included or (2) you see that there is still way too much dry stuff and you're going to need another cup of milk. Note! Do not mix vigorously, and do not mix overly thoroughly. Biscuits do NOT, repeat NOT, benefit from the gluten-forming properties of flour that are so beloved when making bread. The less you mix, the better! Also note: If you realize things are a bit too gooey, that's not really a problem. Even if the dough is a bit wet-looking, as long as it will still hold together in lumps on the baking sheet, that's all you need. Ask me how I know.

Put lumps of dough about the size of, oh, heck, maybe a little bigger than a ping-pong ball? on the baking sheets, leaving about a half inch to an inch (one to two centimeters) of white space around each lump.

Bake until they are really quite, quite brown (the cheese tastes nice and toasty that way), but not burnt!! The whole house will smell fantastic.

I can only wait until they don't actually blister my flesh before I start eating them with vulgar enthusiasm. They're beyond fantastic when fresh, but they make a pretty good breakfast the next day, too. I have no idea how well they keep, because at our place the few that survive dinner usually don't last much past breakfast the next day.

Once you have the hang of it, you can throw a batch together in less than 15 minutes (plus baking time, but you can go do things while they're baking, so this still counts as quick.)

*Biscuit. Not cookie. American-style baking-powder biscuit. If you must insist that "biscuit" means, like, Oreos or whatever, then substitute "scone" for "biscuit." And hang your head for being so culturally insensitive.

New story up at Dry As the Remainder Biscuit.

After way, way, way too long, I've posted another piece at my story blog, Dry As the Remainder Biscuit. It's called "The Monster Tarantella"; I hope you enjoy it.

The first Young Writer story up at Outlandish Voices the podcast!

Outlandish Voices is very excited to bring you the first in an occasional series of stories by young Wollongong-area writers. Andrea Fernando, the author of “Whatever It Takes,” is a student at Smith’s Hill High School in Wollongong. She brings you a terrific story of obsession, ambition, history, and hope. Click here to go to the podcast site and listen or download.

The story came to our attention here at Outlandish Voices for its truly imaginative characterization and the polish of its writing. I think you’ll be as impressed as I am with this story by an up-and-coming young writer with a lot to say.

A poetry moment.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is the poet I turn to most often. I don't read a whole lot of poetry — I find it rich and demanding, and prefer to keep it for occasional consumption rather than a steady diet — but lately my appetite for it has been growing, and I've rediscovered Hopkins for about the fifth or sixth time in my life. (I went to a Jesuit university; there was no escaping Hopkins, himself a Jesuit.)

One of the things that draws me to him is his passion for finding and celebrating the deeper, larger, more real existences that lie beyond the things we see and touch. For Hopkins, the world was full of adventure, meaning, crucial importance, cosmic good and evil: embodied as much within a small wildflower as within the great armed conflicts of human history, as much in the daily business of life as in stories of heroes, demons, and angels. While he wrote from a Christian viewpoint, I don't think you need to share that viewpoint to understand, and even agree with, what he was on about.

Think you're only what you appear to be? Think you're ordinary? Gerard Manley Hopkins begs to differ.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Monsters are such INteresting people.

My favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon ever. Six minutes, 45 seconds well-invested, I say.

Let me tell you about our Easter dinner.

I spent a fair bit of today making our Easter dinner. The easy part (and the only really expensive part) was the ham: I bought it from a really good place-that-sells-meat here in Wollongong (Illawarra Smallgoods — I think they're actually called something like Illawarra Meat & Deli now), and when the time came I trimmed off the bits I didn't want, chucked it in a big ol' roasting pan, and turned the heat on. So that was easy. I didn't bother glazing it or anything, because it doesn't really end up flavoring the meat very much, does it, to have a little bit of sticky stuff clinging to the outside layer of fat, which I for one refuse to eat anyway?

Instead, I made a raisin sauce. Except I forgot that in Australia (unlike amongst my own people), supermarkets are all closed on Easter! All of them! And I had no raisins. And no dry mustard. So off I went after church to see if any of the convenience stores had either product. The only thing I could come up with was a bottle of "American-style mustard," the kind you squirt onto your hotdogs if you're into that sort of thing. Oh well, okay. The raisins were still a bit of a problem. But I remembered! We had grapes! And a food dehydrator! Yay! So I cut up a bunch of grapes (so they would dry up faster) and started them in the dehydrator. Then I got stuck into the alchemy that would make this sauce great: cloves, cardamom pods, juniper berries (yes! I'd just bought some at the really-good-place-that-sells-cheap-vegetables-and-lots-of-ethnic-food, and I was dying to try them out), black pepper, and salt. I boiled these up in a little bit of water and let them steep for, oh, a long time, maybe even an hour. Then I took the bits out and replaced them with a bunch of brown sugar, two squirts of mustard, and a splash (just a tiny one) of additional vinegar ("American-style" mustard already has tons in it). Then I added the grapes-that-weren't-quite-shriveled-enough-to-call-raisins, and a little bit of cornstarch-and-water slurry and let it simmer for a while. I pretty much invented this recipe based on about a dozen I read on the Internet, and I'm happy to say the spicing was incredibly subtle and absolutely inspired. I HATE mustard as a rule, but this sauce came out aromatic and piquant and sweet and just exactly what I wanted for the ham.

Then came the mashed potatoes: two different kinds of potato, don't ask me what they were because I grabbed them from the bottom shelf of the cupboard and didn't think twice about it. I boiled them and mashed them with garlic-and-herb butter left over from making garlic bread the other night, a ton of fresh parmesan (grated, of course), a bit of salt, and a splash of cream.

The veggies were just plain, steamed veggies — have to have some white space in a meal, after all.

The breads were of two kinds: some AMAZING whole-wheat soda bread (my Ulsterman husband reliably informs me that this is referred to back in the Old Country simply as "wheaten") that Margaret made, and a stunning loaf of rye bread I made WITH caraway — mark me, Australia, this is how it should be done: WITH caraway. Went fabulously with the ham, as Americans have known for generations.

Dessert was a plate of strawberries, apples, plums, cheddar cheese, and some (homemade) candied walnuts and almonds.

I am full of food that not only tasted good, but had subtle and sophisticated (and maybe some not-so-subtle) flavors, top-quality ingredients*, and careful (if somewhat innovative) preparation. If there's one thing I learned from my few days in France and Belgium a while back, it was to appreciate this sort of food. It really, truly does make a difference. There's food that tastes pretty good and that's all. Then there's food that just brings it to that next level. That's the food that's good for your soul.

And making a meal such as this for my family — doubly good for the soul.

*Please note: top-quality does not have to mean expensive all the time. The only item on that menu that I really had to shell out the bucks for was, as I mentioned, the ham. I even got the almonds on sale. I will admit, however, that I would have preferred to use dry mustard rather than that bottle of "American-style." But it all worked out in the end.