Now, IFC is weird in our house: Verizon makes it a subscription-only channel and we do not subscribe. And yet, somehow we can still see it? I don’t know. I blame techno-djinn. As should we all.
IFC has been very good with the making-funny, given that there is where I also discovered Whitest Kids U Know (streaming on Netflix, and the Dinosaur Rap is necessary viewing).
Anyway, point being, I’m a bit late to the game here, but Sweet Jeebus, Portlandia is some funny shit. I’m not particularly aware of Portland culture, but it matters little — the show walks this bizarre line where it first puts hipster culture on a pedestal and then pelts it with Pabst Blue Ribbon cans until it falls off and breaks. On Saturday Night Live, I generally can’t stand Fred Armisen — and yet, here, he’s allowed to, I dunno, become his comedy self and go Full Tilt Weird with it. And it works. By god, it fucking works. (Oh, and his comedic partner in crime is, somewhat mysteriously, Carrie Brownstein from totally rad grr-grrl band, Sleater-Kinney. So, there’s that.)
Now, write a three-sentence story from the perspective — first person POV — of that animal.
You are encouraged to anthropomorphize the animal — meaning, the animal acts and thinks as a human would. It’s okay to write about the animal as an animal, or the animal in the animal’s expected spaces, but it’s also fine to think outside of the box (a spy story featuring a cougar, a science-fiction story starring a wolf, a morality tale starring a mouse, etc.).
Any genre will do.
The stories should be PG-13. No sex or gore or strong profanity.
I know. Unusual for this site.
And here’s why:
Bear71 is a documentary and installation about the life and death of a tagged grizzly bear and the surveillance that surrounds this bear. The experience will present at Sundance New Frontier this year — information here — and the best stories of this bunch will become a part of the overall installation (they may, for instance, show up at the installation itself or be included as a part of the Bear71 social media outreach).
Why submit a story? It’s for a good cause and a poignant storytelling experience.
(Also, you retain all rights to your story and can do with it as you wish.)
You’ve got one week — till January 20th, noon EST, to get your stories in.
To submit: please post your three-sentence story in the comments below. Make sure to include a name to receive credit and/or a Twitter handle where appropriate.
Yes, yes, fine, we know that self-publishing benefits the author.
It gives writers greater control and a greater financial stake in each sale and it forms a direct relationship between between said writer and that writer’s readers.
Yay! Huzzah! Let’s all dance around the tetherball pole and give each other playful buttock slaps.
*slap*
*slap*
*ooh!*
*slap*
It’s just — wait a minute.
Hold up, hold up, hold up.
*slap*
I SAID HOLD UP, JIMMY.
Goddamnit, Jimmy. Thank you. Sheesh.
We’ve thought about the one side of that equation — the writer — but nobody seems to be talking about the other half of that. Nobody’s talking about how self-publishing benefits readers.
The reason?
It doesn’t. Not yet, and not directly.
If anybody’s left out in the cold when authors self-publish it’s readers. Yes, they reap some benefit — if they’ve an author they love then it’s all the better to have that author not bound up in a situation where it takes him 15 months from the completion of a novel to the publication of that novel. It also ensures that the reader’s money is going in greater steaming lumps to that author. So, in this way, fans are rewarded.
But regular readers? Not so much.
Now, some of this falls to Amazon and B&N, admittedly — curation and filter of indie books (and, in fact, all books) is awful. Sorting through books on those sites is about as much fun as sorting through a jar of marmot pellets looking for that one good Junior Mint. That doesn’t mean, however, that self-published authors can’t take some responsibility for the work they’re putting out in the world.
Let’s just say it now and say it proud, trumpeting it so loudly that You All The Way In The Back can hear: this should be the year that self-publishers take responsibility. For themselves and their work as well as the larger body of DIY work existing out there in the world. Let this be the year that indie writers step into Thunderdome armed to the teeth with all the best weapons and armor. (Instead of, say, a mop handle “sword” and a flak jacket made from Schlitz cans.) Let this be the year that you do the work and take the time to get your books up to speed so that self-published books become indistinguishable from any other book on the shelf. Because, let’s be honest: 8 times out of 10 you can spot a self-published book a mile away.
Let this be the year that self-publishing serves readers as much as it serves writers.
How can it serve readers?
Here’s a few ways (and use the comments to add your own):
Treat Readers Like Customers And Clients
One thing that traditional publishing offers authors is a thing most don’t realize: a buffer. Formatting error? Not the author’s fault! Weird marketing? Not the author’s fault! Ugly cover? Not the author’s fault!
To a publisher, a reader is a customer. To a writer, the reader represents audience.
Ah, but in this situation, the writer hath become a publisher, like some kind of literary Transformer (cue crunchy transforming noise), which means the buffer is gone and the excuses are cast to the wind like so much dried semen flower pollen.
Writers will self-publish best when they embrace the mind-set that readers are no longer just readers: they are a customer and client base. You’re not freelancing for a magazine, now: you’re freelancing for the greater body of readership, and that means trying to please and appease however you — and they — see fit.
Put Together A Good-Looking Book
I’ll totally admit that self-publishing has come really far. Doesn’t change the fact that a surprising number of self-published books still maintain as much aesthetic value as me rolling around in hot garbage and then splatting my pale, waste-besmirched body on an empty canvas. Also doesn’t change the fact that many are deeply riddled with errors — not a couple here and there born of formatting problems but errors born of writers who wouldn’t know what they were doing if you broke their noses with a copy of Strunk & White.
(And stop redirecting. If any of you are about to type into the comment box, “But traditionally-published books have errors too!” then I will tie you down and give you an Angry Crayfish enema. That’s not an excuse. Getting into a slapfight on the playground doesn’t become magically okay because those kids got into a slapfight, too. One crime does not make equivalent crimes suddenly acceptable.)
Get a cover that doesn’t look like a warty dick. Find a strong editor. Train yourself to be a better writer after every book — grow, excel, learn your fucking trade you fucking animals.
Ooh, sorry. I think I was snapping into Alec Baldwin mode, there.
Point is: put together a good-looking book.
And part of that means: write well.
Quality Over Quantity
In DIY-indie-micro-self-publishing, quantity serves the writer. The more work you shotgun blast into the world, the more work you have to sell (and further, the more legitimate your work appears — “There’s so much of it!”). Readers, though, are often treated to a bunch of half-baked half-ass material.
Stop giving them the half-ass. Give them the full ass. The total booty. The complete rumpage.
Take the time to earn their trust by offering works of maximum quality.
Stop treating self-publishing work like it’ll have to be “good enough.” Be the best, by gum, by golly.
CUE KARATE KID MONTAGE.
Best Practices, Motherfucker
Most industries have an unspoken (or, sometimes, totally spoken) list of best practices. Meaning, the ways for those industries to be jacked up to Maximum Awesome. When I worked at the library, I did marketing and one of the programs I helped put together was a best practices for libraries to serve an aging population. The list wasn’t all, “Make sure old people have their own water fountains because they smell like rose hips and pee,” or, “Ensure the library has a handicap ramp; oh, it doesn’t have to be near a door or anything, you can put it on the roof for all I care, we just need to have one somewhere so we don’t get yelled at.”
They don’t call it a Bare Minimum list. It’s a list of Best Practices.
So much of self-publishing seems devoted toward bare minimum.
So, for your audience, put together a list of your own personal best practices.
Targeted Cheerleading
Stop rewarding bad behavior. When the dog pees on the carpet, the dog is duct-taped to the couch and forced to watch a VHS tape of his many indiscretions with this latest urinary mistake added to the pile. The dog is not given a ham bone and happy good-boy ear-scratches.
Cheerlead — by which I mean, recommend heartily — those self-published books that meet not just the minimum standards of quality but that exceed them. And those books that don’t? Fuck ’em. I’m not saying you have to go full court press and ridicule them in the town square, but stop high-fiving them just because they’re self-published. Which leads me to…
Leave The Tribe
You’re not a tribe. Self-publishers are not “together.” But a lot of them act like it — “An attack on one is an attack on all!” — and that’s not only insane, but bad for readers.
Here’s the thing, and this isn’t meant to be a jab at unions, but when “indie” writers act like they’re banded together, it runs the risk of feeding on all the worst inclinations of a union. They all serve one another as customers and recommend each other endlessly and, most problematically, issues and concerns are hand-waved away by the tribe. Instead of embracing a body of people Doing It Wrong, we should be examining those who are Doing It Right.
Put more crassly, readers aren’t served by the self-publishing circle jerk.
All they get for their efforts is a bad case of spooge-eye.
If you want to come together, do so to be the best, not the worst.
Feel free to re-queue that Karate Kid music video.
Take Risks In Storytelling
Traditional publishing has become more risk averse over the years (though to suggest they take no risks at all is a suggestion born from a person who never takes a trip to the bookstore) — it’s why you see a lot of the same thing on shelves. It’s why the same cover is rehashed again and again. Same tropes, same genres, same narrative copy-pasta.
One could argue that this is just fine for readers — it’s what they want, it’s what they buy, and publishers are just bolstering the trends. I’d argue the opposite: setting trends and taking risks is what really rewards the audience. The rise of Stephen King was not because horror was really popular before he came around. Horror was a non-starter prior to King. King popularized that genre and helped to make it huge. He wasn’t chasing trends — he was the trend.
Problem is, self-publishers end up doing More Of The Same. Look at a lot of self-published work and it feels alarmingly similar to what’s already out there. So much of it can be described as a rip-off of something else.
Time to step up, self-pubbers.
Time to start taking risks. Time to stop following in the well-worn paths and carve out your own.
That will ultimately serve readers.
Take Risks In Format
Format needs risks, too. Traditional publishing is in love with the novel. The bigger novel, the better. Certain formats were non-starters: novellas, short stories, poetry, etc. Risky formats were not rewarded. Hell, they never even made it to shelf half the time — wasn’t worth the printing. E-readers have changed that (and, I’ll add here: e-books were a risk in format and see how that paid off?).
Explore different formats. Readers are a diverse bunch and can be served by various experiences — it’s time to stop serving them standard continental cuisine. Time to introduce some new flavors.
That might even mean storytelling experiences that leave the book.
(I’ll talk more about transmedia and self-publishing later.)
Go forth. Experiment.
Sell Directly
Not ever reader has the same e-reader, and not every reader wants to buy from Megabeasts like Amazon or B&N. Sell your book directly. It provides a fresh option for the audience in terms of procurement.
This is one that actually also serves the author. You hear a lot of “OMG YOU GOTTA PUB WITH AMAZON BECAUSE 70% ROYALTY OMG,” but you don’t hear a lot of, “OMG YOU SHOULD SELL DIRECTLY BECAUSE 80-90% ROYALTY OMG.” But that’s the reality. To give perspective, of all my self-published book sales last year, about 5-6% was with B&N. But almost 30% of my sales came direct from this blog.
Pay attention. Offer direct. Readers want it, and it pays for you, too.
That’s called a “win-win” situation.
Discover What Traditional Publishing Is Not Offering
This goes back in part to the “risk” discussion but, for me, deserves its own special corner of this here bloggerel. What is it that traditional publishing isn’t offering? No, no, not to the writer. We know that already. What aren’t they offering to readers? Where is there a deficit, a void, a secret and totally vulnerable thermal exhaust port into which an author-slash-publisher could in theory launch a proton torpedo?
Discover that, and you’ll know in part how to serve readers above serving yourself.
Your Turn
How can self-publishing serve both writers and readers?
The main character in my upcoming novel BLACKBIRDS can see how and when you’re going to die just by touching you. A little skin-to-skin contact and — *snaps fingers* — she knows.
It can be straight text (preferably under 100 words; shorter is almost universally better).
But I’d also like a mix of other media if possible:
Photos, music, videos, postcards. Anything that tells a story of how you expect to die.
(Again, Postsecret is a good example as any if you need it.)
If you’ve got a Tumblr blog, I’d appreciate you following along.
I’ll keep running this up to and ideally beyond the BLACKBIRDS release on April 24th, 2012 (with the mighty Angry Robot Books). Keep your eyes peeled to that blog as I may do story snippets and giveaways for the book that you can’t find here. But mostly I hope you’ll keep in touch for the stories and the art the community creates.
Which means, it’s time for the disclaimer:
Whatever you send to me, you’re giving to me. I can do whatever I want with it. I can manipulate images and text and edit accordingly. I don’t want to say I own it — but by sending it over, you give me permission to use it as I see fit. Obviously if the time comes you need me to take something down, I will. And feel free to submit anonymously — I will be posting them all anonymously anyway.
One of the questions that’s been driving me of late is, “Just what the hell is an author’s voice and how does he find it and what does he do with it once he has it? Does it make smoothies? Can you shout a dragon out of the sky like in Skyrim? Would you eat it with a goat, would you eat it in a boat?” So, I figured I’d take to the Bloggery Zone and see if I couldn’t conjure 25 things I think about a writer and his voice.
Behold my insipid majesty on the subject:
1. One Word: “Style”
The traditional definition of a writer’s “voice” is, simply put, that writer’s chosen style. “John Q. Snarlmonkey writes with snark and panache, using tons of ellipses and lots of capital letters and made-up words. I love Snarlmonkey’s voice.” Voice equals style. That’s the easy answer.
2. Except, Okay, Fine, It’s So Much More Than That
Seriously, fuck easy answers. Easy answers are for babies and oxygen-starved kittens. A writer’s voice is an incomprehensible and largely indefinable combo-pack of — well, of just about anything. Style, dialogue, tropes, themes, genres, sub-genres, ideas, characters, stereotypes, archetypes, word choice, grammatical violations, and so forth. Anybody who tells you that David Foster Wallace’s voice does not include his obsession with footnotes should be shoved into a cannon and fired into the mouth of a great white shark. Voice is not one thing. Is is, in fact, the summation of a writer.
3. Revised Definition, Then
The writer’s voice is the thing that marks the work as a creation of that writer and that writer only. You read a thing and you say, “This could not have been written by anybody else.” That is voice.
4. That Makes It Yours, Which Makes It Awesome
If you believe that old chestnut, no original stories exist and every character is just a remix of another character who came before. Maybe true, maybe not. What the fuck do I know? I’m a writer, which is another way of saying, “Makes poor life decisions.” What I do know, however, is that a writer gets to own her voice. It’s hers and hers alone. It is her fingerprint, her retinal scan, her indelible and never-replicable identity. The craft of being an author is knowing all the elements that go into a good story. But the art, ahhh, the art is in the arrangement. And that arrangement embodies your voice. How can you not love that?
5. Sometimes Voice Defies Penmonkey Law
I’m just going to say this: sometimes a writer’s voice breaks The Rules, capital T, capital R. A writer makes certain stylistic choices and those choices may be objectively incorrect. That may — key word: may — be one of the strands of memetic material that runs through the DNA of an author’s voice.
6. Don’t Mistake Bad Writing For Good Voice
That being said, bad writing is bad writing. Any stylistic hangnails should be minor and made with full awareness of why they need to exist: don’t write like a shit-heel and call it part of your writer’s voice. Crap writing is indefensible. Try to pull that one over on a seasoned editor and they will stab you in the gonads with a red pen. And you will have deserved it.
7. You Can’t Force It
Forcing your voice is a futile endeavor. Like trying to hammer a cat through a mousehole (which is totally not some weird new sex move, by the way — UNLESS IT IS). Voice is a component of practice and maturity. Same way you can’t concentrate really hard to make puberty come earlier (“Grow, pubes, grow!”), you cannot artificially and prematurely discover your voice. Writers must cultivate patience (or perhaps patience’s rude and grumpy cousin, stubbornness). You’ll get there. Your voice will come.
8. “It’s A Trick. Get An Axe.”
You can try to trick your voice into appearing early, try to overwrite or use purple prose or engage in stylistic flourishes that plum don’t belong. Don’t bother. It’s just peeing with someone else’s dick — it’ll feel weird and alien, like some critical component does not belong.
9. We First Must Mimic
When you first start writing, you write like those writers you read most frequently. Maybe you mean to. Maybe it’s an unconscious thing. But don’t fight it. It’s all part of the process.
10. Other Authors Are Spun Into Our DNA
Eventually we stop miming the style of others, but along the way we still break off parts of other authors and graft them to our own styles. Some parts must be kept. No harm in that — we shouldn’t be upset with our influences. Why turn away from those who got us here? Those whose voices mattered most? As long as their voice does not take over our own, we’re good. It’s okay if we are in part the culmination of other voices. Like I said before: the art is in the arrangement.
11. This Shit Takes A Long Time
You don’t find your voice overnight. It doesn’t just appear like the fucking Tooth Fairy. I don’t know that it’s a function of time or a function of how much you write or some mutant hybrid of each, but it’s a slow discovery. You’ll catch glimpses of it once in a while, and you’ll cultivate it without even meaning to — and then, one day, it’s like, boom. Your balls drop and there it is: your voice. Or, if you’re a girl, your… vagina blooms? I don’t know what happens with your lady-parts, having none myself. I should get a set, just to see.
12. Evolution And Mutation
Your writer’s voice, like your real voice, changes. One day you’re all fresh-and-squeaky, and then calendar pages whip off the wall and suddenly your voice is scratchy and dry like you’ve been gargling watch parts and cigarette butts for the last ten years. Read any given author over a period of time and you see this — you can witness the Auteur Theory in action as their voice squirms and shifts.
13. Beware The Cardboardization Of Your Work
Some will try to beat your voice back, like they’re thwacking a tiger with an umbrella in order to urge him back into the bush. (Also not a weird new sex move.) Again, if you’re confusing bad writing with good voice, okay, fine, let others — be they agents or editors or readers — judge your voice and find it wanting. But also beware what happens when they want to milk your words of what makes them special in order to make something more marketable. Your voice is one of the strongest and most complicated weapons in your arsenal. Do not give it up without a fight. Poll your intestinal flora. Check your gut. You’ll know.
14. Not Just How You Write, But Who You Are
We assume voice to be a thing built of technical components. That’s it, but only part of it. Your voice is also who you are. How you bleed and spit and scream on the page. You are your voice. Your voice is you.
15. The Sexy Tango Of Honesty and Authenticity
Be honest. Be forthright. Be authentic. You believe things. You know things. You question things. All this crazy shit needs to spill out of your head and end up on the page and in that — in the choices you make, choices that come from questions only you could’ve ever asked — your voice will bloom. Like a vagina. A blooming, fragrant vagina. I might be confusing “vaginas” with “flowers” again.
16. What You Add Versus What You Subtract
It’s easy to suggest that a writer’s voice is what’s there when you write unbidden, unrestrained by the shackles of grammar or good taste or, y’know, sobriety. But your voice is not only a summation of those things you let out the door — it’s also a calculation configuring those doors you keep closed. It’s about subtracting as well as adding — pruning as well as cultivating. Voice can be a matter of writing small just as easily as it can measure the boldness of your stroke. HA HA HA STROKE MASTURBATION um, nothing.
17. Look To Your Body Of Work, See The Voice Emerge
Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.
18. Listen To Your Voice — No, I Mean Your Actual Voice
There lurks an intimate connection between the written word and the spoken word. We pretend it’s not true, as if the written word is somehow higher up in the food chain, somehow more exalted, but that’s a big brass bucket brimming with bullshit. Language exists initially to communicate from person to person — it is born of speech and sound. Words aren’t just symbols: they’re really how we say things. And so it is that your actual voice matters in this regard. Listen to what you say and how you say things: your authorial voice lurks in this. You should endeavor to write at least in part how you speak. By doing that, you capture the essence of how you say things. Related: always read your work out loud.
19. The Banshee’s Scream
Voice matters. Voice is important. But at the end of the day, if it takes your story and drowns it in a hot stockpot of scalding soup, then you’ve done yourself a disservice. In the Great Cosmic Chain Of Telling Bad-Ass Motherfucking Stories, voice is subservient to story, not vice versa. Voice helps you tell the story at the same time story helps you find your voice. But no matter what, story is the pinnacle, the zenith, the apogee, and other words that mean the “tippy-top” of the narrative mountain.
20. Regular Like A Morning Constitutional
Consistency in voice matters. It should day to day, page after page, hold together. The only way this fails is if you’re uncertain. If you lose your shit. If you freak the fuck out.
21. Don’t Panic
Breathe easy. Loosen your mind sphincter. Don’t panic. It’s like with sex — think too much and too hard about it, you’ll short circuit a synapse and put the kibosh on the mood. Serenity serves the writer’s voice.
22. Where Writer’s Block Is Born, Screaming And Keening
I wonder if writer’s block is actually a thing born of not yet knowing your voice. If we’re here to assume that part of a writer’s voice is knowing what to say and how to say it, then not being sure of — or comfortable with — one’s voice would lead to the fear that spawns the poorly-named writer’s block. It seems sensible. Then again, so did running through that Arby’s naked last night, sauced to the gills on ecstasy and wine coolers. Maybe I’m not the best guy to listen to on what’s sensible.
23. Eventually You Stop Being Afraid Of Yourself
Writers are at the outset a scared species. It’s not our fault: we’re told that it’s a bad idea and unless we want to prepare for a life lived inside a palatial piano crate we should just buckle down and become accountants. And so I think there’s a lot of bad psychic voodoo that clogs the works, and until we start to clear that out, it’s really hard to find out who we are on the page and what our voice looks and sounds like. Finding your voice is then synonymous with losing the fear of not just writing but of being a writer.
24. The Confidence Game
Confidence is key. I’ll say no more than that: confidence is key.
25. Don’t Write Like Anybody Else
At the end of the day, take the opportunity to write like you want to write. Actually, it’s weirder and deeper than that — what I really mean is, write like you need to write. Your voice might be a component of confidence, but it also might be an accumulation of obsessions and foibles and fears and frailties and all the crazy moon-unit shit that makes us who we are. I’m going to quote from another terribleminds commenter, found last week at “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — Amy Severson said: “When I finally realized that I was never going to write like the the authors I loved and just started writing how (and what) I wanted to, it was like someone blew out the little candle I was huddled under and flipped the switch on a dozen spotlights.” I think that says it all about a writer’s voice, don’t you?
They’re ugly, I know. They look like the decapitated — and also featureless — head of Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy. Did I need to say that first part? “Charlie Brown’s dog?” You already know who Snoopy is, don’t you? You presumably haven’t been living under a lichen-encrusted rock somewhere. Have you?
Oh, fair warning: I’ve been drinking.
Talisker, if you care to know. As everybody calls it, “the “salted caramel of Scotches.”
(Nobody calls it that.)
Where were we?
Ah. Right.
Take one butternut squash.
Peel it. I used a peeler but you might want to use a pearl-handled straight razor or some other serial killer implement. Peeling a butternut squash is a serious dick-pain because the skin is tough and the curves are awkward — it’s like you’re trying to make love to some kind of goblin creature. (It’s nothing like that. Settle down.) Just peel the goddamn squash, already.
Chop it in half. Bisect Snoopy’s head.
Scoop out the Snoopy brains seeds and assorted tangled tentacle-bits.
Do what you like with those. Roast the seeds. Use the mangled innards as a vegetarian merkin.
Then —
Take your two halves of the squash-flesh (“Squashflesh” was my nickname in Sunday School), and then chop them into cubes that are roughly equivalent to one another. Perfection has little value here. Just get close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and call it a day.
Oh, right, the oven.
Set your Food Furnace to a toasty 375 degrees.
You’ve chopped the squash, now it’s time to do the same to a medium-sized onion. Sweet onion if you can manage. You want to avoid any of the unpleasant varietals of onion. No butt onions, doom onions, Hitler onions, mucus onions — all of those are no-no onions. Leave those at the store where they belong. Only sweet onions may apply. Which is coincidentally what the hand-painted sign above my bed says! If you know what I mean! Right? Right? Yeah? Yeah!
*funky sex-jazz ensues*
The onion doesn’t need a lot of delicate attention. Just — you know, fucking chop that sonofabitch.
Both onion and squash will — nay, must! — go into a roasting pan.
I line mine with the magical substance known as “non-stick foil,” which is like a gift sent by the gods. Quite literally, in fact. Zeus staple-gunned a box of this stuff to the back of a dead mermaid and left it at my door. That Zeus! Him and all his silly back-slappers. He should get a sitcom, that guy. I propose we call it “That Zeus!” — it is, in fact, critical that the exclamation point remain intact so that in the show’s logo we may instead draw the exclamation point as a jagged lightning bolt. It’s how Zeus would want it.
Where was I?
Oh, right.
Take one butternut squash.
Wait, we’ve already done that part?
Right! Roasting pan. Throw your vegges into a roasting pan, splash with a liberal dollop of olive oil, shake it around and rub it down and get all the vegetables properly lubed, as if they are about to be shoved into a very tight orifice (they are not, however, so please re-affix your pants to your undertorso).
On top of the now-glistening veggies will go:
A sprinkling of salt.
A dash of cayenne pepper.
A dash of cracked black pepper.
A naughty coating of herbes de provence, which is an herb blend of — I don’t know, a bunch of herbs. Including some herb named “savory,” which I’m pretty sure people just made up.
Into the oven! One hour. Or till it just starts to caramelize. You don’t want it to go too far into that process — just enough to bring the sugary goodness out. Stand vigil.
When they’re done, get out a stock pot. Pop into the stockpot some oil, some chopped carrots, some chopped celery. I did two of each — two ribs of celery, two… what’s a unit that measures carrots? If celery gets “ribs,” what do carrots get? Noses, I guess. I mean, that’s what you use for snowmen. But they also look phallic? Just the same, “two dicks of carrot” just sounds gross.
So, two ribs of celery, two noses of carrot.
Oh! And some fresh chopped garlic.
Start to cook that. Soften it up a little bit.
Dump your oven-roasted squash-and-onion blend into the pot.
Toss in:
Two cups of chicken broth.
Two tablespoons of apple cider (edited to add: vinegar).
Set that all to simmer, cook for… you know, not long? I don’t care. Five, ten minutes. Don’t get nuts with it. Just enough time to have a bottle of wine, read a magazine, kill a dude.
Time to get out your Blender-of-Choice.
Mine is, as of very recently, a Vitamix 5200. Refurb. We’d resisted the Vitamix for a long time because, well, they’re not cheap. It’s hard to justify that kind of money for a fucking blender. Thing is, I’ve hated all the blenders I’ve owned outside my immersion stick, and also we have a baby and I wanted to make baby food and blah blah blah. Long story beheaded and delimbed and made short: we bought a Vitamix.
Worth it.
Let me say that again in italics:
Worth it.
Let me say that again in all caps:
WORTH IT.
That crazy bastard will blend up anything.
Sure, it’s so loud it sounds like someone is mowing the lawn inside my brain, but hey, fuck it. It blends. It blends anything. It blends fast. Efficiently. I could probably use it to split the atom if I needed to. And because it’s so fast and so insane, you can use it to make hot soup or freeze ice cream or, I dunno, grind the bones of your foes into flour for a little recipe I call “Enemy Bread.”
Not “Enema Bread.”
That’s… different.
Point is: choose your blender, and blend the soup.
Until it’s smooth and creamy. Like my supple thighs.
Now, back into the stockpot. Simmer. Pour in: 1/2 cup of heavy cream, or enough heavy cream so that your taste-buds do a happy dance, but not so much heavy cream that your arteries harden into little brittle sesame sticks. The soup at this point should be velvety and sweet and delicious.
I did two more things to the soup (calm down, my pants were on), but you don’t need to.
First, I cooked up some country ground sausage and put it into play. I like to chew my soup. If my soup’s too liquidy, I feel like an old person — I figure I’ve got plenty of years where I’ll be drinking my food through a bendy straw, so why start now?
Second, I “melted” (not really melted) some leeks. I did this in duck-fat and red wine vinegar. Chop your leeks into little o-rings, wash the dirt and grime out of there, put into a pan and sweat the leaks in the duck fat and a splash of vinegar for 8-10 minutes until tender.
I plopped the leeks right on top of the soup in the middle.
Floating there. A little leeky island.
Anyway. There you you go. Butternut squash soup. With sausage and melted leeks.
Your mouth can thank me later.
…that sounds like I’m asking for oral favors, but that’s not at all what I mean. I mean your lips can form the words “thank you” and then your vocal chords can express your gratitude.
