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February 19, 2021 / 32 Comments

Why “Gentle Writing Advice,” Exactly?

If you follow me on Twitter (you fool), you may have seen that I have been doing a thread over there of so-called GENTLE WRITING ADVICE. (That thread is here.)

And I just wanted to talk about, for a moment, why I’m doing that.

So, an indeterminate amount of time ago — my Pandemic Brain tells me it was either a few weeks or seven-and-a-half years — some anonymous individual popped onto Twitter and pooped out some manner of self-identified HARSH WRITING ADVICE. And it was framed as much of this kind of advice often is, which is like, BOOM, FACT CHECK, IF YOU CAN’T WRITE 5000 WORDS A DAY WHILE HARBORING A VENGEFUL INTESTINAL PARASITE, YOU’LL NEVER SUCCEED. Or something. I honestly don’t remember what the advice was. (Correction: I found it. It was worse than I remembered.)

And I did a funny thread of how this advice often sounds, which is, blah blah blah, kill and eat your fellow creatives, if you use adverbs you’ll get butt cankers, whatever. But then I also started doing the opposite of that, a series of gentler, softer pieces of advice — not as a goof, but as a real thing. I thought it useful to talk about why I’m doing that, and am continuing to do it still.

A lot of writing advice is frequently prescriptive. Meaning, it is there to impose law and order onto the chaotic act of writing and art making. Creativity is a lawless land, and art/writing is the act of refining that chaos into order, and so it makes sense in a way that advice is frequently about the imposition of that structure. And artists and authors are viewed as these wifty, wispy spirits who can’t keep it together and who would starve if you didn’t press a taco into their searching hands once in a goddamn while. Certainly my own career is one made out learning that, indeed, if you wanna do this thing, then that requires work and effort, and it isn’t always pleasant, it isn’t always fun, and so it behooves writers to learn that lesson. So, writing advice tends to drift away from the chaotic, unpredictable tangle of writing and storytelling and into the “reality check” style of harsh writing advice — it is often presented as if one is doing a favor by delivering it. “Here,” says the author, “is a hard truth someone may not have told you, you’re welcome.”

I don’t think this is malicious. I even think that some part of it is designed to counter advice from charlatans and abusers who want to sell you fake empowerment or some kind of self-help advice in that direction. I think it often comes from a good place: “I learned these hard lessons, and most people won’t tell them to you.”

Here’s the current problem du jour —

These days, most people will tell them to you.

They will, in fact, mostly give advice in exactly this fashion.

I mean, how often do we endure lists from big authors where it’s TEN WRITING RULES and it’s a deeply prohibitive listicle of Dos and Don’ts, and if you violate them, you’ll never be published and your stories will suck open ass and you will die in a lightless, artless abyss as the God of Story will have turned His Sacred Gaze from you. How many times must we be told that adverbs are BAD BAD BAD (even though adverbs are a necessary part of language that includes words like “often” and “everywhere” and “after”). Or how if you use dialogue tags other than ‘said,’ you’ll get a chafing thigh rash? I mean, sure, yes, okay, if you write —

“I went to the mall!” Derek yammered hydroponically

— then you deserve the side-eye from an editor, but that’s not because of adverbs or dialogue tags, it’s because you wrote a… ennhyeah, a not-great sentence. You eschewed clarity in favor of stunt writing. Stunt writing is okay sometimes. But sacrificing clarity, probably not. But again, the problem there isn’t adverbs or dialogue tags, and assigning writing advice to tackle those specific things is not necessarily helpful. It demonizes the wrong stuff.

Think about it. How often have we been told to kill our darlings without also being told we have to learn what hills we need to die on? How often have we been told you have to sit and write 2000 words a day and not been told that some days you’ll be unable to do that, and you need to not write those words because some days are genuinely for sitting there and staring at the wall and then saying “oh fuck it” before going to look at some birds? And then, in looking at birds, you find an answer you didn’t expect to find because you were able to clear your damn head for five minutes. Some advice says we must write in short, declarative sentences — but sometimes, only a long sentence will do, and it is in some long sentences that we can both contain a world of information and metaphor while also creating rhythm and beauty in the flow of that very sentence.

My point here is that harsh writing advice is in ample supply these days.

And, frequently, it’s a very masculine style of advice, very Western, very pedagogical with a lot of stern grumpy faces and lectern-pounding.

It lends the very act of talking about writing this feeling that there are answers to how we do this thing that we do — that writing and storytelling is an equation, and as long as we adhere to the formula and plug in the proper variables, we will Properly Compose Content. And we will win awards and become bestsellers, huzzah and hooray.

Writing is a craft, and storytelling is an art, and together they form this nebulous interstice where it’s just clowns juggling medium-sized cats and those cats are juggling little cat-sized chainsaws and the whole place is on fire and did I mention the “place” is actually a blimp and it’s drifting swiftly toward a flickering lighthouse operated by orphans? All the harsh writing advice is all about how to steer out of disaster and how to not get cut by cats wielding chainsaws but it all too often fails to acknowledge the glorious chaos of the act, the strangeness of it, the unpredictability. It fails to give you advice on how to go with that chaos instead of against it — how to appease the clowns, how to become a cat, how to turn the light in the lighthouse on once more. It also fails to teach you how to crash. So much of writing and storytelling is in the crashing. So much good comes out of that part.

Too much of our advice presents for us a map, a magic incantation, an instruction manual, but those inevitably fail under rigorous testing. The map is to a forgotten world, the incantation was unique to the wizard who first spoke it, and the instruction manual is in Swedish.

Further, we are currently mired in a fucking pandemic. (In case you haven’t noticed. And going out in the world, it definitely seems like some people haven’t noticed.) Everything is harsh. Shit sucks. It’s very hard to write anything in this situation, I’ve found — the last four years in general have been pretty corrosive to creativity. So I just don’t feel like this is the best time to say, HEY HERE ARE THE HARD TRUTH RULES, YOU PIECE OF SHIT, YOU BETTER DO ‘EM OR YOU’RE GONNA DIE. Like, when our 9-year-old is having A Day, you can’t just pound your fist and growl at him and tell him to JUST GET IT DONE, whatever “it” happens to be. Sometimes you need to sit down and talk him through it, and appeal to him on a human level, a compassionate level, and allow some days to be hard. And on those days where he commits to just doing a little of whatever it is that needs doing, he often goes ahead and gets it all done anyway, because you didn’t try to force it. Some things you can’t force. Emotions are one of them. And emotions are all bound up in the creation of art and the telling of stories.

Now, I’ve also learned that this thing that we do must walk the line between self-care and ass-busting-work. It is work. It is good to acknowledge that it takes work. But we also need time to decompress, and to be kind to ourselves. While also at the same time recognizing that an overage of kindness can start to drift into the making of excuses, and if your self-care stands in the way of getting anything done ever, then it has become the opposite of self-care — it has ceased to be a way out and instead, become just another trap. Just in the same way that hard-grr-bust-your-assery can lock you up, burn you out, and do the opposite of what you needed done.

I’ve certainly been the guy who has pounded that lectern, and told you what to do and what not to do. I don’t even want to look back at old writing advice for fear of what hell I unleashed upon you. I’m sure some of it was helpful, and some of it wasn’t. And some of it may have been helpful then, and not helpful now, because context matters, and times change, and who we are as writers change, too. I mean, Christ, once upon a time I was like, DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKE, WRITERS CAN’T BE SNOWFLAKES, but…

… maybe writers are snowflakes? We’re all pretty unique. Sometimes we melt. And when we all get together, we can form an avalanche of awesome stories. I dunno. Maybe it’s okay to be a snowflake, a fingerprint, a singular being — as long as we don’t become too fragile or narcissistic about it?

All of this is a very long way of saying, I think harsh writing advice is too plentiful, and the pandemic is hard, so maybe it’s time to try the gentle stuff for a while. With the asterisk footnote that says, all writing advice is bullshit anyway, but bullshit can sometimes fertilize.

Be good to yourself.

Progress is progress.

Write on.

February 19, 2021 / 12 Comments

Susan Mihalic: Five Things I Learned Writing Dark Horses

Fifteen-year-old equestrian prodigy Roan Montgomery has only ever known two worlds: inside the riding arena, and outside of it. Both, for as long as she can remember, have been ruled by her father, who demands strict obedience in all areas of her life. The warped power dynamic of coach and rider extends far beyond the stables, and Roan’s relationship with her father has long been inappropriate. She has been able to compartmentalize that dark aspect of her life, ruthlessly focusing on her ambitions as a rider heading for the Olympics, just as her father had done. However, her developing relationship with Will Howard, a boy her own age, broadens the scope of her vision.

At the intersection of a commercial page-turner and urgent survivor story, Dark Horses combines the searing themes of abuse and resilience with the compelling exploration of female strength.

I will never be in a “30 under 30” roundup of impressive young writers.

Although I showed early promise, I’m a late bloomer. I’m making my debut at age 59. It is the new 39, but even that isn’t under 30. While I’m all for nurturing young talent, I object to the suggestion that talent has an expiration date. Don’t write yourself off—and don’t let anyone else write you off, either—simply because of your age.

We write in an imperfect world.

One midwinter day in 2007, I received a rejection letter from Yaddo, where I’d applied for an extended residency. I would have rejected me, too. I’d written only three short chapters—later combined into a single first chapter—of my WIP. Ostensibly, the “P” in “WIP” stands for progress, but I’d made little of that. I began writing Dark Horses in the early 2000s, but for years at a time I didn’t touch the manuscript.

The Yaddo rejection was a dash of ice water on any dreamy notion I’d had of one day finishing my book. If I waited for all those perfect conditions I thought I needed—a stretch of uninterrupted time, a book-lined study (you know the one), no day job, no financial stressors—I would never finish this book or write any other. I would have to write in an imperfect world.

I made a deal with myself that day. Each evening when I got home from the day job, I would eat a quick dinner of cereal (perfect writer kibble) and then write. At the end of five days, I’d made more progress on the manuscript than I’d made in years. It felt good—so I decided to do it the following week, and at the end of two weeks, a habit was formed. That’s how I finished the book, writing for two or three hours every evening and indulging in write-a-thons on the weekends. I turned down invitations for drinks after work, dinner, coffee, and other social activities. No one else will make your writing a priority. Only you can do this.

In which I find an agent.

I finished the manuscript in August 2009 and spent the next year self-editing, a process during which I wasn’t nearly as hard on myself as I should have been, because all of us think, “This will be the cleanest, most perfect manuscript ever submitted to an agent.” HAAAAhahahahahaha. Clearly I hadn’t left all my delusions behind me. Have you seen the dragon in the kitchen?

I contacted an old publishing acquaintance who was now an agent. Of course I could send the manuscript to her. She read it and told me to cut 100 pages and send it back to her. I did. And—oooooooooo, children—she was never heard from again. There was only a hook dangling from my car door. A year passed, during which there were a couple of life-giving, hope-raising messages in which she promised my revised manuscript was next in her TBR pile, but in fact I’d been given the hook.

Slightly daunted, I regrouped and sent it to a friend’s agent, and exactly the same thing happened. After another solid year, another hook dangled from my car door.

Now deeply daunted and in possession of two useless hooks, I put the manuscript away for a year. At the end of that year, four years had passed since I’d completed the first draft. What was I doing with my life? Did I or didn’t I want to be published?

Welcome to the sim-sub (simultaneous-submission) route. I took a week off from my day job and created a spreadsheet with nearly 100 agents on it, most of them gleaned from the pages of Poets & Writers. I visited the website of each agency, where agents specified what they wanted in the way of a query, and contacted the ones I thought were the best fit for my manuscript.

By the end of the week, I’d found my agent. When we spoke on the phone, she asked if I were willing to revise. My reply: “Absolutely, but if I do . . . will I ever hear from you again?”

Her reply: “Yes, because I’ve already invested more time and energy in this than I would if I didn’t intend to represent you.”

Don’t be discouraged to discover you aren’t even close to being finished.

I love revising and editing, which is good, because my agent and I went through round after round of revisions. I was trying my best, but something wasn’t clicking. To my everlasting gratitude, she hung in there with me. Finally, when I thought I’d produced the best possible manuscript, she said, “Cut it by a third, and then I’ll read it.”

Part of me thought I couldn’t do it. The rest of me made a sign that read ENDURANCE, tacked it above my desk, and got to work. I brought Dark Horses in at a sleek 98,000 words and delivered a manuscript my agent could sell—and sell it she did, approaching exactly the right editor at exactly the right publisher. My editor requested further edits, which added slightly to the word count (I got to put back some material I’d deleted), but my agent had been so rigorous that at this point, editing felt like play.

Your path is yours, not ANYONE else’s.

In the critique group I’ve run for 20 years, I advocate heeding feedback that resonates and disregarding feedback that doesn’t—but this works only if you’re honest with yourself. My agent had a keen editorial sense, and I’d have been foolish not to listen to her.

“With your next book, you won’t have to listen to your agent and your editor,” one person said.

“Do you even feel like it’s your book anymore?” said another.

First, why wouldn’t I listen to an agent and an editor I trust? They want a book that will sell, and so do I. Second, it’s more my book than ever, forged by criticism and revision that burned away everything that wasn’t the story.

Only you can write your story, but regardless of whether you take the traditional route to publication, you’ll need to discern between advice that rings true and advice that’s off the mark. Know what to let go of, even if you’re attached to it. My words aren’t gold. Neither are yours. Be professional, listen to your team, and honestly assess their feedback.

Also, know what to hold on to. Tip: It won’t be as much as you think. Good editors, agents, and critique partners don’t want to make your story theirs. They want to help you make your story the best it can be.

***

Susan has worked as a book editor, curriculum writer, writing instructor, and freelance writer and editor. She has also taught therapeutic horseback riding. Dark Horses will be released by Simon & Schuster’s Scout Press on February 16. It has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Book List, and Library Journal. Susan lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she loves riding her dream horse, Goldmark, on the mountain trails. She is working on another novel.

Susan Mihalic: Twitter

Dark Horses: Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Amazon

February 10, 2021 / 9 Comments

Cover Reveal: Dust & Grim!

WELL, HEY THERE. What’s this? Why, it’s just the cover to my new book, Dust & Grim, out October 5th. In it, a girl inherits a funeral home for monsters from her parents, but must share that inheritance with a brother she’s never met. There are: mysterious doors! Talking wolves! A rogue devourer! Something in the wallpaper! A secret cemetery! And also, a Florg. (You’ll see.) The cover and interior art is by the inimitable Jensine Eckwall.

The biggest excitement for me is to have a book coming out that my own kiddo can read. He’s already seen the arcs and is, for the first time, actually excited that I’m a writer? Amazing! Anyway, hope you’ll check it out. If you need some pre-order links, the publisher has ’em lined up right here.

For those not yet caught up, that means I’ve got three (!) books out this year, which means the number of books I had out last year, which was, uhhh, zero.

Release dates:

April 6th: YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON

July 20th: THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS

October 5th: DUST & GRIM

Each book, I think, is a book of monsters.

Some wonderful. Some not so much.

Okay, bye!

*disappears in a cloud of moths*

January 25, 2021 / 31 Comments

Building Bridges Made Of Breakfast

This is not going to be one of those RECIPE BLOG POSTS where you first must endure a wall of text about the author’s magical visit to Tuscany where they met Mime King Marcel Marceau and picked fresh herbs while simultaneously making love to a secret paramour who then cooked them a frittata so wondrous it made them pregnant with a baby Iron Chef. It’s also not going to be one of the ones where I provide you with easy-to-gather ingredient lists, because I am a monster. It’s mostly just, hey, breakfast is good. I like breakfast. You like breakfast, unless you’re a face-stealing Hellgoblin — are you? A face-stealing Hellgoblin? No? Then prove it with your love of breakfast.

Mostly I just figure, I want to talk about some stuff other than the nightmare pit that opened up underneath us in the prior 4-5 years, and it’s honestly been a while since I catapulted a “””recipe””” into your eyeballs. And we are in a country now in dire need of unity, and there is no greater bridge to build between people than breakfast. We all eat it. We all like it. Except goblins. And goblins aren’t Americans or even citizens of the world, but rather, creatures that emerge from the steaming sulphur sphincters that lead straight to Hell. They are joy-hating mine-crawlers, and you can tell they’re evil because they don’t like breakfast.

Hashtag, worldbuilding.

Anyway.

Here, then, are some breakfast foods I make in the morning for myself, my wife, my child, or the various people I have trapped in my cellar. Ha ha ha just kidding I don’t have people in my cellar. They’re in the attic! Where there’s a view!

B-Dub’s Breakfast Buddy

My kid is generally not a fickle eater. He’ll eat… nnnyeah, mostly anything. His first time eating calamari, we put the plate down and he didn’t even ask what it was, he just started eating it. We were like, “You know that’s squid, right?” And he shrugged and kept going. He’s a good eater. One of his favorite foods is Brussels sprouts (my recipe for those little demon cabbages here). Long as something isn’t too spicy, he’s in.

Except eggs.

I don’t know what happened there. He loved eggs. Eggs were a comfort food. Then he went over another kid’s house, and the Dad was both vegan and an asshole, and the veganism isn’t the problem, but the asshole part definitely is, and somehow our son emerged from that experience hating eggs. I dunno why. He swears nobody told him that eggs were bad. But we also know that guy has turned other kids away from eating non-vegan foodstuffs with some real horror stories. We tried to tell him, “You know you’re not eating baby chickens, right, there’s no baby chicken in here,” and he seems to get that? But he won’t eat eggs anymore.

(My grandmother, Mom-Mom, wouldn’t eat cheese, though she’d eat anything else. She could detect the presence of cheese on an incoming meal when the waitress was still twenty feet from the table. She also lived to 89, and survived with mesothelioma for six years after they gave her six months, so who knows. Maybe not eating cheese is good.)

(I mean, I’m still going to eat cheese. I mean, obviously, JFC.)

(This is fast turning into my Magical Visit to Tuscany, isn’t it?)

(Oh well. This content is free!)

POINT IS, removing eggs from breakfast options was tricky at first because, honestly, breakfast is a world built on eggs, at least in our house. Further, the kidlet still wanted a breakfast sandwich to eat, too, and one that did not include eggs.

So, here’s that sandwich:

Toast an English muffin. Bay’s is our brand, in part because I hate the ritual of having to fork-open the forkin’ motherforker Thomas’ English muffins version.

When toasted, you drizzle a little maple syrup on the inside of the one half.

Then: some manner of meat goes upon it. Bacon is great, but so are sausage patties — the Beyond Sausage patties are good, too, if you want something plant-based.

Upon that goes cheese.

The perfect cheese for this is Cooper Cheese, which is the greatest meltiest cheese known to man, and anybody who tells you different can get fucked. It is the best. It’s American cheese, and I feel you already buckling, but stop. I’ve ranted about this before, but get shut of any judgment you may have about American cheese and how it’s not really “cheese” and how it’s a “cheese product,” and STOW YOUR CHEESE CLASSISM, JUDGEY MCJUDGEYBUTT. Anyway, let J. Kenji Lopez-Alt tell you the truth about American cheese. I have also used a good sharp cheddar, but it does change the profile significantly, and cheddar doesn’t always melt as nice.

So, maple syrup, then meat, then cheese. Cheese on both halves, btw.

Toast again, just till the cheese melts.

Slap halves together, put into face, send me money to pay me for the delight I have given you.

If you like eggs, unlike my anarchist son, cook one to your liking and put it on before the “slap halves” stage of the sandwich construction.

Also, in the name, I understand this is not a proper British butty, so I have named it a Buddy so as not to falsely appropriate British cuisine. You should read that prior sentence as sarcastically as you like.

Cheesy Eggs And Rice

Our Chinese food place gives you a whole container of rice for every dish you order, and that usually means we end up with enough leftover rice to choke a bear. But I don’t want to choke a bear. I like bears. So, instead I try to use the rice in a variety of ways, chief among them is fried rice, which I just mistyped as “friend rice.” Which sounds nice until you realize it might be a Soylent Green thing? Whatever. But for breakfast, I do a different thing with the rice, and this is that different thing —

Skillet on medium-high heat. Toss in there the OIL OF YOUR CHOICE, which here I recommend either unrefined coconut oil (nice coconutty taste) or butter. Why butter? Because butter.

Then, take a bunch of rice and dump it in. How much? Jesus, I dunno. How do you measure rice? By the fistful? One FIST OF RICE. There. The goal of this is you want the rice to get cooked on the bottom but stay somewhat pillowy-ricey on top. Spread it out. Think: layer.

While that’s cooking, lay a slice or two — broken up — of melty cheese atop the rice. Again, I will recommend to you Cooper Cheese for this vital task.

Now, to the eggs.

I do this two ways, depending on my druthers. The fuck is a druther, anyway? It sounds like the last name of a nosy neighbor in an old sitcom. “Oh, no, here comes our landlord, Mister Druthers, again — careful, or he’s going to figure out that one of us roommates is actually a haunted mannequin!”

First way is, scramble the fuck out of it. Then, when you feel the rice is sufficiently ready, you use your spatula and get that eggy scramble into the rice. Give it a stir, keep stirring, don’t let it scramble too much, and then put it on a bowl.

But, I find the second way a bit more satisfying.

I make two nests — two egg craters, you might say — in the rice. Like a fish swooping out the riverbed to lay its future fishchildren. Then put in a little more fat in those culinary rice pockets, and crack an egg into each. Let it cook a bit, then flip each yolk. Once they firm up a little bit, so that they’re starting to get jammy (jammy is one of those food words that I find enticing when used appropriately, so like, with caramelized onions, or egg yolks, but not, say, tuna fish). Then break the jammy yolks, stir them into the rice, and serve.

The cheese should be melty. The rice will be both soft and chewy. The eggs will incorporate throughout, a kind of ricey-eggy-custardy pillow. I use a little sweet soy sauce (buy it separate or make your own with soy, mirin, bit of vinegar, bit of sugar, garlic, ginger). I sometimes use Penzey’s Fox Point or Shallot Pepper too to finish. You can do other stuff to dress this up, too: start with onion, garlic, ginger. Maybe add in a dash of sesame oil. Greens go well here, too, like spinach or bok choy. Shit, this would probably taste good speckled with lawn clippings and eaten out of an old shoebox.

It’s delightful.

Also to be clear, I’m quite certain there are Chinese or Korean breakfasts that are similar to this — I’m not attempting to appropriate or claim some kind of culinary genius. I just put things I like together and they taste good and hopefully they taste good to you, too.

Broken Yolk On Homemade Toast

This one’s easy. Even obvious. But it’s a favorite here. I make my own sourdough toast — er, I guess I actually make the bread because the toast part is always on us to make — so, okay, fine, I make BREAD, you pedants, and then I TOAST that bread.

Then I re-toast in order to melt some cheese on it. Cheese of choice.

Then, I fry two eggs, flip, and break open the yolks at the end, and yet the jammy (there’s that word again) yolks spread out like a blanket of goodness over the whites.

Onto the toast goes a bed of arugula.

Onto the arugula go the eggs.

Season accordingly (salt, pepper, and for me, more of that Penzey’s Fox Point). Then use a painter’s trowel to shovel it into your unhinged maw.

You can dress it up with avocado. Or a fried green tomato for that crunchy tartness. Or a little maple syrup under the cheese for a hit of sweetness. Or, or, or, sweet onion jam or some kinda savory chutney. I also like saying “chutney.” “Jammy Chutney.” That’s my spy name.

*kicks down door* JAMMY CHUTNEY, DOUBLE O CIFIBIA

I dunno. Fuck around with it and report back.

(Note, this image is kind of a combination of this and a breakfast sandwich.)

Oatmeal

My current oatmeal is this apple-based oatmeal. The apples require a special shout-out, I think, because the topping I make is particularly good on all kinds of things — cook the apples in cinnamon and butter, then add orange juice, maple syrup, and reduce down till syrupy. No mushy apples for this. Get something that’ll hold up, but that has a natural tartness. GoldRush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, even a Cosmic Crisp.

Also, oatmeal is really good if you cook it in oatmilk.

I know, that sounds like too much oats. Insert Xzibit meme about putting oats in oats. But trust me, it’s just right. It’s a whole oat galaxy, an OATIVERSE, if you will. An OATPOCALYPSE. Good too if you throw some berries on there, some cacao nibs, some walnuts, a salamander egg, a cursed chicken toe, ash from a burned Bible page, and ha ha no this isn’t a evil spell it’s just a “recipe” it’s “fine” don’t “ask questions” you fucking heretic.

Waffles, Pancakes, And Eating Babies

This is the waffle recipe I use: Aretha Frankenstein’s Waffles of Insane Greatness. Before now a lot of the waffle recipes I used required separating out the egg whites and whipping them before folding them in separately, but nobody has time for that nonsense. What am I, trapped in my house during a global pandemic? Sheesh. This recipe gets the same result but… doesn’t need that step, and so I use this with a Belgian wafflemaker. Note, it says “serves 2 to 4,” and that number for me is, “it serves 2.25” people, so if you have a quarter-human in your house, great. Otherwise, double the recipe.

This is the Dutch Baby recipe I use — it’s Alton Brown’s. It’s very good. I wish it and the waffle recipe above gave ingredients by weight (especially since his recipe here lists “digital scale” as useful equipment but gives you no weight measurements).

I don’t make pancakes, my wife does — I do 90% of the cooking, but she makes a few things I simply cannot manage to do well, like meatballs and pancakes. This is her recipe:

So, that’s 270g AP flour

1 TB + 2 1/4 tsp baking powder

2 1/4 cups milk (room temp)

2 eggs (room temp)

1/4 cup and 1 tsp butter, melted but cooled a little

Basic steps are: melt the butter, let it cool a little, mix dry goods together, marry eggs and milk together in wedded bliss, then make a throuple as you slowly pour and stir melted butter into egg-milk so as not to make scrambled eggs, then wet goes into dry, then onto cooking surface, flip when cooked on one side, eat eat eat. The crossed out stuff in the recipe is her old version — she’s been evolving this over a few years now. These are the best pancakes I have ever eaten, with the exception of maybe the pancake I had at the Mad Batter, in Cape May, NJ.

I don’t pour straight maple syrup on any of these, but rather, make a mix of melted butter and maple syrup whisked together right before pouring. It’s phenomenal.

(For maple syrup, I like Escuminiac, or Finding Home Farms.)

NOW GO FORTH AND BREAKFAST YOUR FACE

January 20, 2021 / 34 Comments

Healing Takes Time, And Healing Is Painful

This morning, as Donald Trump left the White House for (*knocks on wood*) the last time, it was snowing outside. Just a light sprinkling of little sugar flakes, sticking to some surfaces but not to others. And then as he took off, the sun poked through for a moment — a patch of blue sky amid the gray. Half the sky is turbid gray gunmetal. The other half a cornflower blue.

Which feels about right to me.

I kinda thought this day would come and I’d just be pure elation. Blue sky for miles! It’d be Champagne corks-a-poppin’ and mimosas, it’d be hooting and hollering, just 100% unrefined, uncut bliss. Electric schadenfreude. Freedom glee. But it’s not all that. It’s not all the way there. I’m also sort of sad, and exhausted, and feeling a little frizzled out. Don’t get me wrong. I’m also happy as fuck. Fuck that guy. We’ve been trapped in the man’s mind for four years, all part of a human centipede chain connecting to his mouth, which is also his asshole, as he steadily forced us all to contend with his hot piping bullshit. Him being plugged into social media like he was meant we never had to wonder what he was thinking, because there he sat, on his golden toilet, petulantly rage-tweeting his every hateful, lackwit impulse right into our skulls. You could mute him, block him, but someone would screengrab it and show it to you. Or the media would unceremoniously just grab whatever false, inane claim he made and use it as their headline without context or clarity. We lived inside his head. It’s nice to have broken out. We beat him. We cracked open his forehead, kicked past the curtain of his naughahyde flesh, and ran for the goddamn hills. We won. Let’s run.

So, yeah, I’m happy. It’s good to see Biden rise to meet the challenge. Day one, he’s showing up with a laundry list of priorities and plans, and further, actual actions to start turning this big-ass ship around. That takes time, but he’s doing it, and I commend him. I also feel bad for him, because what a fucking shitpile he’s going to have to clean up. (Not to mention the smell he’s going to have to get out of the White House. Hamberders, body dye, and exuded human greases. Shudder.)

But I’m also just feeling fucked up, and on examination, I think that’s pretty normal, and I wanted to talk about it — because maybe you’re feeling that way, too.

I feel like a hollowed-out pumpkin. A jack-o-lantern with the candle blown out– my eyes wide, my grin manic, but my middle all empty. And in retrospect, how could we not feel that way? We have been in a war for four years. We’ve been fighting misinformation, disinformation, and cruelty in every direction. We’ve secured considerable political victories at every election since, but their sweetness never lasted long because some new fuckery was always on its way in, a rolling sewage wave crashing down on our beaches.

The parade doesn’t come the day you win the war.

The parade comes later.

Day you win the war, you lay on the sand, you look up at the sky.

You laugh, maybe. You probably cry. You curl up and kick at the ground. You go through it — you go through all those emotions, round and round, a carousel of feelings whirling too fast inside you.

Because here’s the thing:

We’re traumatized as a nation.

We’re experiencing a sociological, widespread version of a complex trauma reaction from chronic exposure to feeling… under assault, to feeling captive. And please be aware, that whatever it is I’m feeling is going to be felt a thousand times worse by those who were truly in Trump’s crosshairs: anybody not white and male and of some wealth. He fostered an environment of hate and restriction against transgender and non-binary Americans. He pushed the racial divide, especially for Black Americans, who are literally standing in the sights of police weapons. He mocked disability. He increased wealth disparity and punished the poor. And his threat against women was profound, too — they were his targets, his prey, his tools. Grab them by the — well. He was a bigoted, rapey piece of shit who should be rotting in an oubliette somewhere.

He stole so much from us. He stole our peace of mind. He stole lives, jobs, a sense of hope, he stole some of our actual democracy — he basically opened the castle gates to COVID-19, which further came in and stole friends and loved ones, it stole work, it stole productivity, it stole our sense of self, it stole our time and our sense of time. He has taken so much.

And now he’s gone. Gone from the White House, soon gone from the presidency. Taking all that he stole with him, carrying it away with him, the fucking loser.

And I think it’s okay to feel fucked up about that. Not sad he’s gone, of course. Fuck him. Fuck his feelings, as sure as he fucked ours. I just mean it’s okay to feel weird. This is healing. We haven’t had that chance to heal yet. It hasn’t begun until… arguably, right now. And healing is rarely comfortable. It’s a good thing, healing — but it’s not a pure thing, a perfect thing. It’s stitches, it’s resetting of bone, it’s relearning how to walk, it’s a limb in a cast, it’s the itch of cells rejoining. It’s uncomfortable. It hurts. It feels strange. That, I suspect, is where we’re at right now. At the point just past trauma’s last mile marker, and onto the healing road. But healing takes time, and healing is painful.

We’re still in COVID-19. We’re still at the cusp of true, dangerous climatic change. We’re still going to contend with all the demons Trump released. We’re still pickling in GOP treachery and the stain of the insurrection they incited. Many of us still have family members whose rational minds are literally lost to this guy, to FOX, to the GOP. So, it’s okay to feel fucked up. To feel sad and angry and not just happy. To be clear, it’s also okay to feel happy, because for real, fuck that fucking loser. It can be all of those things. We can hold many emotions in us. They often compete.

That’s what makes us whole, and human.

You still might wake up anxious.

You still might feel uncertain.

You still can feel happy one minute, and angry the next.

That’s trauma. That’s loss. That’s healing.

We’ll be okay, I hope.

But we’ve learned a lot, I think, about how… well, everything is a garden. Democracy is a garden. Empathy is a garden. Civilization is a garden. And gardens do not just grow on their own — there are invasive species that can take root, there are thieves looking to steal the fruits, the fence can rot, the wind can blow. All of this requires cultivation and curation. It requires a collective effort and if there’s one huge positive, it’s that we figured that out. Trump is gone because of all of you (and Stacey Abrams gets special note, here). He’s gone because our democracy held — barely. It’s the classic American situation: we get ourselves in a bind, plunging the plane toward the ground and then at the last minute we figure out how to pull up on the stick. It’s not a great way to be, but we did it, we made it. And at the risk of continuing to mix my metaphors (settle down, it’s a blog, you’re not paying for it), the garden will grow anew, and it will require our effort to keep it going and growing. We must commit ourselves to that vigilance, to stewardship over this country and its democracy.

That’s how we heal, too.

But committing, and recommitting, to that fight.

That’s how we fight the trauma, I think. By acknowledging it, seeing that it’s real, by mourning what was lost — and then getting to work, the constant work, the diligent work.

Walking that healing road.

Anyway, thanks all for being here, still, and for enduring… whatever this is. It’s hard not to be angry and raaaaar all the time, but I tried to do it in a way that was… at least funny and entertaining, if nothing else. It’s been a hard row to hoe and I appreciate you all doing it with me. We’ll keep walking this road, together, I hope. And finally we can maybe talk about something else for a little while.

January 19, 2021 / 7 Comments

Blurbing A Book: What It Is, What It Means, And Other Questions

So, I started talking a bit about blurbs on books over yonder hills at Twitter, and it became clear that a lot of folks, even other writers new to this whole CHAOS CIRCUS, don’t even entirely understand them. Hell, maybe I don’t even understand them. It’s possible they’re some kind of Idea Virus, some Memetic Parasite and we authors have been passing them around from book to book? Whatever. Point is, I figure since I hit my morning word count already, and I’m trying not to DOOMSCROLL, I’d talk a bit about blurbs, in a sort of FAQ style.

Note that I am not guaranteed to know what I’m talking about, and nothing I say should be considered Writ Law on any such matter. Everything I say is as unfirm as pudding. Mm. Pudding.

Let’s begin.

What the hell is a blurb?

It’s a terrible word, for one. Like BLOG, BLURB just sounds fucking weird. BLEURB. BLOOORB. BLIRRRRB. Anyway, what it actually is, besides a strange word, is — well, you know how you look at a book and it’s got some comment on the cover from another author? Like —

“THIS MADE MY NIPPLES SING LIKE HAPPY CRICKETS, A TRUE TOUR DE FORCE” — Chnurk Mandog, Topeka Times Bestselling Author of 151 Ways To Eat Ghosts

Yeah, that’s a blurb. Sometimes you get a real fancy one on the front cover. Sometimes it’s not from other authors, but from pre-reviews like from NPR or Washington Post or some such. You might see others on the back cover, and then sometimes a bunch more inside the book.

Wait, I thought a blurb was the book’s description?

Uhhh yeah that’s also true. The thing we sometimes call flap copy, cover copy, back cover copy, or just the “book description,” people also call a book blurb. Because I guess fuck you, that’s why? Shrug.

How does one get a blurb?

You ask. Or someone asks on your behalf, which is ideal. An agent, editor or authors asks the author — sometimes via their agent or editor — to take a look at the book and provide a sassy, marketing-speaky line of text about a book.

How do you prefer to get blurbs?

Well, in a perfect world, I’m not involved. Ideally, an editor says, “Here’s a list of who we think could blurb this, do you have any names to add/subtract,” and then they’re the ones who send out the message, HEY, CHNURK MANDOG HAS A NEW BOOK IT’S FULL OF WORDS THAT DEMAND YOUR MARKETING-FRIENDLY SONG OF PRAISE. And then when I’m asked, it’s also ideal when the request comes through either from an editor/my agent or some combination thereof. Again, in that perfect publishing world, the authors are largely removed from the exchange. This isn’t always the reality, and of course that’s fine, too.

How much time do you get to read and provide the blurb?

Often, not enough time, if I’m being a little complainy. Ideally, many many months. In reality, sometimes a month or two. Once in a while, even less.

Is there compensation for a blurb? Is it paid?

No. Gods, no. That’d be some hinky business. I’m sure some authors have treated their blurbers to some kind of reward, by proxy — HERE IS CANDY, you might say, because authors are basically children and children like candy. But I have never given, nor received, candy or other compensation for blurbs. *wink wink just put the bag of money under the park bench marked with the Ancient Wendig Sigil and then the following Tuesday look in the hollow birch tree for the elf that will hand you the blurb ha ha just kidding that’s not a thing wink wink*

So, you do it for someone, and then they return a blurb to you one day?

Well, no. I mean, maybe yes for some? But my view is that blurbs should never be transactional — as in, it’s not tit-for-tat, not scratcha-my-back-scratcha-you-back, it’s just a thing you do because you like books and you value a strong bookish ecosystem. We like to share Book Love and if we can do so in a rewarding official capacity, great. That said, I have no doubt some authors view it in a transactional way, which would be a shame. I think the trick to this is not viewing it as if it’s a favor. Because favors are returnable. You do it because YAY BOOKS, YAY AUTHORS. Again, ideally.

What is the value of a blurb?

I have no idea. Meaning, I don’t know how much it moves the needle on sales. They’re nice to have. I like them. Maybe there’s something to it — certainly if I see a blurb from an author I like, it at least gets me to look at a book. But I can’t say how much it affects actual sales.

I’m told that there’s an inside baseball industry function — as in, an outlet might be more likely to review the book if they see a blurb by a Chosen Author, or maybe that helps goose bookstore orders. But again, if there’s a practical, numbers-based reality to this, I don’t know what it is.

Do you actually read the books you blurb?

Well! This is one of those tricky questions, isn’t it? I do. Though I have heard not all authors do. And I’ve also heard that not all authors even write their blurbs. I’ve heard tell of agents or editors writing the blurbs for them. Now, before we all clench up our sphincters, there’s some value to this, because authors are not marketing people, which means we don’t always know how to coalesce our thoughts into succinct sales pitches. But that would still mean the author has read the book, and if they haven’t and simply sub out the task to an agent or editor… well, that’s weird. It’s also suggestive of the transactional component discussed above.

To be clear, I’ve never had my agent or any agent or editor suggest doing this. My practice is, I compose a blurb and I like to make sure that editors and authors are happy with it, and I note they are free to massage it as they see fit, provided I approve the result before it goes in or on a book.

Also to be clear, and very honest, though I do read every book, sometimes I am forced to read them very quickly, which is to say, not as well or as thoroughly as I’d like — I’m a slow reader by nature and if you don’t give me as much time to read it as I want, I do my best to pace and race through. But I read them start to finish and blurb accordingly if I liked it.

Do you blurb every book you’re sent?

Gods, no. I’m a slow reader, and this Current Era of Aerosolized Horseshit has put a serious drag on my reading time. Further, not every book is for me, nor am I for every book.

What if you hate a book?

I don’t think I’ve ever actively hated a book I’ve been sent for blurbage purposes — but I’ve certainly had some where I felt, as noted, this book just isn’t for me, and it’s not clicking. If that’s the case, you just let the asker know what’s up. You can politely decline, or say, this just isn’t for me, and I like to think that’s okay. The reality is, though, most books I’m sent I don’t blurb, and the reason I don’t blurb then isn’t because of the content, but because of the lack of time to read them.

Real-talk, blurbing feels a little like homework. “Here is a book you have to read in three weeks, and I need your micro-review by then.” There’s a bit of pressure and unpleasantness to that, at least for me. Other writers may find their mileage varies. Just the same, I should also note it’s an honor, at the same time, to be asked. It can be both things, because sometimes that’s how life works. I always try, and I don’t always get there.

Are there ever hurt feelings over that?

Maybe? Not from me, to be clear. I expect fully that any who get my book won’t blurb it, and again, for reasons beyond me. It’s because it didn’t click, or they didn’t have time, or whatever. Life’s hard. Everybody’s busy. We have DOOMSCROLLING to do, dontchaknow. Again, I think it’s why it’s best to remove any sense of “transaction” out of it and why it’s best when the author isn’t part of the exchange — that dulls any potential pain. I like to hope too that editors and agents aren’t burned by it. But, I’m sure some people are definitely Peppermint Petty about things, and I can’t control that.

How many blurb requests do you get?

Me? It ranges from one to four a week, usually.

Are there expectations carried by an author’s endorsement on a book?

A good and complicated question. For my very first book, I had one of the blurbers respond back quite politely that they adored the book (the book in question being BLACKBIRDS), but because they didn’t write books like that, they weren’t going to blurb because they were afraid it would send the wrong message to their readers. And I bristled at that, at first, but then I kinda got it. If a hard sci-fi author blurbs a thriller, there’s a risk — though what size of risk, I don’t know — that readers will see that, pick up the book, and then be salty that the book in question had no science-fiction elements. I think certain authors who write across genres may have an easier time with this, but I dunno. Again, I don’t know how serious a problem that is, but I do understand that if I blurb a book, people seeing my name may not just intuit that I think it’s a book of quality but that the book is in some way like mine. Unfair? Probably. True just the same? Shrug.

Are you proud of any particular blurbs?

Well, I mean, listen, I’m very excited anytime any other penmonkey is like, HEY THIS RILL GUD, because… that’s just nice. They do what I do, and it’s nice to have that feedback. You hope and assume it’s real. It’s especially cool when it’s someone you regard well. If I had a blurb from authors I grew up reading, like Robin Hobb, or Joe Lansdale, or Stephen King — I’d definitely print that shit out and hang it on the fridge. For eternity, or at least until the next fridge. I am particularly happy to have a blurb from Erin Morgenstern, who is a friend and though one might assume that means the blurb is in some way transactional or “who-you-know,” she somewhat famously doesn’t prefer to blurb books by friends, so the fact that she felt Wanderers was of special enough note to earn the blurb regardless felt extra special. But all the blurbs on that book thrill me, because people took the time to read this 80-million page book and… then say nice stuff about it. It’s always an honor.

Hell, that Rin Chupeco blurb for Wanderers is *chef’s kiss* good. Like, that blurb is ART. (See above)

(I also have a couple blurbs in for Book of Accidents that, to be honest, are already pretty thrilling.)

(But those aren’t announced yet shh.)

Do you blurb self-published books?

I’m not opposed to it, though I’m rarely asked, and generally speaking I’d prefer to know you first, and have some semblance of a relationship/online friendship with the author, because self-pub can roam all over the map in terms of quality. Mostly I dunno that blurbs on self-pub books are even that much of a thing?

Do you blurb books that aren’t yet sold to a publisher?

This is a semi-recent thing to pop up — I’m asked occasionally, and no, I do not. It sets up dangerous precedent, asking authors to blurb books that haven’t even been vetted and edited, and also only further entrenches a WHO-YOU-KNOW problem. Editors and agents should stop asking this. It is a waste of time for the authors asked, and also a problematic ask for the author asking, too — it runs the risk of them burning bridges just as they’re getting built.

What makes a good blurb?

I have no idea. I try to walk that line between ooh enticing and here is a specific thing about this book and here are generic cool things people respond to. Sometimes you do that thing where you compare it to other popular touchstone stories like, “It’s like One Tree Hill and Blade Runner had a book baby!” or, “Fans of Ernest Goes to Camp will love this!” There are also lots of repeated words — Unputdownable! Tour de force! Magnifitrillifocent! Okay I maybe made that last one up. It’s fun to say, though.

I mostly wish I could just put YEAH I LIKED THIS A LOT YOU SHOULD READ IT because that’s what I’m saying every time.

Does every book get blurbs?

At a certain level, authors stop getting blurbs. You ascend to a special place where no blurbs matter, because you already sell a Gorgillion copies. I think debuts are probably the most vital place you find them.

And I think that’s it, for now.

If you’ve more blurb-related questions, poop ’em in the comments below.