Two-time runner-up in obscure contest!

In which I trumpet my achievements to the world. Well, the dozen therein who read my blog.
You will recall, faithful reader, that over the Labour Day weekend I participated in the International 3-Day Novel Contest, to the tune of not-quite 20k words.

Hi Barbara,
Congratulations on making the shortlist once again! The
judges were very impressed with your submission. If you
haven't seen them yet, the results are up at
www.3daynovel.com. In a few days, I'll mail out your
Honourable Mention certificate and token, and a copy of
the winner release.

Until then, have a great week! I hope 2010 has been
treating you well so far.

Melissa for 3-Day

The results are posted here. I'm one of 15 honourable mentions, and I am no end pleased about it. Here's the full list:

GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Snowmen by Mark Sedore of Toronto, Ontario
The winning entry to the latest 3-Day Novel Contest is the story of a man who struggles to complete a record-setting trip across the Arctic Circle while his unstable and resentful brother plays a deadly game of sabotage. Snowmen will be released by 3-Day Books in August 2010.

2nd PLACE WINNER
McKinley M. Hellenes of Mission, British Columbia, for Everything Will Be OK
Winning $500

3rd PLACE WINNER
Victoria Dunn of Ottawa, Ontario, for Alice’s Adventures with Welsh Zombies
Winning $100

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Miguel Burr (Vancouver, BC) for Flourescence
Keith Chittleborough (Glen Waverley, Australia) for Sheepless in Puckapunyal
Karen Cressman (Brampton, ON) for Breaking the Girl
Kimberly Davidson (Vancouver, BC) for Jabula
Alice Egoyan and Devon Motola (Fresno, CA) for 77
David Gibson (Hamilton, ON) for Cold Heaven Blonde
Barbara Gordon (Victoria, BC) for Culture Heroes
Meredith Kennedy (Palo Alto, CA) for Strange Alchemy
Edward Lineberry (Dallas, TX) for Forged Prophet
J.C. Locke (Carrboro, NC) for Big Crunch
Gavin McLachlan (Toronto, ON) for Give Up Your Self
Greg Morrison (Woodstock, VA) for The Goetist
Erica Naone (Allston MA) for Needle and Fang
Marion Stein (New York, NY) for Hungry Ghosts
T.R. White (Brampton, ON) for Billy Blue Bear

Google street view

Makes my bum look big.
The street view cars went through Victoria this past summer, and I saw them while biking home. The other night I got around to looking for myself (the views went up in December), by slowly panning along Henderson.
There's a front view, with face blurred, and a back view, which sadly needs some bum-blurring technology.

Every now and then I try to educate myself about the Google book settlement, but it never works. Today's article in the Times Colonist (yes, the Victoria newspaper really is called The Colonist) once again rebuffed me. I was sent reeling off, muttering "Agh, bad bad metaphors, agh, you are writers dammit, an analogy is not an argument, agh...."
I wasn't able to read past the second column, where making a book available digitally is likened to stealing a book from a bookshop.
Except not.
There's a difference, okay, between the content of a book (text) and the physical object of a book (paper & glue), which makes this even more complicated. A book-object, unlike jewelry or old coins, has no intrinsic value.
It can have heaps and heaps of extrinsic / assigned value. I see this on the Booksleuth forum, where someone desperately wants the edition of something that they read as a child, as close as possible to that copy they handled, with their jammy thumb-prints on it, ideally. Other readers just want the text, and would be happy to read it on Project Gutenberg.

My for-real job that pays the bills is finding and ordering out-of-print books online. Out of print means that they're often used books, and in no case is the author getting a penny for that sale. Booksellers get something, and that's good, because bookselling is good just as libraries are good, and more people having access to more books is good...
Which seems to lead me to Google books being good. Although it is clearly vastly more complex than that. Possibly more complex than I can understand. Though at least I've heard of the used book market and of interlibrary loan, which puts me ahead of Sergey Brin, who doesn't know about ILLO, as noted by the Avocado back in October.
Brin's on-record cluelessness about real-world availability of OOP books doesn't make me trust that Google knows what it's doing, and the argument-by-bad-metaphor and similar ignoring of the used book market by writers doesn't make me trust that they have a better grasp of what the realistic problems may be.
A writer 'and former lawyer' is quoted at the end of the TC article with what I in my ignorance would call a classic slippery-slope argument:

If they're allowed to get away with this, what else is any huge multinational corporation going to be allowed to get away with?

From Bhopal to books online, what will corporations descend to next?< / sarcasm >
Okay, I'm sorry, that was unfair of me, but the suggestion that corporations haven't been getting away with abuses until now (ie, when they touch on that speaker's rights) kinda reeks of privilege.

Maybe I'll try again to understand the issues, in six months or so. I can make it a regular checkup. But I'm doubting that there will be any real coming to terms. It's sort of like the fanfiction issue, only with the possibility of someone making money.

A new year full of outrage, already

Tell me again why I should support the Olympics?

Besides the city of Whistler being made over into a venue rather than a community, it appears that Whistler's one public library will be closed to the public for the duration of the Games.
Why?
So that politicians, bureaucrats and Olympic committee members (and hey, maybe even a few elite athletes?) can have a private bar.

I keep trying to comment on that, and there's just nothing sarcastic enough to match the bare facts.
What else? Oh, Whistler library staff won't be out of work--they'll be seconded to VANOC and given vital Olympic duties like greeting tourist busses.

Reportedly the Olympic committee tried this in Vancouver--some of us see a library and think of reading, but VANOC members think of drinking behind locked doors--but was told no.
I wonder who told them no? I can bet it wasn't Jean Kavanagh, Vancouver Public Library's manager of marketing and communications.
She's such an enthusiastic booster (or do I mean enforcer?) of the Olympics that in October she sent a memo around warning staff that only the logos of official Olympic sponsors may be seen during public events. If a branch's AV equipment isn't made by sponsor Panasonic, then, well,
"I would get some tape and put it over the 'Sony,'" Kavanagh said. "Just a little piece of tape."
This doesn't just extend to inanimate objects, but to people:
“If you have a speaker/guest who happens to work for Telus, ensure he/she is not wearing their Telus jacket, as Bell is the official sponsor.”
No word on whether this will be extended to patrons who happen to be wearing brand-name shirts or hats.
I am somewhat comforted by the union stance (yay CUPE! my union!) as quoted on Quill & Quire:
"Our job as library staff is to not ever censor any information.”

To be fair, VANOC didn't ask Kavanagh to establish this policy. She did it on her own go, perhaps taking her cue from previous VANOC excesses like demanding that the Olympia restaurant (named after the mountain range) change its name before the Games.

two announcements

The first one is bouncy-me business. My first pro sale, On the Transmontane Run with the Aerial Mail Express, is up on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It has airships, monkeys, air-pirates and jellyfish--what more could you want? Go, read, donate to the zine!

Second is a public service announcement. The story could not have been written or sold if I had not attended the Viable Paradise writing workshop, applications to which open tomorrow, January 1st. If you aren't already an alumnus/a, and you have hopes or plans of becoming a published writer, you should seriously consider applying.
It is only a week long, so the time commitment is more manageable than Clarion or Odyssey, and it will put you in contact with publishing professionals in a much more low-key and satisfactory way than those speed-date writing conferences where you have to pitch in 5 or 10 minutes. You will get invaluable feedback on your writing, and straightforward advice on how the industry works.
The workshop fee is remarkably reasonable, and includes several meals. The hotel rooms make it easy to share space without stepping on each other, and splitting the room costs make that pretty reasonable as well (even speaking as someone who gets all twitchy at anything above a Motel 6).
And hey, maybe by fall the TSA insanity will be reduced to mere imbecility.

last food post of the year

Really!

For Terri, the hot nuts recipe, courtesy of Kate (to whom much thanks). It may be Levantine, and is referred to as a mezzo:

3 tbsp sunflower oil
2 1/2 cups whole blanched almonds
1 generous cup light brown sugar
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili flakes
salt to taste
Heat oil over medium-high heat until hot. Add almonds, stirring with 3/4 of brown sugar. Toss nuts to coat, saute until caramelised. Remove nuts to bowl and toss with cumin, chili and salt. Spread on baking sheet to dry, sprinkle with remaining sugar. Serve warm or at room temperature. Will keep for a couple of weeks in a sealed container.


And in the What? dept., this dainty from Good Housekeeping's Christmas Cook Book 'selections to brighten the holiday season' (published 1958), from the Goody Greetings section:

Delightful Doughnuts
Old favorites presented in a new way. Stick a long skewer into a grapefruit; string doughnuts onto skewer. Wrap grapefruit in green cellophane, doughnuts in clear cellophane; top with a silver spray.
There follows a recipe for doughnuts rolled in sugar.

There are b/w photos on most pages, including 'Smoky Cocktail Spread' and 'Apricot-Confection Squares', but none of this construction. Anyone out there with expertise in '50s food: what is this supposed to look like, and why?

Merry Christmas!

to you, from a house full of shortbread and wrapping paper.

I bought myself a thriftshop cookie press ($4, missing only one of the nozzles, including all of the random discs) so I can try making spritz cookies, which I've never done. It has a camel disc. Does anyone make camel cookies? What flavour would be most appropriate?
The disc for the heart cookie of the bridge set (hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs) does not look like a heart. I suppose it must produce a heart, just as the squiggly cross must produce a diamond, but I'm taking it on faith so far.
It looks ... okay, it looks like a poppy-head.

Poppy-head is what that same shape is called when found carved on the pew-ends in an English church. Here, I'll show you a poppy-head bench-end from Fressingfield, church of St Peter & St Paul. See the resemblance?
Yes, medieval English churches are well-stocked with these, but Fressingfield must have the most blatant examples. I feel I must quote Simon (stolen from the link above) on Suffolk Churches:

"No, what makes Fressingfield's benches wonderful is the sheer quality of the whole piece; nowhere else in East Anglia is the 15th century so substantial, so full of confidence. Often quoted is Cox in Bench Ends in English Churches (but he is talking about the furnishings as a whole, not just their ends): Fressingfield church, he says, is better fitted throughout with excellent fifteenth-century benches than any other church in the kingdom."

And a happy NSFW Yule to all my pagan friends and readers!

all in the mixing

Baking tally.
Yesterday: gingerbread (cake not cookies); candied grapefruit peel (the first time I've ever done candied peel); sugared walnuts.
Today: cappucino shortbread; honey cookies; two-layer fudge.
Tomorrow: visiting. Other activities uncertain.

Walnuts
The sugared walnuts are dead simple, so it's a sort of public service to share it. Take two cups, or three cups, or whatever amount you have of walnuts (most recently a 1 kg bag). Put them in a bowl. Pour enough boiling water over to just cover them. Leave for 3 minutes, then drain in colander. Tip them back into the bowl and toss with 1 cup of sugar (my observation is that one cup of sugar will do up to 6 cups of walnuts, and possibly more if I could afford more) until covered. Spread them on a baking sheet in a warm oven, and leave overnight. If you've been broiling or baking at 400 or so, just turn the oven off and leave it. If the oven is cold, turn it to 200 or so for a half-hour or so, or kick it up to 400 or broil, then turn it off, and leave the tray in overnight.

Cappucino Shortbread
Cream 1 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
6 tbsp instant coffee, ground fine
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
Form into coffee bean shape, indent tops. Bake at 325 for 15 minutes. When cool, dip into melted semi-sweet chocolate.
I only dip them halfway (this time I used fondue 70% dark chocolate mixed with 2 tbsp butter) because dipping the whole thing tends to obscure the indentation, and lose the coffee bean resemblance. And the half-dipping gives them a classy sort of Florentine look.
And evidently I'm on the spectrum, because it bothers me that in a real coffee bean the indentation is on the flat side, which would be the bottom of the cookie.

I'm kind of excited over having done candied peel, which has always seemed to me one of those dainty high-end things, even though the grapefruit rinds ordinarily go into the compost. The recipe came from a Culinary Arts Institute pamphlet called 500 Delicious Dishes From Leftovers, which is fascinating reading. I kept asking myself where all these leftovers came from, or rather, where they've gone.
Sour milk and cream are still with us, but I'm not at all sure I'd use a cup of maple syrup to avoid wasting a cup of sour cream (though the gingerbread recipe is tempting) instead of something cheap like cornmeal muffins. On the other hand, leftover coffee can nowadays just be microwaved. And what the heck is leftover jam? Why not just have toast and jam for breakfast for a couple of days? As Peg Bracken pointed out in her I Hate to Cook Book, there is no such thing as 'leftover cake'. Inspired by the ethos, though, I did take the water that the grapefruit peel was boiled in, and use it for the hot water in the gingerbread. It makes the gingerbread a little sharper, but still good.

All of which does have a writing application of sorts. My friend Joanna (retired bookshop owner) and I have been bookswapping, mostly fantasy and mystery. She follows a number of mystery series, and I think it would be fair to say that it is far more important to her that the characters be interesting and sympathetic than that the mystery be tightly plotted and challenging. So we've both liked the Jill Churchill suburban mystery series, until the last entry which was ... dreadful. And we both decided that one sampling of Mary Jane Maffini's home organiser mystery series was enough, because the main character is a self-absorbed shrew.
The current favourite for both of us is the Home Repair is Homicide series by Sarah Graves. Looking at it from about book 8, I'm deeply impressed by how the author has woven together so many strands of continuing interest.
First, of course, there are the characters. The soap-opera aspect, if you want. This may have started with Dorothy Sayers and the long courtship of Peter and Harriet. Here we have Jacobia (Jake) Tiptree, leaving a bad marriage and high-pressure career, taking her troubled teenage son and starting a new life in a small fishing town. So right there you have the ex-husband entanglement, the new boyfriend possibilities, and the responsibility for her son, all situations that keep on providing complications.
Graves doesn't stop there, but gives us a townful of continuing characters (some of whom are going to die violently) who have ongoing stories, most particularly Jacobia's best friend and confederate in crime-solving, Ellie, and Jacobia's son Sam, struggling with dyslexia and falling in and out of love.
Then there's setting. Eastport has a wild history and economically-strapped present, and can be cut off by bad weather. Setup for tense situations whether there's a crime in progress or not. Plus, colourful as all-get-out.
Most impressive is the nonfiction aspect. Sure, infodumps are a bad thing, but an awful lot of people either read fiction for information, or justify their fiction reading by claiming that it's educational. That's one reason why romances are so often set in exotic places--not just the wish-fulfilment of being able to travel, but the excuse of learning about those places. Half (possibly more) of the appeal of technothrillers is the stats-laden infodump about some weapon or piece of hardware.
Churchill's suburban series used to regularly send her heroine off to nightschool classes or weekend retreats to learn something or other and incidentally run across a murder. The classes and the quirky fellow-students were at least as much fun as the mystery itself.
Now, Graves has this absolutely knocked. First, Jacobia was a financial whiz back in the big city, so she can explain all sorts of high finance quirks and slang (the first couple of books had finance slang titles) as well as having useful and not-entirely-respectable contacts that she can call in favours from. Second, Jacobia has settled herself and son in a tumbledown early 1800s mansion, which is in continual need of repair. So, in between checking out crime sites and interviewing suspects, she repairs plumbing, puts up rain gutters, sands shutters, and so on and so on, all in detail explained to the reader. It's like This Old House with murder. You only have to look at how long This Old House ran to see that this is a subject with legs.
And because the books are first person, Jake can just pull us aside and explain how to sand a hardwood floor or cover your windows with plastic, without having to justify the digression.
I'm not sure how much space the actual mystery takes up in any one of these, but I suspect half the pages at most. When they were handing out hobbies and professions to murder-mystery sleuths, I think Jacobia grabbed one (or two) of the best. Much stronger and longer potential than the scrapbooking mystery series.