January ice cream

It's a new year, I've had my birthday, and maybe I should prove that I haven't actually abandoned this blog? So, how about a recipe, though not a particularly seasonal one, given the heavy frost and heaved ground here, alternating with grey clouds and sleety rain.
Last summer I found a Donvier ice-cream maker on usedvictoria.com, where I have also found lots of fitness equipment, bookshelves, and other useful things. It came with a nice little recipe book, and soon I was using up frozen blackberries and blueberries from the summer before, squeezing oranges and limes, and generally filling up the freezer.
I'd made buttermilk scones, and had buttermilk left over (which I can't drink, because of the texture). Hmm, wouldn't buttermilk and butterscotch go nicely together, I thought. I bet the slight acidity of the buttermilk would balance the sweetness of the butterscotch. Let's fire up the internet and find a recipe.

Some Time Later....

I have found buttermilk ice cream recipes.
I have found butterscotch ice cream recipes.
I have found buttermilk-butterscotch sauce for ice cream.
I have found not one recipe for buttermilk-butterscotch ice cream.

Why? Would it actually taste really bad? I can't believe that. I decided to be a pioneer and make the experiment.
So, examine several buttermilk ice cream recipes, then several butterscotch ice cream recipes. Figure out which were the necessary steps, and combine them. Ice cream, fortunately, is a pretty forgiving medium. Eggs, no eggs, cream, milk, or yogurt, fruit puree, juice or whole, you generally end up with something people will eat straight out of the ice cream maker as soon as it solidifies.

This is what I came up with:
In a medium saucepan, put
1 cup brown sugar (demerara might be good too)
2 tbsp butter (real butter here, not margarine).
Simmer until the brown sugar is melted and bubbling - stir occasionally. (This is the butterscotch part.)
In the meantime, in a mixing bowl, whisk
3 egg yolks (you can use more, but I'm stingy with eggs)
1/4 cup brown sugar.
Add slowly to the saucepan
1/2 cup cream (or light cream or milk)
1 tsp vanilla (or more if you like vanilla a lot).
Stir and continue heating until any little crunchy bits of brown sugar have melted back in (though they might be nice little crunches in the ice cream, so it's up to you).
Take 2 cups buttermilk,
Pour 1/2 cup into the mixing bowl and whisk up.
Pour remainder, a little at a time, into the saucepan and mix well.
(You can try putting all the buttermilk into the saucepan instead - I wanted to dilute the yolks and avoid them cooking into lumps in the next step.)
Slowly pour the saucepan contents into the mixing bowl, whisking as you go. If you put all the buttermilk into the saucepan, apparently it helps if you pour the hot mixture along the sides of the mixing bowl rather than right into the middle. I haven't tried it.)
When it's all mixed up nicely, you can either take it straight to the fridge, or pour the lot back into the saucepan and cook it down further. I've done both, and the only difference I noticed was a darkening of the colour (but I did not do a scientific taste comparison).
Cool overnight in the fridge, covered.
Put mix into your ice cream maker and proceed as directed by your instruction manual.

And I was right. The tangy buttermilk balances the sweet toasty butterscotch very nicely. It is particularly good with a hot apple crumble. Or an apple-quince crumble as below.

the octave of the 3-Day contest

A week later and I am mostly recovered. As you may have noticed, dear reader, I was not able to post updates during the 3-Day Novel contest. That was in part because on Saturday and Sunday, my eyes were closing and my head was tipping forward by 8:30 pm, though I managed to struggle on past 9 pm.
Ah well, I told myself. I'll get an early night and start off all chipper by 5 am (my usual time of getting up). Did I? Nope, I lay slugabed until 6:30 am.
On the Monday night, when I had to chuck it in at midnight no matter what, the story (finally!) came together, I was full of caffeinated energy and could have kept going until 2 am. Instead, I forced myself to let it go at 11:30 pm, with a brief read-through.

Tuesday morning I compiled from Scrivener, emailed it to myself, and spent part of my lunch-hour trying to submit it through the Geist website. This worked better once I realised that the submission page only accepted pdf, doc, docx and odt, and re-saved the file as .doc.
Excuse me while I express astonishment that .rtf is not one of the accepted formats. What the hell?

Then there was more muddling about because I also needed to submit a signed statement from someone that I wrote the whole thing during the allotted time. Or rather, a scan of said statement, saved in one of the admissable formats, which do not include jpg.
The submission directions, by the way, were barely adapted from the hard-copy snail-mail directions, and included an admonition to not send in your only copy of your ms. because it would not be returned. It's been so long since I've seen that note; I don't think I've subbed hard-copy for  two or three years.

So. Anyways. Story.
Wordcount came out short of 15k, which is the lowest I've had, though I've never got much above 18k. Even with the old trick of expandable middle, some scenes are seriously skimped.
Saturday I started out with an exploration, discovering the setting for myself as much as for the hypothetical reader. Little Cressida wanders through the huge, ever-changing house that she has lived in for as long as she remembers. She needs to find someone who will listen to her news:  that she has seen a stranger--a young boy--in the untended gardens. The others who are usually present in the house are the cook, Betta, and the librarian (never named). The other she doesn't know about is Granda, the old woman spinning in the topmost tower. Granda dreams of a dance on the eve of war, and waking sees the smoke of battle and destruction from her high window.
Sunday I picked up the boy's storyline, making him a refugee from an internment camp with traumatic memories of escape. I also inserted segments of two undergrad girls discussing the Heroine's Journey and its application to fiction. I'd meant to have them discussing what was happening in the story, but somehow the talk wouldn't go that way--it felt too blatant, so I went for echoes instead, discussing the books that inspired aspects of the storyline, like The Secret Garden, The Princess and the Goblins, and Gormenghast.
This is where the absence of an outline really hit me. I knew in a vague way that Cressida needed to go through the house, with different rooms providing experiences--a choice of fates or paths--that would take her through the heroine's journey, and that the boy would take different roles in each of them, such as brother, consort, opponent, child. But I couldn't get them started. I set up the scenes in Scrivener, but other than a confrontation with the Sphinx and a ballroom scene, they were barely sketched, and I couldn't get enough of a picture in my head to do the in-media-res opening that I usually do when I don't know what's going to happen (it saves me the work of figuring out how they got there in the first place, which in this case would be by opening a door).
Monday I could see the ending. Cressida, charged with closing off the paths/doors that connected the house with the world, so that it would be protected from the war that was engulfing said world, decides that she won't close off the last one, which is where the boy Alph had come through, because if the house didn't provide a refuge, at whatever risk, it would wither. But how to get there?
Mark, when I went downstairs to whinge, pointed out that I usually wrote the ending Monday afternoon, and why didn't I do that now and see if the middle came in after that. So I did--and the ending expanded, because once Cressida (now about 20 yrs old, as both children grew up in the course of the journey, time being flexible in the house) understood what Alph had come from, she couldn't just let it go. So there was a rescue and escape of those in the internment camp, which I tried to play low-key so that the kinda-magic-realism story wasn't overtaken by an action movie.
Then I whipped back and started filling in the interior journey, full of caffeinated energy (non-decaf coffee supplied by supportive husband, thank you) but time was ticking on, and at 11:30 I had to accept that I wasn't going to finish the fill-in to my satisfaction.

What with low wordcount and skimpy middle, I doubt this one will hit the shortlist. I might take the concept and mess around with it some more, maybe for Nanowrimo. But I can't do Nanowrimo until the Cost of Silver revision is done.
So, back to the salt mines of revision I go.

ideas in the blender

The 3-Day Novel Contest looms above me, scarcely an hour away. In other time zones, 3-Dayers are scribbling happily away, having started as the stroke of midnight wavered away to echoes. But I'm going to go to bed right after this blogpost, and start fresh in the morning. I'm too old for those all-nighters.

What with one thing and another, I haven't done any outlining, research, character creation or, well, anything. The most I can say is that the house is well stocked with Healthy Snacks, veggies to take for lunches, oatcakes and scones and such. And tea. There's lots of tea.
In desperation, I'm pulling out a number of half-formed ideas, themes, tropes, characters, situations and images that I've meant to do something with at various times, but which never gelled.

-The decaying Gothic (or carpenter Gothic) mansion or castle, with unnumbered rooms
-An old woman with memories unstuck in time
-A neglected young girl in an empty house
-The heroine's journey, encountering avatars of the masculine (I've joked about this before - the Mary Sue's Journey).

So I'll see if something comes together from this. It's likely to be a Big Bag of Tropes, so I may throw in interludes with undergrad students discussing symbolism and motifs if I can remember enough of the jargon from my two years of English lit.
Now I'll go to be and hope that I dream a good opening scene. If I can work the Lovecraftian archaeology dream into this, I will.

Cyclopean dreams

Warning! The following blog post contains references to a dream that I had, though I attempt to avoid a full narration of it, because other people's dreams are boring.

I can tell that I've been away from steady writing for over a week, because my dreams are getting more complex and plotty and the sets are more elaborate. When I'm writing every day (as I should) my dreams are more fragmentary and disconnected. Or at least I remember them that way. The other night my dream segued from a jumble of recent events into something fairly plotty, with impressive matte-painting sets.
The setting was an archaeological dig along the ridges of sharp mountains, with dozens of small teams excavating particular areas. I was part of a three-person team, two dark and dour scholars (male and female) and one fair and lively one (female). All three were in their twenties and had been involved with each other in ways that caused underlying tension during the dig. They worked in a hollow of crumbling earth (presumably once fertile but now barren) set amidst sharp rocks that rose up like a spiked crown around them. They must have been close to the top of the ridge, because they could look across and down at the other teams scraping away.
The excavation was of a long-gone city, and it was becoming clear that the builders had not been human (size and shape of doorways, etc.). The life of the city had abruptly stopped; there was no evidence that the builders had migrated or resettled, and it was unclear what had caused the change.
Our team had unearthed a cache of small oval objects, about the size to fit in your hand, and had laid them on a tarp below their site. My dream-character then had her own dream, in which she understood that these objects were eyes, open eyes lying there helplessly, and it would be a terrible thing if dirt fell into them. She got up and moved the tarp to a safer place, and began cleaning the objects. This activated one to display a stored memory--like a film, but surrounding the viewer rather than in two dimensions.
The memory was of several non-human, vaguely octopodish creatures playing a game that was oddly similar in look to Oranges and Lemons. The two tallest picked up the smallest (which my character understood to be the youngest, although it looked much more like a fat starfish than an octopod) and held it up between them while the middle-sized ones processed under it, singing.
It all seemed very happy and homey, until they paused and 'looked' up. The song changed and was understandable as 'He is coming'. The octopod-people rolled up and shrank into the eye-objects, and my character understood that they stopped themselves to freeze the moment so that He never arrived.
Looking down across the excavation site, she realised that all the teams had stopped what they were doing, and were looking up as the octopod-people had. At her feet, the eyes were extruding little feelers from one end, like sea-anenomes tentatively opening, and 'He is coming' was singing across the mountains.

I woke up then, thinking how Lovecraftian that was, then fell asleep again and dreamed of a zombie outbreak at an airport.
Maybe my subconscious is reminding me that the 3-Day Novel Contest is almost here and I don't have a plot, characters, or opening scene yet?

thinking about other stories

I've been trying to figure out whether the lure of other stories (ie. stories by me that aren't Cost of Silver) is a distraction or a relief. I used to work on two or three stories at a time, working on one file until I ran dry or wrote myself into a corner, then saving it and pulling out another. This year it's been pretty much working on Cost of Silver, then mucking about uselessly on the internet, too tired to produce anything useful like a blog post or another story.
I wonder sometimes whether I'd have more energy for writing if I wrote other things, or whether I'd just be wasting the energy that I do have. Theoretically, if I needed a break / change, I could just work on another scene or the other storyline of CoS, which is what Scrivener allows me to do easily. So why is it so hard to buckle down and do that?

Oh, those other stories. So enticing in their open-endedness, their possibilities of plot and plot twists. Those characters I don't know yet, who might do anything. Those settings I would need to research, and research a little more. Mmmm.

Then there's my stack of unread books by other people. But let's not talk about that. I have to go and write some more now.

welcome to June!

And associated panic as I try to fill gaps and mend inconsistencies in this draft of Cost of Silver before the end of the month when Self-Imposed Deadline looms.
I'm having the usual issue that what I'm writing now feels so much flatter and duller than what I wrote previously. It's some help to know that this always happens and that I haven't actually forgotten how to write evocative prose in the last month or so. Some help, but not a remedy.

And yes, still wrestling with (though it feels more like being pushed around by) body-image issues. A positive change though as I found a pair of trousers I'd put aside to the rag-bag several years ago (because they'd worn thin on the inner thigh where the bike seat rubs) and they fit perfectly, which they wouldn't have, say, two years back.
It suggested that this body isn't a shape-shifting alien or some kind of reverse-possession, but a body similar to one I had before and had forgotten about. An old friend who's been away that I can get re-acquainted with, rather than a potentially threatening stranger who needs to be propitiated with gifts of clothing and protein bars.

Odd to think that at this time last year I was stuck in an immobilizer and posting pics of my x-rays. I have full extension back, but not full compression in the right leg. I can't sit back on my heels or fully kneel, and very occasionally I get a sort of wobble to the right as if the knee wants to bend sideways. But thanks to my keeping up the calf raises and squats, my legs are otherwise much stronger than before my fall.

May was a busy month, including a trip out to Sidney Island to help build a permanent, non-portable cob oven. I'll try to do a post with pictures to liven things up a bit. The garden is threatening Nature's goddamn bounty to come, with rhubarb flourishing, raspberry canes shooting up and the apple trees getting through caterpillar season relatively unscathed. Despite our three little cherry trees, I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get any cherries this year, but I have some hope for plums and pears. In this lull before fruit starts to fall on me, I'm trying to make the most of time for writing. Wish me luck.

May was also a month of being tired and sleepy. Exercise and weight loss continue to not live up to the promises made about them, as I conked out by 9pm, slept fairly well and could barely drag myself out at 5:30 am, not to mention nodding off at 2pm for that impressive face-on-keyboard moment.
The remedy is allegedly to eat more (wait, what?) protein, like peanut butter and cheese, and to eat several small meals through the day, rather than 3 regular meals.
It seems to be working, but I don't think I'll ever accept how effing contradictory this healthy-diet business is. Eat less fat--eat more protein (but they're the same foods!). Don't snack--eat several times during the day (how is that not snacking?). It's like a series of koans you have to act out, but with no promise of enlightenment at the end.
The fatigue is my excuse for not posting. My mornings went to struggling with revision, and when I sat down at the computer in the evenings I most often found myself typing with one eye closing. This I took as a sign that I needed to go to bed. But, knock on wood, I seem to have a little more energy this week, so you may see more of me.
And how are all of you?

still working on that

Packed up some more too-large clothes for the charity box, and again failed to rejoice at it. Several items I had bought new--not going to do that again.
Contrary to my previous habit, I've been turning on the light and looking at myself in the full-length mirror every morning, trying to pin that image down as the actual me, and not a stranger or alien shape-shifter.
It occurred to me that getting some clothes that fit might reconcile me, so I spent a couple of weekends hitting the thriftshops, especially Community Thrift, which has terrific $1 racks plus random sales (once, everything green in the store was half-price--not green tags, anything coloured green). That was fun. I bought myself a few books as well as skinny tops and hoodies that weren't my usual style. Because if a shirt is only a dollar, why not try out a different look? I particularly liked the black hoodie with a heart composed of tiny laughing skulls. Maybe I should have picked up the pink-and-white skull-pattern pyjamas too, but I prefer nightshirts to pyjamas.
One trip netted me a dozen items for $21, another one was eight tops and two pairs of trousers for $30. I was fairly satisfied until I realised that I was engaging in Retail Therapy and buying into the whole consumption will make you happy thing. Okay, it's pretty low-end consumption, and I could make a case for it being environmentally innocuous consumption, but still. Retail therapy is avoidance of addressing the real issues. Or of figuring out what the real issues are.
a) That I'm still struggling with revisions of Cost of Silver
b) That I'm doing fitness/weightloss wrong or I would be happy
c) That I'm having vitamin/iron-related depression again
d) All of the above
e) That our culture is so weird about women's bodies that there is no way to win.

On the positive side, I should note that I do enjoy working out with weights. It's not a team sport, so there's nobody to hate me for letting the team down. It's just me and the machines or the free weights, and I can set my own pace and schedule. I like having stronger arms and core muscles, and I'm getting used to those non-fatted calves.
I don't even mind the shower room, where lean and smooth-skinned young women rush through on their way to or from the pool. I figure I serve a useful purpose as a sort of Memento Mori to them, a reminder that work out and wax as you will, to this favour will you come.
It goes with the skull hoodie, I figure.