hungry ever again?

Because I promised you this some time ago. Above is the Novelty Meat Square, and I really do apologise for it not being in full 1950s saturated colour.
Wait, let me add an equivalent picture, so you can colourise Novelty Meat Square in your imagination. This is the pic of Onion Squares.


Mouthwatering, no?
These two appear in the 'Savory Foods' section of Bake it yourself with MAGIC BAKING POWDER, published by Standard Brands Ltd in 1951. The Savory Foods section also includes Beef Crescents, Tenderloin in a Blanket, and Frankfurter Loaf.
Does Tenderloin in a Blanket sound like erotica to anyone else?
As a library tech and occasional archivist, I feel deeply that Novelty Meat Square should not be lost to the ages. This is what the recipe says:

This good supper dish is made as an upside-down cake, with a meat layer in the pan under a rich biscuit dough. We picture it turned out and topped with an interesting chili sauce meringue, as given in recipe--but a good brown sauce may be used instead.

1 1/2 pounds minced lean beef
1/4 cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons fine-flavored dripping, heated
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
2 cups coarse soft bread crumbs
2 cups once-sifted pastry flour
or 1 3/4 cups once-sifted all-purpose flour
4 1/2 teaspoons Magic Baking Powder
5 tablespoons chilled shortening
1 cup milk
3 egg whites
2 teaspoons corn starch
2/3 cup thick chili sauce

Grease an 8-inch square cake pan.
Preheat oven to 425 (hot).
Combine beef and onion and fry in heated dripping until browned; sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of the salt, pepper, mustard and bread crumbs and combine lightly. Turn into prepared pan and pack lightly.
Mix and sift once, then sift into a bowl, the flour, 4 teaspoons of the Magic Baking Powder and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Cut in shortening finely.
Make a well in flour mixture; add milk and mix lightly with a fork.
Pour into pan over meat and spread evenly.
Bake in preheated oven about 30 minutes.
Turn out onto a cookie sheet and top meat with the following topping.
Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry; combine corn starch and remaining 1/2 teaspoon Magic Baking Powder and beat into egg whites; gradually beat in thick chili sauce. Pile lightly on meat; return to oven and bake until topping is set--about 8 minutes.
Serve hot, with tomato gravy.
Yield: 6 servings.

And for dessert: Blossom Cake! (very springlike)

soul of a writer?

Thing that I'm rather tired of seeing, in whatever permutation: the insistence of yet-another-someone that you cannot call yourself a writer unless you {fill in the blank}.
The blank-fillers range from the quite concrete, like 'sell a story to a print market paying .05 a word or higher' to the maddeningly vague, like 'have the soul of a writer' (which demands the answer: 'but I do, in a green glass vial in my cabinet of curiosities.'). Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they tend to be something the speaker believes him/herself to have and the addressees not to have. (Ha ha, I'm a writer and you're not!)

Pause to prevaricate: there are many ways to become a better writer, such as practice, critique, reading the work of good writers, reading books on writing technique, and so on. There are a few inborn or learned traits that will help you become a better writer, like having an ear for how people speak (this can be acquired by paying attention and making notes), having an eye for detail (same), having a good memory or an ability to visualise plot threads. But that's a modified writer, not 'a writer'. (VP injoke FTW)

If it were up to me, which praise-be it is not, I'd rule that to call yourself a writer, all you need to do is write and keep writing. I'm not even sure you'd need to finish anything, though finishing and revising and submitting are important if you want to call yourself a published or professional writer.
But in the real world which goes on without my having any say in it, nobody can stop you calling yourself a writer even if you never finish anything; even if you never write a full page (250 words in Standard Manuscript Format) but spend all your time drawing up character profiles and writing opening sentences and deciding on titles for your imagined bestseller instead.

And I'm fine with that, because whatever you want to call yourself, it doesn't make me less or more of a writer. It's not as if there are only so many stick-on badges to go around, and if you grab the last one then Patricia McKillip or Tanith Lee suddenly isn't a writer anymore.
Nor will I become more of a writer if I can somehow stop five other people from using that designation. I'm pretty sure I'd have to eat their hearts or brains to manage that.

The ABM is fired

I've been writing. That is, I have been in the depths of my own brain, with occasional excursions to the Bishops' Wars and to the Fenland Riots, and to the Witch Panic. This is not actually a comfortable or relaxing tour, but it is full of incident.
I can sort of see the end of this book, if I stand on my tiptoes and squint. I'm hoping to have all the holes filled in within a couple of weeks.

So every now and then I stick my head out to see what's up with teh intarwebz, which almost always results in my staying up too late reading FandomWank or something similar. Is it my imagination, or has there been a marked increase in Authors (and Publishers) Behaving Badly over the past few months?
I mean, just on OTF (Other than Fandom) Wank, there's been (the ironically named) Chivalry Bookshelf ripping off its authors; Decadent Publishing getting over-excited over some nasty sockpuppet reviews; First One Publishing wanting $150 to take all your rights; and most recently the J Howett meltdown over a mixed review.
More fun threads on Absolute Write, in the forums, but if I look for them I'll be up all night.

Responding to a negative review is such a poor idea that it's called the Author's Big Mistake, or ABM. (Paul Fussell is credited with inventing the term) Back in the day when print was all, authors and reviewers would carry on feuds slowly, over weeks, through the book review sections and letter columns of newspapers. It was made even more fun by the likelihood that reviewers and authors were likely colleagues, published by the same presses and reviewing in the same newspapers and journals. So an angry author might have the chance for sweet revenge by reviewing his enemy's book (and being paid for the review, too).
Yeah, the fact that everyone knew it was a bad idea didn't stop highly-educated, literate and eloquent people from doing it. Some very classy invective was produced this way--but again, if I look for it I'll be up all night.
Wait, Jane Smith's brill blog How Publishing Really Works has a terrif rundown on the classics here.

The internet has made it possible not only to carry on such a feud without any timelag (and without, alas, most of the eloquence, as eloquence takes time) but for everyone and his dog-that-no-one-knows-you-are-on-the-internet to weigh in and mock and share.
I like snark (I sometime explain that we are an ESL family: the first language is sarcasm) and I'm willing to watch a trainwreck happen in realtime. But the scope of the possible wreckage is more than a little scary.
On the one hand, it's possible to have an ongoing intelligent and thoughtful conversation between writer and reviewer, online.
On the other hand, it's possible for things to explode before one party even realises the fuse has been lit.

I wonder what I'll do when/if I get my first negative review? Hopefully I'll have as much class as the author of Pregnesia does here. Or at least the good sense to bitch privately and offline.
Now, back to the fens!

Japan benefit reading

Most of interest to those on the BC Lower Mainland, so I can't myself attend, but just in case anyone reading this blog has the chance, here's the info:

*Japan Earthquake Benefit *

***Friends Across the Pacific: An Evening of Readings & Performances**

Join us in supporting relief efforts in Japan. The BC Japan Earthquake Fund and the Asian Canadian Studies Society invites you to an evening of poetry, fiction, and performance, with some of Vancouver's finest writers:

Daphne Marlatt, Joanne Arnott, Proma Tagore, Roy Miki, Lydia Kwa, Hiromi Goto, Fred Wah, and more!

Thursday, March 31, 2011, 8pm. Doors open at 7:30pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver

By donation. All donations will go to the Canadian Red Cross through the BC-Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

** All welcome. Must be 19 years of age or older to purchase alcohol. ID required.**

The BC Japan Earthquake Relief Fund (BC-JERF) is a coalition of volunteers; we are individuals, community groups and businesses concerned for the well-being of the people in Japan in the wake of the recent earthquake, tsunami, and unfolding nuclear threats. Our purpose is to vet and act as an organizational hub for BC communities' fundraising efforts and to facilitate the delivery of this financial aid to the affected people in Japan. Funds raised through BC-JERF-endorsed campaigns and events will be donated in full to reputable charities operating on the ground in Japan, such as the Japanese Red Cross.

Community Partners: VIVO Media Arts Centre, Powell Street Festival Society and Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

For more information contact: Julia Aoki, Communications Coordinator at julia@bc-jerf.ca

books, book-talk, and race

Terri, I'm sorry, this will probably give you another book to read--but it's a very fast read!

So, I recently finished Half World, by Hiromi Goto, a sorta-local author (lives on the mainland), book trailer for which can be seen here. The back-cover copy reads:

MELANIE TAMAKI IS AN OUTSIDER
As the unpopular and impoverished only child of a loving but neglectful mother, she is just barely coping with school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe itself is at stake....
Award winning author Hiromi Goto's novel is an adventurous, genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half-lives, and redemption.

Wow. This book moves at a dead run. There are two prologues, one distant past and one recent past. The first is a pared-down legend-backstory, but the second is grab-reader-by-throat.
Then the story proper begins, as Melanie's mother goes missing, and she gets a phone call (on a disconnected phone) from the deeply-creepy Mr. Glueskin telling her what she has to do if she ever wants to see her mother again. Because the reader has already encountered Mr. Glueskin in the second prologue, this is even creepier than Melanie knows.
Melanie makes a believable young heroine, sometimes frustrated and overwhelmed, sometimes hasty and resentful, but always picking herself up and 'doing what's nearest'. She has no special powers, only determination and a loving heart--a refreshing change from the YA heroines who are billed as kickass tough girls but are passive and helpless when the crunch comes. (And hoorah, she is a chubby kid and does not become magically thin-and-pretty by the end of the story.)
The horrors she faces in Half World aren't cheap blood-splatter special effects, but subtler and weirder. I thought there was an influence both of the Japanese ghost scrolls and of the Buddhist hells, and maybe also Stephen King's Overlook Hotel, which is to say, pretty damn creepy.
So yeah, if you haven't read this book already, you should go and read it.

You can guess, thus, that when I heard Hiromi Goto was delivering the keynote talk at a conference at the university where I work, I knew I'd have to be there. Even if not for myself, for the others on the book-chat forum who'd read her work.
The conference info is here. Curious, If True: The Fantastic in Literature.
I would have liked to attend the whole thing, but I was booked already to leave Friday for a medieval event in Bremerton where I'd be taking a new apprentice--not something one can reschedule easily. And Hiromi's talk was the highlight.

After some to-ing and fro-ing to find out about registration, which turned out to be on the other side of campus, but which I didn't really need to deal with anyways because I wasn't speaking, just listening, but let me be useful in walking one of the real attendees over to find the secret hidden building he needed, I was in place with coffee and snacks and a copy of Half World in good time. Here's my notes, filled in and cleaned up. Anything incoherent or wonky is due to my errors of transcription and memory.

The title of her talk was: "Escape Procedures May Not Have Been Designed To Your Specifications: Some Thoughts on Race and Representation in the Literature of the Fantastic"

Hiromi Goto is a small compact woman with fairly short grey hair and a face either smiling or seeming about to smile. She is very present, almost concentrated, in the space she occupies (I'm not sure if that's a clear explanation). She spoke from written notes, at first with her eyes on them, gradually more confidently and with less referring. She began by acknowledging that this was the territory of the Coast Salish peoples, and thanking them in Japanese for allowing her there.
The spark for her talk was the not-too-long-ago kerfuffle over the filming and whitewashing of the Earthsea books. Having read the books in her youth, Hiromi's first reaction to the fuss was 'wait, Ged's not white?' Then she was embarrassed: at a time when she was reading avidly and hungrily for characters like her, (enough that she was thrilled and touched by the Chinese character in A Cricket in Times Square, only later recognising him as stereotypical), how could she have missed that Ged was not another white character?
In part because she applied the author's race to the characters. In part because of the author's conscious decision to provide the physical clues gradually, to get the (possibly-resistant white) reader into Ged's skin before noticing that said skin was brown. And in part because the clues about the culture of the islands of Gont (bronze-smithing, goat-herding, witch-women, women's magic being 'rubbish and humbug', dragons) were not sufficient to mark it as a non-European culture for her.
A distinct race (like the Karg?) will be set against a 'normative' race. Readers within a culture that has a dominant race will assume that the unspecified is the dominant. The attempt to envision and write for a 'universal reader' erases difference and homogenizes, which ends up being exclusive rather than inclusive.

Pause to describe the concept of umwelt (German, the surrounding world), the perception of the world related to oneself, through constructions of one's body, education, desires, past. The understanding of the world can be very different even by organisms that are quite similar. A meadow will be understood differently by a fieldmouse, a hawk, and a farmer, and different again by a second farmer. No one umwelt is correct or dominant, each is true for the one within it. Neither is that understanding fixed. One's self alters within different contexts, one isn't a neutral subject. She compared this shifting and altering to the altering of perceptions in optical illusions where foreground becomes background.
Goto's family came to Canada when she was three. She remembers English being incomprehensible babble to her ear, and remembers text moving from incomprehensible to meaningful as she learned to read. As she read, she didn't at first notice the absence of 'people like her', only as she encountered the few that existed in fiction did she become aware of the lack.

Representing diverse races and cultures requires complexities, and the necessities of narrative prune away complexity. Thought must be put into the complexities of race: what effect does it have? The markers of race include colour, hair, language, cultural practices and religion. Not all of these will have space in the narrative, but there is more to representing diversity than providing different skin colours.
LeGuin diversified sf/f, but race is more than skin colour. Goto considers Always Coming Home to be the more effective treatment of race. She uses the term Terra Racialliblendedis to refer to the setting where everyone is mixed or non-white but there are no differences in culture or custom, even in food, and cites The Hunger Games as an example. Given the near-future setting, it's implausible that racial and regional differences could have been subsumed so completely into class differences.
Race is inextricable from political discourse: multiculturalism, immigration, economics etc. Racial narratives can be deadly; she gives the example of the black man seen as criminal. Brown bodies in literature have been locked in the attic or the kitchen, or banished to jungles and forests for exotic background.
Sf/f provides room to imagine different worlds and futures, but setting the brown body in a supposedly post-racial world and flattening the differences inherent in race and culture presents its own problems. Fantastic literature can push at the boundaries of comfort, but is read by the reader within her own social context / umwelt. The reading of the fantastical other is the reading of one's imagined self.

We cannot escape our context, even reading for escape, but we can dismantle, small step by small step, and move toward a place where escape is no longer desired.

After her talk, there was some time for questions. A couple of questions asked on how to represent other cultures respectfully, and what would affect your decision on whether to use one culture rather than another. She suggested (to a question that came perilous close to whining about touchiness) that peoples need space / chance of their own representation, that it may be appropriative to make use of a culture that hasn't had experience of its own (representational) space yet.
The concept that struck with me was 'narrative prunes away complexity' and since I'd recently read a Quill & Quire review of Half World, where the reviewer regretted that the story spent so little time on Melanie's life before the crisis, and wanted more time spent on the world and how it worked, I asked whether much had been pruned from Half World.
Answer being yes - that an earlier draft had been probably 400 pages, and the last was less than 200 (not sure if that's mss or printed - the pbk is 233 p.). The present opening scene of ch.1 was originally ch. 15 or 16. Much was pruned out by the pressures not only of narrative but of market considerations and the intended audience.

Then I had to run away back to work, and was unable to stay for the readings and panel discussions. But I did get a copy of Half World signed, and found out where I can buy her other books (the university bookstore - have not found them at the local indies.).

readers' rights: my pledge

I've been stewing over this for about a week, trying not to get all ranty. Then I read Janni Lee Simner's call to action, and had (yay!) permission to rant.
(A good link roundup on YA Highway here , including a link to Zoe Marriott's fine post on the insecurity that makes writers vulnerable)

As I've said, repeatedly and recently, I was a reader before I was a writer. I'm still a reader. If some wicked fate forced me to choose, I'd weep and wail and hammer the walls... then choose reading.
Something you learn, hanging out with readers, whether in person or online, is that tastes differ. The book one person thrusts into your hands promising that it will Change Your Life is the book someone else gets three pages into and gives up on. The protagonist who is one reader's ideal lover is another's pretentious git who needs smacking hard.
The internet has made it a lot easier to have entertaining, spirited (yet usually civil) discussions about books with people whose perspectives are quite different from mine, and to read reviews of books I might never have known about, reviewed by people who are insightful, funny, and sometimes snarky.
Which means I am not thrilled by the chilling effect of recent tweets and posts suggesting that Negative Reviews Will Be Held Against You (Caps of Portentiousness, found in all the best fantasy novels). At present I find it doubtful that I'll be asked to blurb someone else's books, but I sincerely hope that any blurbing I do would be based on what I thought of the actual book, not whether the author reviewed mine.

Anyway, presently I have no influence, to raise or to crush. I hope I would never want to crush someone for being passionately engaged with books, or for bringing the snark. So here's the little that I can do against the chill:

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

To which I set my hand and seal, this fourth day of March 2011, when I should be finishing my revisions and not blathering online.

snow and sociability

A lost work by Jane Austen? No, the last week-and-a-bit here.
Mark has been away in Arizona, at the semi-disastrous Estrella War, and I've been here, cleaning and tidying the house (to my specs, which may not be universally accepted) followed by spreading my stuff around on the excavated horizontal surfaces. Sometimes I danced around the house singing 'Mine, mine, mine.'
I watched--while rowing--How to Train Your Dragon, which I enjoyed greatly. Mostly I've been watching videocassettes with subtitles, because the rowing machine is kind of noisy, and I'm usually rowing early in the morning, when I don't want to turn the sound up to bellowing level. Previously I've watched Comet, Butterfly and Sword; Lady Hermit; Legend of Zu; Zu Warriors; The Crimson Charm; Magnificent Swordsman (gave up on that one). How to Train Your Dragon made for a change of pace and genre.
That was not the sociable part though. The sociable part was last weekend, when I had visitors, yes. Thursday, our friends Paul and Shona came for dinner, even with the warning that I was only making tuna casserole (comfort food). Friday, Stephen was in town to attend a concert and spent the night here. Saturday and Sunday, my friends Lynne and Tony came over from Seattle, and we had dinner at the Won Ton Noodle House (yes, that's its real name) and lunch the next day at the Penny Farthing, and talked a lot, about writing and reading and work and collecting and stuff. I got to talk about my writing! and believe that the other people were interested and not just being polite! The food was terrific too--I'm astonished I've gone so long not knowing how good the Won Ton Noodle House was. I must make up for lost time.
I know I'm very lucky in having online friends to whom I can go on about writing & about my books. But there's still something special about being able to talk to someone face to face--and it is lovely for the ego to talk about my own characters and stories more than about the craft of writing. Though I suppose doing it regularly would result in unsightly bloating of the ego.

Yes, it has SNOWED in Victoria and the Island generally, between 5 and 20 cm on Wednesday. When I got up, 6ish, there was only a little, but it came down hard, and by the time I set out to work I'd had to shovel the front walk and sidewalk twice. I did the neighbours on each side as well, because it's always a toss-up whether someone in Victoria even owns a snowshovel.
So gorgeous, though. Until later in the day there was no wind, so the tree branches were all laid in with white, the grey and black underlying it like shadows. Except for ruts in the road and the shoveled walks, the snow was smooth as if it had been sanded down. Every now and then a powdering would fall from the trees or roof-edges, and spread itself out, vanishing. Only later did clumps fall and leave their ghost-tracks.
I made a half-hearted attempt to bicycle, but that didn't work at all. The slush built up between tire and fender, and the ruts in the road sent me slithering sideways. So I walked to the bus stop and waited nearly half an hour, during which time about 5 buses should have gone by, but didn't (2 went by in the opposite direction) and all the people who were waiting when I arrived gave up and went home. I might have been able to walk most of the way to work in that time, but given how many sidewalks weren't shoveled, it might have been difficult.
Wednesday was the day Mark got back, so on his return from the desert he was greeted by snow.
The cat is confused by the whole business. Last night she was so whiny about wanting to go outside, then refusing it when the door opened onto a world of white, that I tossed her out into the snow, where she remained, bleating and unmoving, until making a sudden astounding leap back through the door, without touching the snow in between.
Cat-butt-print shown below: