Freedom: Sunday New York Times Book Review

The Sunday New York Times book review sections always energizes me.  It's the first section of the times I read every Sunday.  Today features Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom.
I read The Corrections and thought it was up there right along with Beloved and The Poisonwood Bible.  A great novel, in other words. I am in awe of Franzen. I heard him speak a couple years ago at Boston's Grub Street, The Muse and the Marketplace.  He gave a thoughtful, even profound, speech. 
There is a brouhaha (isn't that a wonderful word?) to do with Jennifer Weiner (on the best seller list today) and another woman writer over the fact that women writers do not make the cover of Time Magazine.  Anyone who belongs to Sisters In Crime knows that women's books are reviewed less by major (and probably minor) newspapers and periodicals.  Folks, this is hardly news and it seems a bit mean-spirited to point this out and (maybe) diminish Franzen's place in the sun.

I have no doubt that Franzen would be able to make first rate fiction out of it.  He's no stranger to controversy what with the Oprah hoo-ha (another great word--why do words describing a dust up or tempest in a tea top event have a "ha" in them?) Ha ha! 
Franzen is a brave writer, the kind of literary writer I would give me genre-gnawed eye teeth to be.
From all discussions, Freedom seems to be a significant literary event.

Hmmm.  Maybe his publisher should have been hawking  Freedom out at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday.  Some of the people on the red and blue sides of the fence are portrayed in  the book.  Who of us will recognize our sorry selves?

Back out of the Writing Into a Corner

All week I'm pondering how to get one of my character's out of this jam down in Panama.  I think hard about her going into the ladies and either coming out in a Continental or Copa Airlines flight attendant uniform and maybe even a nun's habit.  This would be perfect, except that less than twenty pages before, another character shaves his head to change his identity and these scenes would be too similar and way too close together.   So how would she escape? 


Significant Other, who sometimes has good plot ideas, says, "have her and the bad guy go into a bar while they are waiting for the charter flight to Colombia."  Not too preposterous.  So how do you escape in a bar?   Create a diversion.  She goes into the ladies and sets a fire?  How to do that?  

I get my handbag with it's tiny toiletries case and see what's in there.    Alcohol wipes!  Hand sanitizer!  Mouth spray!  I take them out onto the deck with some wooden matches and a heat proof brass bowl.  Guess what?  They all burn. Nice little flames.  Now, add some cologne (mostly alcohol) and use the fire to heat  a really strong drink and we're golden.  A big fire of paper towels in the waste basket and maybe a sink.  Sets off the smoke alarm.  

This character is a smoker so she has matches or a lighter. 

General pandemonium as my character escapes through the nearby kitchen and the bad guy going bat shit because he's herded onto the street with the other patrons.  The character grabs a cab and goes to the other international airport and gets on the first flight to the U.S.  With only her handbag.  Without the suitcase with a million dollars green. 
Bad guy takes money to Colombia and will have to explain how he lost the woman.  We're not in his point of view, and by then the book's final scenes are wrapping up.
I congratulate myself on our ingenuity.  Now, I no longer have to worry about carrying a millions dollars over the border from Tijuana.  I no longer have to worry about where in Mexico to refuel and all the intricacies of chartering a jet airline.  I no longer have to worry about a lot of things. 
Of course my characters all have the BIG worries.  They're in deep doodoo.  
So be it. 


Grapeshot

Salade Nicoise

Many years ago, in a resort in the south of France about this time of year, we ate at a beach restaurant among the bare-except-for-a-bikini-bottom women and other assorted "types."  We had Salade Nicoise and a whole bottle of wine (bad, bad) and it was altogether lovely. 

It was the first time I had boiled potatoes with Salade Nicoise, and they made a tasty addition.  Mine contains tomatoes, tuna (natch!) olives, potatoes, green beans, hard cooked eggs, and a soupcon of red onion, of all on a bed of lettuce.  It feeds the eye as well as the stomach. 

Love live summer! 

Writing yourself into a corner

Ye gods!  The ending of my novel was getting more and more complicated trying to get one of the characters from Panama to Reno with suitcases stuffed with two millions dollars.  I had learned how much it cost to charter a jet (lots) and what custom forms you needed to bring in money and what happens if you lie and get caught (really bad stuff) and after surfing the web so long I wore out my metaphorical board shorts, I realized I was adding at least 10,000 more words to this already kind of long novel. 

So I figured out another scenario that involved only a short flight (no jet charters) to Colombia instead of this 3400 mile trip. 

Now one of the characters needs to escape from the bad guys in Panama, lest they throw her out of the  plane en route.  I already had a character escaping by changing his appearance.  I can't hardly do that twice.  I am thinking pepper spray or mace.  What every woman needs in her handbag to get her out of a jam. 


Querying like mad for my Burning Man book since the man will burn in 10 days.  


Grapeshot

Suck It Up, Yet Again and One More Time ad nauseum

Trying to publish novels, short stories and poetry is a hard row to hoe, and writers need encouragement, which one gets from a writer's group, like-minded internet groups, fellow seekers, and sometimes even published writers.  Still, it's a lonely, gut-wrenching business, and rejection is one's constant companion.   Often, one feels "been down so long it looks like up to me," to use an old phrase from the sixties (?). 

So I've sent some poetry out into the world, and the world said, 'Yes!'  to a few short stories, and one novel, which started life as an e-book back in 2001 when no one had ever heard of e-books.  The publishers went belly up.  They did give me two editors, and one was good and one was bad, i.e. the copy editor.  I tried to fix what she broke, but proofreading  is not my thing.

In high school, we took some test like you might take to find out if you had good skills identifying typos (it was actually a clerical test) and I scored something like 20 percentile, and my mother shut up about my taking secretarial courses other than typing.   I suck at finding typos. 

So when the e-book company folded,  I took The Shadow Warriors to a POD company and got an ISBN and they listed it on Amazon and I actually sold a few hundred copies, donated a bunch, and got about 85 percent positive reviews, some VERY positive, and some critical but still with a lot of good things to say. 

Image my surprise, horror, shock, and devastation when I checked Amazon yesterday and found a totally negative, repulsive, yucky ANONYMOUS review of my novel.  A real stab in the back.  Deliberate. By someone who had never reviewed a single other book on Amazon.  By someone I suspect did not actually read any of my novel, just trashed it. .

One might guess Payback Time, except I have very few (and all positive) reviews on Amazon and have never breathed a less than positive opinion about any of my fellow published writers.  Unpubbed either.  O.K., maybe I snarked about James Patterson once or twice, but honest, most  of my fellow writers actually write good, readable, even riveting prose.  If I happen to put down a book after the first fifty pages, I don't broadcast the act.  And I sure as hell don't "review" that book anonymously. 

I mean, really.  If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it. And don't kick somebody who's been down so long, etc.  At Toastmasters, we use the sandwich critique.  Something positive, something critical, and something positive.  Constructive criticism.

Maybe she/he (why do I think she) was having a bad day.  One star means "not worth the paper it's printed on."  Total negativity.  Some people think Amazon reviewers are frustrated writers.  Dunno.  Lots of them are really very good reviewers.  But you know what they say about a few bad apples. . .

Back to writing, querying, and well, sucking it up. 

   

A report on the cats

Missed Cat Blog Day on Friday.  I have been gardening, swanning to the Cape and the Berkshires, cooking every tomato recipe in the repertoire and finding agents to query for the Burning Man book, Festival Madness. 

By and large, the cats are cool.  The orange cat is very cool, eating well, looking out the window, shedding all over the Calvin Klein down duvet, and wondering why the black and gold cat with the big stomach continues to give him the stink eye.  He gives her a pretty wide berth.  Usually.  

Said black and gold is cool unless the orange cat gets in her face.  A few days ago he wanted to play and made chasing motion, which set her off in a tizzy of hissing.  Sometimes she is caught eating his food and slinks off (guiltily) when reprimanded. 


Nonetheless, life is CAT is pretty calm.  Good birdwatching from the living room window, and chipmunk watching from the kitchen window.  Many places to nap.  Eats of schedule.  Plenty of petting.  What's not to like?

Low Fat versus Low Carb

Ye gods, what with having company for a month (vegetarian high starch diet) and a trip to the Berkshires (pecan pie bars and lots and lots of food), the scale crept up.  And up.  And up.  Now, Grapeshot never met a fat gram she didn't like, and drastic methods were called for, so we went back on a modified South Beach Diet/Dr. Atkins Diet, the only "diets" I've ever lost weight on except for starvation, and I gained that back so fast your head would swim.

The South Beach Diet has some really tasty recipes.  We love the lone dessert, the veggie-egg cups for breakfast and some of the main dish salads and entrees.  I have some low carb recipes  I alternate with these dishes, and we eat a lot of grilled chicken, veggies and fruit.  Of course with ripe tomatoes, there's a boundless supply of Insalata Caprese.   In 4 days I lost the accumulation of 7 weeks.  Not bad.  We allow modest treats occasionally, and work out.  I intend to keep this up until an October vacation, and I'll be posting occasionally to report progress or a lack thereof.

Next on the menu are roast beef sandwiches on rye crisp, tuna salad and then fajitas (no sour cream) with steak and shrimp.  We use corn tortillas instead of flour.  Flour tortillas lack fiber and do have fat, whereas corn is a low cal treat with fiber.  And it actually tastes like something.  Oils from avocado are good.  Just don't overdo it.  We make one avocado last for 2 meals, which means one is eating 1/4 of an avocado.  So delicious.  So satisfying.  I flunked out of Weight Watchers 4 times because of the stringent lipophobic menus.  Weight Watchers is for carb lovers.  I can take carbs or leave them.  Naturally, fresh fries, garlic mashed, baked potatoes with the works are wonderful lovey foods, but I can say goodbye to them for long periods of time.  

Summer makes for easy dieting because of the grill, fresh produce, wonderful main dish shrimp and chicken salads, and hot weather.  No need for pot roast or chili con carne or those darned baked potatoes in summer.  Actually, I knew someone who could eat a baked potato plain, and another woman who liked it with non-fat yogurt.   Ecch!   Non-fat anything to me tastes like chalk.  Once we bought non-fat cottage cheese by mistake and it was almost inedible.

Years ago, I ate some Weight Watchers macaroni and cheese and it tasted like detergent.  This was a while back, and I hope they fixed the recipe in the meantime.  But you get the idea.  Some people will eat chalk and detergent if they can just get to those carbs underneath, but not me.  To each her own diet.

It costs more at the grocery store, because produce and lean meat are expensive, and carbs (pasta, rice and beans) are cheap.  Not that you can't add a few black beans to the fajitas.  Or to a salad.  Moderation in all things.

In the meantime, we discovered grilled fennel, grilled portobellos and other exotic grilled veg.  We will also be doing grilled peaches and grilled plums.

Yup!  In the good old summertime, dieting isn't such an ordeal.

Grapeshot

Will wonders never cease?

Al Fresco At the Red Lion Inn

Back from a wonderful Berkshire weekend.  Stockbridge, with lunch at the Red Lion, Tanglewood with picnic, dinner with friends, discovered the Silk Road Ensemble, discovered how much hummingbirds really do like Trumpet Vine.

We came home to discover the two enemy cats rubbing noses with nary a spit, growl or snarl in sight.  No telltales wads of fur.  The orange cat is sleeping in the office rocking chair and the Terrible Tortoise is snoozing on the floor.

Picnicing on the Lawn

Pesto Alla Genovese

I've  been using the pesto recipe below ever since I began growing my own basil.  It's excellent, and why spend $4.95 for half as much when this only costs a couple dollars to make, including the pine nuts, cheese and olive oil.

My favorite pesto recipe is "chicken pesto," which Bertucci's had as part of their antipasto platter in days of yore. The dish consists of chunks of white meat chicken dressed with pesto.  Haven't seen it for years.

Another idea I got from Rebecca's in Kendall Square was to mix the chicken pesto with bow tie pasta and fresh tomatoes for a luncheon/dinner meal.  Good.  Good. Good.  Add pesto according to taste.

Pesto all Genovese  - makes 1 1/2- 2 cups


Ingredients:  1 cups fresh basil, leaves only packed and lightly chopped.  (I skip this chopping).

1 t. kosher salt
1/2 t. freshly ground black pepper
1-2  t. finely chopped garlic  (this year it's home grown, like the basil)
2 T. finely chopped pine nuts (can sub. walnuts)
1 to 1 1/2 cups olive oil
1/2 cup freshly grated imported sardo, romano or Parmesan cheese. 

Process:  in a blender, combine basil, salt, pepper, garlic, pie nuts and 1 cup olive oil.  Blend at high speed, stopping to push the herbs down with a rubber spatula.
The sauce should be thin enough to run off the spatula easily.  It it's too thick, blend in more olive oil.  Transfer the sauce to a bowl and stir in the grated cheese.

The chicken pesto works as part of a antipasto or alone as a light dinner with a salad and Italian bread.  The pesto can be thinned further by mixing a little pasta cooking water with it.

My Mistress with the Enemy Cat

Can you believe it?  All this blather about people food that a cat wouldn't deign to sniff?  Peach Pie?  Fie!
Even more blather about baby birds (Yum) and summer and not a word about me and my tribulations.  In the dead of night, I find this totally dreadful, jealous-making photo on HER commuter.  HER with my rival, getting cozy while I pursue innocent sleep. 

What's a wrong cat to do?  I took my revenge by making a mess in the litter box.  'Nuff said.


The Interloper was in HER bedroom, on HER bed.  Does she think I can't smell?  It's Sunday morning and I only got perfunctory mommy-kitty time.

It may be summer, but the days are dark.

My Mistress with The Enemy

Thisbe
Author of The Catnip Chronicles