Swedish Meatballs and other delights

Sometimes "retro" food tastes so good.  The last time I cooked up a batch of Swedish Meatballs is lost to history, but certainly not within recent memory, like the six years we've been in this house.  With the cooler weather, this dish just seemed right.  I got a good quality ground beef from the butcher shop and ground up 1.5 pork chops in the food processor, because I didn't like the look of the ground pork at the meat counter.  I had the rest of the ingredients except for white bread and heavy cream, but a trip to Shaw's solved that.  Then I forgot to add the cream, but we didn't miss it.  Making a huge tray of one ounce meatballs was tedious, as was the browning of same, and they were so lean that they rendered no fat, and when it came time to make the gravy I had to had butter to the pan.  Still not enough fat, and I fought the lumps battle (successfully), but then the low-salt low-fat beef broth did not thicken and I had to sneak some cornstarch in.  No problemo.

The end result was toothsome and for once I made enough mashed potatoes such that we could ladle on spoons of the savory gravy.  (Diet freaks stop reading now.) Confession:  last night and this morning when I walked by the fridge I reached under the foil and sneaked a meatball.  Plenty left for tonight's dinner, which will be noodles instead of mashed and carrots instead of peas.  Variety, etc.

I am finishing my novel, maybe even this week.  The following will happen:  a huge sense of accomplishment and then a big letdown.  I'll let the manuscript lie fallow for a while, with the distasteful task of cutting a huge number of words to look forward to.  Good words, all.  Well, maybe not all.

Grapeshot will try to do NaNoWriMo  this year, as I don't have involvement in a writer's conference which has sucked up the last eight Novembers.  I want to get an uncensored leg up on my 1928 California novel, Such Stuff as Dreams.  It's going to be hard to write.  I already know that, so maybe a vault into the story without too much thinking about it.  I do have an outline of sorts, which I must get out and add to.  Then I am at least following a story line. 

Very excited about going to Bouchercon in San Francisco next month.  Bouchercon by the Bay.  What a city!  And then a side trip to Reno to find the very final details for In Flight, stuff I may not be able to add or will have to cut!  Grrrr.

Onward.

The Writing Life

Every February, the Guppies group from Sisters In Crime issues their "Chocolate Challenge."  The idea, February being a mostly dull month, is to write as many words as possible in the month of February, and the winner gets chocolate from the other participants.  Hence the name.  It's sort of like NaNoWriMo with treats.   The challengers also eat chocolate to speed them on their path.

I signed up hoping to get a leg up on the final chapters of In Flight, my fem jep novel.  And indeed I started well and wrote two scenes, one from the drug lord's point of view and another from the main character's.

Then, an idea that had been percolating in my head for years, actually an idea for a novel, came bubbling to the surface and I am writing it as a short story for submission to an anthology.  Probably won't get in, but I can submit it elsewhere.  So I'm 6500 words into the story, endlessly reedited while I write, and have made a winter weekend trip to Cape Cod, and a trip to the New England Boat Show.

I never know anything cold enough to write it off the top of my head.  If I wrote a story about scrubbing floors, I would be in the supermarket cleaning products aisle reading labels.  Maybe this super-picky attention to detail comes from my days as a computer programmer where you sure-as-hell better pay picky attention to detail. 

Anyway, this has been what they used to call a high-forceps birth, not easy in other words, and I've been laboring mightily.  6,000 words in a novel is nothing.  6,000 words in a short story are everything.   

Back to the salt mines.  Of course it is fun.  And gratifying.  I'm not expecting any chocolate for 10,000 words this month.  On the other hand, they may be 10,000 good words or 10,000 words I wouldn't have produced.

Long live chocolate.  The chocolate pound cake was soooo good.    Not too sweet.  The lemon squares are good, too. 

Life is uncertain.  Eat dessert first.

Grapeshot

C is for Crimebake

So, I mut be the only person at the the entire New England Crimebake who did not get her photo taken with Sue Grafton this weekend. The shy little skinny kid who hung back from the swings in first grade is still someone who does not feel comfortable intruding herself into photos, conversations and stalking literary agents thru the hotel trying to pitch her novels to them. Nope! Would rather bathe in hot pitch. You can give countless Toastmaster's speeches, stand up in crowds, yada-yada but the shy person always remains, at heart, a shy person.

I remember a conversation with my mom in the early days of high school. I had a girls get-together at our house, and afterward, my mom analyzed the girls and their behaviors. C was too forward, and J was just about right. In my mom's book, a "too forward" woman was not a good thing. Since my mom was always a forward person, this was sort of interesting. She obviously did not consider herself so. Hanging back (like moi) was not good either. Striking a balance was right. Hey, how does one do that? I am still hanging back. Not that a photo with Sue actually means anything. But it would have been sort of nice. Because Sue is very nice and I try to be nice, too. Nicely nicely, thank you.

The conference was great, and there were a few little SNAFUs that went unnoticed and of course always undercurrents of competition and "stuff" that we writer's like to write about.

Once I sort through the last pile of paperwork and get food in the house, we're good to go. I can think about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is one permitted to hide until the holidays are ove? Please? It's too late to start Nanowrimo. Best get on the stick and make a little plan, and keep writing. Keep things sane. Keep things simple. Make soup.

I missed all my HBO programs and Mad Men last night to watch the blankety-blank Pats game. The horror!

For a good overview of the Crimebake, read this blog: http://patremick.blogspot.com/

Significant Other did the moody, atmospheric cover of the 2009 Crimebake program. Cool, yes?

Grapeshot

Suck It Up

Actually, my week has been more like _uck it up! When the pressure is on, it's a bad idea to try to keep up with blogs and tweets and the like. Dashing off a few words can be deadly. So, these words will be measured.

When I am writing, every novel has a song that I associate with it, and I usually play the song over and over until it melts into every cortical fold and becomes subtext to the novel. The Shadow Warriors song was Pachebel's Canon, but, alas, I had to cut the scene with the Canon, but I still think of it as The Love Theme from The Shadow Warriors. It was a fantastically sexy scene, too. I hope to canabalize it sometime.

World of Mirrors also had it's song. Another Night by the Real McCoys. Yup, The Love Theme from World of Mirrors.

What of Promiscuous Mode? Can you believe Walk Away Renee? I must have played it a hundred times. The Love Theme From Promiscuous Mode. I Will Survive played during a key scene. I love that novel. My writing group loved the novel. Significant Other loves the book. But alas, no agent has loved the novel. Alas, alas.

And Festival Madness? Mais oui, that novel had two love themes. The first is Total Eclipse of the Heart and the other is Desenchante (please add all the accents) by Zazie and Obispo who sang it to me thru earphones on an Air France 747 over the Atlantic. So romantic. It took forever to get the CD. My brother-in-law finally sent it from Europe. Amazon wanted a godawful amount of cash and I just had to have it.

So now I'm working on my "fem jep" (woman in jeopardy) suspense novel, In Flight. So far there are two song possibilities. One is I Need to Know by Marc Anthony; the second is I'm Shipping Up To Boston by the Drop Kick Murphy's. Not too romantic. But still. It has a certain je ne sais pas and the energy it created when Papelbon came in to close a game was phenomenal. Right now I'm playing Marc Anthony. The odd thing is that song is associated with my drug lord, not the main character. I love my drug lord. He's a total play against the stereotype.

This book is, like the others, not exactly writing itself, although the beginning did, creating false confidence. I am plugging away, one sentence after another, one page, another scene and I just closed in on 75,000 words. I always write everything long and then cut. It's easier to take words out than put words in. Believe me. I cannot for the life of me write one of these 75,000 word mysteries. 75,000 words always seems like a little chicken-shit book that you can almost read in one setting, the kind of novel that you might finish before the plane lands. Horrors!

This is NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. Unfortunately, I always have a BIG EVENT in November (see beginning of this post) and it would be incredibly stupid to try to do that, too. Maybe next year. Basically, what NANOWRIMO does is give you permission to write a really shitty first draft, which is what most first drafts are, with the exception of Robert Parker who, I am told, writes such a stellar first draft that he doesn't revise. My god, I hope none of my first drafts ever see the light of day. We are talking really BAD Sentences.

Of course without a publisher breathing down my neck, I don't have to hurry and can write bad sentences with aplomb, knowing there's adequate time for rewriting.

The Huffington Post today advised calling a self-pubbed book an "independently published" book. I like that. Pretty cool, no?

I hope this lengthy post makes up for weeks of not much. I haven't tweeted (except for one disastrous boo-boo) or posted to Face Book either. Exile and cunning and all that stuff. Ha ha.

Grapeshot