S#31: Join the Library
Mmm. . . booooooooks. . .
Flushed with the success of the “Reaching the World” YA writers’ conference in Sydney on July 3 (and wide-eyed with the new data that only 1 in 10,ooo books gets published via the “look up publishers and send the book to The Editor” method), I’ve decided to go to two more conferences. . . starting this month.
First, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival (plus I get to help launch the 30th issue of Going Down Swinging, since I’m in it – as Felicity Bloomfield, since the story is horror). This is a ten-day con of epic proportions – Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman will be there (no use to my career, much as I admire them) plus many publishers and writers.
Second, the CYA Later, Alligator! conference in Brisbane. CYA stands for Children and Young Adult writers. I’ll be pitching one of my books directly to a lady from Publisher J. I’m in a fabulous mood right now because I figured out a way to make it much better at around 2am this morning. CJ agreed that my idea was brilliant.*
There are literally hundreds of writers and publishers, and I’ll be listening to or connecting with about fifty. Thus I’m in the process of scouring the internet for the most relevant books and [this is the bit where I get to the point] borrowing terrifyingly high piles of novels from the library.
So far, I have fifteen books to read – and I’m barely started. The last two cons I went to (in July, and the Sydney Freecon last November) introduced me to exactly one faint-with-exhilaration-because-they’re-so-good author each – Pamela Freeman, and Sandy Fussell.
Later this month, I’ll report back and tell you who is the pick of the bunch this time. So far I’ve read one book, and it was hideously bad (something which I won’t mention to the author when I go to her book launch).
Play along at home: borrow Pamela Freeman’s adult trilogy (the first is “Blood Ties”) and/or Sandy Fussell’s “Samurai Kids” books from your local library. (I’ve decided that Sandy Fussell’s series sets the standard for children’s books worldwide, and have read the first book three times so far, studying how she puts it together and wins readers over. The second and third are also exquisite, but I’m saving the rest for later.)
You’re welcome.
In other news, I went to a new doctor yesterday (one closer to where I live). To cut a long story short, I had food poisoning in Indonesia in January, and I still haven’t 100% recovered. I’ve been wondering if I’ve developed some of the food intolerances (including fructose malapsorption – ie allergic to several fruits) that are just, like, so hot right now. She reckoned I have – temporarily (which answers my question AND means I can eat whatever, comfy in the thought that I’ll continue to improve over the next few years). Among other things, she said I should go lactose and gluten-free for at least three months – just in case they’re the triggers. In less crazy news, she said I should take inner health plus. So I went and bought some (despite the fact it costs almost a dollar per pill – yikes). Inner health plus is a probiotic – each pill contains literally millions of tiny little guys to help me digest stuff. Hopefully all those microorganisms will do their thing so well that at the NEXT writing conference, no-one will ask me when I’m expecting.
The human body is SO GROSS. Don’t you love it?
I’m also finding, lately, that I often forget it’s Winter. I just walk around, reasonably comfortable, enjoying the sunshine and living life. It seems mad, but apparently “Love your Fear” actually worked. Thank you Steff Metal for the suggestion!
And here’s today’s pretty pretty Flickr.com pics (two for the price of one, you lucky sods):
*Or at least, he mumbled something that sounded like, “Brilliant.”
#176: Eat cookie dough
Mmm
Louise’s Lardylicious Choc Chip Cookies:
Mix:
3/4ths c white sugar
3/4ths c brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 c oil
1 cup butter (softened or melted)
1 tsp vanilla esence
Mix and add to above:
3 c flour
3 c cornflakes
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
Cook at 175 degrees celsius for about 12 minutes (or not).
Due to technical problems, there’s no photo today. Sorry! Go search for “rainforest” on Flickr.com if you want to see something pretty.
#140: Antique Shop in a Small Town
CJ and I went exploring in “Grandpa’s Shed” in the small town of Fitzroy Falls (yes, the one with the waterfall).
They’re really serious about their stuff. And there’s a lot of it.
Because having thirty rusty saws isn’t suspicious at all.
Remember those things?
Tins. Who doesn’t feel strangely compelled to buy dozens of tins? Tins are cool.
I have a feeling I should recognise the typing machine above.
Giant bellows.
And. . . a pulpit. I confess a part of me so wants to buy it. And the typing machine. And at least six tins. And the piano thingy.
But never, never the safari hats.
Here’s today’s Flickr.com picture:
Three-Ingredient Thursday: Christmas Salad
Fine! I confess. There are four ingredients. I snuck in the sesame oil on the basis that although it isn’t USED as a cooking fat (which’d make it a freebie ingredient according to the rules), it COULD be.
This is why I’m not a master criminal.*
The ingredients are baby roma tomatoes, baby spinach leaves**, and fetta. With sesame oil.
How to play along at home:
Wash/wash and cut/cut/mix in. Note: do not wash the sesame oil or fetta.
Now, time for further confessions.
Due to the fact that I cordially dislike baby spinach and tomatoes, and I don’t think fetta is enough protein to satisfy a human, I added more ingredients – specifically mint (huge taste difference), mushrooms (which I actually do like, though they’re not quite as bold in colour as the first three) and cold ham. My justification for today is that you can eat the Christmas salad if you like, OR you can use it as a base, and add whatever else suits you (apple and peanuts are particularly good). It’s called the Christmas salad because of the colours.
What I actually ate (and enjoyed):
This is the only salad I don’t refuse to eat. I’m hopefully getting tested this week to find our if I am ALLERGIC TO FRUIT AND VEGETABLES. Seriously. There’s a condition called fructose malabsorption which would explain why apples make me feel sick. Which is ironic, since in my case “an apple a day keeps the doctor in pay.”
And here’s another pretty pretty picture from Flickr.com:
Yes, I know, it’s not Papua.
*not yet
**mmm, tasty babies.
S#52: Have some delicious delivered to your house
Food is good. Food at home is better. Food at home with no dishes is one of the great pleasures of the modern age. I had Chinese this time.
Mmm. . . duck and mushroom sauce. . .
Here’s a link to a short story I wrote called “The Misbehaving Mountain”:
http://www.onthepremises.com/issue_05/story_05_4.html
And here’s a link to my other blog, where I talked about the four greatest modern books for children (trying to figure out how the writers made their work so awesome in order to improve mine):
https://felicitybloomfield.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/the-first-ten-pages/
In other news this month’s twittertale, “Peace Hostage” is set in a real historical setting – warring tribes in West Papua (now called Irian Jaya). Papua has literally hundreds of distinct languages, so some Christians have decided to live with various tribes (assuming the tribes want them there), learn their language, and write an alphabet for it. They then teach people to read and write, and they translate the New Testament into that language.
One particular translator, Don Richardson, believes that every culture in the world has redemption analogies – echoes of the Jesus story – hidden inside it. He worked with the Sawi tribe, who valued deceit as a virtue, and was horrified when he translated the bit in the Bible about Judas betraying Jesus through friendship. All the Sawi cheered at such a great act of deception. He tried to talk to them about the idea that deception ruins friendships, but they were unimpressed.
In the meantime, the Sawi fought with other tribes in the area, and the violence was worsening. Don asked the chief repeatedly to stop the fighting, but the chief said Don didn’t know what he was asking.
At last it became so risky that Don and his family decided to leave the area. The chief stopped him, and said he would stop the fighting. That was when Don learned the price of peace – the chief’s son.
Each of the chiefs involved gave up their first-born son into the other chief’s custody. This was the only way to ensure peace. The child was called the peace child. If the peace was broken, the child would be killed.
As a Christian, Don immediately saw the peace child as an analogy for Jesus – God’s son coming to live with us, so we could be reconciled to God. When he said as much to the Sawi, they were shocked.
They understood exactly what such a sacrifice meant – and the absolute worst thing a person could do as a Sawi person was to deceive or kill a peace child.
The Sawi tribe is now 70% Christian.
I first heard that story when I was ten years old.
This picture is from Flickr.com
#175: Was it REALLY that bad?*
My brother is almost two years older than me. I have many childhood memories of sitting around bored, begging him to play “Risk” with me, and then enduring a long and torturous defeat. And then repeating the whole familiar pattern, over and over and over.
There are two curious things about these memories. First is the strange appeal of all those tiny pieces moving about on the pretty pretty board. Second is the sheer debilitating horror of drawn-out defeat.
Sadly, it’s the first part of my memories that stuck with me. So, after begging various people to play with me, CJ caved and said yes.
This is him reading the rules. (Is it fun yet???!!!)
This is him turning to drink (is it fun yet?!?!?!?!) before we actually started (my drink – who else would put a margerita ring of pink sugar on a frangelico and milk cocktail?)
And this is him (blue) conceding defeat to me (yellow). Is it fun NOW?!
No it is not!
Even though I won the game (very possibly for the first time ever; certainly for the first time in almost two decades), I still walked away sick to the stomach with despair.
What is it that’s so awful about Risk?
1. You never gain anything without the other person dying (unlike, say, Setters, in which you mostly just build stuff and say, “Yay”). Also, it’s surprisingly disheartening to lose an entire country and/or continent. Just ask Hitler.
2. Dice are mean. Life is arbitrarily awful enough without games to make us feel helpless to control our own fate.
3. And of course, the thing everyone remembers (even me, if I’m honest): The winner is decided pretty early on, and 90% of every game is spent slowly grinding one’s friend into the barren sands of defeat.
The unique geography of the board is also strangely off-putting.
It’s good to know my horrific memories of this depression-inducing game are 100% on the ball.
In happier news, Sawi has survived yesterday’s boar attack, and is probably looking at a view similar to this one, from Flickr.com:
Coming soon: Alphabet! Three-Ingredient Thursday! Go shopping in an antique shop in a small town! Silliness with a pirate ship! Other stuff!
*yes
#173: Love and Pirates
How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? I have three.
Yep, three.
Down from over four hundred. I only needed half a dozen folders (three just for writing – legal data, backups, and conversations with publishers).
I also discovered a few old favourites (now in the “sentimental” folder). Here’s a photo taken after a truck ran into my bathroom (fortunately no-one was sitting on the throne at the time):
And here’s another photo of my parents’ house, taken less than a month earlier (yay for insurance!) This was taken at the far end of the house from the actual fire. The “spiderwebs” are toxic solidified plastic from the burning microwave.
But the most sentimental email of all is the one I sent to my sister the night I met CJ (at a pirate ball – the photo on the right hand side of the blog was taken that night). Here it is (I have cut a lot out of the middle, changed names, and fixed spelling, but nothing has been added):
S#17: Midnight Snackage
I took the chance to have midnight snacks with my sister and her husband while they’re here in Canberra. Unfortunately, she’s pregnant and sleepy so the fondue I prepared so carefully needed to be served at nine before she passed out.
It was, however, the best serve of fruit EVER.
Thanks to the magic of the day, and the unpredictability of pregnant-lady energy swings, we did end up staying up until midnight after all. Luckily, my sister had also prepped some cheesecake. Which we ate right on twelve.
Midnight snacks are, and always will be, awesome.
DEFINITELY play along at home on this one.
Guess what! This is your very last bookshelfporn.com pic, since a new tale (and a new realm of pictures. . . you’ll see) begins tomorrow. This is someone’s private library.
#174: Visit a waterfall
Water + gravity = awesome.
Through a convoluted series of events, some of my family ended up at Fitzroy Falls last weekend. The falls are astonishingly well maintained and well run. Some of you antipodeans may have heard that it’s currently Winter, noun, the middle of. The falls were still worth seeing – arguably, more so than ever.
It was a peculiar day because we reached the falls around midday, but due to light rain and heavy cloud (and mountains), we found ourselves in a strange fantasy world of mist and moss and dripping water. The falls area has a lot of brilliant walking tracks, but we took the direct route to the waterfall viewing platform, which is so short and flat I could have done it with no legs while carrying a recalcitrant badger.
The short track is roughly parallel to the river, and surrounded by lush forest – all of which was glimmering with moisture as it had finished raining moments before.
I admit that even while admiring the rainforest I was beginning to wonder what I’d committed to – the river didn’t look that impressive. Very soon we could all hear the rushing water – but it didn’t sound especially impressive either, muffled as it was by trees and mist. I was horrified when we rounded a corner and saw the railing of the viewing platform – and a wall of white. Too much mist! But no-one else seemed to be screaming and cursing, so I walked up to the edge and – pow! Nothing but air below me for 81 metres (yep, I looked it up) of sheer cliff. We stood and gaped for a while, and then we gaped some more. The mist cleared a little to show the other side of the gorge – and these mountains (I swear they weren’t there before).
You can’t see the bottom of the falls here, but I assure you it was a long way down.
Clearly, geology was left unsupervised at some point in the past, and it decided to mess about.
Speaking of messing about, here’s my impression of Great Cthulhu (small children should look away now):
Three-Ingredient Thursday: The Funny Scotsman
The Funny Scotsman woke me up three times last night (and he was rather lumpy toward the end too, if I’m perfectly honest).
1. Warm the milk.
2. Add melted chocolate to taste (and taste the rest). Save a bit to grate on top.
3. Mix in butterscotch schnapps to taste.
It’s insanely delicious, but quite hazardous. Do not drink it if you are pregnant (because there’s booze in it), going to drive anywhere (the combination of schnapps and hot milk is intensely soporific), or an insomniac (because there’s chocolate and thus caffeine in it).
Also, keep a sharp eye out for cthulhu. Today is the last day of the tale, and the last cthulhu picture. I’ll post the full story tomorrow. The new story starts on 1 August.
This picture turns out to be from alanbaxteronline.com. Alan Baxter is an excellent horror author (not YA, as previously advertised), and a genuinely excellent human being (or possibly a cthulhu in an even more excellent disguise). If you like cthulhu, you’ll like Alan Baxter (personally, I find his books gross and scary).
Felicity Banks 