Farewell, Blogspot, Blogger, whatever you're called

You know I wrote something about making my own website? Well I gone and done it now. It was quite hilarious and frustrating, as I merrily broke things left right & center by forgetting to close my curly brackets and such.

Here it is: kate-murray.com

You can see I imported all my JamTart history into it (even your comments, bless!). Going forward, over there is where all the action will be. And lil JamTart, which has been so good to me, shall now languish un-updated.

You can still follow me on Blogger, by putting my blog feed into your Reading List. Or you can subscribe with another RSS reader, if you prefer...

And I shall continue to check my Blogger Reading List to see what you all are up to :)

See you on the other side!

xo

On teeth

Last week, I went to the dentist. I got an NHS checkup (totaling ~5 minutes - the dude basically counts that I still have teeth, does some xrays, then waves me merrily out the door) and a private "hygiene treatment" which is polite dental speak for scraping, poking, twanging and grinding mouth torture.

Anyway. Everybody hates the dentist so I don't need to continue on about how horrible it is. The visit is worthy of mentioning, however, because for the very first time that I can remember in my entire life, the dentist did not tell me I needed further work.

That's awesome.

I also really liked the hygienist -- despite the torture she inflicted on me -- because she talked about where I am not getting to properly with my brushing and recommended a good toothpaste and what else I could be doing to take care of my teeth and so on. All the added-value stuff you expect your dentist to do, only he doesn't because he's paid by the NHS, and that's why you pay extra money to get a private service like a hygiene treatment...

I am a firm believer in looking after your teeth. After all, you only get the two sets and the first set doesn't count! I also haaaate the dentist, just like you. So I haven't been as good about going as often as I should. I do, however, take really good care of my teeth at home every day. I even floss. Okay, not every day (the hygienist told me off for that) but on average, 4 times a week.

Better than not flossing, I reckon.

Setting goals and making rules

Happy Tuesday, bloggerbuddies! Today's been a thick and humid day in London, which was awful in the tube - cramped and sweaty and ugh - but otherwise quite lovely. We're in a wee bit of a heatwave, woop. I hope it sticks around and we get an actual summer this year.

This Friday I'm heading off to Munich for a long weekend, which I'm super excited for. I haven't been to Germany yet! And it'll be my first trip since Canary Islands at Christmas. Duuude. I'm jonesing for some travel.

Urm, what else. Lately I've been working on creating my own website - quite exciting, no? I'm muddling my amateur way through Wordpress and will be mashing up something hopefully halfway decent. When it's ready I'm gonna import the archives from this blog into it, and then continue on updating over there. So I don't know what might happen to thejamtart! I wonder if I can redirect it to my new site instead!

And I've been creeping along on In Finding, word by word. Phew. I've been pondering setting myself a goal around finishing the first draft. Because I've always wanted to finish the first draft this year - but, holy shit guys, it's JULY in two days and I'm only at 65,000 words! So maybe if I have a goal (say, finish the first draft by my birthday in October) then erm that might motivate me more? I could break it down to chunks of words per month.

However, part of me thinks that setting a goal like that may see me writing crap words just to meet the wordcount...!

I've had a new(ish) story idea stirring around in my mind for the last few weeks, to the point where I'd like to start jotting down some notes about it. But I'm committed to finishing In Finding first (Seriously! I am! Don't look like that, I am going to finish this story, for real!). So how about a writer rule: I can't type out anything about the new story until I've finished In Finding - but I can put down ideas in a notebook.

And here are a couple of interesting snippets about writing that I came across recently:

Making a monster: Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, talks about creating a wicked woman, the debacle of film school, and becoming an overnight success after 20 years. I'm always heartened when I hear about writers taking 20 years to get published...!!

Erin Kellison, recently published author of Shadow Bound, talks about her writing path to getting published. I especially love the way it starts: "I had zero aspirations for the manuscript to be published. Zero. My goal was this: learn to write a book while having fun."

Breakfast today

A lovely Sunday morning: the big fat newspaper and a bowl of Greek yogurt, homemade granola, fresh blueberries & strawberries. Not shown: giant cup of coffee like woah.

I made my own granola / muesli yesterday (do you think there's an actual difference between those things, or is it just semantics?). This was a total experiment - I filled a bowl with stuff I found in the cupboard and then spread it on a baking tray and cooked it for a random amount of time (until I thought it was a bit too brown looking, basically). Rolled oats, All Bran, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, pecans, mixed chopped nuts, desiccated coconut, a squirt of honey, and some olive oil. The pecans cooked too quickly compared to the other stuff, but it's still quite tasty and crunchy and not burnt-y tasting.

12th & 13th books of 2010

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I briefly mentioned this book a couple of posts ago. My sister-in-law gave me it for Xmas, as she knew how much I loved The Time-Traveller's Wife. That book - TTTW - mygod, I bawled my freakin' eyes out reading it. Full on weeping so I could barely read the words. I honestly can't remember any other book that made me cry like that (admittedly I was ill & sleep-deprived at the time...)

But this book? Nope. I didn't give a crap about any of the characters. Not a thing. Was not engaged in what could happen to them. The big reveals / twists were ho-hum. The author's research showed through in great big bald chunks of info dumps about Highgate Cemetery. I loved the paranormal / speculative inclusion but - sigh - nope. Not a good book, I'm afraid.


The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Okay, now we're talking! Wonderful humorous space opera sci fi goodness, in a handy dandy paperback that I chewed through like marshmallow. I love John Scalzi and I've only read 2 of his books so far. Yeah. I'm gonna find me some more.

This is a follow-up book to his first, Old Man's War, which I read at Christmas. Although -- it's not a full-on sequel featuring all the same characters. And okay, yes, I think the first book was the better one and again this seems to come down to me liking the characters in the first book better but this one is still on par.

It's been a while since I've been really excited about a sci fi book / author. I love sci fi, I say it all the time, but truth is I actually don't read much of it. What I want to read is character-driven stories, not idea-driven or science-driven. It's hard to tell where a book lies on that regard when I pick it up off the shelf. I'm not good at finding sci fi books I want to read.

I need to get off my ass and start reading some of the classics, I reckon. I need to educate myself more.

I bought a few magazines today...

Here's some random things. Pretty much entirely unrelated except I'm thinking about em all.

Beauty products like woah

Today I bought 3x Glamour magazines. It's the Benefit gift issue, so I got one of each!

• Bad Gal kohl eyeliner pencil - lovely and smudgy and dark
• Eye Bright eye brightner pencil - not as shimmery as I'd thought, but will be fun to experiment with
• It Stick concealer pencil - soft and easily smoothed

Gave a couple of my workmates the spare magazines. Wahay for cheapo Benefit products -- only £6 to get all 3! -- with the added bonus of a trashy magazine to while away the evening on...

Listening to these a lot

Fall Out Boy - Sugar We're Going Down



Fall Out Boy - America's Suitehearts



Like like like this band, and sadly it looks like they are on 'indefinite hiatus' right now. Above average lyrics and the lead singer's voice rocks my socks off and honestly, I don't have a lot of bouncy peppy music in my collection so this stuff is sorely needed.

(It bugs me LIKE CRAZY that I can't reduce the size of those embedded videos to fit the width of my blog! Argh! Look at them hanging over the edge like that! Argh!)

Smashing Mazine tells it like it is

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites by Paul Boag

Work on websites? Read this post, if you haven't seen it before. It's insightful.

I disagree with the first point though! Because marketing is not "a monologue". A website is a communication channel (on a technical platform) and belongs to marketing. Although of course you need a web marketer/manager to own it.

Think of a magazine -- it's run by an editorial team (who have the technical know-how to lay out a page) -- not the printing team.

A very important vegetable!

Sunday evening and the clouds are high and pale and rolling past. It's been muggy all day and now they've broken and dropped some rain. I love days like this. Hell, any day where it's not freezing cold and pissing rain in London

The writing has been pretty difficult the last few weeks. I don't like to write about writing when it's a struggle! It was everything past the Big & Scary scene - none of it worked. So I chopped it all out, 3000 words excised and pasted into the "Poor Little Cut Words" file. And started again. Slowly. Figuring out every scene first and then, word by word, wrestling it in.

I like it better now. I'm not sure if it's right yet, but it's good enough that I feel I can carry on writing new scenes.

So now my word count still hovers around ~61,000 words. Sigh. Such a slow process, this writing thing.

I still haven't edited Piscky's Ascent, after a couple of good reviews from OWW. And I should deliver some crits to other members there too! Eek.

~ ~

Tonight I made lasagna for the first ever time. Big field mushrooms, little aubergines, red onions, layered with pasta, bechamel sauce and spinach, topped with grated mozzarella. I make a damned fine bechamel sauce, so it was the logical next step to turn it into a lasagna. It was alright, though I wished I could've made it with pumpkin.

You know, this puzzles me. I've never been able to find a decent pumpkin in the UK. It's all butternut squash, which I find tasteless, or - at Halloween - those orange things which are more suited to carving than eating.

I miss a good bit of roast buttercup pumpkin, with its dark green skin and tasty bright orange insides.


Oh! I just googled it and it's really a squash (yeah, don't ask me what the difference is, cause I dunno) and looks like it might be a Kiwi variety because check this out: there is a NZ BUTTERCUP SQUASH COUNCIL. Seriously!

They say: "Today, Buttercup Squash is the country's fourth largest horticultural export making it a very important vegetable to the New Zealand economy."

Yep, a very important vegetable.

Loving & loathing

It's the last day of May, can you believe it! And I think June's supposed to be the first month of summer, right? So, tomorrow's forecast of rain and a high of just 14 °C is clearly wrong...

In honour of a new month and a new season, I'm going to write my first "loving & loathing" post. I see a lot of these kinda posts on other blogs and feel like I just gotta get on board!

IN:

• Coffee-flavoured Bailey's. Totally delish over ice.
• Bank holidays. Can't beat a three-day weekend to chill out!
• Inglot. A Polish cosmetics brand with an awesome store in Westfield mall. They are great value and loads of fun! I will def be going back. Pity they have a crap website with MUSIC! I can't stand websites with sound.

OUT:

• Writer's block. I've been struggling to move forward with In Finding for the last few weeks. Hating every word I write. It's this one scene - I need to get it right before I can go on. Gah!
  
• Being in the UK right now. All my family are together in NZ! My brother & his wife & in-laws have flown there for a holiday and I wish I was there too.
• Folk music on TV ads. Okay I admit, this isn't a "dislike right now", it's a "dislike all the time". I'm so OVER cutesy folksy music on advertisements. I blame the bouncy ball ad for starting it all.

Greenwich on a Sunday

It's a bank holiday weekend! I looove 3-day weekends. Today I went out to Greenwich with some buddies.

The view from the place where time began:


And my loot from Greenwich markets:

• Nigerian vegetable stew and bean stew with rice.
• Chorizo.
• Fat olives stuffed with pimentos.
• Honey crusted almonds.
• Lemon herbs & sprices marinade.
• Freshly ground irish whiskey coffee (this smelled so amazing, the whole market smelled of it, I had to get some!)
• And a bottle of Bordeaux red wine I picked up on the way home

Yum!

Book cover design

Today at lunchtime, I found a few blogs about book cover design. I've known for a while that authors get no say in how their books look -- which I understand but still think sucks -- but I never knew that even publishers can get their selected designs overturned by the big time booksellers!

Thinking about that, I wonder how wickedly cool cover designs even get out there in the first plase - e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Are there marketing departments in publishing houses that just stamp their feet and refuse to back down? Are there any authors that do get a say - JK Rowling, Stephen King?

I wonder how a publisher might choose to illustrate the story I'm writing at the moment, In Finding. It's a paranormal chick-lit. So. Some kind of wistful woman on a beach and scrawly handwriting for the title? haha, my poor story. Actually, the book I've just finished reading is Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger and you know what? Kind of paranormal chick-lit-y... kind of... but no headless pink ladies on that cover. Instead its cover is dark, and the title suggests darkness too. I thought it wasn't.

Here's what I browsed through today:

• Guardian books blog: "Judge a cover by its book - the conservative tastes of over-mighty retailers have resulted in generic jackets that say nothing about their contents."
• The Book Design Review blog - favourite covers of 2009. Vote for your favourite! (Mine is Columbine).
• A list of Smashing Magazine's faves - includes some beaten up, old school style covers.

11th book of 2010

Wastelands
Sories of the apocalypse
by multiple authors

Love! I love love love apocalypse stories and this is one big ole book full of em!

There's stories from authors including Octavia E Butler, Orson Scott Card, Elizabeth Bear, Stephen King and Gene Wolfe...

My favourites were:

The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi. Vivid, a grey and grainy feel, terrifically sad in this brilliant way where the narrator and characters are not but you, as the reader, your heart breaks a little.

Never Despair by Jack McDevitt. Because it has Churchill and he's painted so very neatly. A quiet character study in a ruined world.

Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus by Neal Barrett, Jr. Rockingly rowdy and fun approach to the apocalypse, flavours of Tank Girl and Mad Max, as Ginny drives around with her companions selling sex, tacos & dangerous drugs. Great stuff.

Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers by John Langan. The last story in the anthology and the best by far, in this huge way, this engrossing phenomenal story way. From the construction of the words, to the characters and how they are forced to change in mere moments, from the crazy fucked up world that he's invented here - roaving savage beasts and people turning into flowers - it's all amazing. I feel like I could read this story over and over again and get more out of it every time.

If you like post-apocalyptic stories then you should check out this book!

One day I will write my own version(s). I think you can write as many shorts as you want but you only get one novel (Don't ask me where that rule came from. It just appeared!) So, as much as I desperately want to write a sprawling post-apocalypse novel, I'm going to let it simmer in my brain for a while until I have the best kind of skills to write it well, to write it the way it deserves.

9th and 10th books of 2010

Bertie, May and Mrs Fish: Country Memories of Wartime by Xandra Bingley.

A memoir book I picked up in one of the charity shops on North End Rd. I got this one because most of it is set during WW2 / post WW2, about a girl growing up in the English countryside, and I'm trying to absorb details about this time period for the story I'm writing. This book has quite a different writing style to it - full of ellipses, no quotation marks, people's dialogue running into the text. I didn't like this book, to be honest, but I finished it. Mostly because I'm doing these blogposts about what I've read so I don't feel like I can drop a half-read book now!

The Art & Craft of Storytelling by Nancy Lamb

One of the books about writing that I selected for inspiration. Sadly, this book didn't quite kick it off for me. It feels super weird to say this, but it was too basic. I knew all the stuff she was writing about. I found myself skimming pages, skipping ahead. Still, it covers a good range of information and I may use chapters for reference when I go back to edit my current story. And I found a couple of quotes I liked. First from Nancy, the writer herself. She said "honour your art" (well, actually she said "honor your art"...) in a piece about making sure you write, if you want to be a writer. And I like that. If you have the call to write, then you need to honour that. It's the perfect concept.

The other was this quote from Eddy Peters about the English language: "Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets." It made me laugh.

A big fake foam shark!

This has been a strangely productive Wednesday after a couple of weeks of slackness on the writing front.

Tonight I made some minor edits to Piscky's Ascent, the short story I wrote in January. Then I renewed my membership the OWW (Online Writing Workshop for Sci-Fi) and posted the story for crits. I'm going to submit this story. Somewhere, not sure yet. Here's the thing: I've never submitted anything before. Apart from to writing competitions. But not anything for publication. And it's time to do something about that!

I'm going to get myself re-absorbed into the OWW and post some more crits of my own (only 2 more and I will attain "Veteran Reviewer" status!) I've been a member there, on and off, since 2001. Holy sardines, Batman! (I saw some of the original 1966 Batman movie tonight - I've never seen it before! - and it's just awful! I think it jumped the shark before the Fonze was even born - have you seen the foam-shark attack? It attacks Batman while he's hanging from the ladder of a helicopter. Luckily, Robin passes him a handy can of Shark-Repellent-Bat-Spray to ward off the shark, which falls off Batman's leg and then EXPLODES in the ocean. Yep.) Anyway, the workshop is brilliant and if you are an amateur writer in the sci-fi field I highly recommend it.

After the OWW sojurn, I added a few hundred words to In Finding and broke through the 60,000 word mark. A lot of the last 10 k words on that are crap but I need to write more of the story before I know how to go back and fix them. We.are.getting.there.slowly.

Sometimes the most frustrating thing about writing is just how slow it is. For me, at least. Knowing that I have to finish this first draft before I can even start editing, and that process will be lengthy enough too.

Then I played around with another short story that's been brewing since I dialled up some prompts on the story spinner. It doesn't feel as solid to me as Piscky's Ascent, but all short story experience is good experience.

Now, I'm going to publish this, brush my teeth, and settle down to read more of my latest book (Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse - a collection of short stories by some LEGENDARY writers - review will come when I finish it!)

Happy Saturday!

It's another beautiful weekend day in London. I'm super happy with the weather here lately. It's been so lush. Fingers crossed we finally get a decent summer. I personally think I deserve it after living here for almost 4 years without one... Today it's supposed to hit 21 degrees C. WOAH guys. The TWENTIES. That's big.

Duffster and I are off to a BBQ this afternoon at my friends' place. Typically for a bunch of Antipodeans, as soon as the sun comes out, we wheel out the BBQ. This is the second one of the season already! I have some steak pieces marinating on the bench, and we've been tasked with bringing cheese & crackers. We'll pick up some cider on the way and I hear there's Pimms on the cards too!

I am coming down with a cold though, boo! Why does that always happen on a Friday so you get sick on the weekend?! Hopefully I don't infect everyone else on this gawguss sunny afternoon...

Sunday it's Anzac Day - New Zealand & Australia's Poppy Day. Last year, we all went to the dawn service at the London memorials in Hyde Park. I'd love to go again this year, especially as it's on a weekend day again so you can get up early and observe then go back home and get back into bed! But because I'm not feeling so well I think I'll pass.


I'm glad I went last year though. It's a special and important day to respect. Maybe I'll make some Anzac biscuits on Sunday instead...

/photo from http://evanelam.photo-log.com

7th and 8th books for 2010

These next two books I have read this year are fiction novels that I felt drew a lot on each author's personal life and experiences.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

An Xmas gift from my sister-in-law, this is a Pulitzer-Prize winning story of a Dominican family, set in both New Jersey and Dominican Republic. My sister-in-law said I should read it with a Spanish phrasebook handy - wish I had! Colourful and easy-to-read and funny + sad, spanning stories from across the family including the title character Oscar, narrated by a friend of his sister. Oscar is this huge fat guy with a total love of sci-fi and comics and no game with the ladies. His sister is sharp-edged, kind of angry. Their mother - I felt so sorry for her, in a way that made me realise - wow, there's some great characters in this book. The author, Junot Diaz, is a Dominican whose family moved to NJ when he was a child.

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

This book... this book is marketed as a novel but halfway through, I felt like I was actually reading a memoir. It's very memoir-ish, full of scenes from someone's life rather than having an actual storyline. And the author is from Charleston and raised to be a 'Camellia' (women's society member), just like the main character. It was a smooth read, concocting a lovely atmosphere of Southern upbringing and lifestyle and personality, but ended with what felt like a tacked-on ending at a point where the author just ran out of scenes. It read in a very real way, and I think that's what made it feel memoir-ish. All the characters and actions are real people things, making mistakes (again and again) and have real emotions and there's no happy sparkly ending. I got this book from one of the op-shops down North End Rd, and think I'll return it there too...

A random assortment of updates

I owe this sucker an update! Should have posted during Easter. So, the weather is just luscious in London at the moment. Full of light, blooming blue skies. Promise of warmer weather still on the MetOffice website. Love love love. You all know how much I hate the darkness and cold of winter.

The Duffster & I have booked plane tickets -- many, many tickets -- for Christmas and New Years: Nelson for the former, Melbourne for the latter! It's going to be a whirlwind trip of 3 weeks but I'm already hyped up about seeing my family again (it will be 2 years since my last visit), and drinking up some southern hemisphere sun, and all the stuff I raved about last time - fish & chips, L&P, jellytip ice cream, taking the boat out for fresh fish and mussels and oysters and scallops... Plus a trip to Melbourne where I will finally meet Duffy's family!

This week for my writing night, I skimmed back through the short story I wrote in January, Piscky's Ascent. Made a few edits here and there. Now I want to write another one -- short stories are a nice way to work on something different without completely distracting myself from the novel.

I'm going to use this wicked brainstormer wheel to uncover some story prompts RIGHT NOW!


You can click "random" to generate three things, or use your mouse to turn each disc. I just got the following: miracle / rotting / cubicle. Hmm.

I wrote Piscky's Ascent using Notwelshman's prompts of "fish" and "escaping". I love how you can build a story from just a few words, a few ideas. They are the pieces of string you pick up, you pull up, and as you pull they bring more ideas with them, till you have a whole ball of string in your hands, along with other useless metaphors. Stories are everywhere.

Alice in Wonderland vs Return to Oz

I have had a busy week, with no writing so far and it's Sunday already! April should be a better month though, with Easter and another long weekend that I'm taking at the end of the month. Whole DAYS for writing. I shall be like A Real Writer(TM).

As part of that busy-ness, I saw Alice in Wonderland on Wednesday, with buddies from my old job. We went to Imax and got the full 3D experience, which was a tad overwhelming at times when there were character close-ups. I was only able to focus on, like, a single nostril or an eyelash, rather than their whole face.

Verdict: D. It's "missing something", as Julia put it, and I agree. Like a soul. Or a heart. I didn't care for any of the characters. En passant, why is it called Alice in Wonderland when in this movie it's not, it's "Underland"? So, I giggled a few times, got vertigo a couple of times. I liked guessing who all the voices were. Even though I didn't care for any of the characters, I thought the casting was absolutely brilliant. But those things don't really add up to anything that can redeem the shabby story. It's not the one you know; it's a made-up sequel where an adult Alice returns to Underland where the Red Queen has run amok with her Jabberwocky.

The story makes me think of Return to Oz. Have you seen Return to Oz? The 1985 'sequel' to the Wizard of Oz. But it ain't no musical. It's dark and crazy and terrifying and enthralling and everything Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" wanted to be.

In Return to Oz, Dorothy is sent to a mental institution because she refuses to stop talking or dreaming about this "imaginary" world. She manages to escape before she can be given electroshock therapy (yeah, you heard me right!) and finds her way back to Oz. But it's a world changed from the one she last visited: the evil Nome King has taken over in co-operation with the wicked Mombi. Mombi's minions are the Wheelers, a gang of gurgling gulping punkish creatures who have wheels instead of hands and feet. The Nome King has turned everyone to stone and Mombi has chopped off all the beautiful maidens' heads, which she keeps in a room of glass cages AND SHE WEARS THEM, changing her head at whim. There's a desert that turns everything living that touches it to sand. There's the crumbled and deserted ghost town that was once Emerald City, a destroyed Yellow Brick Road, the imprisoned Scarecrow... This movie is actually based on the books, in a way the musical wasn't, so it's not really a sequel but a whole new imagining.


I adored Return to Oz as a kid. It was absorbing and scary and awesome. And the best thing is, I watched it again about 5 years ago and it was still cool. There's movies you loved as a kid that don't stand the test of time but this one does (I'm sorry, Dark Crystal, but those weird puppet voices freak me out, I can't stand em. That one has to stay in my childhood).

I can't help but compare Burton's Alice in Wonderland with Return to Oz, as the storylines are so similar and so are the character roles, and they are both filled to the brim with quirky weirdness. But in Return to Oz, you care about the characters. You WANT Dorothy and Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump and Bellina to succeed.


Dorothy is resourceful and good-hearted, she doesn't pine & mope into the sunset like Alice or declare that she can't do something (Don't you find Alice a bit... bland?). The Wheelers are wonderfully scary and would knock over the Red Army without a backward glance. Mombi is sadistic and mean and would KICK the Red Queen's ASS. The Red Queen cares too much, she wavers on whether she wants to be loved or feared. Mombi has no such qualms.


As for the Knave of Hearts, his limp-wristed posturing is no match for the vengeful and deep voiced and threatening Nome King -- even if the Nome King has a secret achilles heel issue... I guess we'd have to compare the Mad Hatter to Jack Pumpkinhead, the latter being a bit sappy, so this might be the only case where Alice in Wonderland has the edge. But that weird talking dog Bayard is boring compared to Tik-Tok, the fierce metallic army of Oz with his twitching brass moustache and habit of winding-down at inconvenient times, and the Dormouse is cute but ineffective and not quite as entertaining as Gump, who is quite possibly the weirdest character I've ever seen in a movie, being half moose and half couch (that's right: he's furniture).

Plus, in Return to Oz, there's Bellina the talking chicken, and a tree that grows lunchboxes! I think I want to watch it again now...

Sweet spicy kisses

I've lived in the UK for almost 4 years and the country still surprises me. Like this time I had a jonesing for ginger kisses and went to the supermarket and found out that they don't have them here! Can I hear a big WTF? Yes, that's what I said. Sweet soft gingery cakes sandwiched over creamy filling? Nuh-uh, not here in the UK, they appear to be an Antipodean delicacy.

So I found a recipe and broke out my inner Stepford Wife again.



Recipe from here

biscuits:
125 gm flour (1 cup)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
115gm butter
85 gm caster sugar
1 egg
2 tsp golden syrup
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 Tbsp hot water

filling:
30 gm butter
120gm icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 Tbsp boiling water
1 Tbsp preserved ginger, finely chopped
(I didn't think this looked like enough so I added more butter & icing sugar)

Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Line baking trays with baking paper.

Sift together flour, baking powder and spices.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then beat in the egg, followed by the golden syrup. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients. Dissolve the baking soda in the hot water and add to the mix. Put small teaspoonfuls of the mixture on the trays and bake for about 10 minutes then remove to cooling rack.

Making the filling by beating the butter, icing sugar and vanilla together with an electric beater, then adding in the boiling water a little at a time. Continue beating until the mixture is very light and creamy. Fold in the preserved ginger. (I actually melted the butter with the ginger in it first, before adding the icing sugar, etc).

Pair up the biscuits, matching sizes, then put a teaspoonful of filling on the lower half and stick 'em together.

This recipe made me 13 ginger kiss sandwiches (26 biscuits) but they're quite substantial, I think I'll make very small teaspoonfuls next time. And I'll definitely make these again; they're YUMMY. Softish and gingery and tasty, with a creamy icing filling, just like they should be!

Sixth book of 2010

Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel

This book is responsible for one my ridiculous flights of fancy, where I get so enamoured of something (usually a Big Crafty Idea) and totally immerse myself in it for about, ooh, 4 weeks, before I get enamoured of something else instead. So here we go again with perfume. I'm already totting up in my mind all the ingredients I want to buy, the equipment, the beautiful perfumes I'm going to make...

This book is bad for me.

It's a rambling journey through the world of natural perfume. Covering a brief history of it, various types of scents, where they come from, what they mix well with. Base and heart and head notes. How to make your own. Much of it is very overwritten and purpled prose and "ohmygoodness esoteric amazing wow wow blah", I found my eyes glazing over (I don't remember thinking that when I first read this book. Perhaps I have become more cynical since 2004...) BUT the good bits are still good, which is looking at specific notes and what they smell like and how they blend with each other. Less flight of fancy, more actual useful knowledge.

If I indulge myself this time, it will be to 'dabble' rather than 'completely immerse'! Despite my protestation above, there's something about the magicality of natural perfume that I love. I love reading the lists of different botanical extracts and thinking how they might smell, how they might blend with each other.

50,032 words

Woah, it's Tuesday already. I've been meaning to make a "what I did this weekend" post but it's a bit late for that now. Apart from saying: I managed to break 50,000 words on In Finding! In spite of all my procrastination. A great goal like that is easy to motivate yourself to shoot for. A big ole round chunky number of words.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever written this many solid words on a project before. I mean, I've gone past 50k on a maybe 3 other stories, but they were full of holes and "write a scene here"s and all peterey-outy. In Finding is holding it together. And I feel quite well set up for continuing to the end (this is noncommittal because I acknowledge that I might just write myself into a dead end).

I hope the motivation continues, because I really want to finish this.

Right now, I am mid-way through this awesome scene... oooh it's a good one with drama and rain and rooftops and Big Reveals. I've had it partly written since the very start and now I'm getting to fit it into the story and complete it. Leaving the last writing session at such a point makes it easy to pick up the next time I sit down with the story.