Upcoming Guest Post

On Tuesday, I will have an interview up at Chris Henderson’s blog, http://thewritechris.blogspot.com/

Chris blogs about writing, books, and writers. Stop by and see what it’s about!

 

A Cooking Post With (a Little) Preaching

The observant follower of this blog will have noticed that I have a page titled “Holistic Life.” I don’t crow about this page – it’s mostly there to help me keep track of those parts of my life that don’t fall under the umbrella of “writer.”

It includes things like natural childbirth and true breastfeeding, Real Food, and what I like to think of as “honest” living. The kinds of things that speak to my pagan heart, and lead to (or spring from) a deep respect for our planet as a living entity.

I have a separate page for recipes, but in all fairness, my recipes belong on the holistic page as well. To me, the gathering and preparation of ingredients is very deeply holistic, and this requires a fervent avoidance of food created in a laboratory and produced in a factory. I believe this even though I am a scientist with a deep respect for the scientific method, and even though I imagine a future for humanity that involves living on other planets, moons, or on space stations.

I think that no matter where we go, we have to start with, and abide by, the basics. I think that is more obvious and true than ever before, on our very own planet.

This is a very grandiose opening for what is essentially a cooking post. But I’ve had a double margarita, so you’ll just have to bear with me.

In my private efforts to live an honest life that is sustainable for the planet, I try to purchase and use food that is grown in a sustainable way. I have never succeeded in growing my own food, so I have to search out farmers to do it for me. I am very lucky to live in an area that is as natural-centric as I am, and thus encourages organic farmers and pastured animals.  Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that we have a lovely, mild climate to back us up, not to mention a bay and an entire ocean just a few miles to the west.

We do have to deal with frequent droughts, and let me tell you, that takes some thought to work around. But living holistically means living within the climate you have.

So what has me crowing today? Besides the margarita?

Nothing odd or fabulous. Just a meal that took advantage of holistic living. But, I hear you say, WTF does that mean?

To me, it means living thoughtfully. Putting thought into meal preparation, obtaining ingredients, where things come from, and how they are made or grown. This isn’t just food – I also think about clothing, cleaning supplies, and even the tires on my car. Some of these, I have no control over (the tires, for instance). But food – I’m not perfect, but I’ve got a lot of it figured out.

So, for instance, several weeks ago I cooked up a large pot of beans. In this case, it was mixed beans – kidney, black, white, garbanzo – although sometimes I cook a large pot of one particular kind. I keep a hefty supply of dried beans on hand all year long, and cook whatever my mood dictates. I will usually cook them without seasoning, just the beans and fresh, filtered water.  Once they are drained and cooled, I store them in small baggies in the freezer, to use as I need them.

Yes, I do need to think about those plastic baggies. I use and reuse them, but they really are bad for us and for the environment.

Anyway, I had the beans stored in the freezer. Then the other day, Whole Foods had organic whole chickens on sale for $1.99/lb, so I bought two. One went right into the freezer and the other one went into the oven. We ate a little for dinner, I made pot pie out of the back/neck/wings, and the rest went into the freezer, divided into dinner-size portions.

So tonight, some beans and chicken combined with onion, serrano chili, garlic, and tomatillos to make a meal with a Mexican flair. I had a bag of corn tortillas that needed to be used, so I cut them into triangles, brushed them with oil and salt, and baked until crisp. An avocado that was still hanging around made guacamole, and margaritas finished the dinner.

If you make margaritas using one of those green mixes that come in a bottle – please stop. You deserve better than that. Buy some limes, squeeze the juice out, add good tequila and triple sec, or grand mariner if it’s a special occasion. Rub some lime on the rim of your glass and dip it into salt for a pretty presentation.

It only took a few minutes to put the meal together.  It didn’t cost more than a couple of dollars per serving, and most of that was the tequila. My point is that it’s possible to eat well (and cheaply) without recourse to factory foods. It’s good for you, and it’s good for the planet.

Give it a try.

Another Free Day for the Farm on Amazon

Wednesday, Feb. 22 is another free day for my SF short story, The Farm. After that, it goes back to 99 cents. So save a buck and download it for free! If you like that one, you can come back and buy a copy of Shipbuilder, the time travel romance about the builder of the Titanic. It’s available in paperback or Kindle, and is also on Smashwords in other eformats.

 

Reviewing Books and The Writer’s Lot

Thanks to everyone promising they’ll review my book when they get a chance. I’m almost sorry for bringing it up, since of course, the people who feel bad about it are very busy writers, themselves. I do want their reviews – but my last post was really an attempt to nudge the average reader, who might not think about leaving a review.

It’s amazing how much work is involved in this writing gig. Especially since the tax people consider it a “hobby” if you’re not actually making money from it. If all a writer did was write the next story, we could spend several hours a day on it. But writing the next story is only part of the picture. If I was posting it as a job opening, the list of tasks would look something like this:

Daily or several times a week:
Read and critique the work of other writers
Write blog post
Read blogs of other writers and customers (or prospective customers)
Leave comments on as many blogs as possible
Read and comment on other social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. Share and retweet as needed
Visit and post to online forums, workshops, and professional organizations
Read, reply to, and organize email
Write guest posts or interview for other blogs
Interview other writers and help plug their books
Write your own book

Other tasks to be done as needed:
Attend conventions and conferences, appear at book readings/signings
Meet with writer groups for critiquing sessions or workshops
Research for your book
Revise your book and proofread, proofread, proofread!

For the independent author:
Create book covers, format and layout of manuscript (or interview others to do the job)
Interview editors
Search out and purchase ad spots, create ads (or interview others to do the job)

I’m sure there’s more, but you get the point. And all of this is without benefit of a paycheck.  Royalties are few and far between, at least for the new author.

So to all my writer friends, believe me, I know why you haven’t gotten around to reviewing my book. I hope you have the same understanding about me.

 

 

Reports and Reviews

A baby has been accomplished, and I got home just before ten p.m. last night, with sore feet. They are still a little sore this morning, but I have hopes they will improve quickly.

Do you know that even 24 hours away from computer leaves me with hundreds of emails/tweets/FB posts/blog posts to catch up on? I wish I really was this popular.

Removing the doula hat, and donning the author hat: May I humbly beg my readers for reviews of Shipbuilder and/or The Farm? I know I am asking for your time, and believe me, I understand you don’t have much of it to give. But if you can, I would greatly appreciate it, either on Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, your own blog, or wherever else you post reviews.

If you have avoided leaving a review because you don’t want to say anything bad… I understand that, too. But I truly believe that a reviewer’s opinion is sacrosanct, so I will not say a word about it. If it’s so bad, you just can’t post anything, I beg you: send me a private note about it through the contact page. I want to improve as a writer.

 

Shoes, Feet, and Labor: The Writer’s Other Life

Today, I am distracted. I’m wearing my doula hat, so must be ready to dash off to the hospital at a moment’s notice. So I am.

Ready.

Being ready means I’m having trouble concentrating on anything else. I don’t know why it affects me this way, but it does. Perhaps it’s because of last night’s poor sleep. In general, I’m sleeping much better than I have in years, but once in a while, a bad night still raises its head, forcing my head from the pillow.

For news on the “you-don’t-say” front, I wore high heels last night. I have friends who spit their coffee out at that and immediately took it to the gutter. We’ll pause a moment for them to clean up and calm down…

All righty, then. My POINT, is that a few months ago, I had reason to think I would never wear nice shoes again. That I would spend the rest of my life wearing clumpy old-lady shoes, meaning no disrespect to old ladies, of course.  Or their footwear. I completely understand why they have to wear such shoes. I’ll be perfectly willing to wear them when I’m ninety or so, too. I’ll even wear them now if, when I need to, I can wear the Other Kind.

Like Valentine’s Day dinner. We went out to dinner, I wore a dress, and my fancy black high heels with the shimmering stars on them. I was even able to walk in them, without pain.

And THEN… and then I changed the heels for a pair of lower heeled shoes (but still not those orthopedic clunkers) and I went to dance class. I danced for an hour in normal shoes. My right foot hurt a little bit, but not any more than usual.

I can only say this means that the acupuncture has done wonders, and I am very, very grateful. I will wear the clunkers when I go to the hospital, as I will probably be on my feet the whole time I’m there. This may cause a setback, but I’m prepared for that.

For now, I wait for the call, with my doula hat on and excitement drumming through my veins. I love helping a woman through her labor. Even if my feet hurt.

 

Patty Jansen: Love and Character in Hard SF

Guest post today! Say “hi” to Australian writer Patty Jansen:

Because it is almost Valentine’s Day, Marlene asked me to talk about love and character in hard SF, because these are not aspects traditionally associated with the genre.

People often accuse hard SF of being devoid of character. The writers, they say, are more interested in showing off technology than in investing in their characters. Often, they’re probably right, because one important point of hard SF is to show off the technology or science. It simply comes with the genre and has its own audience. Readers expect the tech or scientific explanations. That’s why they buy it. Hard SF without tech or science is like erotica without the sex.

That said, I dispute the notion that hard SF is by its nature devoid of character. It is not and it does not need to be. But it is true that a lot of hard SF is about the process and the science rather than the people. I’m thinking of grand epics like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which has many characters and too many character threads to follow anyone in particular. As a result, the books are about the process of colonising Mars, and use the character to illustrate that, rather than the other way around. Those books have a similar feel to large epic fantasies, say Lord of the Rings. In both books, we see snippets of interesting characterisation, but the books aren’t solely about the characters, so we spend too little time with many of them to become emotionally invested. Similarly, character suffers in all books where another aspect, rather than a personal problem, takes centre stage, whether that be technology, history or grand battles, racing cars or crime-solving. Yes, a lot of these books, especially crime, manage to squeeze a lot of character in.

The fault of creating the disconnect between reader and character lies not with the technology, or the historic facts, or the grand battles, but with the POV chosen for the novel. In hard SF, as well as in epic fantasy or historic fiction, we’ll often see almost-omniscient multi-POV tales, where the POV shifts sometimes for no reason other than to show off something, and sometimes even jumps to a character who has no other scenes in the book. In my view, that’s simply lazy writing. It’s easier to show off large schemes if you have a couple of viewpoints to describe it. But it’s not real life, where we are limited to one viewpoint. Every time a novel adds a POV character, it takes a further step away from the readers’ connection with the characters.

In novels within hard SF or epic fantasy that restrict POV, you immediately get a very different feel. In Stephen Baxter’s Titan, I was impressed not just with the tech detail, but with the POV immersion in one of the characters, the middle-aged astronaut Paula. I’m terrible at remembering character names of novels I’ve read, and just the fact that I remember this one is telling. While reading, I got the feeling that I understood what it would be like to be locked in a tin can with six others for years, what it was like having to decide whether to give a crew member irreplaceable medicine while she was going to die anyway, and what it was like being on an intensely cold world with no hope of rescue. In fantasy, I was similarly impressed with Joe Abercrombie. Close-ness to the POV often means that the story becomes less vanilla and more gritty. The characters worry not just about the evil overlord, but also about frozen feet or whether or not an ill-advised jump in the sack may have led to pregnancy, and the implications.

This is something the romance and chick-lit genres understand intuitively. They are about feelings, and therefore feelings get a lot of word-space, by which time there is no room left for extra characters. Romance and chick-lit novels rarely have a large cast of POV characters (more than two being many in this case). Many are written in first person. Love is magnificent to write in first person or third limited. Love is tension. Jumping to the love interest’s POV and showing that he/she does/doesn’t reciprocate feelings reduces the tension created by a primary character falling in love. For “love” substitute anything the character feels passionate about.

When planning a novel, every time you add a POV character, it means you have less word-space for the feelings and immediate experiences of your primary character. It is a style choice that is independent of genre.

Bio:

Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing hard SF, space opera and hybrid fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27^th anthology. Her story Survival in Shade of Orange will be published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Her novels (available at ebook venues) include Watcher’s Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (middle grade SF),Charlotte’s Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy Fire & Ice (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005TF1B9K) and Dust & Rain (epic post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy).

Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at:http://pattyjansen.com/