Kristin Janz

I recently finished reading my contributor’s copy of Aoife’s Kiss, which features my story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate”.  My favorite story was Rachel Zakuta’s “Memory of Snow”, an urban fantasy retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”.  I’ve always found “The Snow Queen” the most compelling of Andersen’s stories, and I thought Zakuta’s version worked both as an homage and as its own story, with Gerda having to rescue her younger brother from under the spell of their magically-gifted mother in Canada.

Aoife’s Kiss also published poetry.  I’m not sure I read enough poetry to be a good judge, but I loved V. Shirley Valencia’s poem “The Stray They Brought Inside”, printed on the back cover of the magazine.  It’s a beautifully written poem, the speculative element both subtle and integral to the piece.

I also enjoyed  ”Wolves”, by Laura DeHaan, a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” with a clever twist; and Chris Ward’s “Happy Shopping”, a satirical science fiction piece about the future of consumerism (you can read Chris Ward’s story and V. Shirley Valencia’s poem for free at the Aoife’s Kiss website).

I really like the diversity of fiction Aoife’s Kiss publishes, everything from steampunk to historical romantic fantasy, to hard science fiction.  They have great cover art, too, this month’s by April Bullard.

Aoife’s Kiss is also the only magazine that both Donald and I have appeared in, so far.  Donald’s story “A Stranger in the Library” appeared back in Issue 23, December 2007.

The magazine comes out in print four times a year, in March, June, September, and December.

So, yesterday I made Lasagna al Pesto from Mollie Katzen’s cookbook The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest.  (The “new” part means it’s a re-issue of the original Enchanted Broccoli Forest, not that it’s about an enchanted broccoli forest only recently discovered.)  One step calls for finely mincing a pound of raw spinach.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pound of raw spinach on a cutting board, unconfined by the plastic bag it came in.  It’s a lot.  I had to work on half a pound at a time, since my cutting board wasn’t large enough to accomodate it all.  And I think I gave up somewhere around “finely chopped”, which consists of significantly larger pieces than “minced”.

Is this small enough?

Even that took a long time. 15 or 20 minutes of chopping, easily, alternating between chef’s knife and cleaver. My shoulder is still a bit stiff.

I also made the green lasagna noodles the recipe called for from scratch, because I couldn’t find any at the grocery store. It was kind of a pain, but I’m a bit of a kitchen masochist (earlier this week, I made coconut milk from an actual coconut). I used the recipe in The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (Beth Hensperger).  You can make a lot of stuff besides bread in a bread machine; this particular cookbook also has recipes for jam.  I thought it worked pretty well.  Rolling out the dough was a bit of a pain, as I don’t have a pasta machine and had to do it by hand.  But it was easier than I remembered from the last time I tried making homemade pasta, when I was a teenager.  I don’t know if it’s because the recipe I used this time was better, or because my arms are stronger now.

A sheet of spinach lasagna noodle drying on the counter

I didn’t bother cutting the pasta into lasagna strips, since I would have had to re-assemble them into sheets in the pan, anyway.  Though I did have some strips, because I didn’t realize the pasta recipe would only make enough for one batch of lasagna, so then I had to trim bits of the edges of the 3 sheets I rolled out to re-assemble into a 4th sheet in the baking dish.

I thought the homemade pasta was good, though not quite as amazing and wonderful as I’d hoped, after all that work. I did like it better than dry noodles, but it didn’t have the light, tender texture of really good fresh pasta. It was a bit doughy. I might have rolled it out too thick, or it might just be the recipe, which called for all-purpose flour instead of semolina.

The lasagna used up the last of my vegetable CSA produce, finally. I’d made massive amounts of pesto during the height of basil season, since we were getting an enormous bunch of fresh basil each week, and stashed it away in the freezer. This was the last container.

I didn’t take a picture of the final lasagna, because I’d made it for a potluck we were hosting, and by the time it came out of the oven, people were already here.  Donald thought it was good, for a vegetarian dish.  Other people seemed to like it well enough, too, since there was only a little bit left over.

3300 words of novel written today!  I think 3800 words is my all-time record thus far, so I’m feeling pretty cheerful right now.  Of course, I don’t know how many of those words will end up staying in the final draft, and I think there are probably too many pixels devoted to characters worrying about what’s happening, telling each other important information that the reader needs to know, and too much about the wheelbarrow.  But, we’ll see.  It’s better than spending all my time on Wikipedia reading about ancient Roman swear words.

Some writing sessions are productive.  Words flow from my fingertips onto the computer screen as quickly as I can think of them, and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.  Other times … not so much.  Here are some of my favorite ways to procrastinate (number 3 was most apt, today).

10.  Re-reading favorite parts of books I liked.

9.  Catching up on e-mail.

8.  Trying to get the armrests and seat height on my office chair just right.

7.  Filing my nails.

6.  Inventing complex back stories for secondary and tertiary characters who will probably be cut out of the final draft anyway.

5.  Facebook.

4.  Reading humorous articles my husband e-mailed links to, then following links on those pages to articles that are less and less funny, until 45 minutes have gone by and I’m watching a YouTube video that isn’t funny at all, wondering how I got to this point.

3.  Research, research, and more research!  (“How can I possibly start writing a near-future science fiction story without learning everything Wikipedia can tell me about climate change, population trends, and peak oil?”)

2.  Reading cookbooks.  (I’m not sure how many writers share this one, but for me it fills the role that for others is often filled by television:  entertainment that doesn’t require too much attention or engagement.)

1.  Extra-long showers (“I’m clean now, but once I get out of the shower I’ll actually have to go work on that story.”)

From Nick Mamatas, ten bits of advice writers should stop giving aspiring writers.

Though I wonder if it would be better to rephrase this as “Ten Bits of Advice Aspiring Writers Should Stop Listening To.”  I’ve received a lot of the advice on the list.  Some of it has been helpful, some of it hasn’t.  My advice is to ignore any advice that you think is wrong (including this).

The comments thread for the article is also worth reading.  One point that comes up is that too much advice about the mechanics of writing (write likeable characters, don’t use adverbs, don’t use verbs other than “said” for dialogue, show don’t tell, go through and trim 10% off the wordcount once you think you’re done–that last one is one of my writerly advice pet peeves) can lead writers to produce stories that are adequate, but not very distinctive.  The best thing for your writing career isn’t necessarily to quash your individual voice and end up writing stories that are just like everyone else’s.

Mamatas’s bottom line is that the only generally applicable advice for writers is:  “Write something publishable, attempt many times to get it published.”