I took my camera to Readercon, but didn’t remember to take a single picture. Fortunately, others are not so lax. Here’s my friend Matthew Kressel’s Readercon photo album.
There a few pictures of me. Interestingly, I think there are more pictures of my boyfriend Donald than of me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I’m always happy to look at pictures of Donald! 🙂
There’s a lot of material on the internet about how not to be a deadbeat writer. Much of it is posted by fiction editors, often in exasperation after the latest badly-formatted 30,000-word story about zombie mangosteens, submitted in response to guidelines clearly stating that only vampire vegetable stories under 4000 words will be considered.
While I agree that editors have a right to be irritated by all the writers out there who fail to follow clearly-outlined submission guidelines, send death threats in response to rejections, and consider the use of proper punctuation to have a stifling effect on their creativity … well, I just think that there’s another side to the story, and lately I haven’t been hearing much from that side.
Hence, I present the Top 10 Habits of Highly Irritating Editors. Names have been withheld in case I might still want to send one of them another story some day.
10. Requiring overseas authors to include IRCs (International Reply Coupons). (To be fair, it’s not that hard to order postage from other countries via the internet. Of course, one might suggest that it shouldn’t be that hard to reply to overseas authors via the internet, either.)
9. Submission guidelines that are not easy to find on the magazine’s website. Please don’t make me search through 6 months of blog archive just to make sure I’ve correctly formatted my submission.
8. Rambling submission guidelines that are longer than the stories that the magazine accepts. I actually don’t mind this so much, if the rambling submission guidelines are entertaining. Often they’re not.
7. Special treatment for submitting authors who also subscribe to the magazine. Or contest fees. Or any extra hoops that authors need to jump through in order to submit a story. I’m actually sympathetic to some of these things. But they still irritate me.
6. Unnecessarily mean rejection letters. I once received the following rejection letter: “Unfortunately, your story fails to overcome the overly cliched opening and I was never sufficiently grounded in the story to truly sympathize with your protagonist’s dilemma.” This was, in retrospect, a valid criticism of the story I had submitted. But isn’t there a nicer way of saying it? (In fact, there is, and a received a much more constructively worded rejection letter for the same story from a different magazine. Interestingly, even though both rejection letters basically said the same thing, it was the nice rejection letter that convinced me I ought to go back and revise the story.)
5. Rejection letters including terse suggestions that I read sample copies of the magazine to find out what sort of stories they publish. It’s especially irksome when I did read sample copies of the magazine. “Well,” I think. “That was pointless. Better save my money next time.”
4. Number 5, only with a subscription form included with the rejection letter.
3. Making me check the magazine’s blog periodically to see if my story has been rejected, instead of sending a quick e-mail to that effect.
2. Not following through on the obligations outlined in the contract, once a story has been accepted. This includes many different irritating behaviors, but the two most irritating are probably (a) not paying the author, and (b) not publishing a story after the contract has been signed. (B) is especially obnoxious when combined with the Number One way to irritate an author …
1. Not responding to query letters!
We’ve all been there as authors. The magazine has had our story for a really long time. Maybe a year. Maybe longer. We start to wonder. Did their reply get lost in the mail? Eaten by the internet? Did they even receive the story? So we send a politely-worded query letter, asking if they are still considering the story, of course we’re happy to wait if it’s still under consideration, but just in case it’s already been rejected and we just never got the memo … we send off the query e-mail. And, nothing. Another month goes by, or two. They don’t accept simultaneous submissions, and neither do any of the other magazines we’d like to submit the story to. So, perhaps we send a second query letter. Perhaps we go so far as to send a (still-polite) e-mail to the effect that if we don’t hear back from the editor by X date, we’ll assume they’re not interested.
It happens all too often. Sometimes, a year after the “ultimatum” e-mail (and after we’ve already sent the story to 4 or 5 other magazines), we finally receive the missing rejection letter. A form letter. Encouraging us to read a sample copy of the magazine. With a subscription form enclosed.
In closing, I would like to offer my thanks to all those editors who, by their example, made it possible for me to write this list. And extra-special thanks to those who didn’t.
My boyfriend Donald and I attended Readercon at the Burlington Marriott Hotel this weekend (Burlington Massachusetts, not Burlington Vermont). Readercon is one of my favorite science fiction conventions, and I’ve gone every year since 2005, except for 2008 when I was at Clarion West. It has no art show, no masquerade (and very few people dressing up in funny costumes), no movie/TV/gaming-related content (not that there’s anything wrong with that!); and the only things they sell in the dealers’ room are books and magazines. (Well, Darrell Schweitzer does sell his ancient Roman coins, but that’s it!) Since my interest in sf cons is primarily books and writing, this suits me just fine. It’s a fairly small con, and most of the people who attend (though not all) are either writers, editors or publishers. So it’s very good for networking (which, as far as I’m concerned, is a fancy word for hanging out with old friends and meeting new ones–or at least it should be).
I had a wonderful time, as always, and got to catch up with a ton of people I don’t see very often, and I won’t try to name-check them all because I know I’ll forget important people (I mean that they’re important to me, not that I’m hoping they’ll buy my epic fantasy novel someday). However, I do want to mention that I got to see my friends from the New York City writers group Altered Fluid; a bunch of other friends from the Brotherhood Without Banners (the famous George R. R. Martin fan club); and several people from the Canadian science fiction scene, most of whom I was meeting for the first time. Also my Clarion West classmates Rajan Khanna and Theresa DeLucci (Raj is also a member of Altered Fluid), and our Week One instructor from Clarion West, author Paul Park.
For some reason, I attended more panels this year than at a typical Readercon. I’m not sure if this is because of a change in me, or a change in Readercon programming. There were definitely more program items that I thought would be interesting than there are in a typical year. One person commented to me that they thought the programming was less intellectual than usual. (I’m pretty sure they meant it as a compliment.) Unfortunately, I was often (though not always) disappointed in my expectation that the program items I attended would be interesting. I won’t say which ones were a let-down, but one thing I’ve learned over the years, attending cons, is that how interesting a panel will be depends more on who’s speaking than on the topic.
I also attended a “secret” room party (though not a very well-kept secret, it turned out), avoided drinking too much alcohol, and failed to avoid purchasing far too many books in the dealers’ room. And after I had been thinking of trying to use the library more often, and perhaps buy a Kindle to slow down my accumulation of heavy unread reading material. I got, among other titles, Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel (which I’ve been told is more classic Kay in the model of Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan, and not like his more recent The Last Light of the Sun). And The Desert Spear, the second novel in Peter Brett’s series (I got the first novel for free at a different convention, a couple years ago, and was surprised by how good it was.).
I also picked up an anthology of short fiction entitled Tails of Wonder and Imagination. Yes, you guessed it, an entire book of fantasy & science fiction stories about cats. I have to admit, I initially picked it up off the table to make fun of it. I also half-considered buying it for my sister Lisa, since she loves cats so much! But then I noticed that there were actually a lot of really good authors in the anthology: George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke … so, yes. I bought an entire book of short fiction about cats. At a science fiction convention.
I also have to thank my good friend Rene Walling from Canadian publisher Nanopress, for kindly offering to sell copies of the print chapbook of my story “Looking-Glass Milk” at his party on Saturday night, even though he had nothing to do with publishing it. He managed to sell nine copies, and is planning to take the other three I’d given him back to Canada to see if he can sell them at Canadian science fiction conventions (since I’m a Canadian writer and all!). So if you’re reading this from north of the border, and attend cons in Canada, look out for Rene from Nanopress, and see if he has any of my books left! (And check out the books he publishes: the press is very new, but they already have a short story collection by Canadian author Elisabeth Vonarburg, and an anthology featuring selected stories from the Aurora Awards, one of Canada’s major science fiction prizes.)
I would be remiss in failing to mention that at least two of the chapbook sales were directly due to my wonderful boyfriend Donald convincing people to buy copies. Thank you, Donald, and I promise not to follow through with my threat to write Domini slash, after all.
Looking back, I am sort of afraid that, when I was asked to autograph the chapbooks, I may have spelled someone’s name wrong. If so, I’m terribly sorry!
All in all, it was a great weekend, and if you’re a fantasy or science fiction writer or fan, and the Boston area isn’t too far away for you, I definitely encourage you to check out Readercon for yourself next year.
The latest Rachael Ray recipe I tried, Cheesy Pasta Presto, from Just in Time! was supposed to take only 15 minutes. It took 53!
When you think about it, there’s no way pasta is a 15-minute meal. It takes 15 minutes just to boil the water. And another 10 to cook the pasta.
The good thing was that Cheesy Pasta Presto tastes much better than it sounds.
My story “Looking-Glass Milk” is now available to read online at Scribblers and Ink Spillers, as part of their Crystal Codices series. They initially published this story back in November, charging $1 for a downloadable e-book and $2 plus shipping for a paper book. The print version is still $2, but now the electronic version is free.
This is one of the few science fiction stories I’ve written. Two organic chemists courageously set out to save the lives of an imperiled landing crew, and to discover the answer to a mystery that has perplexed scientists since long before the dawn of space travel….
For any in the audience who are organic chemists (like me), the scientific mystery at the heart of the story is that of biological chirality: why do most chiral natural products on Earth have the same handedness (if you don’t know what this means, and are curious, go read the story, it’s explained there!)? There’s actually a line in the story that references some work that I did as an undergraduate research associate way back in the early 90s. Some chemists at a German university reported that you could get a chemical reaction that usually gives equal amounts of two products that are mirror images of each other to give more of one by doing the reaction in a magnetic field. It was theorized that this might be relevant to the origin of “biological chirality”; that early reactions taking place on Earth before the emergence of even single-celled life forms might have been “pushed” towards one product by the influence of Earth’s magnetic field.
Later, the post-doc involved in the research confessed to doping the reactions with one of the two products, so that it would look like the reaction had given an excess of that material. The whole incident is sort of the “cold fusion” of the organic chemistry world. However, before people knew for sure that the results had been faked, my summer research adviser (John Scheffer at UBC, with whom I later did graduate work) thought it would be a neat project for me to attempt to duplicate the results. (As most of you probably know, when a scientist publishes startling results in a paper, and people aren’t sure whether they believe those results, scientists in that field around the world try to follow the procedures given in the paper, to see whether they get the same results, doing it exactly the same way – if they don’t, there’s obviously a problem, whether it’s deliberate scientific misconduct or sloppy documentation of the original researcher’s work.)
I was not able to duplicate the results (fortunately!), and then the fraud was confessed, and I moved on to something else for the rest of the summer. However, the experience got me thinking about the whole issue of biological chirality, and how it had potentially arisen, and whether organic molecules on other planets would also have all their amino acids and sugars having the same “handedness” … ever since, I’ve wanted to write a science fiction story about this question. And I finally got around to it.
So, Breitmayer et al. in Germany may not have answered the question of why chiral organic molecules here on Earth mostly have the same orientation around the stereogenic centers. But at least they inspired a science fiction story.
Last night I hosted a dinner party. It was me, my boyfriend Donald, my roommates Cory and Aubrey, and my good friend Bob (a former housemate of mine). I did all the cooking, and Bob, who has an extensive wine cellar, brought wine specially selected to accompany the meal.
I was a bit pressed for time this weekend, since I had to pick up a rental car on Saturday afternoon (which is another story). Also I was kind of tired, and didn’t want to have to get up at 5 am to start cooking. So there were only two courses: the main course and the dessert.
All recipes were courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. The main course was from the Quick Recipe cookbook: pan-seared veal chops with gremolata and lemon spinach. Gremolata is an Italian seasoning, a mixture of parsley, lemon rind and garlic. I mixed the gremolata with extra-virgin olive oil and spooned the mixture over the chops after they were cooked. The chops were pretty big, so I decided I didn’t really need a potato or rice side dish.
I don’t eat veal very often, partly because it’s expensive and partly because these days you have to check with your dinner party guests to make sure they’ll eat it. So it’s a taste I’m not that familiar with. Donald, Aubrey and Cory had actually never tried it before (at least I think that’s what they said). Aubrey thought it tasted quite a lot like beef (not surprisingly, since it’s from the same animal), but that she kept looking at it thinking based on the taste that it would be red, and kept being mildly surprised to find that it was so pork-like in appearance. I guess I think it’s a little beefy, but a little like pork, too (except with the “piggy” flavor, if that makes sense). It’s definitely milder than, say, lamb.
For dessert, we had the fresh strawberry tart from the New Best Recipe cookbook. It was the first time I’d made this particular strawberry tart, and maybe only the second time I’ve made one of these (with the tart pastry, the pastry cream, then the fresh raw fruit on top, glazed with melted jelly – red currant, in this case). It looked pretty just after I had assembled it, but serving it out was fairly disastrous. The recipe said to prepare the baked tart shell and pastry cream ahead of time, cool the tart shell to room temperature and chill the pastry cream, and then assemble the tart no more than 30 minutes before serving. However, when I tried to cut it, the tart pastry was so crisp that it shattered under the knife, and was kind of impossible to slice neatly. Also, the pastry cream gooped out around the edges of the cuts. So it was very messy! Bob, who is a more experienced cook than I am, said it’s usually better to put the pastry cream in the shell, then chill that for 30 minutes before topping it with the fruit. He said that the pastry cream will soften up the crust just enough in that time to make it cuttable, but not enough to lose all the delectable crispness.
Despite the appearance of the uneven slices of goopy tart, it was very delicious, and the 5 of us all had seconds, and finished the entire thing in one sitting.
To accompany the veal chops, Bob brought two Burgundies from the same producer, Domaine Francois Lumpp. One white and one red (for the curious, white Burgundy is almost always 100% chardonnay, and red Burgundy is 100% pinot noir). Both were Premier Cru from Givry; the white was the 2002 Crausot (I think Crausot is the vineyard, but maybe I’m wrong; sometimes I forget my wine knowledge) and the red was the 2001 Petit Marole. I liked both wines, though I thought the white was a little too old, and tasted kind of oxidized. But some of the other people liked the white better than the red. Some people actually liked the red better by itself, but the white better with the food. I still liked the red better with the veal, though I agreed that, with the fattier bits of the veal, the white was better. Also, the white was better with the spinach.
To accompany the tart, we had a 1976 Johannisberger Holle Riesling Beerenauslese from the Rheingau in Germany. This was a very sweet white dessert wine (made from Riesling grapes). It was definitely my favorite wine of the evening, with a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity, and a great flavor profile. It was a fairly decent match for the tart. It worked really well with the strawberries and with the crust, but wasn’t quite sweet enough for the pastry cream.
My next “fancy” dinner will probably be my boyfriend’s birthday dinner that I’m cooking on the 3rd of July (not his actual birthday, but it’s a Saturday, and that’s the important thing). But I had better not say what I’m making, because it’s supposed to be a surprise!
p.s. – Whole Foods did have the veal rib chops I wanted (reduced cruelty “barn-roaming” veal), but they were a little thicker than the recipe called for. I just cooked them a little longer. It worked fine. (I did use a meat thermometer to make sure I got the internal temperature right, rather than relying too heavily on the suggested cooking time.)
Last night, I prepared a Rachael Ray recipe that was supposed to take 60 minutes … and it did! 62 minutes, to be exact. But well within an acceptable margin of error.
The recipe was “Spicy Lentil Stoup”, from Just in Time. It was good, too! A nice, thick soup with plenty of lentils and kale, plus tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, onion, garlic, various spices, and a bit of pancetta, a couple anchovy fillets, and chicken broth to give it flavor.
I think that the 60-minute meals are more likely to be accurate estimates of the time required. They tend to be recipes that require simmering for 25 minutes or so, and where Rachael grossly underestimates the time it will take an average person to sprint through one of her recipes is in prep. I just can’t chop that fast! Not to mention finding the ingredients, mopping up all the liquid that the tomatoes I chopped have released onto the cutting board before I mince the thyme. Etc.
The Spicy Lentil Stoup serves way more than 4, though (and is not really very spicy)! Hopefully Donald will help me to eat lots of it tomorrow night, so that I don’t have to put any of it in the freezer. I’m going to Newport next week for a chemistry conference, so I’m afraid I might not have a chance to finish it (especially since I’m having a dinner party on Saturday night, so I won’t be able to eat it then).
I’ve mentioned America’s Test Kitchen a few times, and how their cooking time estimates are usually more reliable than Rachael Ray’s. On Monday, I prepared Grilled Tuna and Bok Choy with Soy-Ginger Glaze from The Quick Recipe. Estimated time, 45 minutes. Actual time, 52 minutes. But that includes the time it took me to run back into the house and splash water in my eyes when the glaze dripped down onto the coals and turned into some potent tear gas that could have been used as crowd control.
That recipe was also tasty. Though the grilling part gets busy, when you have 4 tuna steaks and 8 pieces of bok choy on the grill all at once. And I couldn’t figure out how to keep the bok choy leaves from turning into charred shreds like the newspaper I used to light the coals. The cookbook said to squirt water on them occasionally “to prevent them from drying out”, but it didn’t really seem to help all that much. Besides, I had to keep glazing the tuna, and flipping it periodically (and chasing the tuna pieces around the grill with the spatula). And splashing water on my eyes.
Whole Foods apparently hasn’t gotten the memo that America’s Test Kitchen recommends grilling tuna steaks at least 1 1/2 inches thick if you want rare tuna, because I couldn’t find anything thicker than about 1 inch.
Okay, I guess I unfairly accused the old lady down the street from my boyfriend of stealing his cookies. The postal service returned them to me as undeliverable.
I do have an unfortunate habit of jumping to the conclusion that people have stolen stuff of mine (or borrowed it without asking), and then finding out in an hour or so that the item in question is actually right where I last left it, maybe hidden by a stray paper or two.
Can I complain about the US Postal Service, though? I’ve lost track of the amount of mail that’s been delivered to my address, but is addressed to people who haven’t lived here in at least 10 years. Or that isn’t supposed to come to this street address at all (it’s supposed to go to another house on our street, or even another house 1 or 2 streets over). Not to mention all the times they’ve lost letters, magazines, credit card statements and Amazon packages addressed correctly to me and my roommates.
The one time I wish they would just drop off the package at the address written on the box, they have to suddenly start following protocol and making sure the person whose name is on the box actually lives there. Though clearly, they’re not on the ball enough to think to themselves, “Hmm, there’s a Donald Crankshaw who lives on this street, just a few houses down … maybe this package is really for him.”
Grrr!
This story requires some background information. For Christmas this past year, one of the presents I gave my boyfriend Donald was a 6-month membership in the Cookie-of-the-Month club. This entailed me baking cookies once a month, and then either giving them to him or mailing them if I wasn’t going to see him soon enough (cause who wants stale cookies?).
This was not my idea. I stole it from my roommate’s sister. I’m not sure I’d do it again, especially since I also gave this gift to my brother-in-law on the west coast (assuming that neither Donald nor my brother-in-law would want to eat an entire batch of cookies on their own). Postage is more than you’d think, especially to the west coast.
In any case, I just baked the last batch of cookies (chocolate chip) last weekend, and mailed them off on Monday. However, when I got to the post office, I realized that I could not remember my boyfriend’s mailing address.
This might seem weird, but I don’t really mail him that many things, and he currently lives a half hour drive away, and I don’t have a car, so I’ve only been to his place once (and he’s lived there less than 6 months). Also, I don’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t call him from the post office.
So I guessed. Unfortunately, as I realized when I got back to my office and called Donald from my office phone, I guessed wrong. However, I knew which wrong address I’d sent the cookies to (another house on the same block), so Donald said he would walk over and let them know that he would be receiving a package at that address, addressed to him.
Well, he went over twice, and the old lady who answered the door both times claimed that the package never showed up! Hmm….
I hope she ate them, at least. I’d hate to think they’d gone entirely to waste.
For years, I’ve been a devotee of the sadly-out-of-print book Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century (Paul Harrington and Laura Moorhead). I learned about the book from a friend, and managed to find my own copy at a used book store (and pay far too much money for it). It’s served me well, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve tried all 275 drink classics described therein … well, to admit how many I have tried might reveal more about my drinking habits than I’d care to confess.
Recently, however, The Drinks Bible has been shoved rudely from its pedestal by a new cocktail cookbook, Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, which I received as a Christmas present from the thoughtful parents of my teetotalling boyfriend. Each book contains cocktail recipes that the other has left out. However, they both provide recipes for the essential classics (the Martini, the Manhattan, the Mojito, and many drinks that do not begin with the letter M). For the most part, I’ve found that I prefer DeGroff’s version of a cocktail to Harrington’s. Harrington’s recipes are sometimes so sour as to be almost undrinkable. I occasionally do find DeGroff’s just a little too sweet, but overall, the flavor profiles of the drinks are more interesting. And it’s a better cocktail cookbook for right now; Harrington’s is a bit out of date in terms of what ingredients you’ll actually be able to find at even the best-stocked liquor store, these days; DeGroff’s is more mindful of this issue, and also includes newer products (like the ginger liqueur Domaine de Canton) that may not have been available when Harrington’s book came out.
Be that as it may, I just got around to trying DeGroff’s recipe for one of my favorite cocktails, the Aviation. And I found that I like the Drinks Bible version much better.
The recipe DeGroff provides calls for 2 oz gin, 3/4 oz maraschino liqueur and 1/2 oz lemon juice. Harrington’s recipe is 1 1/2 oz gin, 1/2 oz maraschino and 3/4 oz lemon juice. I found DeGroff’s recipe too alcoholic, and out of balance with the tartness that I think this drink needs from the lemon juice.
This might just be me, though; I do like my drinks more sour than most people. But if someone wanted a sweeter Aviation, I’d probably recommend keeping Harrington’s proportions, and just increasing the maraschino up to 3/4 oz (though I haven’t tried that yet, to be honest).
It’s also possible that I’d think differently with a different gin. I used Tanqueray, which I usually prefer because it has a stronger juniper flavor than Bombay Sapphire, and I find that Bombay Sapphire with tonic tastes too much like Sprite (though it’s not quite as Sprite-like as Tanqueray Ten and tonic – shudder!). Perhaps Bombay Sapphire or a milder gin would work better in DeGroff’s recipe.
A nice variation, which I got when I ordered an Aviation at Clio Restaurant, is to use Meyer lemon juice in place of ordinary lemon juice.
