Margaret

Who, exactly, wants to read my novel?

The reason I ask is because some days, I’m not sure I want to read my novel. Mostly the days on which I am editing it. Since I am currently engaged in a painful top-down restructuring of 200,000-ish words, that’s most days. That’ll teach me to never write without an outline again (I hope).

Here are a few criteria I have identified for readers of my eventual book:

Must enjoy speculative fiction or fantasy
Must like character-driven books
Preferably not care if characters kind of wander around for a while Doing Stuff for Some Reason
Enjoy detailed descriptions of Nature In All Its Glory
Be my mom

Do you fit these criteria? If so, comment here to be a beta reader!

Today I have been writing down the plot points for the Book That Will Be; I already wrote down the plot points, insofar as I could, for the Book That Is. I’ve done a lot of noodling with the desired plot plots but writing them down in an orderly fashion has had me spooked. I guess it’s because it feels like I’m committing to them now, and commitment is not my strong suit. Choosing one path means you can’t go down the others. But that’s what got me into this mess: trying to leave as many options for myself and my characters as open as possible led to a meandering, decisionless wasteland.

Do any of you who are writers, reading this, relate? Do you find it difficult to make choices for your characters?

Pop quiz! Is R2D2 here channeling me when I have:

Been working on my plot map for 3 minutes
Just re-read my extant draft after it’s been a while
Decided to rewrite 40% of my book AGAIN

The correct answer is, of course, all of the above.

Zucchini Goat Cheese Tart

For a leisurely Saturday dinner in with a vegetarian in mind, I wanted to make something fun and filling. Because this is New England in April, the weather has been a weird mix of nearly hot and actually snowing. I wanted to bake, which would warm up the house, but include fresh spring flavors. I thought immediately of a tart I made last summer and have been wanting to do again. I found the recipe on Fine Cooking and having used it twice with only slight modifications, highly recommend it.

Essentially, you:

Make a savory pastry dough; chill it for 30 min.
Mix 8 oz. goat cheese with herbs and lemon zest
Slice 1.5 lbs. of zucchini very fine, salt and let drain for 30 min.
Roll out dough, spread cheese on top, cover with concentric circles of zucchini, drizzle with a bit of olive oil, and bake at 400F for 40ish minutes or until golden and tantalizing

All in all, I’d say it was about thirty minutes of active work. I served with a green salad with fennel and apple in a light hazelnut dressing and it made a lovely meal for four.

Are you afraid of pastry? Don’t be. It’s more forgiving than people generally give it credit for. And it’s so buttery and flaky and delicious when you do it even partially right that it’s soooo rewarding. I use my food processor to blend the dough these days but it’s easy enough by hand.

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The key is keeping the butter in the dough chilled, so don’t overwork either in the processor or by hand. Of course you can buy pre-made pie crust to make this tart super easy (just avoid ones with sugar in the crust, which honestly will incur more irritation and time than simply making it by hand. See what I did there?).

For the topping: I used only zucchini. Last summer I did a mix of eggplant and zucchini, which was gorgeous. A mandoline comes in handy here but it’s not necessary as long as you’ve got a reasonably consistent slicing hand.

Modify the suggested goat cheese mix to your taste. (Rosemary? Herbs de provence?) I used fresh thyme and about a tablespoon each of lemon zest and tangerine zest. It was so zingy that I would tone that down a notch next time.

The concentric circles of veg on this tart were not tight enough. In cooking, they shrank down a bit too much and revealed some gaps. The other mis-step this time was taking it out of the oven too soon. The edges were getting crispy, we were getting hungry, and we decided a slightly underdone bottom crust was a small price to pay for immediate gratification.

Reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me — Yes, it’s an actual book. All the better to be actually snuggled up with.

I am an escapist media aficionado. When I get into a good book or television show, I get dangerously into it; I may not emerge for days. So when I am trying to focus on writing, as I am now, I can’t give up reading entirely but I avoid my usual suspects of easy-to-lose-oneself-in novels. Right now I am reading a few non-fiction books as the spirit moves me. The one that has most of my mind-share and my full, boundless admiration is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.

All quotes in this post are directly from that book.

The first thing I read of Coates was his groundbreaking essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations” (2014). It blew my mind. I had never fully considered (let alone been taught) the actual legislative bones supporting the horrible carcass of systemic racism in this country. I’m white, so I have had a life where I can control when and for how long I stare at the body, and this was the first time I couldn’t look away. If you haven’t read this piece, just go do it now, okay? Because the thing is: it’s gorgeous. Coates is not a man who writes simply to get his point across. His point is the writing. His control of style is pure, his reasoning crystal-clear. Truly, I can only compare his rhetoric to Dr. King’s. It was easily the best essay by a modern author I had read in perhaps a decade.

“I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.”

Okay, I haven’t actually talked about Between the World and Me yet, I know. I just needed to set the stage for my expectations going into this book. (If you couldn’t tell: they were high.) This was Coates’ first book and I didn’t read it when it came out. I don’t generally crave non-fiction, and I was thinking about it like I think about heavy documentaries: that is, bound to be overwhelming, depressing, and generally the worst possible thing to read before bed after a long day.

Then, Coates’ second book came out and I was itching to read more of his writing and I thought: Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll grit my teeth and be depressed because that’s how much I love this man’s art. I felt like I owed it to him, vaguely, notionally, to read his first book before the second. I knew it was supposed to be an intimate, personal sort of read, given that its structure is that of a direct address to his son.

And then I actually read Between the World and Me and felt like an idiot. Of course Ta-Nehisi Coates would not write a burdensome book. He might actually be incapable of it. The topic is serious. The insights and the honesty are often as heart-breaking as they are heart-opening. But there’s not a piece of it that feels “heavy.”

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

I have not quite finished it yet. I’ve been reading it for about a month and when I pick it up, two or three times a week, I only read a few pages. I remember reading Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and describing it (probably to Ashley!) as very rich cake: I loved it, I wanted all of it, but I could only have a tiny bite at a time to really appreciate it. I feel that way about this book and I don’t want it to end.

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.”

Who but an American black man can understand what it is like to be a black man in America? But I am an American, and I acutely feel Coates’ criticism of our country’s history and of our present society. At the same time, his compassion for all the messy components of his own experience; his love for his son, and his worry; and above all his expert, lyrical writing create moments of pure human connection that are the hallmarks of every great artist.

Have you read it? What do you think? And if you haven’t read it: get to it.

“I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

The Bread of Monks

Did you know that a small Zen community in northern California was largely responsible for the bread baking revolution in the United States? Like much home food preparation, bread baking had gone by the wayside post-WWII. Cheap supermarket food and the shifting demographics of the workforce (i.e., women working outside of the home) made rare a once ubiquitous practice. There was also some pretty killer marketing and social dynamics at work in the popularity of, yes, WonderBread.

But in 1970, this newbie Zen monk published a slim, approachable, humble little brown book that started with a poem about yeast and whose recipes were thoughtful and charmingly illustrated. They also worked. The counterculture was already championing a return to “real” food, and the book took off. The copy I use was my mother’s. I think she still has another one. Its spine is long since broken, pages are coming loose, mysterious oils have denuded the type in places, and the feel of it in my hand makes me smile.

I am not going to reprint the recipe here, because if you are even mildly interested I do suggest you go buy the Tassajara Bread Book. You don’t have to be a Zen monk to appreciate it, but having a Zen monk talk to you about bread baking is awfully reassuring.

As with any standard yeasted bread (not sourdough, for which I have a deep and abiding love and on whose production method I will no doubt wax poetical at some point on this blog), there are a few basic steps. They mostly involve doing some pretty mechanical, straightforward stuff to a mixture of flour and water and then leaving it alone for a while. You have to be around for bread but it requires comparatively little active time. (Also, a bench scraper and using only cold water makes cleanup go way faster than you might think.)

For this batch, I used about half plain flour (King Arthur’s unbleached all-purpose, my go-to). The other half of the flour was a combination of random odds and ends I wanted to get rid of. That’s the beauty of this way of making bread. I threw in some chick pea flour, some wheat germ, some oatmeal, some flax. Olive oil and some toasted sesame oil went in. Some buckwheat honey. Sea salt.

Was it perfect? Nope. The chick pea flour was maybe a little past its best-by date and lent some bitterness, I got slightly lumpy loaf shapes because I got lazy (I always get lazy), and the dense dough could have used some more vital wheat gluten and a longer first rise to give it lift. (I think. I’m not exactly an expert.) But one of the reasons I love baking bread is that nothing short of a catastrophe keeps you from an end product that will make you feel warm and satisfied and reaching for a crock of the richest butter you can find.

Creation vs. Organization: A Writing Malady

There’s this book I started writing when I was 13. There have been times when I’ve thought, Gosh, it’s been five years since I started, I better finish this thing! Or ten years. Or fifteen. Now I’m up to 22. It’s not like I haven’t been working on it. To the contrary: my current draft is 165,000 words long, give or take, and it’s been through two gut rehabs. I’m in the middle of the third.

This time — for the first time — I’ve brought in professional help. My problem (one of them, ha) is that I’ve always simply written. I feel inspired, or depressed, or committed of an evening, and I pop out 5,000 words. I have never written to an outline. I’ve hardly written to even a vague idea of plot. I’m not saying this to be charmingly self-deprecating, get you to ask to read my MS, and hear you say, “Wow, it’s actually got great structure, what are you talking about, you crazy next-best-seller you?” No. This book is a hot mess. Let me tell you why.

For all the hundreds of thousands of words I have written in my life, and for all the Ivy League writing classes I’ve taken, until a couple months ago I had literally never spent time with the bare bones of narrative structure for fiction. I got the technical details for playwriting (not my milieu) and poetry (for serious not my milieu), but somehow, all of my fiction writing classes were built around peer review and a general sense of enthusiasm for Your Unique and Special Inner Voice. Turns out that knowing narrative structure really helps structure a good narrative!

Up until this point in my writing life, whatever movement a story had, it had because I’ve read so much that I’ve got some mute instincts for the shape of a story. Story is something I feel. Arguably, story is something you must feel, but being able to top-down critique or shape my own work is opening up whole new worlds of possibility for me. I know. Pity me. I’m in my mid-thirties and just figuring this out.

For me, this structural work is powerful not least because I have some native aversion to conflict. The inestimable Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a workshop book for writers; one of the voice exercises asks you to imagine you are an on island. What do you do? What do you see? Wallowing in the luxury of simply writing a scene for the pure sound of it, I didn’t put any pressure on myself to shape it. Here is what happened. I wrote a scene in which literally nothing happened. My narrator walks over the island, to the highest point of it, and looks out at the ocean. The end. Meets no boars in the brush. Begs food from no one’s campfire. Hears no voices, no distant gunfire, no rising storm over the water. This insulated, conflict-avoidance mentality which seems to be my comfort zone for writing makes for terrible stories. I mean, awful stories. The very nature of story is conflict.

Pulling back and doing this structural analysis of my hot mess of a novel has been empowering. And exciting. And overwhelming. Helping me keep such cool as I have and make progress towards my goal of one day not hating my own book is a friend of mine with tremendous powers of organization. She has broken my goal down into sensible, manageable, truly bite-sized mini-goals, and when I’m having trouble she seems to know exactly what I need to hear to keep going. (She does this professionally, by the bye. If this sort of personal project management sounds like manna from heaven to you, as it did to me, comment or message me and I will give you more info.)

So I’ve got professional help and I’ve got friends and family cheering me on and I’ve finally got the tools I never knew I needed to fix some of the gaping holes in this sprawling, under-engineered work. My goal is to have done with the gut rehab by my thirty-sixth birthday this summer. Since I finished my first early draft of this when I was 16, achieving this goal would have taken a cool twenty years.

Still — it’s better than thirty. Wish me luck, would you?

Carrot Cake

I made a carrot cake. It was epic, at least for me. I’ve done one cake that involved more effort, a coconut cake with a complicated icing, but I’m quite proud of this one anyway. I grated the carrots by hand and everything.

I used this recipe (http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015523-dorie-greenspans-carrot-cake) with a few alterations. I don’t have three cake pans of the required size—I only own two cake tins of any sort, and knowing me disaster would ensue if I had tried to take one of the cakes out, clean the pan up, and cook the third layer separately. It would have come out too thin, or burnt, or something. I have a genius for such cock-ups. I also used half fancy olive oil and half canola, instead of all canola oil, and switched out one of the cups of white sugar for brown sugar. I strongly recommend the olive oil (find a good one with an intense flavour—Trader Joe’s Sicilian Olive Oil is a decent price), as it gave a nice depth of flavour to the sweetness.

The bake took exactly as long as instructed, for once. They did sink a little in the middle, but not enough to make me regret using two pans rather than three. This could have been the result of my switching things out in the recipe, but the same thing seems to have happened to the cake in the original illustration, so it could just be how heavy the batter is with all the raisins and carrots and whatnot. (Possibly? This is where it would help to be a better chemist.) I had to trim a little from the sides when they were cooled, but there was no spilling over the edge of the pan, which is what I was most concerned about.

Cake 3

The final product came out pretty much exactly as I was hoping for—I don’t think I’ll ever buy a carrot cake again. Next time I’ll work on avoiding the sinkage, and get a better picture where you can see the icing between the layers (it is there, just as it should be, but is completely obscured by cake crumbs in the last picture).

An Ode to Bread

Comfort food. In American pop culture, we interpret this as: fatty, salty, sugary, bad for you. Something you shouldn’t have, but when you’ve had a bad day, well damn it, you’ve earned it. But what about actual comfort? What food makes you feel better when you have it? Not guilty, not stuffed, not drowsy, but — good?

Comfort food for me is bread. I’m a starch-driven machine even on my best days. Buckets of pasta. Chips. Pretzels. Almost literally endless quantities of popcorn. Good bread is the high-octane version of my simple carbohydrate primary fuel.

Good bread is fresh bread. I prefer it with texture, with rich scents, warm, with butter. I grew up in a household where my father was the (excellent) cook. My mother could technically feed us in his absence but it wasn’t pretty. However. She baked. The sticky feel of dough slowly turning into the smooth miracle of a shaped loaf is an experience so deep and early that only my hands remember it.

Good bread, while it is baking and for a while afterwards, fills your space with a smell that in itself is nourishing. Any yeasted bread will produce this smell but I am fond of using sesame oil during the last rise, when a sheen over the surface of the dough will keep it from drying and cracking as it rests before baking, and it adds a dimensionality to the fresh bread aroma that might be described as exotic or heady or but however you phrase it you will never want to stop smelling it.

Good bread is a baguette from a market vendor in Barcelona, crisp-shelled with a tender, chewy crumb, eaten in chunks with salami and a blood orange while you sit on the quay with your friend and look out at the busy port and feel drowsy and lucky and sunned.

Good bread is sandwich bread from the store stacked around thick slices of cheddar, eaten with grimy hands on top of a flat rock in the middle of your hike that’s taking longer than you thought. You’re saving the apple for later.

Good bread is the champagne bubbles of sourdough popping under your fingers as you work flour into the sponge.

Good bread is a slice from yesterday’s loaf, nutty and chewy, folded around a still-hot piece of bacon and taken like the sacrament as you walk to work in chilly pre-dawn light.

Comfort food. I love that phrase, which sounds like what a friend might bring to your house when you’re sick. Bread in particular comforts not just with taste and texture but with the act of its creation. It is no exaggeration when people describe kneading dough as “grounding”: you are gently reaching, again and again and again, through the medium of one of humanity’s oldest nourishing substances, with your hands, to the earth.

Introduction: Margaret

Hi! I quit my job for this.

Okay. Not just for this. But I went from security to Who Knows because I had one of those moments where you realize this is the only life you get. What was I doing, futzing about with writing for an hour here or there? Who was I kidding? I’ve been making up stories since I could talk. It’s what I love.

Writing — and food. Eating it, making it, talking about it, eyeing it lovingly at farmers’ markets, thinking about how its cultivation and distribution is at the heart of a sustainable future for humanity. But mostly eating it.

Because we both love reading and writing and food and reading and writing about food, my dear friend Ashley and I decided to start a blog that would be a home for all that. She’s much better read than I am. I take many, many more useless macro shots of fresh produce. So you see we both have our place in the order of things.

What an extraordinary piece of luck to be at this point in life, to be able to do this, to have this space. Thank you for sharing it, even if just for a little while. Come back soon.

See?

Hello, world!

As a first post this will leave something to be desired, but we thought it best to bite the bullet and get this out there. This will be a place for writing about writing; writing about food; for pictures of food, and probably also of kittens; and for working through our offline writing, and occasionally, our lives. Some sweet, some bitter, and hopefully much to savor.

Welcome to Salt Sweet Bitter.