Reading …

One of my quarterly goals (Third Quarter) for Discord.com’s The Writing Cartel is to read at least one book a week. Going all right with that goal. I’ve probably read two books a week up to now but that progress may slow when I try to continue my writing progress in the new WIP and finish the old WIP.

Getting distancing happening in MELD to be able to re-think the last couple of chapters is my second goal. The idea is to enable the supporting MC into a stronger role ready for part 3 of the trilogy.

I’ve just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Its fantasy and the world building is out of this world. I loved the main character … he’s a great thief but absolutely the worst skilled murderer in the Gentlemen Bastards, needs other people to save him quite often; lots of twists and unexpected turns in the plot.

The thing that surprised me most, considering I was reading fantasy, was the late introduction of magic … probably about a third way in before it was used. By then I’d almost forgotten there was such a thing as magic. The culture in this world is so well thought out. Commerce is there, being used for scams by the Bastards. Twelve acceptable religions and one unacceptable all have their place. there are plenty of poor people, middle income, and rich all trying to live their own lives. Festivals are fabulous, including the shark combats.

There is a lot of killing murdering dueling sword play and other more intricately inventive ways of getting rid of enemies. lots of swearing. Most memorable line? Memorable lines, I should say. More than I can say. A great read … it will be one of my favorites this quarter.

Personal Headlines

When she was a first-time grandmother. It might take a while before she meets the new baby.

Trawling through my social media accounts during the week, I came across a little article written by a man in his late eighties. He said the thing that cheered him up most through all the troubled times that he he experienced in his life, was his daily habit of composing a positive personal headline.

I had a think about the idea for a couple of days without doing anything about it. I was negative. How could any of my personal positive news compete with COVID, political stupidities, cyber-attacks on all government departments (in Australia), and the thing not sitting just over the horizon but already in our midst, climate change and the continual ending of species diversity?

Then a new baby was born in the family.

I let all that stuff up there go. Released it from my mind. I filled my mind with thoughts of the baby’s parents. Her other grandmother, her grandfather. Her little brother. How could I not celebrate her arrival? Even in these frightening times, a new baby is a powerful sign of hope.

My headline? Two-times grandmother welcomes her grand-daughter into the world.

Of course, yes, I know the world is not a perfect place. When was it ever and for everyone at the same time? That’s Utopia we’re talking about.

In this world, there are positive things happening. The #BlackLivesMatter movement. I heard #GretaThunberg speak again yesterday. The Fifth Estate keeps plugging away for more green jobs, green buildings, green cities. People are still planting trees. I’m looking at you #Brunswick Valley Heritage Park, Maslen Arboretum in Mullumbimby.

A fifty-words-or-less competition

A couple of months ago I stumbled across a CSIROscope competition in honor of World Ocean Day and as I had just been researching ocean clean-ups and the work done on the gyres, I thought: Yeah, I’ll give that a go. The prize would be an analysis by a bunch if scientists of the feasibility of the idea and the illustration once it had been used for social media promotions.

Mmm. An illustration by Campbell Whyte? Could be useful for a story I might write one day. It seemed like a very faint hope/plan/dream/possibility.

I thought up the words, reverse engineered them down to the required number, posted my entry and then forgot about it. The Covid thing makes you forgetful on a lot of fronts. Duly got an email telling me the good news that I was one of four winners. I was amazed.

So, yes, I’ve tried embedding to show-off my prize. I’ve tried merely to link. I’ve tried to post the URL. I’ve tried … to no avail.

I don’t see the problem.

Ah ha … stopped the embedding function. Learn something new everyday. I better hurry up and post. Battery is down to 47% …

https://blog.csiro.au/powering-our-future-oceans-floating-lab/?fbclid=IwAR2XN82ZahsgFK8mVokYBUoi0Tx2IK2DSYOGIukVCV85eVIzwXar5W5HQ_Y

Tropes: Time Travel

Watercolour: we spent summers travelling to the beach.

My interest in time travel began when my birth-family arrived in Australia as immigrants from the Netherlands. The first place where we lived was a migrant hostel outside Sydney. We children mostly noticed differences. The English language of course. The food. What the hell is this orange stuff? Pumpkin? But that’s cattle food. And what is vegemite? it’s horrible. Nothing like apple butter.

And the bush. Walking along the dirt road to our house block at midday, there was no shade. The thin vegetation let the sunlight burnish right through it. The only living creature we saw that day was a snake sunning itself on a sandstone slab protruding above the road’s surface. A venomous brown, in suburbia. My father said to stamp on the ground to scare it away. The landscape seemed very alien.

Adults noticed the seeming backwardness of the new country. There was not a decent cup of coffee to be had, for instance. Schooling was 30 years behind European education, many parents thought when they took their kids to the migrant hostel’s school. Most of the breadwinners, having their European qualifications downgraded, could only get laboring work.

A common complaint was that we had traveled back in time.

But the primitive building code enabled a lot of families to live on a house block and build their own accommodation. Many children saved shoe leather by going to school on bare feet. And if you lived in the outer suburbs, it was cheaper to buy a week’s supply of fruit and vegetables at Paddy’s Produce Markets in central Sydney and carry them home in a hessian sack, than getting stuff piecemeal at the local shops.

The existence of tropes as a category of themes tells you there’s nothing new in fiction. But I’m cruisy about using a conventional theme, if I can do something new with it, time travel as an immigrant having prepped me.

Though I’ll tell you right now that I won’t be sitting through the 700+ movies that apparently use time travel as their theme. Wikipedia has a nice page on Time Travel in Fiction listing the main sub-tropes of time travel generating a manageable list of things to read/watch.

From all the above, and without having to watch anything, I gather that what I’ve been writing into is the time-slip sub-trope.

LEGO Masters’ Australia 2020

For something completely different, helped along considerably by losing my internet link and having only ordinary television, I started watching LEGO Masters. Much less depressing than everything else on offer.

My interest in Lego began when I received a box of red components, the approximate size of a pack of cards, way back in my childhood. Both my brothers and I were given a set each as presents before our family left on the first of of its sea voyages.

I think my set probably represented the build of a little red house. I recall a red framed window-piece, bits of red roofing-tile and some red eight stud bricks for the walls.

It’s an off-the-planet experience for me to see a bunch of eight adult teams race each other and the clock to produce amazing masterpieces using all the colors available, pressing thousands of small pieces together and coming up with astounding themes. The builds tonight required the interpretation of a fairy story.

Apart from the sheer inventiveness of the projects, the thing that grabs me most is the complexity of the meta-world that surrounds the Lego phenomenon. There’s Lego-specific jargon to describe, for example, each Lego piece. SNOT pieces? Only users will know what they mean. And as for acronyms? There may be a dozen that probably even the Urban Dictionary doesn’t know.

And there’s a language for critiquing the builds. How else would the best be chosen, you might ask? But seriously, this language rivals the language invented to describe post-rock music that I studied last year. One of my interests is how specialist terminology can help or hinder enjoyment of the art they describe. In the case of Lego-critiquing, the Lego specific terminology definitely helped me to see and appreciate the different projects’ intricate complexities.

Music: Dirty Three

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_Three

In the present day consensual all writing has ground to a halt. The self isolating jig is in full swing. The main street is as silent as the CBD of a ghost town, which normally is abuzz with cars, coffee places, people and outdoor life generally.

As I live only one block back from it all, and today it might as well be the depths of a public holiday, and the silence is already quite oppressive.

I’ve been filling the silence with music. I’m wearing earphones hours a day. This week I discovered the Dirty Three. An Australian alternative band, led by Warren Ellis, a violinist, they play a great variety of post rock, experimental, rhythm and drone.

Whenever I’ve built up a bit of strength, I move the next item of furniture in my big project of fitting an architect’s drafting desk into the house. Yesterday was Day 3, and I moved a chest of drawers into my bedroom that will be used to store seasonal stuff … blankets and winter clothes.

Trouble is, when that chest of drawers stood in the sun room it contained kids’ toys, photos and photo albums, and various other stuff. All those have been displaced and today is the day of decisions. Hundreds of them. Like, I have too many photos. It’s a cull.

I haven’t started yet, and I also still need to go out … the IGA for food and the chemist for advice and band-aids.

Food: Making Up Recipes

Needing to be a low-FODMAP eater for life, I’m constantly on the look out for easy recipes for sweet treats. While good cook books and online recipes are now no longer as scarce as hen’s teeth, I’m still always searching for EASY recipes.

Nothing turns me off from cooking or baking quicker than a recipe with dozens of ingredients–also called an ingredient stampede.

Not only that, I’m after a recipe for choc brownies or non-chocolate ‘brownies’. It’s that consistency of batter, I’ve decided, is the easiest to bake. Fill the cup-cake tray with the patty-papers, fill with the batter, and put in oven. Easy.

And I’m not eating the silicone off the baking paper, or from the silicone baking trays. I’m a Luddite in that respect. No silicone baking for me.

So recently I’ve been experimenting with the Rule of the Egg. I came across this rule many years ago in the hand-written cookbook of a friend of the family, Mary Morgan. I don’t think she would’ve minded me mentioning her name in regards to traditional Australian cooking and baking, she was a star. (1925 — 2011)

I have several recipes in my own hand-written book of recipes named after her. You know the sort, Mary’s Sponge; Mary’s Marmalade; and Mary’s Pav. But to get back to the Rule of the Egg.

In the case of today’s experiment I put in two eggs and four tablespoons of peanut butter. So that’s a doubling of the nut butter/butter/margarine/oil.

Then for each egg used, add one tablespoon of each flour you’re using, and one tablespoon of sugar.

I didn’t bother with salt as the peanut butter had salt in it. But normally it’s a pinch.

I mixed the ingredients in as I went, starting with the eggs and peanut butter. There’s a rule about order of adding that I’m somewhat hazy about. I figure though that since I’m not using a flour with gluten in it, there need be no worry about developing the gluten with too much working of the batter.

And finally I moistened the batter to a good consistency with rice milk. I’m sure any milk-like fluid can be used for this step.

Half-fill the cup-cake-cases. I got eight cup-cakes out of this batch.

Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Cool on a rack.