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.
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.
Whales by Rita de Heer, embroidered with Colourstreams Silks on silk scrap background
After I was involved in a discussion on what constituted clangers, and disagreed, I decided to write a story in the mode that was held to be okay. See what it felt like more than anything. See if any sense could result …
Aile cast her eyes across the inn room. Hoping to catch the thief at his work, she aimed them for his face. Twould be good if at least one forced a couple of his teeth to spring for the relative safety of the steak sandwich he’d stolen.
Gusting with laughter, the rest of the patrons sent their hands a-clattering on the tabletops. The applause was that strong, that long, that numbers of armless hands rolled from the table entirely disenchanted.
They had to be rescued, sorted, relieved from dustballs picked up from under the furniture, and restored to their rightful owners. The work of fae. Lordy lordy, do expect a few misses. They’re not paid near enough.
The thief laughed unbridled and so lost his gains … a sandwich that was still only crammed into his gob, not swallowed, not masticated, not yet bitten off or even partitioned. Fearing his pretty teeth might lose their battle with Aile’s eyes, he sent her a thought by way of his ear-jacked aerial. Would she hear his by talk? The way his eyes talked of love with his eye lashes batting shyly and his head cocked just so?
He got his eyes at the smithy, cheap rubbish his mother said. How will you ever get a girl’s unbridled interest? I need you off my hands. His eyes took offense and went back to where they came from.
His second set he worked for all the night hours of six days at the dove house. The girls, as always, were utterly enamoured with his technique. But their hearts were not what he wanted, he told them. Go on. Out with the rubbish, said the madam, throwing her eyes after him for she enjoyed a strongly-built back.
He tried his best to make her eyes work for him. But his lashes would’t have her lashes, and those eyes ended up being glanced back into the dove house, through an open window, for old time’s sake.
His third set must be made to last, he knew. Everybody in the town had lost their patience, lots of broken bits, patents, patterns, cowpats and patty cakes to fall over if he wasn’t careful. Being eyeless as well, don’t you know? He applied to the cloisters with his desperation in tow, having had to dig deep within to find it.
With him wounded in mind as well as body, the monks laid him in a cell to be assessed by the head himself. Calm yourself, oh sightless sinecure, they said. The head has worked here many a year without its body incorporated. It’s a choice you too can make though we will find it difficult to perform our miracles from a blind. Still, we are a charitable institution and will always work with a given.
Meanwhile, back at the hostelry, Aile reeled in her eyes by hand. Their thin-stranded wires coiled by her feet. She fished their control unit from a nearby soup. So much for their reputed flight. Of steel and ebony her eyes were made in a cave where the dwarves weren’t all that fussy about their justified desserts. They cared more about how they were paid.
That ‘how’ became Aile’s target. She grabbed an ill-conceived idea, with wings barely longer than a falconet’s and sent it to the breakfast table to sort her thief’s unregarded losses. Fleeting back to her in numbered send-packets, she swept them into her snood and slipped out the door. The monastery stood downhill, a slide not too hair-raising.
Her beloved thief heard her coming, glorious, victorious. I’m on my way-ay-ay!!!
Would he welcome her with a hair-flick tossed randomly into the crowded cloister for every mad monk to scrabble up from the floor or would his cowlick long enough to torque around her finger do her justly?
I don’t know, he cried. I suffer from malaise, inept-time-management and lassitude. I wish she would just carry me off. The sunset beckons for it captured that clause. Different to when the red coat lived in the Arctic and it still had ice and he still had his elves and missus. He gave out presents when you needed it and I’ve run out of mine. First I lose my eyes, then my nous, then my presence. What will I do?
Yoo-hoo, my love. Let’s be about it, thief of my heart. Aile waltzed into the cell and sweeping the thief from the bed—she plucked a round-eyed gaze from the attendant—she set her lover on his feet. Come with me my torquing clown my glaze-eyed gorget glass-eyed geegaw. The world is oysterishly beautiful.
The monkish eyes fit the thief remarkably well. He stared owlishly into the future she described so eloquently. Oysterishly? I think not, my aileron. My work is here, with my ineptitudes taken care of by management. I understand that they will whip me if I so much as drop a bundle. Apparently, I’m better at cards than every-other sharp in residence.
My new home’s clangers will control my torpors, lassitude, laze and make them episodic. Permutated with episode, epistle and episo they will finally give me an epilogue. Look for me in the cemetery, my love, on the day when you too come a-burying.
It’s useless to be thinking about the future when you are starting out, on anything. You start your working life putting up signs, you have no clue that one day you might be working on high rises installing in glass walls with the help of a robot.
People starting out as writers are the same. I started with writing poetry. I had no idea then that one day I’d take on an sf trilogy.
Nearly everybody here in the Discord’s Writing Cartel has a world/universe that they are either writing into or using as scene setting for any number of creative projects. Yesterday I watched a short film on Youtube, there are people developing games, writing novels, short stories, you name it, it’s being written.
Every one of these worlds/galaxies/universes are huge. Many of us have spent every spare moment of our boring work lives thinking up detail. There will always be areas in any of these worlds that will stay private to their creator, and other areas that will see heavy traffic of stories.
We’re all doing it for the love of it. World building is one of the most satisfying mind games we all engage in, relaxing and psychologically uplifting. Next comes the harder thing. Convincing other people to put their own worlds aside for an hour, and engage with us in ours. So we write stories, develop adventure games, produce visuals, film about our worlds.
The Discord Writing Cartel community is all about sticking our toes in the waters of our worlds, writing though the shallows, and finally committing ourselves to writing fully fledged stories to share first with each other, then with the world.
Only then, with that last word, can you start thinking about how much money you might make. Though, of course, these are just my own thoughts. Take them well salted.
This began as a piece of paper I used for practicing leaf shapes with a new brush, using indigo with a bit of yellow top and bottom.
Then, doing this project, I’m recycling paper as I go since everything I do is trial and error.
So, when trying phthalo blue over indigo and mopping out the centres of
shapes–another thing to practice–that fish became a thing when I
added its eye.
I realize that it is only through the corrugations formed by leaf shapes that I have a shaped mouth, and that I’ll probably never be able to reproduce it.
Bat out of Hell, Nov 17
This pic began with red. Bush-fires have burnt out large swathes of forest and hundreds of animals have died, four humans among them.
Red mixed with indigo and phthalo blue gave me the fire-ground. Indigo for the bat with a touch of orange for its eyes. The blue touches contrasted and made the clouds. Made it realistic, in fact.
After the Fire, Nov 19
After the fire when dead trees stand smoking and still aglow. The sun still shines, an angry ball. This little scene was to give me shades in indigo, but as usual I get carried away by the content.
Those of us in my region living in towns feel ourselves fairly safe in this emergency. So far. People from out of town have been evacuated and are staying with us. Others ask us to store their precious goods. I’m hosting four musical instruments and three large containers with photos and documents.
Recharging batteries is another thing we can do for people who no longer have electricity laid on. Whose power lines and generator sheds have been burned. In two cases I heard of today, the fire was stopped only a few meters from the main house.
The bushfire season began early this year. We’ve been burning since September, and the fires are getting worse, if that’s possible. Hotter, faster, and more destructive. In the past, diligent back-burning and fuel reduction in winter reduced your chances of being burnt out in summer. Now there’s hardly time. Winters are shorter and we’ve had less than half the rain we had last year when we already had a third less than in 2017.
It’s possible for a fire-ground to be burnt twice in two months. This despite the traditional view that rain-forest plantings, in contrast to Eucalyptus forest, will protect your property. No such thing now. Fires burn so hot that rainforests don’t stand a chance and they don’t grow back the way eucalyptus trees recover.
How will we live in a forever-blackened landscape?
Catherine Ingram’s article Facing Extinction, about the state of the world and humanity’s chances of surviving, is more a prescription for coping with the grief than a wake up call. It’s too late, she says, to try and save our Nature.
The way my countryside is burning, it certainly feels too late. I’m with Landcare. We plant trees. What if no trees survive either? It’s difficult to plan how to live now, when there’s said to be no future.
Rita de Heer 