Weaving Delicious Nightmares
Writing
Famished at GenCon 50!
GenCon is typically a vacation for me, but a working vacation in many ways. This year, with the release of FAMISHED: THE GENTLEMEN GHOULS OMNIBUS, there were obviously things to be done!
I signed every print copy of the book we had on hand. My signature is notoriously bad, but it gets better as I repeat it, so by the end were doing well. I spent a little time – not as much as
I should – in Authors’ Alley, working to inform people about both my books and others from Apocalypse Ink Productions.
It’s not a terribly onerous job, though it can be demoralizing. I work the booth for Triskele Moon Studios jewelry on a regular basis, and while it’s easy to entice art lovers to look at jewelry, it’s a much harder task getting gamers to stop to discuss fiction – especially when that’s all the area is selling!
Still, being an extrovert certainly helps. I don’t know how more introverted artists and authors manage it, and I salute their fortitude every time I see them sitting quietly behind a desk. It’s also a trick learning to read introverts or the very shy, so that I don’t upset or startle them with too many loud words as they pass by. I like to think I’m okay at this.
We nearly sold out of the print edition! That was a high point, to be sure. And while I didn’t purchase as many books as I’d have liked, personally; I’ve got a shopping list for the post-convention season both to support my fellow writers and to find new and exciting works of fiction.
The high point of the Con, though, came in the aftermath of my first sale.
While I was manning the booth with Jenn on Friday, we had a visit from a wonderful young woman who was shopping for her stepdaughter.
“What does she like to read?” Jenn inquired – a common question from her.
“Horror, mostly.” The answer that’s music to my ears! We talked for a few minutes before she agreed to purchase the book, and we asked if she’d like it personalized. I heard from her stepdaughter that evening with a joyful excitement, and when she found out it was the first sale of the first book of my Con, she was thrilled! It turned out they came back the next day to buy a second copy, as they didn’t want to damage the first one by reading it.
I have to tell you, that was a great moment. It’s hard for me to imagine someone having that level of respect for what I’ve done, for where I am. I do sincerely wish I had been there to personalize the second book, but it still makes a great story; and if I ever do meet them again I promise to make it right.
Foodie Friday: Ivan’s Nam Sod
Friends, this nam sod is a golden trifecta: Fairly low in calories, certainly cheaper than my usual fare, and ready in less than 30 minutes; but it tastes like none of these are true.
It’s good hot off the stove or cold the next day for any meal. This is a great weeknight recipe, especially during these hot summer months.
As with all my recipes, remember that I loooooove garlic and strong flavors. You could certainly pull back on any of this except the orange juice to protein ratio.
Ingredients:
- 2 Tbsp sesame oil
- 2 lbs ground chicken breast
(You can use ground chicken, ground turkey or ground pork, but this is the low-cal version) - 8 cloves minced garlic
- 3 Tbsp fresh minced ginger
- 1 cup fresh orange juice
- 6 Tbsp low sodium soy sauce
- 4 Tbsp sweet chili paste (I use Mae Ploy red curry)
- 1 1/2 tsp fish sauce (optional, but brings the delicious funk out)
- 2 Tbsp crushed peanuts
- 2 Tbsp fresh cilantro leaves
Options:
- Rice to serve in a bowl (Brown or wild is healthiest, it goes very well with Jasmine rice, though)
- Lettuce leaves to use as wraps
- Green onions, radishes, bean sprouts, sliced water chestnuts … any crunchy vegetal bits
- Broccoli, green beans … any side vegetable that’s bright green (adds color to the plate)
- More peanuts or cashews
- More chili paste, or crushed red pepper
- Lime wedges to squeeze over the entire thing
Directions:
- Heat the sesame oil over a large skillet and brown the chicken on all sides.
It doesn’t need to cook fully, just brown. - Add the garlic, ginger, soy sauce, chili paste, fish sauce and orange juice and bring to a boil.
- Turn the range to low and simmer until you’re ready to eat.
- Top each bowl or wrap with peanuts and cilantro, plus any of the options listed above.
Adapted from Frugal Nutrition’s Orange Ground Chicken Bowls.
My Take on Reviews
7 years
I was in Indianapolis for a convention, wandering the streets with my good friend around lunchtime, when we found ourselves in front a brewpub. There were no lines – a rarity at this hour – and my stomach was making the rumbiles.
“Let’s grab a bite,” I said.
“Hang on,” said my friend, and he took out his smartphone.
“Who are you calling?”
“Nobody. I want to check the reviews.”
“Reviews?” I asked. “It’s a brewpub. It’ll have hamburgers and beer and cost around twenty bucks. There’s no line. Come on.”
He looked up. “But are they good hamburgers and beer?”
“We won’t know until we try them.”
“We will if we check the reviews.”
This is utterly, completely … alien behavior.
I understand that reviews drive a lot of consumer activity, but it’s never made sense to me. In the days before the internet made everyone a critic, we had a professional class to tell one what to watch, what to read, where to eat. I remember that they existed, but I can’t remember a single time I took their advice.
I’m not sure why. It may just be a contrarian streak, or a dislike of presumed authority, but mostly it’s because I know I like a lot of things other people don’t enjoy. For instance, it’s difficult to imagine anyone I trust giving a five-star rating to even the most remarkable plate of haggis. My favorite whiskies have been described by trusted friends as tasting like “a mouthful of wet dirt.” And I take comfort in the existence of a Never Mind the Bollocks cover album performed by bhangra musicians.
Aside from my own quirks, thanks to the internet things have spiraled completely out of control. Anyone with access to a public library’s internet connection and two working fingers can now take part in elevating or torpedoing anyone else’s endeavors.
My favorite to date? “Honestly one of the worst masses I have ever been to. Boring, uninspired, sloppy and irrelevant”—Marilisa A., reviewing Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Manhattan.
Seriously, who decides what church to attend based on semi-anonymous reviews? Presumably the same kind of people who take the time to write them.
I’ve tried to fold reviews into my recent larger purchases –a car, for instance. But with these items, it always seems to come down to hooting tribalism around someone’s personal preferences wedded to a certainty that all OTHER preferences are the work of Bealzebub himself.
Now, that’s at the consumer level. At the creator level, it’s naturally a different story. I have to recognize that reviews are considered an important part of the buying process by many people. I don’t have to understand it, necessarily; but I do have to engage with it.
What I *can* understand is this: It’s always pleasant to hear your work praised, and it’s always useful to receive constructive criticism, and it’s always a pain in the ass to slog through the pointless and unconstructive criticism. One way to counterbalance the unconstructive criticism is to provide more positive or constructive reviews for your fellow workers, slogging away in the word / note / jeté mines.
To my mind, the best review isn’t one which seeks to influence others into purchasing (or refusing to purchase) some piece of work. Rather, it’s a means of letting the creator know their work was seen, that there was a connection made. It exchanges just a bit more of my time for their work, lets them inhabit my mind for few hours longer. I suppose, perhaps, that’s the point that many reviewers make. A tip of the hat to someone’s best efforts, whether it was fully appreciated or not.
For the record, I didn’t review the brewpub. But the burger was fine and the lager was lager.
Review: Play to Innovate, by Bret Schwalb
Play to Innovate isn’t my usual read. Generally speaking, I find books on business practice to be either tiresome slogs or condescending managerial tripe. Finding a book filled with solid advice that still clips along at a rapid clip is a wonderful change of pace.
Bret Schwalb’s central concept might not be brand new – brainstorming has, of course, been around longer than most of us have. What Play to Innovate does is shift the focus of a brainstorm away from the gray, safe, dry-erase corporate boardroom and towards a method of freeing our minds, individually or in a group.
While we’ve heard “there are no bad ideas” in countless sessions, none of them have felt true until running through one of Bret’s meetings. By encouraging a safe place, Play to Innovate unlocks something many of us buried long ago – the capacity for wonder, the ability to dream something larger than we have before.
When we hear of history’s great innovators, not one of them played it safe or focused on the realistic. They dared to think beyond the minds around them, to stretch the boundaries of imagination and pluck something tangible from a dream. Bret’s methods provide a framework to help your team do just that.
Perhaps the most eye-opening piece of advice is to let those individuals who take pleasure in dragging things down simply opt out. It’s rare, in my experience, to hear someone admit their method won’t please everyone. I can name with certainty the people in my company who would roll their eyes, drag their feet, and refuse to engage with this process; and seeing this acknowledged by an author is a refreshing thing.
I recommend Play to Innovate to anyone who has struggled with a thorny problem at work, or been challenged by seemingly impossible requests. Because with just a touch of play, the impossible can become innovation.
Stagecoach Mary, by Jess Nevins
(Full disclosure: Jess Nevins has “Tuckerized” me – which is to say, named a character after me – in this book, so if you’re expecting solid literary criticism you should go talk to an academic he’s annoyed. However, I’m being as candid as my massive ego permits.)
Stagecoach Mary is a Weird Western pulp-style collection set in an alternate Montana in the 1890s. Consisting of eight short stories and encompassing elements of horror, westerns, steampunk and modern sensibilities regarding such things as race and gender; it’s a delightful read in the summer and, I suspect, will be even more fun come Halloween.
If you’re unfamiliar with the historical “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, well, you’re in for a treat. In our reality, she was the first African-American woman star route mail carrier in the United States. Tough, stubborn, independent and successful, she was a remarkable woman. Actor and Montana native Gary Cooper wrote an article for Ebony in which he said, “Born a slave somewhere in Tennessee, Mary lived to become one of the freest souls ever to draw a breath, or a .38,” which sounds like high praise in any era.
Jess doesn’t shy away from the racial elements of the time – you really can’t, writing about such a woman – but to my mind he handles it with grace. Alongside Mary’s own racial issues, the Blackfoot tribe and the trials of the Chinese in the American West are all presented with heroes of their own. (I will confess that Cool Hand Liú is, perhaps, one of my new favorite names.)
He writes each of the stories through the eyes of a young white American man, however, never trying to put himself into the shoes of the other characters; and while the narrator and the sheriff are perhaps remarkable for their tolerance in this time, if you can accept ghosts and river serpents you should be able to accept softer edges in a social milieu.
For the most part, the stories read with the quick action and tense excitement one would expect from this style. As in any clever collection, the two strongest stories serve as bookends. “The Hitchhiker” is a perhaps classic ghost story, but one with enough twists and turns, not to mention exciting scenes, to make one forget the urban legend at its core. And in “Stagecoach Mary’s Last Ride-Out,” a half-dozen more legends of the fictional Wild West make an appearance to fight alongside our erstwhile heroine, culminating in a shootout described with all the breathless intensity of the OK Corral.
Other solid stories include “Omahksoyisksiksina,” about those creatures the Blackfoot tribe may have left behind and to whom they eventually return; “The Phantom Airship of ’98,” featuring members of several tribes attempting to right a historically tragic wrong; and the aforementioned “Cool Hand Liú,” in which an alternate Paladin has his guns, and has certainly travelled. Each of these were well-crafted and enjoyable tales, with characters deeper than your average pulp and creatures described with feverish intensity.
The two weak stories, to my mind, are “Stagecoach Mary Outwits the Devil” and “The Madness That Overtook Cascade.” While “Outwits” is certainly well-written, and I enjoyed Jess’ Devil immensely, I was still unable to decouple it from its well-known inspiration, which you will recognize within a few pages.
My shrug at “The Madness” is, in a word, maddening, because I’m a huge fan of the work I believe inspired this one – HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories – and I believe I simultaneously wished for more mythic and doomed poetry while being unable to envision the story’s events taking place in a stolid American plains town.
That being said, Jess Nevins has an excellent grasp of the way people speak. His dialogue throughout gave me different tones and voices in the ear, and his descriptions of Cascade and its surroundings made me feel as though I was there myself. Unsurprisingly, given his reference works, Jess also knows how the pulp heart beats, and makes copious use of that knowledge.
I found Stagecoach Mary to be a wonderful collection of stories by a writer who is solidly in his wheelhouse, about a woman who deserves to be more well-known and regarded in the modern day. Pick it up and review it for yourself, if you’ve the time and inclination – you won’t regret it for a moment.
