What are Human Tales, you ask? Tales of warning and terror about mortals who break their vows and kill supernatural creatures for no reason other than malice. Tales of saving the lovely mortal princess from the horrible mortal prince and what it took to bring her home, of rescuing babies from unfit parents and leaving a changeling in the baby’s place to teach their mortal parents a lesson. These are Human Tales.

My short, Bloody Spindle, was accepted on August 28. I didn’t post about it here because I’d just redone the writing page, and wanted to be sure to have something to talk about later in the week, you see. LOGIC!

Edits are forthcoming, which I have actually come to look forward to. I used to hate the idea of editing my stories, but a side effect of levelling up as a writer is the ability to recognize when people are making your work a lot better. Not taking it personally was my biggest challenge, which I’m over at this point.

Today saw a good amount of work on the novel, with high hopes to get some more short story work done this evening. However, I’ve got three sites to work on before that can happen, and a campaign game to put the final touches on for the crew of Adveriad … so those words may need to chew through their restraints with the dawn instead of dusk.

Or at least it was true!

The writing page has been updated with links to all short stories available online through the Edge of Propinquity, as well as links to purchase the anthologies I’ve appeared in from both the publishers and amazon.com, in paperback and Kindle formats.

As my focus has shifted more toward my writing than my design skills, I’ll be keeping that page updated on a much more regular basis moving forward. Check it out, and if you like what you see, why not leave a comment?

I used this recipe from Nichols Farm as a baseline and made the following immediate changes:

Behold! My system of mighty ingredients!

Healthy canola spray
2 cups chopped onions
5 ripe Holy Mole peppers, deseeded & chopped
5 cloves garlic, peeled & chopped
1/4 cup raisins, chopped
4 tsp Texas-style chili powder
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 cups chicken broth
2 large chopped, peeled tomatoes
.5 oz. dark unsweetened chocolate
.5 oz. dark sweetened chocolate with ancho powder
2 Tbsp.  peanut butter
1 Corn tortilla, lightly toasted and shredded

As always, I started by thanking the house leshies and spirits for the chance to do the things I love most, and set up a small dish for them to get the first bites of everything I cut up.

The onions, garlic and raisins all went into the food processor after the initial cuttings, while the mole peppers were sliced by hand. I wanted to get a feel for them, since I hadn’t worked with them before. I did notice that the peppers weren’t really the reddish-brown that they’re meant to be, which meant I was probably moving too quickly. For the first time in my life.

In the end, I decided to go ahead, and call this a “young mole sauce,” much as illicit moonshiners might sell “young whiskey” or Wisconsinites might sell “fruit wine.”

All four of these ingredients were sauteed in the canola spray. Meanwhile, L was kind enough to come in and teach me how to peel tomatoes in salted water. I had no idea, and likely would have wound up either a) not peeling them at all, or b) making a much, much bigger mess of the kitchen than I typically do. If one can imagine such a thing.

This was actually a big step for Adventures in Cookery! In that I didn’t get all high and mighty insisting that god damn it I know how to peel a tomato woman will you get back to watching your stories* on the teevee already. Which tends to be a problem, especially when she is such a fantastic cook already.

At the same time, we experimented with toasting the corn tortilla. Initially I took the coward’s path and tried to toast it in the oven at 315 degrees on an aluminum pan, but in the end that turned out to be a bit of a bust. So we took the bolder step of laying the tortilla directly on the burner, fire extinguisher at the ready in case of fire and rum available in case of painful burns.

We lost one tortilla to the burning, but the second turned out perfect. We were able to use the center of it to scrape all the peanut butter off the tablespoons when we assembled everything, so double-bonus!

In went the rest of the ingredients, though at this point we had not yet added the sweet chili chocolate. After sauteeing the sauce for about fifteen minutes, I felt the sharp bitterness of the unsweetened chocolate and cinnamon needed something to leaven it, which is when L suggested using a bit of one of her specialty candy bars. We used just a bit at first, but getting bolder proved the final bit! I tossed in a few sliced jalepeno peppers to bump up the heat factor, threw the sauce into the blender, and we were ready to prepare the chicken.

We decided to go very simple for the chicken thighs, since the sauce was so complex. We just sprayed them down with smoked Tabasco and hot chili pepper sauce, then threw them on the direct heat of the grill for six minutes a side before moving them to indirect heat – we had picked up a guest by that point, who needed to grill up her salmon, and so the chicken thighs rested while the fish was cooked up.

Coming inside, we shredded the thighs and each assembled our own tortilla-based meal, with sauce to taste.

Victory! If not flawless victory! Next time I will make the following adjustments:

1) Corn tortillas are fine in the sauce, but I don’t care for the texture when they’re around the food. Next time it’s over the rice, or on flour tortillas.

2) I’d love to try sauteeing the mole sauce on the grill while the chicken is cooking, then shred the meat up into the sauce itself. I think that’s going to help keep a stable temperature as well as a more authentic texture.

3) Next time: Pork. The chicken thighs were fantastic but the idea of a nice, smokey pork roast shredded into the mole sauce makes my mouth water.

Thanks for watching! Let me know if you try the recipe yourself, or better yet … write about it!

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* – Note: The fact that L’s “stories” are mostly programs on quantum physics or quasars is beside the point for comedy purposes.

1. Writing: At GenCon this year, I spoke with the esteemed Jennifer Brozek about returning to the online magazine The Edge of Propinquity in 2011. We agreed that my current serial, Solstice, hadn’t reached the level of  my previous story, Vorare; and that while I wasn’t interested in revisiting Vorare, we agreed that Solstice’s time had come.

   I spent the next two weeks brainstorming and scribbling frantically. I wanted to get a story down that hit my sweet spots: Weird suburbia, rural horror, the Midwestern seasons, the new age, arts and crafts, obsessive characters and boundary issues. I wanted characters who were sympathetic but vastly flawed, characters with more distinct voices and more careful research put into their development and worlds. I wanted an outline that would let me start working well in advance of my due dates and plan for photos, images, foreshadowing and more polishing than I’ve done in the past for any serial work.

   I pitched Jennifer on Friday and received a thumbs-up on Sunday afternoon that made a good day great. I am tremendously excited about this new story and its world, and will be sharing it aggressively in the lead-up to 2011 and throughout that year.

   I hope you’ll come along – it’s going to be a fantastic ride.

2. Acting: My friend and colleague Diane Baia’s excellent play, The Wisdom of Serpents, has been picked up by Northwestern University to repeat her staged reading. I will be repeating my role as Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, which is an absolute plum for me. Historical Emperors with a dash of snark? JA, BITTE.

   I’m also elated for Diane, as one of the world’s foremost scholars on the life of Hildegard von Bingen will be taking part in the performance as well. Quite a feather in the cap of any writer, to be sure!

   This will take place on October 17 at Northwestern University. More details will, of course, be forthcoming.

Often, a small task I’ve been asked to accomplish gets set aside. It’s something I know won’t take me more than fifteen minutes, so it can wait. What happens next is the snowball effect – another small task gets put aside, then another, then another. They’re invisible, though; small and beneath my notice, so even though they’re piling up in my subconscious I don’t realize how much they’ve started to weigh.

There’ll usually be a two to three day period in which I get snarly and snappish with the people around me, getting more and more frustrated with smaller and smaller things. Then one day, I’ll look up and realize exactly what’s happening, as well as how to fix it.

Step one: Apologize to the folks I’ve snapped at.

Step two: Long hot shower and general clean-up.

Step three: Leap into furious action and clean up the verdamnten list already.

Steps one and two are complete. It’s time to get moving.

It’s hot out today, over ninety-five degrees; but the lawn desperately needs mowing, I have no clean laundry, the garden has once again become the red line for feral and diarrhetic cats, and I’ve got a wedding to attend in the early afternoon.

I get the lawn mowed while laundry is in the works. Each pass with the tractor in the heat saps more of my already none-too good sense, especially as I am more interested in being done quickly than things like a hat, sunscreen, or hydration. Once this is done I go to the garage to gas up the mower.

The muddy clothes I wore to paintball last time – you know, June 5? About 42 days ago? Yeah, they’re still in a plastic sack in the garage. And have been all through this heat wave. Without ever being touched.

A common mind might wrinkle his nose and toss the bag, but I am mindful of my proud Scottish ancestors! Waste not, want not! A penny saved is a penny earned! Also, these are a pair of my better skivvies here! I can hose them off, scrape them down, then throw them in as a separate load of laundry!

This is where it gets harder to explain, but the following thoughts are important. Bear in mind that I am crazed with sun and heat.

1. I’m hot, sweaty, terribly sticky. I’m going to shower immediately. Off with the t-shirt.
2. Oh look, I’m wearing my good work belt. Silly me. Off with the belt.

So, I’m half-dressed and ready to hose down an entire suit of clothes in the yard.

NOW. The following are not thoughts, but things, which are equally important to know.

1. I’ve been better on my diet lately and have lost several pounds.
2. It’s laundry day. Certain articles of personal clothing may have been sacrificed until I am finished working and showering.

This is the bit where the laugh track gets uncomfortable, and rightly so; for the audience slowly realizes that a shirtless dude going commando in pants made for his previous size may experience certain issues.

What they may NOT realize is that, for maximum comedy potential, said issues will occur while hosing down a pair of mud-caked underwear in the yard.

I have personally done more today to lower property values than any of the local dealers. And in its own small way, that’s something of an achievement, don’t you think?

When I’m in motion, I tend to remain in motion. Whether that’s writing, reading, working in Photoshop, exercising, partying, whatever; left to my own devices I’ll just keep going until some outside force or commitment drives me to stop doing so. I can get a lot done in a short amount of time when I’m able to get myself going.

When I’m lost in some activity like that, I am truly relaxing. My brain turns off or switches channels and allows me to float around whatever it is I’m engaged in. The feeling of being completely in the moment and absorbed in what I’m doing is a blessing of the highest order.

The catch of that law is that, of course, when I’m at rest … nothing happens. Nothing. I remain at rest until there is some overwhelming reason to stop it. Watching television? Mark off the evening. I used to be able to count on waking up early and starting the day immediately; but of late, even waking up’s becoming a chore, much less getting out of the bedroom (the only air conditioned place in the house). If I sit down in the summer sun, there’s no budging me unless it’s bedtime or dinnertime. Even reading is a struggle then, because the temptation to just sit and do absolutely nothing at all overwhelms me.

That’s frightening to me. Maybe it’s normal and I just don’t recognize it in other people, but it feels absolutely maddening to me for the split-second before I can embrace the feeling of lassitude and sink into it. Making that active and mindful is the real key – choosing and deciding that enough has been done, or that I need the low-key, low-level time in order to recuperate from whatever I’ve driven myself into the ground for.

A good friend called me a type A personality last night. I never would have thought of that, but maybe it’s true. Who knows? What I do know is that it’s a quarter to ten and I have to get moving.

Having made the lists of things I need to do, both for others and for myself, it’s more than clear that I’ll need those two hours a day back for a short period of time. It’s a sprint, more than anything; the web-centric version of a short-term cleansing program.

Unfortunately, two of the things I’ve already determined that I need to do for myself are: 

1. Write 250+ words a day, and
2. Spend more time writing on this blog.

Naturally, removing myself from the social sphere at the same time I’m trying to step up the amount of time I spend contributing to said sphere initially seemed pointless at best, callous at worst. If I’m speaking or writing, and people are being good enough to pay attention, think things over, and respond to me, what does it say when I withdraw from the two-way communication that is the theoretical reason for writing in the first place?

Oh, a good deal of this is selfish, or at least self-full. I’m not necessarily writing anything new or groundbreaking, and the main reason I’m doing it is to get more accustomed to what the folks over at Writing Excuses call “making the clackitty sound …” that is, getting my finely toned buttocks in the chair and getting used to putting words in order across the bright and merciless monitor. I’d be doing it right now even if I weren’t posting the pages to the blog, but it’s not as if I don’t keep a private journal as well.

That one, using pen and paper, averages two full pages a day – probably around my 250 mark already. Increasing that by leveraging the blog is a way to try to ensure that I’m both overachieving on my goals without much mental strain, and to make sure that at least some of what I write is about more than my plans for dinner and having the dream about the pickles again.

To that end … by writing in public, I’m working to be sure I have something that someone, somewhere, might actually find useful or entertaining to some degree. Naturally, I can’t know if that’s true or not without talking to and connecting with people – otherwise, it’s chattering into the dark, like the lemures of the Styx.

All of which is a fairly wordy way to say that I appreciate the comments people leave for me, and that if I’m not responding for the next week or so, you can be assured it’s only because I’m working to find more things to talk with you about on my return.

The bright side is that I know myself and my triggers well enough now to be able to identify what’s causing most of the concern.

1. Too much management, not enough motion. I’ve had to spend a lot more time shepherding projects along at the day job without actually doing anything manually to move the processes to completion. The same is somewhat true of the freelance work, where I can encourage people to give me content but can’t actually write or create it on their behalf. That frustrates me, because I really prefer getting into a project, finishing it quickly, and then moving on.
2. Too many ideas, not enough time. I’m exploding with ideas for stories, flash fiction, graphics and paintings. Too many of them to get any one of them actually done in a reasonable amount of time, especially given the time constraints listed above.
3. Lack of exercise and motion. I’ve been away from the gym for weeks now. It doesn’t actually help that people keep telling me I look like I’ve lost weight – what I think I’ve lost is muscle, but when people keep saying you look too thin it’s harder to make the workout a priority.
4.  Poor dietary choices. “Make good choices,” L and I say to each other, but I haven’t been. There are barbecues, parties, celebrations and reasons to dine out on every side of me, every day. I’m not complaining about this – the chance to see so many people and have such a good time is among the better parts of my life – but my lack of self-discipline in choosing what to eat and drink is really dragging me down energetically.
5. Relaxation vs. reality. This one will get a whole post of its own soon, but it comes down to choosing how to spend the free time I do have. I’m often questioned on why it’s so hard for me to just sit down and relax – the fact is that I recognize that when I spend too much time doing so, this anxiety is the equivalent of my hangover from excessive fun-time. I’d rather avoid that anxiety than spend the time ‘relaxing’ in the ways that most people recognize as relaxation.

So how do I fix this, and get back to my usual stance of breezy self-assurance?

Numbers one and two can be managed by lists – putting things that I want to do, need to do, and deadlines for both down on paper. This lets me actually track what’s happening in the real world, rather than looming over me as some amorphous mass.

Numbers three and four are down to me and down to re-establishing new routines that work. I can keep attending parties and cookouts as long as I pay more attention to breakfast and lunch choices, and knowing that the lack of exercise is making me crazy is a powerful motivator to get back to the gym.

As to number 5 – like I say, that’s a post for another day without any question. In the meantime, it’ll behoove me to find ways to distract myself from overwork or overplay. Balance may be the key, but it’s not something I’ve ever found that simple.

Jennifer Brozek (Murder) and Seanan McGuire (Mayhem) are bringing frights and entertainment to the west coast for two days only. This free mini-tour features Jennifer’s newly released horror collection, IN A GILDED LIGHT: 105 TALES OF THE MACABRE, and Seanan’s Edge of Propinquity series, SPARROW HILL ROAD. Together, Murder and Mayhem will read excerpts from their fiction, tell tales out of school and generally have a good time.

SEATTLE
July 10, 2010, 6:30pm
Third Place Books
17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA
98155

SAN FRANCISCO
July 17, 2010, 3:00pm
Borderlands Books
866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA
94110

Come out and enjoy the fun. Have your books signed and asked that question you’ve always wanted to ask. I hear there will be cupcakes, too.