Novel #20!

So you wanna know something? I'm tired. It was a rough semester and I spent the better part of my last week off sleeping. Well, that and being stuck in Christmas traffic. I'm never shopping on Christmas Eve eve again. This is a lesson I'm sure everyone else learned ages ago, but I guess that is what your early twenties are for.

I promised you chicken popovers today for the amazing City of Thieves book. This is still coming soon, but I wanted to share a bit of news today instead. One reason I've been so busy recently is that I did NaNoWriMo.

This isn't the first time I've done it. In fact, this was the fourth time I've done it, but only the third time I've won (A term I'm not sure I feel fully qualified to use. How about finished?). Last year I lost (A term I DO feel qualified to use.) for the first time in NaNoWriMo. It was my freshman year in college and I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with stuffz. I started a novel that was a disaster and quit at around 30,000 (which, from experience, is about when I hit a wall anyway).

This year, I tried again. I was a little wary. I'm still in college and probably busier than ever but if there is one thing that bugs me, it's when someone says they don't have time to do NaNoWriMo. And we've all heard it. "Yeah, I really, really want to do it, but I just don't think I have time this year."

You don't really want to do it. Time is an excuse, not a reason. Last year, I didn't lose because I didn't have time. I could have made time, despite working and having an internship and being a full time student and living in an undergrad dorm. I could have done it. But it wasn't the right novel, I was having other life issues that made it hard for me to get motivated to write. There were reasons that I chose not to finish, not reasons that prevented me from finishing.

So this year, I decided that I would do it again because I haven't finished a novel since I started college and I wanted to prove to myself that I still could, and that I still wanted to. One great thing about NaNoWriMo, to me, is what it encourages me to do. It encourages me to cut down on the amount of trashy TV I watch (One Tree Hill, anyone?) and the amount of time I spend studying for class and forces me to increase the amount of time I spend doing something I love -- writing. Because writing isn't a chore for me, or something I feel like I have to do to get a good grade and prepare for my future. Writing is something I do because I love it. It's a self preserving activity, something that has become increasingly obvious to me since I did NaNoWriMo in college. I love college, but it can make me crazy. And writing makes me sane.

I finished NaNoWriMo this year, reaching 51,000 words during the course of November on my new novel, Jacked. I'm pleased to say that today, the day after Christmas, I finished the novel in full. It is my 20th novel. I'm going to relax for the rest of the day, drink some hot chocolate and eat Christmas leftovers. In a few weeks, I'll start editing and I'll make sure to carve out time when I go back to school to edit and write because if I don't give myself time to do what I love, what am I doing?

My Future and the Future of the Humanities

I'm back at college now and in a week I will be 20. I know for a lot of people, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But when I think that this is my last week as a teenager, I'm actually a little freaked out. This is what the difference between 19 and 20 says to me:

19-year-olds can spend massive amounts of time watching "Say Yes to the Dress" on Netflix. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds can know all the lyrics to "Call Me Maybe" and scream them out open car windows at stop lights. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds don't have to be ashamed that they spent their last Friday night learning all the dance moves to Gangnam Style, while in their horse-pajamas. 20-year-olds should be.

But, most importantly, 19-year-olds are teenagers. They don't need to have their lives figured out yet. 20-year-olds are young adults. They should.

The prospect of my future has never really freaked me out before, which I guess is a pretty naive statement. I've been a very lucky person in life. I've always known I wanted to be a writer, and I'm not bad at it. I got into my first choice for college with some scholarships. I come from an amazingly supportive family and I've got great friends and a terrific boyfriend. When I came to college, I knew I'd be an English major and a Creative Writing minor and I knew my goal was to go to graduate school, either for a PhD in English or an MFA in Creative Writing. A professorship would be next, some tenure, a home in New England, some novels published on the side.

So today I decided that since I'm turning 20 and everything, I should probably start thinking about how I'm going to make these things happen. I went to a workshop today on how to apply for an English PhD program or a Creative Writing MFA program. Want to know how that went? Pretty much like this: Me Being a Dumb Ass (minus getting a C and wanting to go to Yale)

Suffice to say, the general message of how to apply to graduate school in English was don't do it. Why? Out of 600 applications, 15 get accepted. Programs are shrinking, getting canceled, ceasing to exist. For the first half hour of this workshop, we were given a lecture about how the death of humanities is upon us. A panel of advisers and professors in the English department told us with straight faces that people today see little need for the humanities and its future is very much at risk. And I thought it was just mine.

I could make this post a long rant about how ridiculous this feels to me, how stupid I want to say people are, how helpless I feel but also how much I want to fight back against this stereotype of the humanities and the idea that soon it will only be something people once studied and liberal arts universities will no longer really be liberal arts universities. But I'm not. Because I think those opinions of mine are obvious. I'd heard these sentiments before but I'd never taken them too seriously. But when a group of experts in the field sit in front of a group of future experts in the field and tell them that their field is on the brink of death, it's hard not to take seriously.

What do you think? Are the humanities dying? Why do people need the humanities, and literature in particular? Because I know this was a question that I'd never thought needed to be asked.

(On a lighter note, I read a fantastic book by David Benioff called City of Thieves. In honor of it, I'm making chicken popovers (the book is about two boys hunting Leningrad in WWII for a chicken). I'll post the results up here on the next post, like I did with Lemon Cake.)  

A Lesson in Nudity and Violence from Game of Thrones

Recently I’ve become addicted to a new television show. Don’t worry, this happens like once a month. I’ll hear something is a good show and then I’ll troll the internet (mostly Netflix) until I find all of the episodes ever and then I’ll watch them all one after another until I feel guilty about having gotten nothing else accomplished. If it’s a good TV show, normally I won’t feel guilty about this until I’ve watched all the episodes.

So, right, recently I’ve become addicted to a new show. I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s a little show called Game of Thrones. It’s summer, so I’m home, and my parents saw me watching an episode. For anyone else that watches this show (which should be EVERYONE), you know that along with all of its amazingness, it also has a ton of violence and nudity. So my dad is standing there watching a second of this with me and he says, “So why exactly do you like this show?”

This is a reasonable question when he is watching a bit in which in one scene someone gets his throat slit and in the next scene two women in a brothel are getting it on. But it didn’t take me even a second to think about it before I answered.

The writing is amazing.

Part of this is probably because the author of the books this series is based on writes some of the episodes and is a co-producer so he has a ton of creative control (always a good thing). Part of this is probably because the main writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, have experience in both screen writing and in novel writing. This second part is the key bit. They both also write novels, which, when it comes to adapting a novel to the screen, seems utterly important to me but also utterly overlooked. Plus, I just finished reading David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves and it was incredible! So, you know, it’s good writing upon good writing upon good writing.

Okay, so fine, I like the writing. But there has to be more that attracts me to this than just the witty dialogue (although I could probably just listen to Tyrion talk forever). 

 

I think it also has something to do with the mix of violence/nudity and the extremely emotional connections we make to the characters. Game of Thrones is widely known to be that show that kills off everyone you like and never the people that you hate (which happens to be more than half the characters). This sounds evil, right? But it’s actually kind of brilliant. If you put those characters that fans hate in charge and always put the good guys as the underdogs, it is guaranteed that those fans will come back. They want to see their favorites succeed, but if they do, fans will feel satisfied and leave. So while all of us fans moan that Joffrey still hasn’t died and that not even Sansa deserved that, we all secretly kind of love watching all this violence and nudity and this horrible stuff happen. Not because it’s happening, but because we know that the best is yet to come.

Delayed gratification. All of our writing could learn a little from it. Or, at least mine could.

Bravo David Benioff. Bravo D. B. Weiss. But really. Bravo George R.R. Martin.  

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake Lemon Cake (Without the Particular Sadness)

So last night, with the help of my boyfriend, I undertook the challenge I mentioned in my previous post, which was remaking the lemon cake that I am currently reading about in the novel by Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. It’s a great book, I highly suggest it, but I also suggest making yourself some of this lemon cake while you read it. Because just reading this book made me hungry.

The book isn’t really about food. It’s about people. But since she learns about people through her food, it certainly talks about eating a lot. Which made me really want a slice of the lemon cake pictured on the cover:

I mean, who wouldn’t?

Most lemon cake recipes suggest using marshmallow cream icing or some kind of lemon or vanilla icing. Since I was trying to copy the cake from The Particular Sadness, I used chocolate fudge icing on top, but I couldn’t resist making some lemon curd for the middle. I’ll be honest, I was a little overwhelmed at the prospect of making the cake and the curd and the icing, so I cheated and just bought some chocolate fudge icing. Meh. I’m sure homemade would have been delicious, but I had my work cut out for me as it was. Here is what I used for the lemon cake and the lemon curd center:

(Adapted from Country Living and A Piece of Cake)

 What you need:

For the curd:

 Zest from two lemons

1 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 6 lemons)

1 teaspoon unflavored gelatin

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

4 large eggs

6 large egg yolks (reserve whites for the cake)

8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and frozen

For the cake:

3 cups cake flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup butter, softened

2 1/2 cups sugar

5  eggs

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup lemon juice

3/4 cup buttermilk

Start with the cake. Preheat the oven to 350 °F. Butter and flour 2 parchment-paper-lined identical cake pans. Set aside. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda together. Set aside. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy using a mixer set on medium speed. Add the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the vanilla extract. Reduce mixer speed to low and add the flour mixture by thirds, alternating with the lemon juice and buttermilk. Fun fact about my experience: we didn’t have a mixer, so I just used a whisk and mixed at the speeds I imagined it would do. This is probably a fail technique and if you have a mixer, use it. But honestly, the cake turned out fine. So, oh well. Divide the batter between the pans. Bake until golden, about 45 minutes.

While it is baking, go ahead and make the lemon curd, using the ingredients listed above. Measure 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice into a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatin over the top to soften. Work the lemon zest with your fingers into the sugar until the sugar is fragrant and evenly moistened with the oils from the zest. Heat the rest of the lemon juice, the lemon sugar, and salt in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture is hot but not bubbling. Whisk the whole eggs and egg yolks in a large bowl. Slowly whisk the lemon syrup into the eggs, then return the mixture to the saucepan over medium-low heat. Cook the curd, stirring constantly, until it’s thick enough to draw a trail through it with a spatula. Stir in the softened gelatin until completely dissolved. Set aside.

When the cake is done, make sure to let it cool! This is where we went a little wrong. It smelled so good and we really wanted it so we just started to decorate and put the custard in without letting it cool. The top layer literally fell apart on me! Luckily, icing proved to be really good cement and held it together, and it still tasted delicious. But if you want to make it look super pretty, you need to let it cool.

Take the first cake out of the pan (after it cooled!) and spread a thick layer of the curd on top of the cake. Then stick the second cake on top of that and ice over the whole thing with the chocolate icing. Best served with milk. : )

Here is my finished product. Look much like the book cover? Maybe not as pristine. But you’ll have to excuse me. I couldn’t help myself, and I took a bite of it before the picture was taken. Mmm.

  

I really enjoyed making (and eating) this cake so I’ll probably do this more often when I’m reading a good book. Hope you enjoy making this too! And, even if you don’t cook, I hope you enjoyed the food porn in this post, at least.

Nom Nom Nom

So recently for my internship, I was given the job of starting a Pinterest for the small press. As if this is a job. I already live way too high of a percentage of my life on Pinterest. Just ask my boyfriend who actually got an application on his iPhone for Pinterest just so I didn't have to be away from it for too long.

To complete this task, I read articles about how businesses can use Pinterest for advertising and how other publishing companies, particularly small publishing companies, use Pinterest as a new social media outlet. The bottom line with this seems to be to make boards that would be interesting to a lot of people (DYI boards, wedding boards, clothing boards, etc.) and relating it back to your product in some way, i.e. books. Naturally, given my love of food, the first board I wanted to make was a food board. So, in my limited infinite wisdom I developed this board for my boss: Savor the Pages. I started pinning images/recipes of food that is mentioned in the books we publish. After hours of finding and pinning food porn, I decided I really didn't want to just pin this food. I wanted to cook this food.

Thank God for how versatile this blog is. Because guess what? I can do just that. Except I'm going to make food that are in the books I'm reading for fun, not ones from my boss's company. Right now, I'm reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. 

I'm sure what you can guess what that means for my cooking plan. Mmm. So excited! Look forward to the results. They will be posted here soon, whether they turn out to be delicious or a disaster...

New Beginnings (And a New Look)

Happy summer! Don’t think this is as big of a deal for something people that aren’t in school (or teach school), but for a college student, summer time means a ton more free time. And a ton more time for writing. With summer starting, I feel like it’s time for other new beginnings (which is why I changed the design of my blog to this cleaner look). Knowing my obsession with lists, you can’t be that surprised that I’m about to give you another one…

5 Things That I Will (Hopefully) Do This Summer

1. Blog once a week: Yikes. I just promised (kind of) to do that. But if I can’t do it during the summer, I’m never going to be able to do it during the school year, which is the ultimate goal. So yeah. Once a week. I promise. I hope. I’ll try?

2. Submit my work for regular editing: Geez, why do all of these sound so scary? Don’t get me wrong: I like editing and I even like being edited (sometimes). But committing to regular editing? It means that I am going to have people reading my stuff once a week for scrutiny. I am going to have to produce enough each week (and clean it up enough) to send it off to an editor. But it’s good. It is. It is. I just gotta say it to myself a few more times.

3. Start to combine my love of food and writing on this blog. I have a plan for how to do this, which I will express in a later blog post. The bottom line is, get reading for some recipes!

4. Finish my current WIP: Yeah. I’m in a hole and I know from experience that getting in a hole at this point in my WIP is bad news bears. So I have to push through whatever rut I’m in. And the best way I know how to do it is to just sit down and write.

5. Read 10 books: for fun. These last two words are the key ones.  I read plenty during the school year, and they are good books (er, most of them.). But this summer I want to read books that I pick. So far, I’m two books in and working on the third. I may be posting reviews as I go. Want to follow my progress and read with me? The first book of the summer was A Fault in Our Stars by John Green (amazing!) and the second was The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (love her). Currently? Delirium by Lauren Oliver. 

Do you have any summer writing/reading goals? Tell me about ‘em. And, if I stay good on my goals, I’ll be talking to you again really soon!

Success Kid: When Memes Apply to Real Life

Today, I finally got my query letter to the place it needs to be. For anyone else who’s had to write a query letter, you know what a great (and elusive) feeling this is. How great? This great:

Success Kid, how I envy your everlasting sense of victory.

Because I know that in a few days, I’m going to look at this query letter that I feel so proud of right now and think, “Really? That’s the best you can do?” At first, it’s disheartening to think that these feelings of inadequacy are an ingrained part of a writer’s life. But then I think, what if it wasn’t? Would that make me happy with the subpar? I don’t want that. I’ll take the feelings of inadequacy if it means I get to feel like Success Kid some days.

Critiques are a good example of this. Every day I walk into a workshop for my creative writing classes, I want to pee my pants  get really nervous. I’m anxious about what people might say about my writing. I’m anxious about coming across too harsh about other people’s writing. But mostly, I’m anxious about not getting that harsh feedback or not being too critical about someone else’s piece. If I went into workshop expecting nothing but compliments and giving nothing but smiles in return, I’d get nowhere.

I don’t want someone to tell me that what I have is perfect. Because nothing is perfect and I don’t want to settle. As writers, it’s our job not to take the easy way out and say, “It’s not getting any better.” So with this in mind, I’m going to enjoy this feeling of success today and then I’ll come back to the letter later and see what can be done. And I hope you do too!

If you want to check out the query letter for my WIP, you can find it under “The Writing Desk” up top. Have comments about how it can be better? Please, leave them in the comments! Want me to look at yours? E-mail me! Then we can all be Success Kids.