Feeds:
Posts
Comments

So Long, Election Night

30 Oct 2012 by KRAG

Obey the Kitty!The world changes quickly, and as I get older, I start to feel the current move faster than I am. Slowly, inexorably, I’m being left behind. This is something I work hard against; I try to keep current, but I never was “edgy” or “cool” and I sure as hell don’t expect to start now. I suppose this makes me a member of the Curmudgeon Party. I’m pretty happy over here. I can rant and rave, piss and moan, and no one is surprised when I do it. So, don’t be surprised. I’m going to do it again.

Last night—on an October night—I voted in a general election. My wife and I sat in the living room, discussed each of the initiatives and reviewed the candidates, colored the little bubbles on our computer-ready form, and stuck them in envelopes to go out in the morning’s post. Washington State now has a wholly mail-in election system.

And I hated it.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Low Tech, Politics, Seattle | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Back At It

29 Oct 2012 by KRAG

Well, that two week’s vacation went by in a blitz. It was very productive, with the last two books of the Fallen Cloud Saga hitting the streets, but boy, could I have used another week…or month.

Now that the hardcopies are available, I realize I have made a classic mistake. It’s all part-and-parcel of the difficulty in switching from my author hat to my publisher hat. The author in me just wants to get the book out there and get it into reader’s hands. The publisher (an admittedly weaker part of me) wants to get the best release, the best buzz, and the best notice which helps get the book into more readers’ hands.

So, this classic mistake is to rush “to print” at the detriment of any sort of planning and release strategy.

But all is not lost.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Consommé

26 Oct 2012 by KRAG

Obey the Kitty!(All the puns I could have used to title a post on stock, consommé, and au jus are terrible, so I refuse to pain you with them. Besides, you’re hearing them all in your head right now, anyway.)

Egg whites and I have a long, antagonistic history. I don’t “get” them, and they don’t do much for me. It all goes back to my attempt, at the age of about twelve, of making an angel food cake, from scratch, while my family was out for the day. “Whip the egg whites until they form peaks,” the recipe said. So, bowl in arm and whisk in hand, I beat them until my wrist was ready to crumble. What’s a “peak” anyway? How does one judge”peakiness”? I poured the resulting froth into the cake pan, presuming it would rise during cooking (don’t all cakes rise during cooking?) I took it out of the oven just as my family arrived home. The resulting half-inch high hard-pan custard…jerky…would forever be known as my Angel Food Flop. Egg whites and I have never gotten along, since.

One of the things I’ve always wanted to be able to make is a nice, flavorful, crystal clear beef stock. A consommé, to be precise. Years ago, I went to my copy of La Varenne Pratique to find out how to do it. Great. Egg whites. I tried again and again, and all I got was cloudy stock and a couple of wasted eggs. Or worse. Enter Julia Child.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Food, Low Tech | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Needles and Haystacks

25 Oct 2012 by KRAG

I am not a procrastinator, in general, but I do indulge in what some might call “creative prioritization.” You know: the fun stuff first, the not-so-fun stuff next, the tedious and boring bits dead last. I can euphemistically refer to this as putting the “most bang for buck” items up front or go all corporate and say I’m going for “the low-hanging fruit” first, but I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.

I’m just delaying the inevitable, and in editing, the inevitable includes the dreaded, stupefying, and largely useless practice of Spell-check and Grammar-check. I’d skip the whole damned process if it consistently came up with nothing, but it doesn’t.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Hi Tech, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Is Someone IN There?

23 Oct 2012 by KRAG

Yesterday (okay, very early this morning) I submitted the final content for FC books IV and V to the CreateSpace “submission review” process. As I’ve mentioned before, this process finds a lot of formatting errors such as text beyond margins, low-DPI graphics, unembedded fonts, and so forth. It’s a good review process, and it encourages the author—through feedback, easy-to-follow help guides, and forum discussions—to submit the highest quality work to achieve the highest quality product.

Up ’til now, I’ve assumed this was a mechanical review process, but after the response I got today, I’m not so sure.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Hi Tech, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

The Sliding Scale of Attention

22 Oct 2012 by KRAG

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiI’ve fallen down on the job, here. My excuses are many and diverse—I’m on vacation, I caught a cold, the Giants are in the NLCS—but I can still say that I’ve kept my priorities straight. I may not have posted here each weekday (my stated goal), but I did spend time every day editing my MSS for the Fallen Cloud Saga re-release. So, there’s that, anyway.

In re-editing the MSS for FC:I-FC:IV, however, I noticed two distinct patterns.

The first pattern I noticed was an increase in my cockiness as an author. This is not a good thing as it led to stupid artifice and ill-thought-out departures from established conventions. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten over that one, as I’m now correcting all those “artistic decisions.”

The second pattern was a decrease in editorial attention. This, also, is not a good thing. Unfortunately, the two patterns exacerbate each other—the cockier I got, the less my editor cared to work with me, and vice versa. It’s a chicken-and-egg argument, determining which came first, but I also know that by the time we got to FC:IV, the publisher had decided my numbers weren’t good enough and closed the book on the series, my editor was looking for a career change, and I was the last one to know any of it.

So, what does increased editorial disinterest look like? Continue Reading »

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

A Wing of Plovers

18 Oct 2012 by KRAG

They don’t have a cool collective noun like “a murmuration of starlings,” but they were enthralling nonetheless.

Yesterday, I stood on the beach while a wing of plovers gyred and swooped around me. I stood transfixed, my feet freezing in the cold water, watching them, hearing the whispers of a thousand wings surround me. They flew as one creature, sides flashing like a school of fish in clear water, black wings, white bellies, gyring and twisting as one, creating shapes in the air above the sandy waves.

They rose in a mass, split into two amorphous shapes, each one moving around the other, until they merged like droplets of quicksilver. They spindled into a long roll and swept across the sand before piling up again into a heap, a mound, a pillar fifty feet tall.

As the wing spun and eddied, individuals would fly off from the body, peeping as they shot outward, slate-winged rockets ejected from a massive, living firework.

And then they settled, falling like heavy leaves back down to the sand, the rustle of wings replaced by a piping chorus that drowned out the roar of the surf. The wing of plovers in the air, now a congregation on the shoreline, dipping each black beak into the sand, searching for food, skedaddling back and forth in time with the waves until the ocean sent another big roller to make them take wing once more.

I stood there for the better part of an hour, rapt, giddy, grateful.

k

Posted in Low Tech, Seattle | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »