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La Casa Azul

29 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Seattle’s offerings in Mexican cuisine are usually pretty pedestrian, but if you look off the main tracks and take a chance, sometimes you can find something fresh and interesting.

La Casa Azul is a small but clean little restaurant right up along the northern Seattle city limit. The decor and ambience are intentionally reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s home, covered with deep blues and bright yellows, and the walls are filled with examples of Frida’s artwork, and photos of her and her beloved Diego.

The menu casts a wide net, leaving behind the standard fare of chimichangas, tostadas, and fajitas, and offering instead some more unusual items, such as tlayudas, lomito puerco ala parilla, and alambres.

The service was exceptional. Our server (the only guy working the floor) switched flawlessly from English to Spanish, provided quick and friendly attention to our desires, was helpful with the menu without condescension, and worked prepping juices and such behind the counter in his free moments.

The sauces were excellent. The mole Coloradito on my wife’s enchiladas was especially good: a stunning melange that hits the palate with the syrupy sweetness of a plum wine, moves smoothly to the charred base and fruity flavor of chiles, and then backs you up against the wall with the threat of biting heat (but not too much). The cream sauce on the gorditas was a pleasant addition, and the salsa (though thin) was flavorful, tart, and zesty.

The presentation of the dishes was top-notch. In short, the entrees were beautiful to the eye and well-proportioned. We left sated but not stuffed. The tortillas and gorditas are made fresh, daily, and the quality shows there, as well.

On the not-so-good side…

The fillings need work. The chicken in my wife’s enchiladas was dry and bland, while the pork filling in my gorditas was both sparse and flavorless.

The sides also need work. The rice was starchy and bland (though that worked out well on my wife’s dish, as a contrast to the mole Coloradito). And the black-bean refritos, though excellent in flavor, needed a bit more body as they were more suited to eating with a spoon (which we didn’t have) than with a fork.

Overall, I would have given La Casa Azul four stars, had the fillings been better, but we’ll definitely go back and give it another try, just to try some of the remarkable items on the menu.

k

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On Observation

29 Jul 2012 by KRAG

20120729-075810.jpgFor me, the most powerful tool in a writer’s toolbox is the power of observation. It not only helps me create believable characters, it also gives me the ability to fill my worlds with believable detail. Some examples…

I was in the office when the wind-up clock stopped. It didn’t go tick-tock—tick—-tock, slowing as it reached the end of its wind, but just went tick-tock-tick-tock—-, ending suddenly and abruptly like some metronomic cardiac arrest. Odd.

My stomach growled at me this morning, and it sounded for all the world like it said, “Hello, Chuckles.” My guts have never spoken to me so explicitly before, but I’m glad we’re on such friendly terms; that hasn’t always been the case.

For her 60th birthday, I gave my sister a vintage electric clock from the ’40s. It didn’t tick like a mechanical clock but hummed as it worked the sweep second hand around the dial. My sister liked this especially, as it matched her feeling of time as a continuum. I prefer the mechanical heartbeat of a tick-tock clock, as I like to think of time having a constant, measured passage.

These details of life and character are just the sort of things that inform my writing, providing snippets of description or personality. Observation is such a critical skill that it has actually become a pasttime for us.

We can play this game anywhere–at a restaurant, waiting at a stop light, anywhere–just by looking around at the people around us. (Coffee shops are perfect for this game.) I’ll pick someone or she might pick a couple, and we’ll start building backstories for them, weaving a tale of why they are there, what they’re doing, and what they are feeling. These aren’t just wild imaginings, though; we base our story on the subject’s dress, movement, and behavior. Couple on their third date? Construction worker doing the shopping for a sick wife? Woman contemplating divorce?

The key to the game is that the stories must be believable, and must tie into the person we observe. While my wife enjoys the game simply for the mental exercise, I find that it hones my skills and heightens my awareness. If you aren’t aware, you cannot observe, and if you aren’t observant, then you’re creating characters and descriptions in a vacuum.

Characters have to be believable, consistent, and comprehensible to the reader, even if the setting is as alien as a moon or the 9th century. In all the historical research and reading of memoirs I have done in preparation for my novels, the one thing I have learned is that we, as people, have not changed much. The world surrounding us has transformed, technologies have changed, but human behavior remains remarkably consistent.

So keep your eyes and ears open. Stay frosty. Inspiration may be standing ahead of you in the checkout line.

k

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The Modernist Fast

27 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Back when I was a theist, a few times each year I would go on a fast. From sunset on the first day to nightfall on the next, I would take in nothing but water. It wasn’t easy but then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.

There are many days when I’m so involved in a project that I simply forget to eat until 2 or 3pm. But, of course, we humans are contrary creatures, and never appreciate a thing until we are deprived of it. As a result, during a fast I was always hungry right out of the gate, and hungrier by the next afternoon than I would have been under other conditions.

The main purpose of a fast, in my estimation, is to enforce an atmosphere of introspection, and to instill a sense of gratitude for the most basic things in life. By intentionally depriving myself of food, the most basic requirement, the mind quickly turns inward. Reflection and meditation come easily, and the things that plague our everyday lives lose all importance in comparison.

I have extended this practice to other areas with good effect. When life begins getting to me, I go on a “modernist fast” in an attempt to reboot my thinking and my perspective. If you are interested in simplifying your life, I recommend this heartily. Some things I have done in the past:

  • For a week
    • Give up junk TV shows, news shows, or turn off the TV altogether
    • Take mass transit everywhere, and walk to places whenever possible
    • Give up a vice, a guilty pleasure, dining out, etc.
    • Wash all dishes by hand (sounds goofy, but it’s rather meditative after a while)
  • For a day
    • Give up food
    • Turn off your Blackberry
    • No internet!
    • Do as much as you can by hand

I’ve even gone so far as to try to go the whole day with limited use of electricity. I tell you, spend a whole evening without it—no television, no stereo, no dishwasher, just sitting around with your loved ones, talking or playing a game by candlelight—and your perspective really changes. After all, some people live like this every day.

I find that these Modernist Fasts help me keep my priorities straight, and show me just how much in life I have to be grateful for. Gratitude and humility—appreciating what you have and realizing how lucky you are—really help build inner peace.

k

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Tea Leaves in the Amazon

27 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Yesterday was an interesting day on the KRAG blog.

Being supremely new to blogging (Week 5), I’ve been watching the “Stats” page with interest. WordPress provides a nice collection of statistics which—depending on what you see—can be either fascinating or depressing. I’ve been watching the blog-stats bounce along: the number of daily views within easy reach of zero, fewer followers than eggs in a carton, most traffic sourced specifically from my “author” page over on Facebook.

Then, yesterday, a spike: I had views from India, Canada, the UK, Israel, and New Zealand; the number of views was more than double the average; and several folks took the time to leave comments. I asked myself: What the hell happened, and why?

And this reminded me of Amazon.com and their maddening “Sales Rank.”

Of course, I had been aware of Amazon’s “Sales Rank” for a long time, but it really meant nothing to me. I never buy a book because it’s a bestseller. I only buy books because they are recommended or because they just sound interesting. Sales Rank? Who cares? Pas moi.

But when my first novel went for sale up on Amazon, I did a complete 180. Suddenly, nothing was more important than that damned Sales Rank. I began tracking it, checking in on it hourly, in fact, entering what I found in a spreadsheet. I found websites devoted to the tracking of the Amazon Sales Rank. I watched my book’s ranking trend upward, break upward into the 6-digits, into 5-digits, back to six, up again, back again. It would change radically, without discernable logic, bouncing from a low rank of over 1 million up to under 60,000. Then, one day, as I repeatedly hit F5 to refresh my screen, it bounced up to around 1,400.

Number 1,400!! Out of millions! Boy-o-boy! I was on my way!!

When I hit refresh again, it was back at #90,000. What the hell happened? And why?

I did more research, found article upon article purporting to divine the math, method, and meaning behind these numbers. Taken in the aggregate, however, it quickly became clear that no one really knows how the Amazon Sales Ranks are calculated.

I stepped back, and thought again about what the Amazon Sales Rank meant to me as a reader. This arcane, inscrutable number meant nothing to me as a reader or purchaser of books, so it probably meant little to the public at large.

Of course, the stats associated with my blog have a little more meaning—each new reader is potentially a new person who might want to read one of my books—but should I spend time tracking the stats and trying to discern the reason they spiked or dipped? Shouldn’t I spend my time on more meaningful and productive efforts? Damned straight.

It comes back to why I do this: for the love of writing, and for the conversations it engenders. It doesn’t matter to me if this blog has 20 readers or 20,000; it’s the writing, the connection, and the interactions with readers and other writers that count most.

k

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Redefining Failure

26 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Often, when someone learns that I am a published novelist, they give me a puzzled look. I know what they’re thinking.

Why are you still working that day-job, living in that house, driving that car?

I used to think that, too. I had already figured out where I’d be teaching (after receiving my honorary degree), had already picked my house on the shores of Green Lake,  and had chosen the flash car I would use to zip around town.

Then I sold my first novel. Nothing changes your worldview more than achieving your dream.

As a writer, I have had some successes: eight novels published, four by a large NYC publishing house, plus a smattering of published short stories, articles, and essays. I’ve also had—I used to call them failures, but now after “periods of redefinition,” I think of them as successes, too. You see, when I started out, anything other than a bestseller was a failure, but soon I would only fail if I got anything other than a solid sale. In time, I accepted any sale as a success, and then…you see where this is going.

A long time ago, Dean Wesley Smith asked me, “If you knew you would never sell another story, would you still write?” My answer was flippant. “Of course,” I said, “but tell me now so I won’t worry about it.” I was green as springtime grass, back then, and had yet to feel the heartbreak that only publishing can provide. Today, my answer still stands, but it stands on its own; it doesn’t need the cocksure attitude to prop it up.

When I started, I wrote as a way to achieve fame and fortune. Sure, some people make gazillions at it, but you can count those who do it consistently on your fingers. In reality, writing is a hard way to make a living, and if you’re in it only for the money, my advice is to get out, now.

Here’s what people don’t get: writing is an art, but publishing is a business, and publishing doesn’t give a toss whether your book is good or bad, it cares whether your book will sell or sit on the shelf. Your novel can be total crap, but if it’s the kind of total crap that sells, it’ll get snapped up. But good or bad, if it does get snapped up, there still isn’t a lot of money in it, and one sale is no guarantee of future sales.

Today, I don’t write for fame and fortune, nor do I equate not having them with failure. I write because I want to tell stories, and tell them well. If a book of mine doesn’t get finished, that’s a failure. If I just hammer out some words and have a lackluster product, or write something I don’t love, that’s a failure. If the faithful readers who do love my books don’t get to read any more of the stories I want to tell, that’s a failure.

Of course, if a publisher thinks I’m putting gold on the page, or Hollywood wants to option my novels, I sure as hell won’t complain. But that’s gravy, and I am able to succeed just fine without gravy.

k

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Foreign English

26 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiEvery once in a while, out of the blue, a common, everyday word will suddenly look…wrong.

This has happened all my reading/writing life. I actually remember the first time this happened. I was in 5th grade, and I was reading along and came across the word “dirt.” I stared at that word for a while; I knew what it was, and I knew what it meant, but I was sure it was misspelled. I even went to the dictionary and looked it up. “Dirt” had become, suddenly, foreign English.

It doesn’t happen frequently—perhaps three or four times a year—but it has always puzzled me. Today, it happened again, but with a new twist.

Today, I was writing an email, tutoring someone on SQL basics. In checking my facts, I came across a snippet of code.

SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE . . .

That word, SELECT, just looked wrong. Did it really end with “CT”? Does any other word end with “CT”? I typed it out myself, and it looked fine. Here’s the deal: It only looked wrong in Courier font, all caps.

Now why would my brain suddenly reject (Hey! another word ending in “CT”!)—Why would my brain suddenly elect to reject (I’m going to have fun with this, now) the word “SELECT” as suspect? (Okay…I’ll stop.) And why only in Courier? And why does it look fine, now?

Some form of super-limited aphasia? Perhaps a pathway neuron that hooked to my recognition of “SELECT” suddenly died, and it took me an hour or so to reroute back to that brain-byte.

The brain is a mystifying thing. It does things we don’t understand, sometimes seemingly without reason.

I’ll never know. I only hope it isn’t just me… That would be weird.

k

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

A Tale of Two Tattoos

25 Jul 2012 by KRAG

Last night we screened the American version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” I was disappointed, but not unexpectedly so.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the movie already, skip this post.

We read the books (in hardcopy, of course) years ago, burning through the trilogy in record time (for me…I’m a slow reader). While I didn’t find them flawless, I found them much more entertaining than Dan Brown or any of the other modern “thriller” genre. Personally, I found the whole Blomkvist-as-Babe-Magnet a bit tiresome, and felt Larsson intruding into the story with every conquest his hero made.

We did enjoy them, though, and when the Swedish movies came out, we snapped them up, screened them, and loved them.

In adapting a novel to the screen, you have to change something; you have to. Many people just don’t get this, and they’re angry when the screen version doesn’t match up with the novel, point for point, like a DNA profile. Every adaptation has to drop some elements, combine others, and sometimes insert new elements in translating from word to picture.

The Swedish versions did this perfectly. They dropped everything that was unnecessary (like the Blomkvist-as-Babe-Magnet wish-fulfillment), collapsed time, merged some ancillary characters, and told a story that was tighter, leaner, meaner, and more compelling than the original. Not bad.

Then, because Americans can’t be bothered to read subtitles, we made a version of the same movie, in English. It wasn’t atrocious, and if I’d seen it first, I’d have been less disappointed, but here were my complaints:

  • The opening credit sequence looked more like the start of a Bond film. It had nothing to do with the imagery of the film, a soundtrack that was jarring and out-of-place, and seemed so off-target that we wondered if they’d sent us the right DVD.
  • Why was Duck Lips (aka Daniel Craig) the only person in the movie who didn’t have a Swedish accent? Hell, even Robin Wright (great casting, BTW) did a passable job.
  • It was clear that someone in the Hollywood machine felt that the American version of Lizbeth had to be a bit more…sociable. While Rooney Mara did a very good job of acting, the writing and direction weakened the character. If you haven’t seen Noomi Rapace’s portrayal, rent the Swedish version and compare them. That is the Lizbeth Salander from the book.
  • Why change the end of the Harriet mystery? Why collapse the Anita/Harriet characters? The movie hit this point and it was like hitting a cobblestone road in run-flat tires. Bumpity-bump-thump, a few clumsy lines of dialogue, and Poof! Anita is gone. Where? Who knows, and it was so clunky I didn’t even scan back to parse the ham-handed expository block.

Not all was less than the original. Some of the Kubrik-esque rolling shots were quite effective, the soundtrack (apart from the opening credits) was effective, and Duck Li…I mean Daniel Craig was a more animated, less cryptic Blomkvist.

k

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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