Monday was a bit of crazy around our house, so we missed the two premieres we were waiting for. To be fair, we were going to miss one of them, anyway, since they were both on at 10PM and I was not staying up until midnite…not on a school night.
But last night, we caught up with both “Castle” and “The Blacklist.”
Warning: there will be some mild spoilers in this post.
Posted in Culture, Television | Tagged building characters, Castle, james spader, Richard Castle, television reviews, the blacklist, Writing | Leave a Comment »
Something tells me that Americans have lost touch with what chili really is.
Go down to the supermarket and you’ll find your choice of chili, chili con carne, and the mind-boggling “chili con carne with beans.” All of them are stultifying assaults to any palate and not worth the label of “chili.”
Red–a hearty meat stew–is to my heart and mind the original chili: nothing but meat and chili peppers. Sometimes called “Texas Red,” my version is definitely un-Texan, so I just call it “red,” but it is, at its core, a purist’s chili It has been a standard big-batch-home-cook recipe of mine for years. I usually cook up a big batch, we have a great meal, and then I freeze what’s left in discrete two-person servings that we can pull out at a moment’s notice.
Last night, for the first time, I rolled it out to non-family at a potluck evening, and it got raves all night. Anything that gets that kind of response deserves to be shared.
This red is best served in a bowl, over a hunk of freshly baked cornbread.
Posted in Food, Recipes | Tagged chili pepper recipe, chili powder, chili recipe, chili sauce, cooking, Food, golden cayenne, hot sauce, Recipe, texas red | 2 Comments »
We are live. “The Revitalization of Emily” is live on Amazon, and available for Kindle readers and apps.
Formatting went well, but there’s one new lesson I learned. Fonts that work well on the printed page are often too big for the Kindles. I had a couple of iterations before the headers worked properly.
Overall, though, an easy process.
Some people wonder why I do this on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) instead of iBooks or Smashwords or any of the several other venues open to short fiction works. They also wonder why I don’t put it up everywhere, simultaneously.
The main reason is one word: reach. Continue Reading »
Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged creative writing, ebooks, editing, Kindle, self-publishing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | 7 Comments »
I spent the weekend doing two things: trying to relax, and editing the novelette.
I succeeded in the latter.
Editing went well, both on the story and on the cover art.
Each editing pass revealed fewer errors–reaching zero by the fourth pass–and fewer lines that gave me pause. Eventually, in editing, I like to get to the point where for each possible change, I have to think, play it two or three ways, and then end up with a STET in the margin.
My last pass, I also took special note of the “said” use. They’re still there (despite my earlier efforts), but now each one that is in the story has been considered. If it’s there, I want it there, and I’m happy with that. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, ebooks, editing, Kindle, self-publishing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | 2 Comments »
We all have our individual quirks of style. Little, verbal quirks. We use a phrase once, like it, use it again, and eventually it becomes habit.
For most people (i.e,. non-authors), this isn’t a problem. A quirky turn of phrase, a tag-line, a preference for the spelling “grey” instead of “gray”–these are not problems for most people.
For writers, though, it can be a problem. Why? Because you can’t see them. And because others can.
Yesterday, I discovered a new one of my own. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, dialogue tags, editing, novel writing, said bookisms, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | 3 Comments »
As I’ve been working on this story, re-creating it from an older model, I’ve been watching over my work. Supervising, if you will.
Overall, the new version is half-again as long–originally around 8,000 words, it now clocks in at about 12,000–and I wondered if that was just because I added a scene here and there.
So I took the opening section. The action is the same. The first and last lines of the section are the same, like fenceposts. But the rest of it has been entirely rebuilt, rewritten, similar only in structure and in what happens. So, what’s the word-count for each version? Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged creative writing, editing, short story, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | Leave a Comment »
A friend of mine runs OACA Pepper Farm, and he shared a great recipe for a hot sauce that uses carrots, onions, and habanero chili peppers. The carrots give sweetness, the habaneros the heat, and it comes out orange, tangy, and very good.
When my garden started providing me with golden cayenne chili peppers, I thought I might try a twist on the OACA recipe. Keeping with the a la page concept, I considered my options as to what might work well with the intense, almost candy-colored yellow of the golden cayennes. The answer came at a BBQ during Labor Day weekend: corn.
I whipped up a batch of this yesterday, and it’s yummy.
Posted in Food, Recipes | Tagged chili pepper recipe, chili sauce, cooking, Food, golden cayenne, hot sauce, hot sauce recipe, Recipe, recipes | 7 Comments »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 