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My blind spot. Let me show you it.

For the last several days - having sprouted mung beans to my satisfaction - I have been designing meals-to-make-with-beansprouts. And, almost without exception, I have been forgetting to add the beansprouts.

Two days ago, there was the Singapore noodles. Yesterday, there was the fried rice. Today, there was the pho.

I think it's partly because these are all dishes that have a lot of separate ingredients going in more or less at the last minute, and it's easy to forget one, especially if it's sitting in a jar on the worktop at your back rather than on the chopping-board at your side; but mostly it is because I have an inherent flaw, which is that I can't remember stuff. Stuff like the-reason-I'm-cooking-this.

Still. All these things were nice without the beansprouts, and there is still hope. Even if the beansprouts are actually starting to sprout little leaves now...

And, pho is not the only use for beef stock. Tonight - at anef's inspiration - we have mushroom and leek and fennel risotto, with roasted bone-marrow on the side. If I die of it, well. I go gloriously.

I do love making stock. I taste it every half-hour or so, and there's a chartable progression: first it tastes entirely of the herbs that have gone in there (rosemary and thyme, today). Then the vegetables (onion, leek, carrot). It takes a good hour or longer for the primary constituent, the meatiness to start coming through. Then that seems to dominate for a while, before it all settles down into a harmonious balance.

Meaty fatty bones cost me fifteen pence at the market, for a bagful. If you roast them first, which I do, then that takes most of the fat off so you don't have to skim the stock so much, and yields the secondary pleasure of making your kitchen smell gorgeously of roasted beef. The tertiary pleasure, of course, is a panful of beef dripping. Which, spread on bread with a scatter of crunchy salt, is not quite as good as marrow-on-toast, but we're talking minimal distinctions here. It will definitely do. And, as I say, 15p. Three bob in old money. The rewards of thrift are as old-fashioned as its pursuit, but as pleasurable as ever they were.

First thought after having roasted marrow-bones for twenty minutes in a hot hot oven:

That thought I had, about going on working while munching marrowbone-toast? Forget it. This is too gorgeous, and too messy...

Second thought: I need a bone-saw.

Third thought, on failing to discover a bone-saw somehow lurking in the house: I need a marrow-spoon - oh. Wait...

I suspect, technically, it is not a marrow-spoon; I suspect it is a pickle-spoon, and not even runcible. But still. Long and slender, and extremely apt for probing the length of a marrow-bone. I may have left yummy fragments within, but not many.

Even after washing, my hands still feel ... well, like sheep's-wool, really. Inherent with grease. And if I'd had batteries in the camera, I'd have furnished photos of the boys attending to my plate even after I had very thoroughly wiped it with a crust.

Happy Families, my rules: let me show you them.

[NB and PS - while googling for marrow-spoons in order to provide a link for those who'd never seen one, I discovered a whole nother use for the word: fisher-folk use it for a tool which will allow them to dig out the contents of a fish's stomach, to see what it's been eating. Um, why do anglers want to know what a fish has been eating...?]

I must have marrow on the mind. First, the chutney; now the bones.

I have come home from the market with a bagful of bones. Which I shall roast hotly, scoop out the marrow and spread it on toast, eat with a parsley salad. Nom-nom-nom. Then the roasted bones will go into the stockpot with veggies for a long slow simmer; then tomorrow I'll poach a brisket in the liquor. Which will leave me with broth for soup and beef for sammiches. For which I have just harvested a big fat horseradish-root out of the back yard. Did I mention nom-nom-nom?

Times like this, I may be squatting in the bottom of a deep horrid hole, but the food down here is fabulous. I just wish I ate more; I can't keep up with my own cooking.

I didn't get to nom pork pie yesterday, on account of going to town in the morning, working in the Lit & Phil till lunch-time then meeting up with Gail for fish & chips, wine and speaking. And more wine.

Then I came home and made, oh, about ten pounds of marrow chutney. (If anyone close at hand wants a jar of marrow chutney...?)

This morning, I put my preserving-pan to soak in vinegar (ahem: a little enthusiastic, perhaps, with the drunken boiling yestereve...) and went to town, and worked more; but this time I came home and nom-nom-nom'd with a will. Half a pie is better than no bread. And no, the cats did not get the other half, though they had major ambitions in that direction. Next time a bit more with the flavourings, I think, and I need better technique for introducing this utterly delicious meaty jelly into the pie, but still. Nom-nom-nom.

And in mid-afternoon the nice UPS guy brought me books. Books! I has the Del Rey Book of SF & Fantasy, edited by the omnipresent ellen_datlow; and I has Catie Murphy's "The Queen's Bastard", by mizkit; and both of these make me happy. Also I have time to read, I have just declared it. Tho' as it happens I'm currently reading something else, for blurby purposes.

I just went out to buy my regular 10kg sack of rice - and came home with a 5kg sack of rice, for about the same money. Gloom. It's true, then: no more grainy bargains.

Never mind. I have rice, and prawns, and my own beansprouts. (Does anyone know what beans they use, to make commercial beansprouts? I used mung beans, and the results - tho' delicious - are not the same...)

Okay, things are in other things. The pies are in the oven; the leftover raw pastry is in Mac (milk! lard! flour! nom-nom-nom! It's probably awfully bad for him, but I do get tired of yelling); the leftover pork-meats in their herby goodness are in the bolognese sauce (yes, honestly. It's traditional: beef and pork, in combo, and cook for hours). The marrow chutney is in abeyance until tomorrow, because I have quit.

Not yet all the wine is in me, but we're getting there. Also, yummy crispy porky snacks.

Calm. Calm is in me, too. Until tomorrow. Maybe something will happen, by tomorrow?

So the bank manager calls me in today, "for a chat," he says, which must be bank-managerese for an intense grilling, for I am seared on both sides, tho' still raw in the middle. The gist of our conversation was that he wants me to pay off the bulk of the overdraft; which I can see his point, because fifty per cent of annual turnover is probably not a standard model for an overdraft facility, but now is just not the time. Like, I have no money, and will not until next year. But he is kind of insistent, so I don't quite know what to do.

As witness, I went shopping to soothe my ragged soul once I got out of there, and didn't buy anything. That's how bad it was.

So I asked my three wise friends (I kept six honest serving-men, but three of them have quit), saying "what should I dooo?" - and one said "work harder" and one said "write more" and the last of them said "get lucky". Which I can do two out of the three, 'specially as they are in fact the same thing; but there's nothing I can do about the third, I never have cracked that one.

So, extra words it is: but not today. Today I am going to make pork pies. And marrow chutney. I might even do some housework or something. Though the thing about cleaning, as against cooking: nobody ever notices that you've done it, y'know? They only ever notice if you haven't. Cooking's better. *nods*

Okay, as this is partly your fault for encouraging me, or else it's All Thanks to You, I thought it only fair to share:

I have surprised myself today, by writing the opening opening to I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS. It's nowhere near ready to write as a story, of course, but this is just setting up the board, bringing pieces into play, all of that stuff. Clearing my throat, perhaps. It's all vulnerable; nothing is safe.

( Such as it is, though, here it is. )

So I have posted a couple of times these last days about my sudden urgent need to write about a good old-fashioned barber, yes?

Yesterday, working on a ghost story in the Lit & Phil, I wrote the line:

The hands of time hold razors, every little tick catching at your skin, cutting you newly.

I can’t help it, okay? It’s just the kind of line I write. And likely that whole razors thing has been lurking in the back of my head anyway; it’s no surprise if the substance of one story becomes an image in another.

Only then - because I’m in the Lit and Phil, in a bay in the Silence Room where the old histories are stored, and because I’m easily distracted, and just because I can - I reached out an arm and plucked a book off the shelves: “When William IV Was King” by John Ashton (Chapman & Hall, 1896).

And it fell open - I swear! - to a page about his ruthless regulations regarding the appearance of the Cavalry, and featuring this verse by T Haynes Bayly:

Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!
Lost, lost is the pride of my chin and my lip!
When Laura last saw me she said that the world
Contain’d no moustachios so charmingly curl’d!
But razors are ruthless, my honours they nip,
Adieu, my moustachios! farewell to my tip!

Sometimes I think the world is laughing at me...

There has been a fly in the house today. Between them, the boys have notched up one (1) box of eggs [Mac] and one (1) much-valued china bowl [Barry] in their frankly reckless pursuit of the thing. I would have hung up its trophy head regardless of the expense, but alas: Mac caught me the fly, but he eated it.

I do feel mildly revenged, though. Their tea-tin said "tuna flakes", but it wasn't. "Undifferentiated mush", I would have called it; in a restaurant, I would have sent it back. They're eating it anyway, and I'm sneering at them.

Famously, I dislike research; equally famously, I love to learn new stuff. (One of these, you understand, is Wurk; the other is the satisfaction of curiosity, of which I have a catload.)

This morning, in the pursuit of New Stuff not unrelated to my last post (see how far I will go into the convolutions of syntax, in order to avoid any suggestion that I have been researching?), I learned that there is a profession called cosmetology, and that "In the United States of America, all states require barbers, cosmetologists, and most other personal appearance workers (with the exception of shampooers) to be licensed". It's the exceptions that prove the rules delightful; but I think we will forswear cosmetologists and keep all such work under the purview of a competent barber. What more or better licence could he want, after all, than the patronage of the Half-Emperor? (Don't say "the other half". I still haven't worked out what this means, but I'm fairly sure there isn't one.)

So I was sitting in my bath, musing upon... Well, not musing upon anything much, really: listening to the radio, rather, as I do. Only it struck me suddenly that I'd quite like to write about the adventures of a barber who served the upper crust; and that would probably be a steampunky elite, which would add to the fun of it all; and - hey, could it be called...?

Yes, it can. I have googled, and the name apparently did come out of nowhere; for this little time, I guess I have made a Googlewhack.

The title and first line are:

I SHAVED HALF-EMPEROR CYRRHENIUS

These? These are the steadiest hands in the demi-monde.

[And don't ask me about these halves and demis, I haven't worked that out yet...]

I don't talk much about process here, let alone structure, because I don't have the analytical approach to my own work, any more than I do to other people's. It's why I can tutor but I can't teach: I have a realm of practice and experience, and no theory at all.

However, even to someone as unstructured as I am in my approach, some things are obvious. My stories - many of my stories, most of my stories - tend to start the same way, with an abstract or dogmatic assertion ("The dead don't go away") followed by a paragraph of discursion ("They inhabit other people's lives, fragments of our own"). And then there's a line-break and we start again, introduce main character, setting, so forth. It's almost operatic: we have to have an overture, before the curtain goes up.

( This story appears to have three overtures. )

Well, maybe not technically the finest lamb curry ever made - but it may well be the finest that I ever made. It's sort of Rajasthani, with much garlic and onion and many dried red chillies (I used the 'Facing Heaven' variety that's actually Chinese, but hey, it's interstitial, 'k?), lamb still on the bone, cooked in a spicy yoghurt sauce, and I just didn't want to stop eating it. I'm sorry you weren't here to share - but then, if you had been, I couldn't have eaten so much and there wouldn't be any left for tomorrow, would there?

Famously, I don't make notes of ideas as I have them. Neither do I, from choice, write synopses; I like not to know where a book is going, to discover the journey hand in hand with the reader, as it were. (This is for values of 'like' that include total panic at frequent intervals, obviously; I just think that for me, it makes better books. If I plan a story out, then I follow the plan like a route-march, which all feels a little mechanical; if I let it happen day by day, then there's a whole lot more that gets a chance to feed into the story, including all the character development as we go. Plot is what people do, and if people change en route then the plot can change with them, unhindered. Someone once said that being asked to write a synopsis for a book they hadn't written yet was like being asked to draw a map of a country they hadn't visited; I like that...)

Anyway. A while back, a year or more, I was writing a sort-of horror book for kids, at the same time as I was writing an SF novella for grown-ups, turn and turn about; but then rewrites for something else came in, and I had to put at least one of those projects down, so it was the kids' book that was set aside. I had just reached a good stopping-point, five chapters in; also I had just had the sudden revelation that made sense of the plot-thus-far, I knew at last just where it was heading.

So I wrote the novella, and then I worked on the rewrites, and and and; and I never got back to the kids' book till now. Where of course I realise that I have entirely forgotten that sudden revelation, and I now have no idea where the book was headed.

I worked through the extant 20K words, revising and cutting, to see if that would help; it did not. I didn't make notes, because I don't, and whatever that inspiration was, it is lost.

So this evening I went for a stroll to think things through, and came back with a totally other idea that works absolutely. Whether it works as well as the original, we will never know; but for certain sure this is not it, and for certain sure this works extremely well. Which I think is the first time I've ever had a significant chunk of book branch off in two contrary directions (it's one of those nodes in the multiverse, is what it is: somewhere out there is another world, where I did remember the original version...).

I think this is cool, and it totally justifies my shruggish attitude, "if I forget something lovely, hell, I'll just think of something else..." There is always another idea out there, waiting.

Advisory Board Nominations Begin

This morning we are opening the nomination process for the user-representative positions on the LiveJournal Advisory Board. A full description of the process can be found here.

To get you started, here are the basic things you should know:

- You may only nominate yourself
- Each nominee will need 100 motions of support in order to be eligible to be a candidate
- We ask that you keep your comments on the nomination posts to "I support this nomination" or something to that effect; be kind to those who will need to count the "supports", please.
- Although the nominations and election poll will take place in lj_election_en, you do not need to watch the community in order to keep up with the election; we'll announce everything here as well.

Everyone here at LiveJournal is looking forward to this first-ever User-Representative election! We'd like to thank everyone who is participating. Some words from our current Advisory Board members:

danah boyd: “LiveJournal is filled with very passionate users. These users have helped shaped LJ's various communities over the last decade and it gives me great joy that LJ is recognizing and incorporating users' voices into the decision-making processes. Having user representatives from different parts of LJ on the Advisory Board will help make sure that the company is meeting the needs of its diverse constituents.”

Esther Dyson: "I'm sure we'll learn a lot from the process, and later on from the two users selected as well. Especially, I hope that the discussions before the voting will be more meaningful and more focused on policy than those in some offline campaigns."

Brad Fitzpatrick: "It's cool that SUP is getting users involved with the LiveJournal decision-making process. I look forward to seeing who the community elects and the results of our efforts working together."

Professor Lawrence Lessig: “The user elections will provide a critical check on LJ's process of maintaining a valuable and trustworthy environment for the LJ community. The mandate of the elections will give the user representatives pride of place among the members of the Advisory Board. Each of us will look to them to guide us in our judgment about how best to make LJ the community we all aspire that it will be. I look forward to welcoming the user representatives, and learning a great deal from them.”


chasethestars has also made some banners for you to use, if you'd like to show your support for the candidate of your choice!

( Banners + code for you to use! )

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