Portugal, Day Eight

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It’s always challenging to cook in someone else’s kitchen, right? Well, I impressed myself with today’s pepperoni frittata. Let’s pretend you tasted it and were impressed, too.

Today was a prep day. My wife and her sister have a friend flying in from Italy—a friend they haven’t seen in years and years, but have kept in touch with—and they’ve decided to surprise him with a traditional American Thanksgiving meal: roast turkey, sausage stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, apple pie, the whole deal.

But first, supplies: I was excited to go to the old bull-fighting ring with my son. There was a food court where he and I could sit with our laptops and while away a few hours, and there was shopping to be done.

Unfortunately, the bull-fighting ring was mostly a shopping mall, and the food court was cramped and noisy as hell. To me, it was just an indistinguishable clamor, but it really bothered my son. We tried to slip away to a quieter place, but their internet wasn’t working. In the end, we just went back to the apartment and did a little work. Too bad. I would have liked to have pretended part of my new book was written in a bull-fighting ring, even if no one knew the truth.

Oh, and there was a bookstore but nothing I could read, of course.

Lots of quiet and lots of cooking today.

Portugal, Day Eight

Portugal, Day Seven (and on the seventh day…)

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You know what’s nice? Taking it easy. I’m not a kid anymore and we’re in Portugal for a full month. I don’t need to rush every day. In fact, a little downtime to get some writing done is just the thing.

I spent the morning working quietly in the lobby of the Residencial Uniao, our “guest house.” The chairs were very comfortable, and for once I didn’t just nod off in one of them. Then we caught a train back to Lisboa, carried all our stuff into my sister-in-law’s apartment, and I fell over into a deep sleep for several hours.

That eventing we had leftovers from the fridge: chili, octopus and rice, good bread…

Actually, have I talked about the bread in Portugal? The local word is pão.

It’s incredible. As troublesome as we sometimes find the food here, the bread is always first-rate.

Anyway, we played another game of iota, then had quiet time. A day off. It was nice.

Here’s a picture of an old building. If you like decayed places, Portugal is the place for you.

Old things

Randomness for 12/3

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1) Skimp or Spend, an Illustrated Mens’ Style Buying Guide

2) Seven Things I Learned Reading ISIS’s Magazine.

3) She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.

4) Piecaken

5) I dressed like Cookie (from EMPIRE) for a week to get over my Impostor Syndrome.

6) Purple Rain, remade in a language without a word for “purple”.

7) That history of the Mork and Mindy show you didn’t know you wanted.

New anthology: Unbound

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Released today:

(Hopefully that cover image shows up.)

With stories by Joe Abercrombie, Seanan McGuire, and many more (including me). My short story, “The Way into Oblivion” is tied in to my Great Way trilogy.

Check it out, and don’t forget to buy copies for all your friends.

Huge delay in my next book

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m not going to hit my NaNoWriMo goal. No big deal; I was just using it as a goad to pick up momentum with ONE MAN, my current WIP which has stalled.

It was a new thing for me, and it didn’t work.

What I realized on Wednesday was that I needed to start over. I plan to keep most of the 65K I’ve written so far, but I need to revise it extensively. The protagonist need to be someone else. I’m even going to give him a new name.

So today is the second beginning of my book. It’ll be a deeper, stronger story, and I’ll be able to make serious progress on it.

Sometimes I wish I could be one of those writers who finish a paragraph, tweak it here or there, then never look at it again. Sometimes I would like to be one of those writers to takes five years for a single book, and just keep revising like mad until it’s perfect.

Unfortunately, I’m me, and tossing a book so I can start over is part of how I work.

I never post movie trailers

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Until I do.

Here’s the trailer for Captain America: Civil War, and it looks really good.

Comes out May 6th. Wow.

Get Limited Edition Omnibuses of The Great Way from Worldbuilders

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This year I sent four copies of the limited edition hardback omnibus version of The Great Way to Worldbuilders. Fewer than 200 were printed and they aren’t designed to be sold in stores; there’s no ISBN, no listed price, no bar code. I created them for Kickstarter backers who pledged at $100 or more, and while I shipped out a whole bunch, I ended up with a significant number in my back hallway, still in their boxes.

I’m not planning to sell them, but I have sent one of those boxes to Pat Rothfuss for his Worldbuilders. The picture of the three books included in the book lottery is here. (Remember, that’s not the three books of the trilogy, that’s three separate copies of the entire trilogy).

However, if you really want that particular limited edition, there’s an ebay auction going on right now. And it benefits charity. If you’re interested in learning more about Worldbuilders and its charity work, you can.

To sum up: If you’re a fan and you missed out on the Kickstarter, you may think you also missed out on your chance to pick up a limited edition hardback. You didn’t! Just click on that ebay link above and do your part for charity.

Honey-glazed onions: a Turkey Day tradition

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My wife loves this recipe. I make it every year as part of our Turkey Day celebration, and every year it wins the award for Least Likely To Become Leftovers. It’s also the only part of my dinner that’s sweet. We don’t do the yams with marshmallow thing, and the pies we eat for dessert always come hours later.

While in Portugal, I made this for my sister-in-law when she organized a Thanksgiving dinner for an American friend who’d been living in Italy for many years. I promised to give her the recipe, but I forgot. Here it is, converted to European measurements.

.5 kg small boiling onions
75 grams butter
40 grams honey
salt

Bring a big pot of water to a boil, add the onions, and boil for 5 minutes if they’re really small, 8-10 if they’re big.

Drain and cool, then peel them. The easiest way to peel them is to cut the root base almost all the way through, then pull off a strip of the outer layer, then peel off the outer skin. (I do this part the day before, usually).

On the day of, melt the butter in a skillet large enough to hold the onions in a single layer. Medium heat. When the butter stops fizzing, add the onions and then the honey. Stir until everything is well combined.

The original recipe said they were done when slightly browned, but I cook them way past that point. I cook them until the glaze is dark, dark brown and incredibly thick, and the onions are basically falling apart.

Divers Matters (aka N things make a post)

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With all the terrible news in the world right now (along with the deeply awful responses) I’m going to write about some personal stuff.

1. One of the regular features of this blog is the recurring Story Seeds posts: when I get a story idea that starts taking over too much of my thinking, I give it away here on my blog for anyone to use. Well, as I mentioned before, a writer ran with one of those ideas and sold his story. And now the anthology is out: Caped: An Anthology of Superhero Tales. His name is Stephen Kotowych. Check it out.

2. Everyone’s buzzing about the latest new awesome video game, so let me mention one I played right before my Portugal trip: it’s called PORTAL. Very fun and funny! I played Portal 2 immediately after, which was also fun and funny, although not as much. The cake is a lie! Right?

My kid has other ideas, and convinced me to preorder Fallout 4 for him. With our terrible internet, it took 2 days to download, but he’s been playing it regularly ever since and he loves it. Do you love post apocalyptic settings? You might like it, too, but if you wait ten years you can probably pick it up cheap and play it on an old computer.

3. For the first time ever, I figured I’d try NaNoWriMo, because I was having trouble getting momentum on the book after a month away. I’m supposed to write 50,000 words during November, and today is the 15th. The halfway mark. How many words have I gotten done? 8,000.

That would be fine if they were all excellent words in great scenes, but there’s at least one pivotal scene that I know I screwed up in a big way.

4. I mentioned this on social media, but I’m almost psyched to watch Jessica Jones on Netflix. I say “almost” because I don’t really have strong expectations, and might be deeply disappointed, but I still plan to start watching at midnight when it airs, just as I did for Daredevil.

This is the way I enjoy big corporate entertainments: I see them as quickly as I can, with little to no enthusiasm. This lack of excitement is why I usually find myself deep in online discussions of movies or shows without feeling even remotely like a “fan.” I think it’s also why online disagreements about a show, which usually feel clinical to me, can be so upsetting to other people, especially now that everyone has decided that casual conversations are “attacks from fans”.

5. The other video game that is taking over my life is Sentinels of the Multiverse, which started as a cooperative card game but was turned into a virtual card game last year. It’s a complex game, and frankly I found all the conditions impossible to keep track of when I had to jot them on pieces of paper. I much prefer to have the software keep track of all that for me, not to mention how much easier it is to read the cards on my screen.

Steam assures me that I’ve played this game for 83 hours this year, which doesn’t cover the many hours I played the version on my wife’s iPad. And while the graphics are colorful and the knock off superhero characters (pseudo-Flash, pseudo-Iron Man, etc) are cute, the different decks interact in interesting ways. Winning games becomes a matter of working out each deck’s strengths.

Anyway, Handelabra has created a free version of the game that you can download. You can play the free version with a tutorial that teaches you the game or you can turn that off. And while the paid version of the game comes with four villains, four environment decks, and ten hero decks, the free one has only a single villain and environment deck, with four heroes to oppose him.

So if you want to see not-Superman, not-Flash, not-Batwoman, and not-Iron Man take on not-Lex Luthor on Dinosaur Island, try out that game for free. There’s no time limit on it and you can play it as many times as you like.

Randomness for 11/12

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1) Icons Unmasked. I liked the Goku one.

2) Theater from the back of a car during a traffic jam. Video.

3) The top ten Lifehacker posts of all time.

4) “If you were with me, you’d suffer.” Australia falls in love with Chinese dating show.

5) What it’s like to drive the worst car ever built.

6) Every country where James Bond has spied.

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