Bacteria-fest

I’ve been on a kick lately of making certain kitchen staples from scratch. First it was black beans, soaked overnight and then simmered with onions and garlic, for use in burritos and as a side dish. So much tastier than the canned ones. From that it was easy to branch out into homemade refried beans that I could make as garlicky as I pleased. Then, tired of the flat taste of the bottled stuff, I began making my own salsa. It turned out to be so delicious that I keep some on hand all the time.

My latest project, though, has been homemade yogurt. I read an article about how allegedly simple it was to make, and how it cost mere pennies in comparison to the more expensive store-bought containers, so I thought I’d brave the world of bacteria and give it a try.

I make my yogurt in a crock pot, because I don’t have to pay much attention to it that way, and it really is easy; I pour in a half-gallon of lowfat milk, heat it on low for two and a half hours, then turn it off and let it sit for another three. At that point, I mix a little gelatin in some starter culture—simply a half-cup of store-bought plain yogurt works, though I can use my own for the next batch—and blend it with the warm milk. Then I wrap a towel around the crock pot and let it sit overnight.

When I open the lid the next morning, I’m rewarded with a scent that’s tough to describe. It’s flowery, but not sweet—yeasty, but not smelling of earth. And there’s something magical to the reveal that’s actually a little bit exciting. Every single time I open the pot I look at the white surface that looks so unchanged, and think to myself, Oh crap, it’s just a pot of sour milk. Then I’ll drag a spoon through the stuff, and feel the soft, pudding-like custard resisting its pull, and know that the transformation has taken place. It’s a little bit of Hogwarts, in my own kitchen.

Cyberkitten

“Fred’s checking her email again,” is a familiar cry around our house. Ever since she was a kitten, our youngest cat has always made time to keep in touch with her friends and family over the internet. In the late afternoons when I’m done writing for the day, I’ll set down my laptop and walk away, and Fred will take over.

She’s not content to look at the screen and browse the web. No, Fred likes to put her paws on the keyboard and press as many keys as she can before hitting the return key and startling my friends with long and incomprehensible instant messages. She enjoys pressing the function key that will increase the computer’s volume and listen to the alert sound play over and over and over again at an ear-shattering intensity. She uses spotlight to search for and pull up the most obscure files lurking in forgotten corners of my hard drive. And when the lure of her email and chat buddies loses some of its luster, she’ll active the screen saver, swat at it to clear the monitor, and start all over again.

If I try to chase her away from the computer, she gets testy and complains that she’s not done and couldn’t I just give her a goddamn minute to check the auction house and pick up some gear for her night elf priest? I haven’t figured out how she’s become such a cyber-connected cat; she definitely has her own thing going on when she’s online, though. When the feds track her down for hacking, though . . . that's when I’m putting my foot down.

Rollercoaster

I’m roughly a third of the way through the third book in the Cassaforte series, currently called A Traveler to Nascenza. Today I found myself stalling over a particular scene toward the end of the first section. Originally the scene had occupied all of an entire paragraph—it was just a little incident told in passing, as my travelers vainly tried to move from one town in the countryside to the next. A blip. Yesterday I decided to expand it, although the scene isn’t mentioned in the detailed outline I originally wrote for the project. It seemed as if it would offer some unique opportunities for tension that I couldn’t pass up. And now, here I am up past midnight, dragged out of bed because when I was nearly entirely unconscious, I had the inkling of an idea of how to expand the scene even further—in fact, to make the scene the lynchpin of the entire first section. My brain insisted on poking around online researching the tenuous trail it wanted to follow, rather than sleep.

I worry about all my books, of course, but it seems as if I’m being especially fretful about this one. Particularly when I compare it to the previous entry in the series. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is all about kidnappings! And murder! And sword fights! And explosions! And more abductions! And political plotting! And shipwrecks! And bad actors! And that’s just in the novel’s first twenty pages! (Really.)

A Traveler to Nascenza, on the other hand, is a gentler tale. It’s not about shipwrecks and pirates. It’s a story focusing on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the protagonist of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, and it starts off gently enough at the school where he’s living. No one is taken hostage in the first five pages. No one lies in a pool of blood, early on. There’s talk of a ruined wedding—I won’t say whose—and there’s a practical joke that has serious repercussions down the line, and there’s an entire page in which two teenaged boys make terrible dirty jokes with straight faces to a nut farmer. There’s some weirdness, and some suspense, but action? Nothing like The Buccaneer’s Apprentice.

Until the second and third sections of the book, that is. Then there’s death and intrigue and explosions and blood to spare.

Every story has its own shape, I need to remember. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is like one of those theme park rides that’s fast and wild and relentless the moment the lever’s released—a higher-speed Tilt-a-Whirl or a Loop-O-Puke that’s determined not to let you off until you’re dizzy and breathless. This story is more like a classic roller coaster. There’s the inexorable winching up, the terrible moment of sheer suspense in which you realize there’s no returning, and then the inevitable plunge down. The Glass Maker’s Daughter had much the same shape—it was all woe and teenaged moping, and then suddenly the entire city started to fall down.

I have to keep in mind that nobody likes 24 syndrome, either. That is, it’s tough for a continuing story like television’s 24 to avoid becoming wearying, because every year the pattern and the rhythm of the story is the same. Jack Bauer’s forced to save the world from some awful threat, which turns out to be not as awful as the even more awful threat no one saw coming, which is just an appetizer to the really awful threat that concludes each year. The forces he battles are like a never-ending series of nesting Russian dolls, each one bigger than the last. Now that the show’s locked into an unvarying structure, I think most viewers are pretty numb to any of the threats at all. Oh, pooh. It’s just another few hundred nuclear bombs, Jack. Yawn! No, having the freedom to vary the rhythm of a continuing story line is a good thing.

So. Tomorrow (or later today, technically) I’ll rewrite that scene yet again. Third time should be the charm. Now, if only my brain would let me sleep.