serakit

LOOK AT MY ADULTING.

Hand pies are actually a lot easier than I remember them being, maybe because I have significantly better medical care now and therefore more spoons. I make them with a yeast dough from How to Bake Everything that goes with a hand pie recipe I have never actually made. I double the dough recipe, let it rise a good bit longer than called for, and then pull chunks off and stretch them with my hand, which I fold upwards galette-style rather than over sideways like a meat pie. Filling is entirely improvised, but generally uses ground meat of some sort as a base, to which I add various vegetables and spices. It's the one thing I actually can do consistently on my own when I have enough energy to do it and have been reminded that it's okay to move all the stuff to the kitchen table and sit down for the actual assembly part. I made enough that my shelf of the freezer is quite full.  Yay for not having to think about what I'm packing in my work lunches for a bit!

I've also made some progress with actually using my cookbooks: trying out The Handmade Loaf, which I have never used. It strikes me that I am significantly more likely to try new cookbooks if they have yeast bread. I'm a varied baker, but it takes me a lot longer to get comfortable with any given not-bread recipe, and I need to make it four or five times close together before I really absorb it. As a consequence, I use fewer of the other types of recipes in my cookbooks, and fewer of the books that don't have any yeast breads at all. There are of course exceptions, like my beloved Wintersweet, but those tend to contain things that are both simple enough to prepare repeatedly and that I like enough to eat a lot-- Wintersweet became a favorite because it's got a cranberry section and I am a cranberry girl.

What bread did I use? Almond Milk Bread. I did elect not to grind my own almond milk using a mortar and pestle, though. (Yes, this is a thing it calls for.) It comes out rather bland and dull-- it's a bread for sandwiches and spreads, not a bread for just eating. Which, fine; I can slice it up and freeze it and use it for cheese toast or grilled cheese or what have you.

I've also elected not to participate in the workplace cookie contest. The odds of my being able to eat any of anyone else's contributions are vanishingly small and I'm choosing to spend my limited spoons on stuff I'm eating. I will bring something simple-- probably more yeast breads-- for the holiday potluck, though, just on the off chance I can actually eat anything anyone else made. (This is not a crowd that will go for my Hypoallergenic Bread, which used to be quite popular at New Year's... but then the people attending that party had many, many food restrictions, and so everyone was delighted with gluten-free, yeast-free, corn-free, nut-free, vegan bread even if it was a bit bland, because it was an excellent substrate for hummus. I thought it was terribly bland but it was entirely gone at the end of the party.)

So the "are hot dogs sandwiches" thing came out at work today and I was amused to watch one of the people who had never heard of it get drawn in, while I and the person who'd never heard of it watched. He had apparently not even known this was a thing, and was quite befuddled by it all. (I was like "Yes, this is a thing, and also a thing about is a pizza a something or other; yes, it is ridiculous; no, you don't need to participate.")

I have never liked these arguments, in large part because I don't like spending time having meaningless discussions, but I've also realized something else that bothers me about it: it's a prescriptivist approach to language. You can sit down and try to work out the definition of a sandwich in great detail all you like, but the fact is most people have a specific image category in their head when the word "sandwich" is said, and it's going to be very similar from person to person-- the fact that everyone has enough common ground to have this argument in a meaningful fashion is itself proof of that.

And trying to redefine it based on elaborate criteria is prescriptivist. So not only are you having a ridiculous argument that doesn't really matter, you're actively supporting a way of looking at language that is wrong and is wrong in ways that do matter, and therefore contributing to the degradation of very important linguistic norms.

So I think, after another round of "I am near a Buffalo Exchange; I should pop in and see if there's anything wearable," I have figured out the problem I am having with Buffalo Exchange, namely that they have whatever the opposite of vanity sizing is-- something that is a large might or might not fit me, but it should never be too small. (The dress in question had "6 US 10 UK" on the actual tag. Even accounting for vanity sizing in dresses, that is not a large, yet Buffalo Exchange's tag labeled it "large" and it was in the large section.)

Incidentally, I had a moment of "women vs men" when articulating this, as it came up when I was talking to some (female) folks at a little pop-up craft fair phrased as "So I think the actual problem I am having with Buffalo Exchange is that I am no longer a size zero" and they were like "Yeah, Buffalo Exchange started targeting a much younger crowd and going much more fast-fashion leftovers and less actual vintage"... and repeated that phrasing to my (male) roommate a bit later who I think interpreted it as my having been in denial about my actual dress size.

I did actually find two dresses that worked, one of which is even work appropriate (and also vintage-- it said "vintage" and "as is" on the tag and I have looked it up and down and have no idea what they meant by "as is"), and one of which is a nice enough polyester that I was initially convinced it was rayon and was concerned about cleaning it. (I have a few hand-wash only outfits but they're all special occasion wear.) They're both SO PRETTY. Not winter wear-- or, well, the work-appropriate dress can be because anything with a full-length skirt can be winter wear with enough sweaters layered over it-- but pretty all the same.

Also I've now got three regular-use-type items of clothing that are line-dry. I am tempted to put up a clothesline once the weather gets nicer.

I was having a conversation with one of the roommates (who may need an initial soon; we're becoming friendly) about cooking and he got me onto my rant about how bread and candymaking are both things people think are harder than they are. He responded "That's because you're good at it."

And I'm... not sure that's true. I mean, yes, I am good at praline and decent at yeast breads and slowly improving at pie crust, but yeast bread and candymaking both get waved around as "These things are HARD" and I think that stops people from trying because they think it's going to be HARD. I was not aware bread was supposed to be especially hard when I started making it, and I think if I had been it might have discouraged me from trying. Certainly "this is a very hard task" never occurred to me while I was learning to do it. If you get a good recipe aimed properly at beginners and follow it carefully, it will be at least okay. And if you sort of follow it but are not super careful about it, if you've got a simple yeast bread you're probably still okay.

On the other hand, I was aware that candy is supposed to be exceptionally hard. Everyone says that. Candy is difficult, you need to watch your candy thermometer absolutely precisely, you need to take it off the heat the INSTANT it hits the temperature. I was not going to go near candy, but then Trader Joe's praline pecans had corn syrup in them, I found a recipe that promised to be easy, and benign_cremator really loves pecans.

Except, of course, that I do not have a candy thermometer, but the recipe thoughtfully included the information that you want soft ball stage without actually using the term "soft ball stage." (Having read Like Water for Chocolate in high school I was familiar with the actual words for the various candy stages, but I didn't need to have been to follow the recipe.) I have never owned a candy thermometer, I make praline with a bowl of ice water to tell me when it's done.

I know I've joked about candy thermometers being cheating, but I do think using the bowl of water has given me a much more visceral sense of how it works and more to the point the fact that there is a lot more give in this than people admit. It's not like it immediately jumps to hard ball as soon as it gets a hair past the soft ball temperature. There's a continuum of softness to hardness, and it's edible and tastes good anywhere within it. (Yes, if you get it too far wrong, it will burn-- but you can give the instruction "once it starts to get really bubbly and foamy, stir it a lot and drop bits into the ice water more frequently the closer it gets to forming a ball" and that will probably work for most purposes.) Not to mention that conventionally, "nut brittle" is supposed to be something that hits hard crack and here I've been making a version of it that only gets to soft ball and is still fine in both taste and texture. As with most things, I suspect there are easier and harder recipes, but that's no reason to go "candymaking as a whole is Difficult."

Now, I do think it probably gets harder the farther up the scale you go. Anything that gets into hard crack has lost so much of its water content that you probably have less reaction time before it gets out of candy temperatures entirely. (I've never tried, but that makes logical sense.) Something like a toffee or a lollipop is going to need you to move quicker, so you should make some of the more forgiving ones first to get a sense of the movements and reading the stages and having your ice water up.

But my praline? That's extremely forgiving. Unless you actively burn it, it's probably going to come out tasty. It took me a really long time to get to a point where I make it without a second thought, and benign_cremator loved it even on my first attempt when I had no clue what I was doing. The recipe I'm using is here, if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

And if your only reason for not making candy is that everyone's told you how difficult it's going to be, please do give it a whirl.

I haven't previously had much awareness of the Rusty Fears competition. Remember that I came to Magnus comparatively late; I skipped over much of the interstitial content for the first several seasons in favor of catching up with the main series. I went back to listen to the Q and A's, but I didn't bother with much else, and being extremely picky about my horror I didn't really bother with Rusty Fears even when I'd caught up to it... and I was never aware of any of them until after the stories had gone up, so I didn't know how it was being run.

Now I do, because the next Rusty Fears is open for submissions.

And I'm upset, because ethically, I can't justify entering it. Entering it, especially if I were to win, would be supporting it, and this is structured the way every taking-advantage-of-the-novices contest is structured, and I am so angry at Rusty Quill right now, because they're so vocal about how they try to be an ethically run business... and they're ignoring that one basic tenet of genre fiction writing.

Yog's Law. Money flows towards the writer.

Sure, there's no contest fee, which I suppose is the absolute bare minimum, but equally at the other end you lose those all-important first publication rights.

I know how they're going to justify it. This is for fans. It's not a professional writing opportunity; it's a fan contest. But they outright say they're looking for new and undiscovered horror writers. And anything good enough to win this contest? Is good enough to sell to a horror magazine. Hell, one of the six winners gets to write an actual canonical episode of the Magnus Archives and it's explicitly noted that that person gets a brief and points to hit just like any other professional... and makes no mention of being paid for this. Your reward is that you get to write for the Magnus Archives.

For that reward you are permanently licensing your story to Rusty Quill. They get to do whatever they want with it with only credit given, no payment. Including "all adaptations"-- they can incorporate it into other stuff they do, if they want, beyond what you originally submitted. Paid in exposure, people, paid in exposure.

People die of exposure.

If you want to target new, you do what the Resnick Award did and say the only people eligible are people who haven't had a pro sale yet. Or haven't had any sale. Or haven't made more than $X total from writing. I promise you the people who are actually going somewhere value their reputations too much to risk them on a sale that will have them easily found out; you don't have to worry that much about verifying it.

Rusty Quill ought to be a pro market by any definition. They have a huge audience and they have an entire paid staff, which is way more than... any of the pro markets have, which means they can afford to pay pro rates. If I sell something between 1000 and 2500 words to a pro market I get paid between $80 and $200 and all I'm giving up is first publication rights with an agreement not to reprint for a set period of time generally measured in months rather than years. (If I sell to one of the anthology podcasts rights bought will include audio as well, subject to similar time limits.)

I really did think better of Rusty Quill than this. I thought they were trying to do better than the usual industry behavior. I thought they were trying to be better.

But no; as it turns out they're just like all the other companies out there willing to take advantage of the new and the young. And I can no longer have the daydream of someday getting to pitch to Alexander J. Newall.

Me: "I'm not actually terribly good with computers, you realize."

Also Me: "I want to know the size of this image, clearly the logical way to do this is to select 'inspect' from the right-click menu and look for how many pixels it is in the webpage's HTML, a solution that is very obvious and would clearly occur to anyone."

(Although there has to be a more direct way to do that, so I'm not sure 'skill' is quite what this says.)

So you know I am quite fond of the Zombies Need Brains folks, for being both my first pro sale and my first experience with professional-grade editing. And also the anthologies are just good.

Their Kickstarter for the anthologies for the year has four days to go and needs an additional $3500 to fund. If it doesn't fund there won't be anthologies this year, and that would be very sad because some of them look awesome-- Game On!, SF renditions of fiction about games, is one I'd particularly like to see come into being. But there's also one with stories from the perspectives of dragons, a solarpunk one, and Artifice and Craft.

So if that seems neat and/or you'd like to support a small press, drop a bit in the Kickstarter here.

I really really like Kimball Anderson's Okay Okay. It's lovely. The art and words are beautiful.

I have read it a couple of times now and I have absolutely zero idea what's happening in it.

But it's a lovely book, highly recommended.

Apparently we are talking about the Milford Method and writers workshops, thanks to this Tor.com article. (Well, mostly we are talking about it on Twitter, but since I don't do Twitter, I am talking about it here.)

I have come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for never having made it to Clarion. For that matter, I haven't really taken a lot of creative writing classes in general. Playwriting classes, yes, but Milford seems not to have penetrated those (despite--or perhaps because of-- the college one being taught by a graduate of Iowa) and there's a fair bit of focus on "does this work upon the stage" (ie "are you going to be torturing your actors or director"), which tends to keep it from winding up too much in beating-up-on-the-creativity-land, especially given that the ones I was in had a lot of actual discussion. "And we will now do a table read and then we will talk about how the dialogue flows" formed a major part of playwriting critique in every class I took.

(It hadn't occurred to me until this moment, but the majority of my formal creative writing education was about how to write plays. Of course, putting on a play is not a solitary endeavor, and so I have not really done much of this now that I have left environments with a large group of easily accessible people to put on plays with.)

I do remember avoiding the entire lit department in college on the advice of the lit students I knew, because it was big on what I did not know at the time was Milford and everyone hated it. I have been vaguely aware of the existence of writing workshops for a while and I have often wondered how exactly this was meant to improve your writing. The process sounded dreadfully regimented. I always really liked having my plays read in class because then we'd have a nice discussion of them and people were looking at my work and thinking about it and talking about it! But that worked because it was a discussion. Currently my best worldbuilding tool is infodumping at Mathfriend about my works-in-progress and he will ask questions about things that sound like potential holes-- "So how does X work, then?"-- and this forces me to think more deeply about what I'm doing.

None of this is to say I'm against critique! Remember my delight in how much the True and Proper Line Edit the good folks at Zombies Need Brains gave "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams" improved not only that story but all my subsequent writing. I don't understand writers who are like "Now I am so famous I can dispense with editors!" I really don't. But that was helped a lot by being asynchronous. I got a day or two to get the instinctive "AGH THIS STORY IS COVERED IN COMMENTS" out of my system before actually engaging with it.

Gatekeeping is another matter.

Because while I've always thought the critique method sounded painful, the idea of spending several weeks hanging around with a bunch of other young writers and some well-known writers and editors sounded tremendously fun, and also then you've met some well-known writers and editors and maybe you've impressed one and this will be helpful later. For a lot of people it seems like it is helpful later; there are a number of tales of people in those groups remembering each other and soliciting stories or making introductions. Looking at the tales that have surfaced since the article went live, it looks like the connections are what actually helps people-- the people who talk about how it forced them to do better at writing are often really vague about what, specifically, it helped them do better, while they're very specific about "It introduced me to so-and-so!" And the number of editors and agents who say being a graduate of certain workshops means they'll take an extra look is enormous.

I will be coming up through the slush and whatever audience I obtain through my other projects like fanfic and the podcast. (And I have also found the podcast quite educational in the learn-by-doing sense. It's the only long-term joint creative project I've ever worked on, and both the length and the process of working with someone else teach things I could not have learned any other way.) I don't have money for workshops and my day job doesn't allow the time for most of the famed ones... and with the pandemic, I'm not even at conventions, although three pro sales and a few more not-pro sales puts me into the category of "people who could reasonably volunteer to be on panels." The lack of connections will likely make things harder for me in the course of making my name.

On the other hand, I seem to be doing reasonably well for myself so far--  a few short story publications a year and a podcast every other week, and I'm not burned out on writing like the bulk of the workshop folks who don't go on to make it big.

It's a start.

It's interesting the different definitions of "Fandom Old" that you see floating around. Because it seems to depend a lot on the area of fandom. For convention fandom it's people who were there for APAs and saw Harlan Ellison misbehave in person. For fic fandom, though, it's anywhere from "remembers when Kirk/Spock was referred to as 'the premise'" to "remembers the citrus scale and the world before AO3" to "lived through Strikethrough."

Now, I'm not one by any of these definitions-- I had found fic by the time of strikethrough but I wasn't really involved in fandom as such; I was mainly a reader and wrote a couple of unutterably terrible id-fics that I summarily disappeared from the internet a few years later.

But I am old enough to remember the internet before The Algorithm ran everything, and therefore apparently old enough to be absolutely shocked by encountering someone very seriously arguing that algorithms on fic sites are a good thing because they mathematically figure out what you're interested in and are therefore perfectly one-size-fits-all, while rec lists are bad because not every rec list is for every person. Which is just "????" (Apparently the only thing that makes algorithms bad is capitalism, and if we didn't have capitalism algorithms would be perfect. Aside from the usual "we live in the society we have, not the one we want" issue, AI technology isn't actually there to the degree this person seems to think it is.)

Since I still visit fanfiction.net occasionally and I've been known to peek into whatever of the truly old archives remain-- Petulant Poetess and Sycophant Hex both still exist and I have a lengthy outline for a fic that's inspired by something originally posted in 2004-- I very puzzledly went "Wait, what fic site has an algorithm? When has ANY fic site had an algorithm? I know I don't use FF.net much but I would notice if it had got an algorithm!"

Apparently Wattpad has an algorithm. I have never visited Wattpad because my impression of it is that it is a commercialized mess and the few times I've tried to read fics I've been linked to there their interface has been horrible, but an algorithm? Really? (You are supposed to be able to sort your search results by date updated, date posted, likes, and sometimes number of comments or reviews. I would prefer it if more sites also had a "word count" option, but that's not standard. Minimum is the ones I listed.)

The tone of some of the complaints I've seen floating around about AO3 suggest that younger internet users are so used to the algorithm deciding everything that they can't find things on AO3 because they don't have the relevant search skills. Which explains a lot about the current social moment and is also terrifying-- most of the people I deal with at work who don't have basic search skills just straight-up dislike technology in general. Computers are hard and complicated and they don't want to use them. (That is less generational than you're probably assuming. I run into plenty of new adults who also think this.) This suggests a lot of the Extremely Online people don't have basic search skills, which is alarming. I mean, it explains why people keep insisting AO3's algorithm is terrible-- the idea that there isn't one is apparently so inconceivable that it's easier to think "it's terrible" than just accept that it doesn't exist-- but it says some alarming things about the current state of the internet.

(I mean, we all know most of the complaints about AO3 boil down to "They won't let me link to my Patreon," which... I am old school enough to be like "Get sued for copyright infringement on your own time; don't drag the archive down with you" about that. I assume Wattpad is relying on the safe harbor laws? Even FF.net officially doesn't allow it; they just mainly moderate by algorithm so you can get away with things like "P*tr**n".")