Silk & Shadows

Currently working on: Butter cookies
Mood: Pressed (because now I have a cookie press to make butter cookies — hey, why didn’t I use the cookie press as my blog post last week on favorite kitchen implements?)

Well, 2011 is 1/12 over. How’re you doing? I haven’t been so good about cleaning my closets — and evil XY actually put some of his stuff in one of my closets, which means I have negative goal success on that front. On the plus side, I’ve been fairly consistent with my workouts, which is why I indulged this weekend with butter cookies. Indulged in moderation (does that even make sense?) of course since butter cookies have a way of going from plus side to plus size.

Checking in on the progress of my projects is something I often forget to do until the next time New Year’s resolutions roll around. I like setting goals and I like reaching goals, but doing the work between… Yeah, that’s the tricky part.

So I want to rant for a moment on goal setting philosophy.

See, self-help gurus tell us we should set SMART goals, where SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Which is indeed smart, as well as lovely, balanced, popular, and perfect — all the things I DESPISE in a romance heroine. Because it’s completely NOT THE TRUTH. Oh sure, maybe there is some girl/goal out there who meets all those criteria, but more likely she/it is hiding some deep, dark, delusional secret. In the case of the romance heroine, I’ll like her better when I discover she has a secret she never wanted to deal with but is forced to confront during the course of the story. In the case of the goal, the secret is… Often in real life, we don’t get to pick our goals.

Seems to me, many a goal in real life is an I-SMACK goal. As in “I get smacked” by an Imposed, Sudden, Monopolistic, Aggressive, Chaotic, and Killer goal.

I’m being a little unfairly grumbly because the aforementioned self-help gurus do offer some advice that can still be applied to I-SMACK goals.

Break it down: What are the baby steps that compose this overwhelming I-SMACK goal?

Back it out: What’s my drop-deadline and when do those baby steps need to be overcome to get there?

Buckle down: How much caffeine do I require to make this happen? (Well, actually the gurus don’t say quite this, but I think it’s what they meant.)

Worse, my secret — which is not very deep or dark or delusional — is that I don’t care that much about cluttered closets and I’m never going to be able to benchpress my body weight. SMART goals forget to include the element of desire. And as any attentive romance reader knows, without the desire, this story ain’t happening.

I-SMACK goals at least have the element of onrushing doom to stimulate the desire to live. But it IS desire.

In looking at some of my goals again, I’m wondering, Do I really want this? WHY do I really want this? If I can’t answer — or if I answer, I don’t — maybe I need to change my goals.

Because as young Skywalker discovered, if the answer is “Do not,” the universe falls to evil. So… I’ll DO. And reward myself with a butter cookie.

Out of curiosity, how do you reward yourself for a goal met or a job well done?

Kitchen toys are great fun.

My favorite has to be my coffee maker. This would be because, without coffee, there is no existence. My shiny friend grinds the beans every pot. I load it the night before so that a mere push of the button is all that is necessary for life to flow back into my shivering, semi-comatose body every morning.

I also like my timer that looks like a skull. Very Hamlet.

There’s also my avocado knife, egg slicer, the pan for cooking ladies’ fingers, a device for making tortilla salad bowls … the list goes on. I love to cook. More specifically, I love to accumulate cooking gear (not that I have room for it in my closet-sized kitchen). I have been known to carry on long-distance communications regarding the acquisition of the right frying pan (which was just right, in case you read this, o cousin mine).

A new city means finding new cooking shops and when I discovered Sur la Table on a visit to Portland, well, it was a love match. I got the cutest bright red colander, just the right size for a few cups of blueberries. How could I leave it behind?

Why does this stuff turn me on? I think because a) I like food and b) the kitchen is symbolic of well-being. Parties end up in the kitchen. Togetherness happens around a table. It’s warm and bright and nurturing. It’s only natural to equip it with amusing, useful, and sometimes just indulgent doodads.

My current home improvement project is to put in a stainless steel backsplash, which is going to make the work area look 100% better given the current surface is old, peeling wallpaper. I’m taking before and after pictures. I’ve left the kitchen upgrade until last because of the disruption involved, but it may be the one I appreciate the most!

Has anyone else redone their kitchens? Any words of advice or war stories?

I’m the furthest thing from a professional cook you can imagine. I used to joke that I was such a bad cook that I burned Jell-O. My skills have improved marginally over the years, but family dinners are still held at my sister’s house. For good reason.

I would willingly abdicate all cooking responsibility and resign myself to a life of mooching off others, but I can’t—I’m a mom. Which means there must be healthy food prepared on a daily basis.

BUT, I also have a mental problem common among writers called I’m-lost-in-my-manuscript. Ask my daughter how many times I’ve boiled a pot dry, overcooked the pasta to the point of mush, or burned the bottom of a pan. Too many to count. Seriously, my kid would a scrawny beanpole if it weren’t for carrots, pita, and hummus.

Enter the Slow Cooker. Also known as the Crock Pot.

My brother gave it to me for Christmas last year, and I love this thing. I throw things into the pot in the morning, work all day without giving it a thought, and by dinner time, I have tasty food to eat—with no burning. It even switches from high heat to low simmer on its own, if I forget to eat on time. It’s a miracle worker. Okay, no, it won’t make Jell-O, but it will make hamburger soup, teriyaki chicken, chili, pot roast, pulled pork, mushroom pork chops, short ribs, and stew.

I’m still experimenting with recipes, but there are tons of dishes possible—just Google ‘slow cooker recipes’ and you’ll see what I mean. I found one for lasagna that I’m eager to try.

Do you use a slow cooker? What food miracles do you produce?

Thanks to random.org, our winner for Laurie London’s guest post last week — receiving a signed copy of Laurie’s debut novel BONDED BY BLOOD — is Janna! Congratulations, Janna!

Currently working on: Juggling
Mood: Cue circus music

This week at Silk And Shadows, we’re leaving our cozy writing lofts and exploring that other holy mecca of the working writer — the place from whence all snacks spring: the kitchen.

I live with a professional cook. Before you decide to hate me, consider these repercussions of living with a professional cook:

• Professional cooks believe they are followed sometime shortly after closing by a professional cleaning crew
• Professional cooks use a lot of spoons — I mean a LOT of spoons, an insane number of spoons, a ludicrous and baffling number of spoons, more spoons than you will ever, ever own
• Professionals are not to be questioned on their home surf’n'turf (even if you don’t like, have never liked, and WILL never like peas)
• Professional cooks believe that amateurs shouldn’t play with knives (this despite the fact that if my cook ever develops alien hand syndrome and is murdered in his sleep by his left hand — he wields his knife right-handed — his left hand will walk on a self-defense/PTSD plea; yes, it has that many scars)

Despite these occasionally troubling aspects of living with a professional cook, I will STFU already because without him, I would starve.

My mother is a wonderful cook and fed me through high school. (Thanks, Mom!) I don’t remember eating anything after I left my college dorm. No wait, I think I had a hot dog once. My semester in Moscow, after my imported peanut butter ran out, I survived on bread and honey alternating with Georgian cheese bread. By the time I got to my first apartment by myself, I filled one cabinet with nacho chips and the other with brownie mix: for, you know, dinner and dessert.

So to say my live-in professional cook’s kitchen craft confounds me is to speak with severe underemphasis. He can make all three stove burners, the oven AND the toaster oven yield up completed — and completely heated — dishes at the exact same time. Crazy, yo.

My minimalist impression of cooking is to melt the chocolate chips before pouring them over the brownies. When I’m feeling wild, I melt the choco chips with butter. I call that my French method.

Despite my incompetence in the kitchen, I do have a favorite kitchen implement:

The spatula.

You can tell spatulas are my favorite because the one on the left is still dirty from my last batch of brownies. (The remains of the French method chocolate is in the skillet on the stove.) Well, maybe you can’t tell it’s dirty because I licked it clean. But trust me, spatulas are my favorite.

Not only is “spatula” a hilarious word to say repeatedly, the spatula is also often the only kitchen implement available to you when a professional cook has stolen all the spoons and forbidden you from using the knives.

(Warning: Extreme tangent and whine. My cook broke the tip off his best cleaver in a futile attempt to assassinate a mole that was uprooting our garden. But I’m the one not allowed to use the kitchen knives. Does this seem fair to you?)

Not only are spatulas the one reasonable way to lift a giant chunk of frosted brownie from the pan to your mouth (okay, fine, a plate) but a spatula can also be used as a spoon (should all your other spoons be mysteriously missing). The edge of a spatula even makes a passable knife (should you be hollered at whenever you touch real knives). Spatulas are frequently slotted (middle and right spatulas pictured above) and can be used to drain mac’n'chez or ramen noodles for those meals that aren’t coated in melted chocolate.

Spatulas are undeniably the best.

[Updated: I've been informed that the spatula pictured on the right isn't actually a cute mini spatula but one half of a salad tosser. Who knew?]

So do you consider yourself a kitchen klutz or a kitchen craftsman? If you’re not sure, the answer may be related to the number of times you’ve bloodied your knuckles on the cheese grater. Or do you think the immersion blender is more dangerous?

So I clicked the “This Year I Will…” link that Annette included in her post, and my response was, “CREATE! CREATE! CREATE!”

YES!

I have a critique partner, the very talented Elle Jasper. For the past couple of years, we’ve exchanged goals at the beginning of the new year, and this year was no different. As part of my goal-creating process, I felt I needed to take things up a notch from the previous year, so I made a few changes in my personal habits.

One of them was to begin getting up at least three mornings a week at 5:00 a.m., when the house is quiet, to write for an extra hour and a half before work. This is something I’ve never done, unless I was in the last stages of a deadline. I work a full time job, so many days I come home pretty fried. But some little voice inside my head said that if I was HUNGRY enough to succeed at writing, then I needed to SACRIFICE. And there’s nothing I love more than my sleep.

To my surprise, the 5:00 writing sessions (fueled by freshly ground coffee beans) have been very productive. I’m very clear early in the morning, and ideas seem to come more easily.

Tying in to Sharon’s post, this hour and a half I spend alone writing, early in the morning, has become my woodshedding time. I write freely, without putting boundaries on myself, and come up with some pretty creative (and sometimes outlandish) stuff that makes me very happy.

Here’s a couple more of my goals for the year.

- READ MORE BOOKS. I read all sorts of books. I am inspired by the talents of other authors. By appreciating their work, I find myself more inspired to go above and beyond in my own.

- DREAM LARGE. I’m a realist, which can be a great trait at times. But sometimes I get so caught up in reality, that I forget to DREAM. So I’ve exhorted myself not just to DREAM, but DREAM LARGE.

- And yes – CREATE! CREATE! CREATE! Perhaps this will surprise you, but published authors get rejected too. That’s why it’s important to stay in a constant state of growth and exploration, so when one project or contract comes to an end, you’re prepared to present something sparkly, new and fresh. Sometimes that “sparkly, new and fresh” idea doesn’t pan out, for any number of reasons, and so it’s great if you have more ideas.

What about you? Are you a project type person? My husband just fixed the gutters on the roof (exciting!!) As for me, after holding his ladder, and passing up the requested tools, I finished up a new historical proposal, so I feel like celebrating. What’s a project you recently completed?

Note from Jessa: I met Laurie at a signing up north when SEDUCED BY SHADOWS first came out. Learning that her debut novel was in the works too, I instantly felt affinity. Even if she’s not a plotter like me One of my favorite parts of being a romance writer and reader is that anywhere I meet fellow rom writers and readers, I have insta-friends.  If you need more romance lovin’ friends, you can find Laurie online on Twitter and Facebook, oh, and Goodreads.

Unlike Jessa, I’m not a big plotter. Let me admit that right up front. She showed me her plotting charts once, and I’m still getting over my hives. Before jumping into a story, I do the bare minimum of planning. Oh sure, I write character sketches and fill out a few simple character charts, and now that I’m on contract, I grudgingly write a synopsis for approval before writing the book, but I don’t plot much beyond that. I prefer to discover the story as it’s revealed to me while writing the first draft.

However, this can lead to a lot of surprises. Enter Hello Kitty.

Ideal ending hooks for chapters, as well as a line or two of dialog, often pop into my head, and I find myself building scenes around them. This happened when I wrote the first chapter of BONDED BY BLOOD.

At the end of the scene, Dom looked down at Mackenzie’s keys in his hand and wondered, “…who was this woman with the Hello Kitty keychain? Hell, this was going to be interesting.”

Perfect, I thought. Mackenzie was already confounding him—even though she was unconscious at the time.

But now I had a problem. How in the world did a vampire warrior recognize Hello Kitty enough to identify her by name? He didn’t refer to it as a toy, or a Japanese cartoon character, or a keychain from a store at the mall. Heck, my own husband wouldn’t know Hello Kitty by name.

Sure, I could change it, but it felt so right. I just had to figure out how he knew.

Dom didn’t have children, so that couldn’t be it. He didn’t have family members with children, so that couldn’t be it either. Aha, Lily, his good friend and fellow Guardian, had a daughter. That was it!

Because she’s a single parent, Lily works two weeks on and two weeks off. While she’s on duty, her daughter stays up in British Columbia with her parents. It just so happens that Zoe is obsessed with Hello Kitty and Dom often buys little trinkets for Lily to take to her. A few chapters later, Lily tells Dom that Zoe loves the Hello Kitty purse he gave her, and voila, the reader (and I) now understands how and why Dom knew about Hello Kitty.

This process of discovery not only ended up answering questions in the first book, but it seeded events in the second book.

EMBRACED BY BLOOD comes out in July and is Lily’s story. Not being a single mother and never having read a paranormal romance about a vampire single mother (let me know if you have), I’m not sure I’d have thought to write about such a character if this whole Hello Kitty angle hadn’t happened.

So my advice to other writers is this: when Hello Kitty happens, don’t blow her off. Work with her. You might be surprised to learn just how powerful she really is.

Thanks for having me on Silk and Shadows. I’d love to give away a signed copy of BONDED BY BLOOD to a commenter.

Jessa adds: To kick off comments, I’ll ask, does anyone know a real-life male who could touch a Hello Kitty object without fearing that he might burst into flames like a vampire exposed to sunlight?

As I’ve thought about the “what do I want from 2011” subject, I’ve found it hard to narrow my wish list down to one thing. I’ve been in the land of big goals for the last few years, and I have achieved many of them. Yay for me. Unfortunately, that comes at the price of a lot of other things, usually those small grace notes that make life more than an act of survival.

I’m not talking huge stuff. I’m thinking of afternoons on the couch reading, time to sort through my collection of movies, or hours spent idling in a garden centre wondering if pink petunias would look better next to celosia or thrift. In other words, all that fun and variety we tend to forego when faced with monumental goals, such as making an unreasonable book deadline (And let’s be honest—when faced with that due date, they all seem unreasonable.)

Ironically, not only do those idle hours provide R&R, they also afford the opportunity to push the envelope. Just as big projects tend to jettison that afternoon spent getting a pedicure, they also squash any chance a writer might have to develop whacky ideas. There isn’t the time to make up stuff for the sheer joy of it.

This is a sad thing, because that’s where a writer gets practice with ideas and techniques that can later go into “real” writing down the road. I knew a fiddler who called this kind of activity “woodshedding”—that is, going out into the garage where no one could hear him and making his mistakes with impunity. When he was satisfied with his new licks, he’d come back in and share. Everyone—from gymnasts to chess players—needs that safe space to take risks and to feel the metaphorical wind in their hair.

So my goal for 2011 is to go reacquaint myself with that woodshed, and to try something daring. Maybe it’ll make it into a published book, and maybe it won’t. That’s not the point. It’s the sense of play and freedom I’m after. Call it research and development or call it goofing off; I want to see what craziness my brain is capable of.

Have you ever started a year with the best of intentions only to have those intentions derailed by life? That’s what happened to me last year. I had a lovely list of goals I wanted to accomplish, and I got none of them done. Circumstances beyond my control disrupted my plans.

So, today I thought I’d discuss getting back on track.

When the harsh realities of life intrude on your dreams, it can be really hard to get back into the swing of things. Your life is no longer the same. Maybe you lost a loved one, or your house, or your job. You might even be battling some long term consequences of the disruption.

Under those circumstances, it can sometimes feel impossible to pick up the threads of your life where you left off. In my case, I started this year reluctant to make any plans at all, because making plans the previous year had ‘clearly been a waste of time’. For those who knew me, this reluctance to look ahead came as a shock—previously, I was a person who derived tremendous satisfaction out of setting goals and reaching them.

It’s only been two weeks, but my attitude has taken a 180.

How? Believe it or not, I give credit to a little web tool for setting New Year’s resolutions. It’s set up to give you only one resolution, not a dozen, and the responses are canned. Some of them are downright silly. Some are philosophical. Try it, and you’ll see what I mean. I tried it, and the response came back as: This year I will do it.

Totally vague, right? Except that I’d been thinking earlier about how much weight I’d gained over 2010, and it had depressed me. To me, ‘do it’ meant lose the weight.

One goal: get back to the weight I was at the beginning of 2010. No big list of high-falutin’ dreamy goals. Just one very practical and possible goal.

So, I set about making it happen. I took out my daughter’s Wii, put in the Wii Fitness program, and started a daily regimen. I cut back on my portion sizes at meals. Cutting my favorite foods out completely just isn’t in the cards for me. I snacked a bit less, and chose fruit, vegetables, or nuts when I did.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I lost two pounds. No, it’s not a monumental achievement and I’ve got a long way to go to get rid of the other pounds, but I made progress. And you know I love progress. Better yet, I’m back to believing I can make plans for 2011 and achieve them. Will they be the same sort of plans I made last year? Probably not. But they will be goals that are right for this point in my life.

If I do one thing in 2011, it will be to lose the weight I tacked on in 2010.

Currently working on: 100 things at once
Mood: Scattered

When writers learn about creating characters, one of the first techniques we’re taught is to assign each character a story goal, something the character desperately wants and must pursue through the course of the story. Since many of us use the start of the new year to assign ourselves some resolutions, I think we can all relate.

Next, writers are told to figure out why the character wants to reach the story goal. What is the character’s motivation?

This is where I, as the (ostensibly) lead character in my own life, get a little murky.

Why do I write?

If I do one thing this year, I want to figure out the answer to that question. See, this year is a turning point (my fellow writers will recognize that term too, and probably wince) in my writing life, and it’s time I clarified my motivation.

Why is motivation important to characters? In a story, strong motivation keeps the poor, beleaguered character on task no matter what rocks we mean writers throw at them. Wimpy motivation lets the character off the hook and he slinks home to his easy chair, never to adventure again. Booooring!

In real life… Well, in real life, I secretly do want the easy chair with a fuzzy blanket and fuzzier socks, BUT I know that strong motivation is really what will keep me reaching for my goals.

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.”
– Zig Ziglar

More than a year ago, I attended a writing workshop where the speaker asked us to determine our own personal reason for writing. Other than fame and fortune. (Cue laugh track.) Everyone diligently bent their heads to their papers and scratched away. I cheated off the writer next to me.

Because I’m not sure of my motivation. I asked other writers afterward what they wrote. They had great answers:

• I write for free therapy.
• I write because I have to write.
• I write so I don’t have to get a job where I wear pants.
• I write to get the strange voices out of my head. (See reason #1.)
• I write because I love to write.

Great as these answers are, they don’t really resonate with me. (Although I’d like to not need a job where I have to wear pants.) So I never answered the question for myself, never found the motivation that rings me like a bell. But this year, I think I’m going to be forced to figure it out.

I hope it’s a good answer.

So do you have parts of your life you don’t look at too closely? Are you happier that way, or do you want to explore those hidden depths? How many people do you think get eaten by the dragons in their hidden depths?

I’m the only Silk and Shadows member who lives in the the South. I truly can’t comprehend what my friends go through. I’ve never spent a winter in the north and never had to deal with the trials of snow, ice and winter monotony.

Sure, we have cold weather. We even had snow on the ground last year, and it stayed on the ground for a couple of days. But where I’m from, we might have temps in the 20s one day, and the high 70s or even 80s the next.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have our winter “comfort” rituals. There’s a reason I usually gain 8-10 (ouch!) pounds each winter. My winter weaknesses are:

1. Warm drinks. I love to drink Mexican chocolate, made with a square of real mexican chocolate, milk, vanilla, cinnamon and a dash of habanero pepper, with marshmallows on top.

2. Stick to your ribs stews, chilis and soups. You name the recipe, I want to make it. While these meals can contain all sorts of wholesome ingredients, they always, ALWAYS, are accompanied by a big chunk of crusty bread and a glass or two of red wine.

3. Baked goods. Cranberry bread! Biscotti! Cookies. I love to bake, and winter seems the perfect time to indulge in all of these warm, delicious treats.

4. Hybernation. No calories involved, but it’s a weakness no less. At the first brush of cool weather, my systems slow down, and I tend to choose comfy clothes, big socks, and as others have mentioned, cozy throws that encourage passive endeavors such as reading books and catching up on all the DVDs I haven’t seen during the previous months. And more mexican hot chocolate, bread and wine, and two cats who want to share my warmth. Bring it on! Zzzzzzzzz!

But also, in the midst of all this, my fantasy-generator has been whirring along. I’ve written two proposals for new book ideas, and have more in my mental wings, waiting for attention.

Is there any activity you tend to tackle in the cold weather months, like scrapbooking, writing letters or reading, that you don’t do as much the rest of the year?