Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Peppers and Dill

Despite the title, that's not a recipe. The dill is doing most excellently - I think it's trying to bolt. So today's dinner included fresh dill and oregano in the tapenade-stuffed pork loin, and steamed carrots with a sauce of butter, lemon juice, and fine-chopped dill. I also made some refrigerator pickles - fresh-sliced cucumbers, peppers, and half a red-onion, all thinly sliced, with vinegar, stevia, salt, and some dill stuck in the fridge to marinate to itself overnight.

Dessert was dill free: cherry pie and black walnut ice cream.

Meanwhile, I have little tiny thai peppers growing. I've never seen the skinny little peppers grow before, and was surprised and amused to find that after the flower is pollinated, the petals don't drop off. Instead, they become a wrinkled brown crown on the pepper itself as it grows out from the base of the flower stem. I picked a few rings of dead flowers off peppers this morning, and it seems like they grew half an inch by evening. Spiffy!

The tomatoes, on the other hand, are strangely curly-leafed (I suspect it may be a blight or virus), and none of the flowers have turned into little green tomatoes. Win some, lose some!

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Lists, Plots, and cleaning.

Some people have a list of chores they need done, and mark them off as they are done. Some people have a list of chores done divided per day, so Saturday is laundry day while Wednesday is clean the bathroom day, or something.

Me, I needed more motivation than that. After the injury spent months grinding me down by staring at all the things that need doing and I couldn't do, I've started on a simpler track:

I do things, and make a list of what I have done.

I learned this from a writer, Dean Wesley Smith, who was talking about the artificial divide between pantsers (make it up as you go along, plotting by the seat of your pants) and plotters (have a detailed outline before you write the first word). Most authors aren't actually one or the other, he contends, and there's a wide range of folks who agree that their "plotting" ranges from six bullet points on a notepad that have to be accomplished by the story's end to writing the ending, and then figuring out how to get there, or building a plot, then writing scenes with characters, and as the characters do their own things by their own motivation, revising the plot.

Dean himself plots in reverse. That is, he'll come up with a title, and then write whatever comes to mind, in the style of a pure pantser - but when he's done with a writing session, he pulls out a notebook and notes down who the people are, where they are, and what they did in the scene. After every session, he'll add to that. And if he gets stuck, he'll pull out the notebook, look at the plot so far, and go "Ah! I haven't done anything with that character / plotline!" or "I need to flesh out that character arc." And that'll inspire him on how to go on.

I'm not that awesome. But I can clean in reverse: look around, pick something, and start cleaning. Then clean the next thing, and the next, noting them down as I go. The advantage is that I'm making a growing list of "I got this done", instead of failing to cross out a list of "need to do." So when I become one with the couch in a puddle of very tired and sore shoulders, I can feel accomplished at everything I managed instead of frustrated at what I didn't do.

Hey, works for me.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Rimworld!

For the last few months, OldNFO has been tossing a chapter at a time to us when we come over for dinner (and sometimes, bringing a revised or new chapter when he comes over for dinner.) The story is awesome, even if it's, in his inimitable way, something completely tangential to most Military SciFi right now. Even better, it's now out for sale!

Remember when he had a maintenance tech get stranded because he was too busy setting up the illegal still to notice the evac order? If you don't, he's got the story up for free right now:

https://www.amazon.com/Rimworld-Stranded-JL-Curtis-ebook/dp/B01G7HSBMI/

But yeah, same universe - this time, it's the story of a medically retired ground-pounder who just wants to get to a nice little backwater planet and live a quiet retirement.

Things never work out that way. 

https://www.amazon.com/Rimworld-Into-Green-JL-Curtis-ebook/dp/B071NK39D8/