Julia is not to be trifled with

My mother gave me Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a Christmas gift, and it’s something I plan to treasure and use for years to come before passing it along to my own daughter. I was hoping to end up with Mom’s own, decades-old copy, but it seems to have disappeared somewhere between my childhood and now. I made it a point to make Julia’s famous onion soup first, since it was a staple in our home as I was growing up. And I quickly learned that when Julia admonishes the reader to do something (i.e. watch the onions carefully in the caramelizing stage), she’s not doing so for her own benefit: A mere few minutes distraction and I had eye-watering charcoal in the pan instead of uniformly browned onions as the recipe called for. Not to be put off by this initial mishap (mainly because I’m well aware there will be hundreds more like it in my future as I work my way through Mastering the Art), I tried again. Keeping my focus this time and following Julia’s directions to the letter, I ended up with a dish that not only brought me right back to cozy winter nights with family while the northern California rain beat down on the roof, but that even had my finicky tween son asking for seconds.

Moving on, it was time to tackle Poulet Poele a L’Estragon (many accent marks missing), which is basically Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon. Here it was necessary for me to deviate from Julia’s directions slightly (even though I’d assured myself I’d never do that again after the charcoal onion mishap), mainly because I didn’t have the mattress needle and white string necessary for trussing a chicken. So, I sort of just let my chicken hang loose throughout the process – more of hippy chick(en) than an uptight, French bird. And the fact that I kept thinking things like “Poor little chicken” to myself while preparing the dish is just one of the reasons I would have made a terrible farm kid. Regardless, I was obliged to put the thing through all sorts of humiliations (beheading and plucking aside) in order to end up with yet one more mouth-watering (if I do say so myself) and popular dish:

I'm pretty sure Julia's chickens behaved in a much more professional manner.

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lost and found

Having not, as I mentioned in a recent post, read Lorrie Moore for many years, I find myself snowed in and feasting on her latest, A Gate at the Stairs. While it took me a while to really get into it (as will happen when one tries to start a book at Christmas time, I suppose), I'm already racking up a list of favorite lines. Among them:

"The January day was blue, sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine." (p.78)

Later, in coming spring, a "hot lemony sun" makes an appearance - and there's a lot of classic, but somehow also more knowing Moore throughout, as if she's been there, done that and is still alive to tell the story. By the end of the novel? Well, frankly, I was getting too weepy to pick and choose favorite lines.

Frankly, it's like the return of an old friend who dropped off the map and was more or less given up for lost.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

gone egg noggin'

I'll be out and about, perusing the wide, mad world for the next...oh, ten days or so. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the holiday season, and I'll catch you on the flip side of 2010. In the meantime, there's this:

"But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.


Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it’s that private perpetual struggle.

Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are."

~Steve Almond, The RumpusFollow @nicole_mcinnes

empty chairs, empty patches of sunlight

At this time of year it's so easy to think, talk and post about the food and the shopping and the get-togethers and the decorating - all of it seemingly required for the holidays to go smoothly. People are trying to stick to a budget, to manage their December calendars, to watch the calories and strategize travel plans all the while stressing out over the economy. It can get crazy and distracting, and it can wind us up for the big, post-holiday crash. Beyond that, it can make us forget about the pain some people are bearing at this "most wonderful time of the year."

I know, I know. I usually try to keep the blog light and optimistic. And I really do love Christmas - really, I do. So, don't think I'm trying to bring the blogosphere down or anything. But I have dear friends and family who have lost loved ones in just the past couple of days, and my heart is heavy for them. This goes both ways, since their hearts have been heavy on my behalf when I've endured my own losses as well.

And as much as we don't want it to be so, as much as we want the season to be pure Happy-Happy-Joy-Joy (that's a Ren & Stimpy reference for those of you who didn't know), that's not always the case, and Grief can be a most unwelcome holiday house guest for adults and kids alike. For some, Grief is an empty chair at the table. For others it's an empty patch of sunlight on the floor, the favorite spot of a furry friend now gone.

So, this is a reminder to myself as much as it is to anyone else: Give an extra hug when you have the chance. Lend your ear for an extra minute to listen. And, most of all, celebrate the people and the pets and the moments that bring you joy. We're all in this together.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

book crush

Ever had one of these? Or maybe multiples? I heard somebody refer to Lorrie Moore last week, and it brought me right back to graduate school, when I read everything I could by her. My well-worn copy of Like Life still sits on my bookshelf, and I sometimes think of how one narrator described herself waiting for her lover as arranged on the bed like some ridiculous cake.

Anne Lamott’s books were major crushes for me, too. I’ve been reading her books since Rosie, Hard Laughter and All New People were new. And since I’m from Marin, it’s not at all unusual to see her around town when I’m visiting. When she came to the Northern Arizona Book Festival back in the ‘90s, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by giving her a big hug during the author meet-and-greet. I’m sure she thought I was a stalker or something.

I don’t have any current book crushes, but the history goes way back. What are some books you’ve crushed on, either recently or in the distant past?Follow @nicole_mcinnes

somebody told me that her name was jill

So, last winter was crazy here in Northern Arizona. On top of being all but snowed in for what seemed like forever, the roof of our local ice rink collapsed. Then, my favorite book store of all time - the place where REM's Michael Stipe walked up and started talking to me  - met with a similar fate.

This year, with the official start of winter just days away, locals are walking around in t-shirts, hanging laundry out on the line and doing Christmas shopping in flip-flops. It’s crazy again! But in a different way!

Yesterday, while feeding the horses, I heard a chirping and trilling overhead. When I looked up, I saw a decisively spring-looking songbird hanging out on a telephone wire. Get thee to Phoenix before the snow comes, Little Buddy! I found myself thinking. There’s even green grass on my property still, and bumblebees flitting around now and then. Seems nature herself is as befuddled as the rest of us.

I do love t-shirt weather in December, though it’s sad to see how thoroughly it has harshed the collective mellow of local skiers and snowboarders.

Oh! And speaking of t-shirts…I don’t know if I’ve just been watching too much Glee, or what, but I have songs in my heart lately. A lot of them are, um, interesting songs, too, like this Paul Anka classic sung by Finn. And it’s 70’s songs like these that get me in the mood to share one of my most treasured possessions with all of you. Now, I don’t want to, you know, brag or anything. I know the economy has been rough for a long time now, and not everyone can have something so...special.

But here it is anyway:

I have just four words for you: Da. Doo. Ron. Ron.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

NaNo FAIL

Just call me NaNoWreckMo Nicki. The woman whose NaNoWriMo dreams imploded at 31,000 feet words. It happened a little over a week before the end of NaNoWriMo. I just…stopped. And for some reason it’s totally okay. Normally I’d be awash in chagrin by now, pointing my finger at myself for not having finished something I set out to do. But, you know, life’s short. And it’s the holidays, and frankly, I decided I’d much rather spend time with friends and family and get my paying obligations met rather than chain myself to the keyboard to ensure my word count for the day was met. So, I let it go.


The good news? I got some solid material for the next project generated with those 30k words, material that now sits in the hopper fermenting until it’s ready to take on new life as a potential draft. I’ve had the “NaNoWriMo Winner!” badge on my blog before, a few years back. I have to say, I wish they’d come out with a “NaNoWriMo FAIL!” badge, as I would no doubt display it proudly. Or maybe it’s like the equestrian endurance racing folks say: To finish is to win. Maybe I’m a winner after all…but nah. Twenty thousand unwritten words tell a different story. Oh well!

In other news, I’m going to be redundant and link to a blog post Nathan Bransford has already linked to on his phenomenal blog. Kudos to Ms. Whipple for going where most authors don’t dare to go.

Happy Friday, Everyone!Follow @nicole_mcinnes

little cat feet

A friend loaned me the Hilary Swank/Richard Gere movie Amelia the other day, and it was really good. I particularly liked the scene where Amelia Earhart is looking out through the window of her little plane and thinking in voiceover:


“The fog comes/on little cat feet…” she muses.

Then, the next day, I was looking over a book of poems my boy checked out from the school library. It’s an oldy, this book, and my first thought was that it would be a perfect submission for Awful Library Books.

 Then I opened the cover and completely cracked up.

Discarded Because of Obsolescence. Ouch. There’s one of the top ten worst fears of most people, am I right? I’m not sure why it made me laugh like it did. Clearly, The First Book of Poetry is on its second life at our little rural school.

Anyway, in thumbing through I realized it wasn’t bad at all. Robert Frost is in there (…and miles to go before I sleep…) as are A.A. Milne and Emily Dickinson (Wild Nights is one of my favorite poems ever). And then, there on page 72, was this:

The fog comes

on little cat feet.



It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

~Carl Sandburg

 
Weird coincidence. But, there you have it: I guess you really can't judge a book by its cover.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

pop musings

I have to say, I was held fairly in thrall by the latest Rolling Stone interview with Eminem. Here's a guy who found a lot of fame by ticking off/shocking a bunch of people, and he's also obviously faced down his share of demons over the years. I have to say, it's refreshing to have something like respect for an entertainer who used to repel me on every level.

Also, call me hopelessly behind the times, but I heard Katy Perry's Firework for the first time today, and ...Wow! What an awesome message (though I have to say "igniting the light" looks pretty painful).

Just, you know, catching up with pop culture a little bit.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

writing and running

Seems a lot of writers are also runners, and as I work the theme of running into a new story I’m working on, I can see why. The physical act of writing is fairly static: You sit in a chair, you stretch once in a while, but mostly it’s your fingers moving. Running is a chance for those of us who otherwise sit a lot to get out and get moving. It’s a way to connect with motion and forward momentum. I’ve found this can be really, really useful when a project is getting bogged down and losing that page-turner quality.

Running – especially outdoor running…especially trail running – is anything but static. When you’re out off-roading it, your entire being needs to be alert and aware. It’s good practice for writerly types who, if given the choice, would spend most of their time with their heads in the clouds. I remember when I used to go for runs across the remote prairie where I lived I always had at least one ear and one eye on the alert for mountain lions because a canyon they supposedly liked to frequent was just a couple miles away as the crow flies. It was great motivation to keep moving at a good clip, let me tell you (and I was never quite sure what I’d do if I actually ran into a mountain lion, but just being aware of the possibility seemed somehow like a good idea).

These days I run mostly on a frontage road near the interstate, but I usually take Lizzy the Cow Dog with me on her telescoping leash. That means I have to keep my eye out for cars, since she has very little sense that way and will basically run right out into the road, completely oblivious. So, my eyes are on the dog and the road ahead, my ears are kept busy with iPod tunes, and my legs are doing their thing, reminding me that forward momentum is what keeps the world – and the story – alive and interesting.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

a warm song

...for a cold day. Brrrr! It feels like the icy November wind is finally blowing winter into the Northland. It was t-shirt weather all weekend, and I'm NOT ready for the freeze!

That's okay. Paramore can warm us all up.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

being enough

Here’s a pretty awesome article for those of us who have a history of being – how can I put this delicately? - RABIDLY TYPE A about some of these issues.

Seems especially fitting for a day like today, when channelling Jimmy Buffett sounds like not such a bad idea.

So, what are your "what ifs" and "whens?"

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wri-ing the mo away

So, National Novel Writing Month. Yeah, that thing.

It's actually going pretty well, which is surprising. I'm up to just over 16K words as of last night, which is just a couple hundred words shy of where I 'd ideally like to be. Normally, by this point in the process (well into week two), the initial exuberance has worn off a bit and things have started to plateau. Also, a few weeks in I generally start finding it really tough at times to meet that daily word count.

Not so much this time around, though. It probably helps that I jumped into the writing with some fairly strong ideas and story leads I wanted to follow. Having just finished getting a YA novel ready for submission, I figured my muse would be pretty much spent, and I'd end up writing 50,000 words of drivel. And while some of what I've knocked out definitely has been drivel, I'm finding some pretty nice passages when I look back through the past ten days of content.

If you're doing NaNo this year, too, how's it going?Follow @nicole_mcinnes

thanks, popular kids

Seems my whining about being all alone and dweeked out on the Facebook Interwebs worked, and I'd like to thank those who came to my rescue by either accepting my friend requests or friending me of their own volition. Bear with me in this digression, but it reminds me of the boost of confidence I was supposed to get when I was thirteen, and a kindly neighbor lady stopped by to chat with my mother. I was wearing braces to fix the diastema (which I hear is all the rage among the supermodel set nowadays) and coke bottle glasses to correct the myopia.

After chatting with me for a while, the neighbor lady said something along the lines of, "You know, you're going to be a pretty girl...Some day, I mean. When you get rid of the glasses and braces."

I assume my response looked something like this:

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overheard at the school bus carpool drop-off

A 6th grade boy (mine) and a 4th grade boy (not mine) were vehemently agreeing on the general principle of teachers seeming to go easier on girls when it comes to warnings, discipline "and stuff."

The conversation was peppered with exclamations like, "I know!" and "Dude, it's so unfair!"

Until finally, the whole thing was summed up by an observation delivered by the fourth grader in the most authoritative tone imaginable:

"That just proves my theory that girls get more publicity and stuff than boys."

Touché.

Wait...what?Follow @nicole_mcinnes

the lone FB-er

After a long hiatus, I've decided to return to Facebook. I know, I know: It's breaking news capable of stopping the Earth's very rotation. It's a bit of a sad state of affairs, though, since I apparently deleted my profile with such vehemence that I managed to wipe all traces of myself from the FB system (some may question whether this is even possible: I say, yes it is).

So, I'm starting from scratch, with NO FRIENDS! It's like a bad junior high nightmare where you walk into the cafeteria holding your lunch tray, your headgear strapped firmly into place, and look around, hoping that someone - anyone - will summon you to their table.

Oh, and you're in your underwear, too.

Can you feel my pain? Can you??

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"note to self:

must use the words midget, Saluki and galoshes in next novel (man, I love NaNoWriMo)."

Thus begins the first 2,000-word installment of my 2010 NaNoWriMo journey. My mom's getting in on the action this year, too, which is awesome. She's long been a prolific journaler, but her big quandary for this undertaking is deciding whether to write in English or Spanish. My advice? Do both! It's NaNo, fer cryin' out loud!

What are YOUR NaNoWriMo plans?

What?

Don't have any?

Well, shoot - come on! Jump on the bandwagon! It's a literary (I use the term loosely) free-for-all, and it's going to be fun!

Go ahead and sign up at the official NaNoWriMo site.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

crunched

October, as promised, has been...how shall I put this?....

COMPLETELY INSANE!!!!

There have been tornadoes, birthday parties galore, the loss of a beloved canine friend who was like my first baby, special events at kids' school, work, work, work and more work....

Deep, cleansing breaths are in order.

November promises to be fairly jam-packed, too, but hopefully in a slightly less frenetic way. The final (hopefully) edit of the new YA novel will be (fingers crossed) zipping across the Interwebs to my agent tomorrow, at which point I'll have approximately 2 days to catch my breath before the onset of NaNoWriMo on November 1. Of course, I must help prepare Princess Tiger and Pancho Villa for the Halloween festivities first.

Phew! Yoga, anyone?Follow @nicole_mcinnes

was seriously blessed

to spend this past weekend in some of the prettiest parts of SoCal, like Pasadena and Malibu, where I attended an amazing wedding. Good people, good food and good ceremony (not to mention dancing like a crazed 16-year-old to Cyndi Lauper, Journey, and Hava Nagila) were just what the doctor ordered. It's good to be reminded these days - when so much of the news we all hear is bleak and dour - that simple things, like a young couple, aloft in chairs on their wedding night, starting a new life together under the watchful and tearfully joyful eyes of the families that nurtured them, are what matter most. (Was that a run-on sentence, or am I just up typing too late?) Actually, the older I get, the more I think that those are the kinds of things that matter at all, really.

It's always good to be home, though, even if it means I'll be knee-deep in last-minute novel editing until the end of the month and teaching until the Christmas season offers a break.

It's okay, though. It's all good.

I am exhausted by work and kids, and love and responsibility. But mostly, like I said, I am blessed.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

and speaking of education

A book-banning hornets nest has been stirred up yet again, this time around books such as Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak.

The man with the whisk seems to be this guy - and, hey, I guess it takes all kinds to make the world go around. But, seriously? Having just finished - and loved - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I find some of the bashers' comments about that book hilarious as well. OMG - a high school boy talking about (gasp!) sex!

This blogger and this one have some interesting thoughts on the matter, as do many others out there.

What do you think, boys and girls?Follow @nicole_mcinnes