Aspen Frost by Alison Meyer
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December, 2009
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Dear Cowgirls and Friends,
December. The darkest month of the year, for those in the northern hemisphere, but also the month of that glorious annual turnabout, when the light begins to return, the days lengthen. It's not surprising that many cultures and faiths have holidays during December. The return of the sun is not something to take lightly or for granted.
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Have there been Decembers of life that you came through to the other side? Times that got so dark you wondered if there ever would come a time when the light would start to grow instead of shrinking? What helped turn it around? Take it for a write, if you can, or at least blow it a kiss and say thank you, because life is a real bear sometimes.
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Hearth by Hearth
Still, for most of us the December holidays will bring some times of cozy warmth and light and family. We humans don't give in to darkness easily. Hearth by hearth we push back the night with light and laughter, giving and song, feast and family and fun. In the darkest time of the year for half the planet, billions of us make an extra effort on behalf of peace and goodwill, on behalf of light and love. It's a time of contradictions; dark/light, dreary/bustling, stressful/peaceful, generous/commercial, cold/warm, and more. Contradictions are good, if you're a writer. Contradictions make for conflict and contrast and complication and complexity (lots of important 'c' words in writing, eh?). December can be a rich field for plots and ideas, in addition to the metaphorical leaps we sometimes make in trying to connect the disconnected. Here are some good December words for you:
bleak warm sled cocoa ski north Solstice jolly dark celebration Christmas snowstorm candy-canes fireplace shiver carols peace Hanukkah survival candles popcorn goose tree bauble homeless shiver Kwanza wise anticipate naughty sleigh jingle coal gold poor elf gift lodge greed cookies reindeer stranded skate gilded nice |
A sled dog injured in the middle of a race?
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Grab one or two or a handful, and take them for a write. Now, as we've been doing in this first year of the newsletter, think up a few seasonal complications to add to the mix. Does a big snowstorm make it difficult for holiday travelers or strand them in unexpected places (poor Cousin Ed, having to find room for a dozen relatives—let alone quarrelsome ones—to sleep, when he has exactly one bed and one couch…)? Did someone snoop into the presents and find out they are getting one they are going to hate? (This happened to me as a child the only time I ever snooped, though in my case it was a good thing I did, because I had a chance to prepare to act happy about the gift I hated, which was definitely the safest course of action, but geeze I hated that ugly accordion-side briefcase I had to carry to junior high when all the other girls just carried their books in their arms.) Is someone who was prosperous in the past facing a leaner holiday than they can ever remember and trying to figure out how to cope? A pregnant holiday traveler who can't find a motel vacancy and thinks she might be about to go into labor if she doesn't get to lie down soon? (Hmm… that one sounds a little familiar…) A sled dog injured in the middle of a big race? I'm sure many of you can come up with even more creative ideas. Take your complication and some words out for a frosty write.
Low-Fuss Cookies
It's nice to have some extra goodies during the holidays, but sometimes it's hard to find the time to make fancy treats. One good solution to this is bar cookies. Many are delicious, and some are even quite elegant, but they are way less fuss than individual cookies, let alone individual decorated cookies. Here's one of my favorites:
| Almond Shortbread Bars | ||
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Heat oven to 350 degrees (F). Dump the first six ingredients (including the yolk of that egg you separated, but NOT the white) into a bowl. Use a mixer on low, scraping bowl often, until it's all kind of mixed and crumbly. (Alternatively, use a food processor or wade in with whatever hand tools you have that you use to make cookie dough and pastry—it's not a very fussy dough, so just get it reasonably amalgamated.) Press into greased 10"x15" cookie sheet (using oiled hands or oiled large spoon back or bowl scraper), as evenly as you can. In small bowl, beat egg white and water until frothy. Brush on dough (go ahead, use it all, it helps hold the nuts on). Sprinkle with almonds. If you want a little extra sparkle for the holidays, you can sprinkle on some sugar or decorative sugar, too. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until very lightly browned. Cool and cut into bars. These are not as crumbly as traditional shortbread, so you can cut them into fairly small, dainty pieces. I took these to the IWWG conference to share last June, and they travelled so well I believe they would would ship well except in the dead heat of summer. They are on the rich side, but they are very satisfying, so I don't tend to gorge on them. These are very little trouble as cookies go, especially if you buy slivered or sliced almonds. In the summertime, this is a favorite in my solar ovens, but they're great in the winter, too. |
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Hearth by hearth we push back the night with light and laughter, giving and song, feast and family and fun.
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Easy, Fancy, Juicy
If a turkey is too big and you can't spring for duck or goose, the next recipe raises roast chicken to new heights. If you are new to cooking, this is a great recipe, because it is relatively easy as fancy holiday dinners go, and the chicken always comes out juicy, even the breast.
| Pot-Roasted Chicken with Rosemary |
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1/2 cup butter (or half butter/half olive oil, or all olive oil and a pinch more salt) 2 tablespoons dried rosemary (pestle or grind a bit if you can) 2 tablespoons chopped parsley 3–6 cloves garlic, pressed or minced 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper dash hot pepper sauce (optional)
1 large roasting chicken (5–6 lbs, or as close as you can get) 10–12 small new potatoes, halved (more-or-less, depending on expected appetites and size of new potatoes—if you can't get small new potatoes, quarter larger ones) 1/2–1 lb. washed "baby" carrots (or chunks of bigger ones) 2–3 stalks celery, in 2" pieces 1 medium onion, wedged into eighths |
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Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Melt butter (with olive oil, if using the combination, or just heat the olive oil a bit if you're just using that). Add next five ingredients. Stir and set aside. Place chicken on rack in a covered roaster (use foil over an open pan—a deep cake pan or open roaster, not a shallow cookie sheet—if you don't have a covered roaster). Truss the chicken: use cotton string or heavy thread to tie the wings close to the body and tie the drumstick ends close together, which will help keep your chicken juicier and help keep it from falling apart when you lift it out of the pan. Place vegetables around chicken. If you have a meat thermometer that can stay in the oven, insert it deep between the thigh and breast, but not resting on bone. Spoon half the butter mixture over the chicken and the rest over the vegetables. Cover and bake for one-and-a-half hours, basting veggies and chicken (squirt a little inside the chicken, too) every half hour. Uncover and continue to roast, basting occasionally, for one hour longer, or until your meat thermometer says it's done. Remove chicken to platter. Take the vegetables out with a slotted spoon or tongs and either arrange around the chicken or pile in a bowl. Cover chicken and vegetables until serving time (turn the oven down to 225 or so and put the covered chicken and vegetables back in to stay warm while you make the gravy/sauce if desired). If desired, thicken the pan juices with a little flour or cornstarch and add a little white wine or sherry or chicken broth (or white grape juice, or apple cider…), which makes a nice sauce/gravy to serve with the vegetables (if you don't know how to do this, use cornstarch and look for a basic gravy recipe on the package). Sometimes the chicken is hard to carve, because it is melting off the bones, but just take it off in juicy, tender, steaming hunks if that happens, and listen to them oo and ah when they dig in. Cranberry sauce or applesauce is good with this, as is a fresh, crunchy coleslaw (put in a little red bell pepper and chopped parsley or green pepper for a Christmas-y color note). Add some good rolls (and maybe some corn or a corn casserole if you need to stretch things or have teenage boys or other particularly hearty appetites to deal with) and you will have a delicious and festive dinner. If you buy prepared coleslaw or make yours early, there is very little last-minute fuss with this dinner. |
'Tis a Gift to be Simple
Here are a couple tips too simple to quite qualify as recipes. If you are seriously watching your fat intake but don't want to feel totally treat-deprived, here's a good trick. Buy a package of brownie mix for an 8"x8" or 9"x9" pan, but instead of the ingredients like oil and egg the package says to add, just mix it with one cup of either fat-free sour cream or plain or vanilla yogurt and one teaspoon of vanilla. Add some nuts if you love them… nuts contain the healthiest of fats in addition to valuable protein and fiber. Bake as directed on package in a well-greased pan and be very careful not to overbake or they will come out hard when they cool.
For a delicious, healthy snack, take some good bread and toast one side under the broiler until golden. Remove, let cool a minute or two, then turn it over and spread the untoasted side with butter, cover thickly with sesame seeds (preferably the tan ones from bulk foods), and broil until the seeds start to turn golden and toasty. It's a little messy, but very good as a snack or alongside soup. (Thanks to Peg Bracken for that last idea, which we've been enjoying for decades.)
There's plenty of work for the Dragon's Union during National Novel Writing Month!
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Nano Win, First Draft Done!
Participating in National Novel Writing Month made an always-crazy month crazier, but I finished my whole rough draft, which was even more important to me than passing the 50,000 word mark that qualifies as a win, and I made it with room to spare, at least in part due to Holly Lisle and some terrific novel and scriptwriting software for Macs called Scrivener. My NaNo page has a tab called "NaNo Statistics" that shows the steady progress made easy by my new approach and tools (see below for more information).
Several people from NaNo-land joined this list during November. As I have no way of connecting real emails with NaNo screen names, I'm not sure which NaNo folks you are, but welcome! I know we have my buddy, Shixam, on board, and she's a winner, too.
I'm sure we have other "winners" on board, and maybe some others like my granddaughter, who didn't "win" in the 50K sense, but who I am very proud of, because she got many thousands more words written than if she hadn't tried at all. Kudos to all of us who gave it a shot! All NaNo participants can get a special free gift from my website, so if you don't already have yours, go learn about and collect it here. It is something fun that can help you come back an even stronger writer next year. (If you are not a NaNoWriMo participant and are curious, check it out. There is an easy way for non-participants to get it in good conscience by donating a very small amount to NaNo and the Young Writers Program.)
Moving Write Along
I am so excited to finally have a whole rough draft novel in hand! What a difference from my other noveling attempts. Now that I have had a chance to plan and write a whole novel using my new methods, tricks, and tools from Holly Lisle's Create A Plot Clinic and her free Holly Lisle's Professional Plot Outline Mini-Course, with its accompanying free email course on Using Basic Conflicts to Build Plot, I am more impressed than ever. Whenever I stalled a little (I never hit a serious block) over a plot point or new twist or transition, I'd turn to Holly's tips and the twenty creativity tools in the Plot Clinic and one or another would come through for me. When I found that I needed 30 percent more story, the methods I learned from Holly enabled me to extend my plot outline while continuing to write.
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The whole plotting/action/moving-the-story-along actually went so well, and I was so excited to get down what happened next, that I wrote too much plot and not enough character description and scenery. I'll go back and weave a little more of that in before the big revision—I'm good at that part usually—but to have a plot that basically just kept racing ahead in a novel-length story is a real breakthrough for me as a writer. Holly Lisle made NaNo easy for me. A ten dollar e-book (and a few totally free resources) has done more for my novel-writing process than any other writing resource I own.
Holly's resources, as a whole, are so much more practical than most of the other fiction resources I have read and used. Her style is very different from writing-book authors who have had, perhaps, a few books published and often teach or have some other "day job" that helps support them. While they may know how to turn out a quality novel eventually, they don't know how to streamline the process, let alone explain it to someone else. Holly Lisle has been averaging better than one-and-a-half novels a year, written, edited, and sold, for more than 20 years (with about twenty of the thirty still in print). She has worked out ways to streamline the process while turning out a quality product (some of hers are on the rugged side for my taste, but all of them are tight and well-written and edited). I am so glad she decided to share, because I think she will take at least a couple of years off my journey towards novel publication and being able to continue to write and sell enough novels to save us from a cat food retirement.
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Holly demonstrates how those 20 Plot Clinic creativity tools work by developing a whole new novel plot before your very eyes. The conversations between her and her muse as she does this are priceless. I downloaded Holly's e-book How to Write Page-Turning Scenes late in November but haven't really had a chance to give it more than the briefest of glances yet. It looks promising and I think I'll have a better grasp of the whole complex "conflict" business by the time I've finished it. I'll be reading it before I start revision, and I'll let you all know what I think. Now that I have it, I'm also planning to go through Holly's Create A Character Clinic with my character, Feldrea, and develop her a little more before the revision, too.
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Revision is approaching for me and a lot of other NaNo-folk. I'm looking forward to it, because I'll get to try the one thing in the Plot Clinic I haven't been able to test-spin, the Line-For-Scene, Take Two, that uses cards in four colors to help plan a simple cohesive (but still fluid enough) outline for an efficient, effective revision. I plan to combine ideas from the Plot Clinic and from one of Holly's free articles, One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle , which gives a good description of Holly's one-pass revision method. How wonderful to know I will be able to approach this revision with a cohesive plan.
Site News
NaNo kicked something of a hole in getting as many new things up on the Write 'em Cowgirls website as I would have wished, but there is a new page in the Creativity Corral, On Creative Writing and Creative Writing Programs, on which I invite people who have participated in university creative writing programs to let me know how/if they feel it helped their writing. I have listened to or read discussions on that issue many times, and I'm interested to know what site visitors and list subscribers think, if anyone wants to drop me a line. You can either hit reply to this email (it will just come to me, not to the list) or hit any of the contact buttons on Write 'em Cowgirls. I am still hoping for the Writers' Links page soon, and I have made progress, but it takes time to visit the sites and set it all up. Don't forget, if you need any fun new prompts to keep you writing over the holidays, you can check out Sharon's Deluxe Take-a-Write Prompts in addition to all the free prompt ideas on the Freewriting pages and in the Creativity Corral and in these newsletters.
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Free the Flow
For NaNo writers and writers in general, establishing a habit of regular (or even occasional) freewriting practice is one of the best things you can do to develop confidence and a strong, authentic voice. The more practice you have, the more useful a tool it is when you come up against plot or character problems or blocks, because you can use it for those things as well as with general prompts. During NaNo, I found that sometimes all I needed to do was threaten my muse with a freewrite and she'd cough it up. Remember, first thought, best thought. There are no wrong answers or bad freewrites as long as you write, and if you start now you will be a much stronger writer for next year's NaNo attempt. If you've never done any freewriting, the Freewriting Basics page explains how to get started, and Freewriting Prompts will give you some prompt ideas to get started with.
Sharon's Gift Picks
750ml slumped green wine bottle made into a bowl shaped dish.
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There's a new banner link in "Sharon's Picks" (left hand column on the Write 'em Cowgirls website) for Costa Wine Design, the new brainchild of my niece, Jamie (the one who designed my Cowgirl logo and did the cover for my upcoming solar cooker book). Her graphics business is suffering in the economic downturn, but ever versatile and undaunted when it comes to finding a way to use her artistic skills to let her work at home with her three young children, she has turned her hand to making beautiful serving pieces out of "slumped" wine bottles. Her trays, bowls, and clocks are recycling at its most elegant and make great gifts, and I encourage you to take a look. The one I ordered is beautiful, and arrived promptly and in good shape.
If you happen to be looking for other gift ideas (yeah, I know, it's kind of last minute, but my sweet daughter-in-law is very ill, adding to seasonal complications of getting this finished as soon as I would have liked), any writers on your list (including yourself) who do not yet have Susan Tiberghien's One Year to a Writing Life, Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft would benefit from its excellent advice and exercises. Wherever you are with your writing, Susan can help you make it deeper and richer. My thoughtful non-fiction top pick is Jan Phillips's The Art of Original Thinking . The more earthlings who have that book in their consciousness, the better off our planet will be. Any of Jan's other books, CDs, and DVDs would also make a great gift, depending on the interest of the recipient, and you can give yourself a free gift by signing up for Jan's unique Museletter while you are on her site.
For readers on your list, especially those with an interst in history and culture, Peach Blossom Pavilion, Mingmei Yip's engaging debut novel, is my top pick gift book this year. If you order from her website and get two copies, you have a free gift choice of a print of her original Chinese Goddess painting or a recording of Mingmei (who recently performed qin music and calligraphy at Carnegie Hall in a festival celebrating Chinese culture). For a bright and beautiful children's book, consider Mingmei's Chinese Children's Favorite Stories, which she wrote and illustrated.
Holidays with the Write Touch
By the time the next Express comes out, we'll already be a couple of weeks into 2010, so let's try a graceful slide from the giving and receiving season into that popular time for resolutions. What do you want to give to the New Year? What are you hoping to receive from it? Take those two thoughts out for a write and see if you come up with some good potential for resolutions that will further the process of getting you to where you want to go.
I wish for all of you cozy times with people you love during whatever holidays you celebrate. Those of you lucky enough to have family on the literary side could spend some of those cozy times sitting around a table for a round-robin story session. Everyone writes a first sentence (or possibly paragraph, depending on age/ability/interest), which might or might not be started with a common theme, then passes their paper on, everyone writes a second sentence, passes that paper on, etc. You might (depending on number of participants) want to go a set number of times around the circle (or once if you're going for flash or have a large circle), and then at the end you have as many unique stories as you had players, each of them written by everybody. Prepare for hilarity at the ensuing reading.
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Whatever you do for holidays, do it for all you're worth with people you love, but try to find times to sprinkle in for writing, even if only for stolen moments. A ten-minute freewrite or spot of journaling is so much better than not writing at all. Make some writing time one of your gifts to yourself this holiday season. Give yourself the gift of a stronger, surer voice, for those messages only you can give, those stories only you can tell, those things you can explain in a way that helps others understand.
I had hoped to get this newsletter sent sooner, but Cookie Weekend, our traditional three-day extravaganza with kids in the kitchen, hurled itself at us with the approximate speed and force of a runaway train and blasted a hole in everything else, as usual. Fun but exhausting, and I just can't find as many ends of my candle to light as I could a decade or two ago. We celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, and Sun-Return in December, so we are a busy bunch. Be well, have happy holidays, and write on into the New Year, boldly and audaciously.
Best Regards,
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Sharon |
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P.S. In the last month or so, I re-read the first three of the Ukiah Oregon books by Wen Spencer. I think these books are the best anyone has done with an alien-genetics-takeover scenario, and they are very good indeed, tight and compelling, so creativity kudos to Ms. Spencer. She has also created some of the most engaging characters I have every met, including not only the loveable, forthright (if very complex, and a little, well, weird) obvious hero Ukiah Oregon, but also the dark hero, Rennie Shaw, who fights dirty, but so would you if you'd been trying to save the earth from a genetic invasion for more than a hundred years. I love this series and I'm sorry Ms. Spencer has no current plans to continue it, but I will continue to treasure the four books in the set.