Cooking experiment! Lemongrass Curry London Broil

Given:  London Broil, artichokes, lemongrass curry powder, chopped spinach


What would you make?

I made a marinade of lemongrass curry, thyme, lemon pepper, rice vinegar, and a little bit of soy sauce, and soaked the london broil in it for thirty minutes in a glass pie dish.  Popped the pie dish in the oven at broil for 5 minutes on one side, and five on the other, before pulling it out to let it rest before I sliced it against the grain.

Served over whole grain brown rice (I mixed a spoonful of Better than Beef bouillon into the water it was cooking in) with chopped spinach mixed with canned artichoke hearts.  It came out surprisingly good.  The beef took on the lemony flavor and was tangy and delicious, the curry marinade poured over the rice and spinach was delicious.

I win!

Went to Zumba at 9:30 this morning for the ass-kicking. (I swear I'm burning at least 500 calories in that hour.)

Got 2115 words today on novel #1.   (Major rewrites suck.  At least I've finally figured out what I'm doing.)

Ate 6 Grasshopper cookies  (Damn you Keebler elves!)

Sent section of novel #2 to writing group for discussion on Wednesday.  (Love my group.)

And now.. it is nap time.  I don't expect nap time to last very long, as the baby has been asleep for 2 straight hours, (allowing for the writing time - yay!), and she's only good in 3 hours stretches most of the time.  But naps are healthy, and I have earned it.

So there.

So far, so good.

Last night I got a thousand words down on my second novel in progress.  I've about decided that I'm going to experiment with self e-publishing with this piece, because it's not the main genre I want to write in, so if it goes badly, then hopefully I won't screw up my chances at traditional publishing.

A lot of literary agents / editors / publishers are blogging about the changing publishing environment, and the possibility that someday soon, all books will be e-books.  I don't believe this will be the case, (though in fairness, I am about two steps from a Luddite and hate reading books electronically, so my opinion could be catastrophically wrong.)

I think e-books are here to stay, and that they will be extremely popular in the future.  However, they are a different enough format from traditional tree-flavor books that I don't think they are in a Highlander situation here.   When movies and television started up, people stated that it would be an end to reading.  Who would spend 3 hours reading a 300 page book on WWII when there was a snazzy movie with hot-bodied celebs to display pertinent information in a handy 150 minutes?  As it turns out, a lot of people.  The people who were prone to watching the movies instead of reading the book were, in a lot of cases, not the sort of people who were going to read the book anyways.

However, I think e-publishing in certain genres will be the way to go.  Young Adult of course, and the cheap romance / fantasy / sci-fi novels.  Those genres are full of people buying in bulk and volume, without expecting much in the way of emotional depth or re-readability.  (As an aside, I like all four of those categories, but I rarely buy any books in them, because I buy those books I would want to re-read.  Urges to read those categories are satisfied by my library card.)

I don't think mystery fiction will go that route as wholeheartedly, because mystery-lovers strike me as traditional readers.  They find something they like, and stick with it.  They're also typically looking for a little more from their books than a cheap thrill.  They want to be intellectually stimulated, and it's rare to see sloppily-written mystery fiction churned out with the same frequency as the other categories mentioned above.

We'll see, I suppose.  In the meantime, back to writing.  

Spider's back!

And this time, the poor bastard lost his lunch.  He had a full spiral web, about a foot across between the side mirror and the door.  I again, didn't check for a spider before getting in the van, but as I was pulling out of the driveway, I noticed he was asleep (all hunched together, legs tucked in, not moving) in the upper middle of the web, and there was a bug in the dead center, all wrapped up.

Well, he woke up pretty quickly once the van started moving, (though I didn't get above 20 mph, to give him a chance to duck back into the mirror.   It took him about three blocks to decide this wasn't going away, and he abandoned the web, and dove into the mirror.  Unfortunately most of the web, including the part with the fly in it, blew off. 

Poor guy.   I'll try to get a good picture of him to post.

I hit the 9:30 Zumba class at the gym and it was an excellent workout.  I was sweating from crown to toes.  I had sweat beading the entire length of my arms.  She does a "toning" regimen after the hour of Zumba for another 15-30 minutes, but I'd told the MIL / babysitter that it was an hour class, and I didn't want to worry her by being late.

Now it is time to paint.  I had a scroll request from the Baron & Baroness of the local SCA group for an extra special piece of court business, and I've been fiddle-farting about on it for the last month or so.  (Painting bits here and there.  There's not THAT much left to do, but none of the calligraphy is done, and the illumination still has a few hours to go.)  My normal style of illumination is to sit down for long 6-8 hour chunks at a time, but the New Addition in my life makes that impossible.  If I get two hours straight, it's a bloody miracle.  Especially if someone keeps dropping her Soothie, and waking up because of it.

Later this afternoon, I'm going to finish the pell I've been working on for two years.  (I have the post in the concrete bucket.  But I need to sink the bucket in the yard, and pad the pole with the pipe insulation and ducktape so I can practice whacking without blowing out my wrist and shoulder.
I've also realized that unless I want permanent standing water, I'd better drill some holes right at the concrete line so it will drain.

Today was a good day!

It started with the poor spider in the side mirror.  A friend needed a ride to her mechanic to pick up her car. (They were willing to shuttle her to her house, but as she's getting out of the shuttle, the driver says, "By the way, you're too far away, so I can't come back to pick you up."  What the hell, really guys?)  I pack the baby in the car seat, grab the diaper bag, and boogie on out of the driveway.

At the very first light, I notice a desperate spider (dark grey, with zebra striped legs, a big fat orb body and little tiny head, about 2.5 cm across.) bouncing frantically in what was left of the web he'd built between the side mirror and the window on the driver's side.  (Yes, I am completely oblivious sometimes.)  I felt bad for the poor spider as he clung to the web which was shredding around him, and started driving more slowly so as not to bounce the spider completely off the line.

Unfortunately for the spider, red lights were few and far between.  I kept telling him to duck back in the side mirror, but he kept taking the few pauses available to run up and down the web instead.  I realized that he was dismantling his web, rolling up a little white ball of silk in between bounces.  The next light, he made it into the side mirror, tucking his head and legs in tightly, with his big round butt hanging out.  I felt like cheering.

I guess the economy is so bad even the spiders are saving their silk.  It's silly but I felt uplifted by the spider triumphant.

I also got to the gym for the first time since giving birth and took a Zumba class.  I managed to make it through the entire class without gassing out - a huge relief given my fears about completely losing any muscle tone or stamina over the pregnancy - and didn't trip or fall into anyone. 

Last time I was at the gym about 5 months ago, the Zumba class was fairly well attended by maybe 20-30 people.  Today, I was handed a ticket with the number 52 on it.  Upon inquiring, it turns out that the class is now so popular that they cut off attendance at 60, and if you don't get a ticket, you don't get in.  People line up to get in 30 minutes before the class starts in order to make sure they get a ticket. I am going to have to start going a bit earlier.

So the spider survived, my ass is not as flabby as first feared, and the baby has been sleeping for the last 3 hours straight.   It's the little things. 

Inspiration hits like a MACK truck sometimes.

So I had written my mystery novel.  I'm bad at outlining.  I'm more of a write as the mood and whim takes me sort of author, which is something I've had to work on quite a bit.  It's a terrible struggle for me to impose discipline on my writing.

I had a sort of mini-problem in the beginning, which I dwelt on for 20 pages, before getting deep into the actual heart of my mystery.  And I never came back to that mini-problem.  And every reader I had, said they enjoyed it, but they kept waiting for that mini-problem to come back and be important.  And it never did.

And deep down, I knew that was a problem.  But I couldn't figure out how to weave it in, or make it more relevant than as a backdrop to introduce my main characters and provide some action.

Last night, I had a dream about the book, and I realized that my main villain needed to be the one character I mentioned the least.  I saw instantly how to re-write and re-weave the book so that both plots were related and relevant.  And unfortunately, it's going to involve a huge ginormous rewrite.  But it will work, I think.

I'm having to start entirely over (though granted, I do have the large chunks of text written that I can use and paste where possible.)  but I think the book will be better and stronger for it.  And now that I can see my way forward to that better book, I'm feeling inspired all over again.

I'd been so tempted just to fling it out into the agentsphere, but the other day I read a fantastic post on a great agent blog about how you shouldn't submit hoping that the agent will fix the problems with your book, and it hit me square between the eyes.  So.. Here goes.  Again.

It's been a crazy six months

I've given my novel to my writer's group and gotten it back with their critiques.

I've given birth to my daughter, who is now five weeks old.

My mother-in-law has for all intents and purposes moved in with us.  (The idea was that she would move in to provide childcare since me and the husb both were working at the time.)

I got laid off (RIF'd really.) from my job. (Along with the entire accounting & administrative staff, bar one poor soul who has taken on all the admin / accounting functions that had to remain on site.)

The animal count in my house went up by two (admittedly fairly well behaved) chihuahuas.

And I'm trying to decide where I want the priorities for my time to be, because I'm rapidly discovering that item number two on this list is eating time like a mad thing.

Work on the novel?  Get the yard / house projects that have been pending for "when I have time".  Go gung-ho on SCA heavy combat and hope to turn into a decent fighter someday?  Work on the other writing projects I have pottering around?  Get my scribal backlog of calligraphy & illumination pieces caught up?  Fill my house with Baby Einstein stuff and start trying to teach my daughter to read Chinese by age 1?  (This would be quite a trick, as I can't read Chinese either.)

I am still job searching, but the last time I was in this position, I was seriously angry with myself for all the hours I wasted being depressed and moping around the house.  (I did write most of the novel while I wasn't working but I still wasted a great deal of time.)

I've got to be more effective this time around, since my time is allocated in two hour increments between diapers and feedings.  So I'm going to carefully figure out what's important to me this time, and set aside blocks of time for each thing I want to do.  Hopefully it will work.