cloudscudding

Velcome to my lair--er, livejournal.

If you're a livejournal user and you decide to friend me, please leave me a comment letting me know how you found my journal and why you friended me.

If you don't have a livejournal or only want to follow part of my blog, these RSS feeds might make it easier:

Everything

1. The RSS feed for all my blog posts is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss

Writing

2. The RSS feed for all my writing blog posts (includes my market list updates, Circus of Brass and Bone, and MinnSpec podcasts) is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=writerblog

3. The RSS feed for only my Aswiebe's Market List newsletter is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=marketnews

4. The RSS feed for The Circus of Brass and Bone, a post-apocalyptic steampunk story about a circus traveling through the collapse of civilization, is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=circus of brass and bone

5. The RSS feed for the MinnSpec Writers Group podcast is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=minnspec podcast

Photography

6. The RSS feed for only my photography blog posts is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=photoblog

Food

7. The RSS feed for only my CSA posts is http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=csa

Announcement! Phil and I are expecting our next child this November!

We've been not-not-telling people for a few weeks, but between an emergency room visit and puking in the in-laws' bathroom while lead renovation was going on at our house, this pregnancy was pretty much impossible to keep secret from the start. I'm now at the beginning of the second trimester, and I've been entirely wretched for the last couple of months. I'm only now starting to feel like I can do anything other than cling to the couch in the desperate hope that if I hold perfectly still, I won't puke.

We don't know the gender yet, but I do have an interesting Science! Fact! about this little one. Remember how I had an ectopic pregnancy and lost one of my fallopian tubes? Right. Guess which side the egg for this pregnancy came from? That's right. The one that's not hooked up to anything. Apparently, fallopian tubes can move a little; they have long, moving tendrils that entice the egg into the tube. My tendrils were extra enticing. That or the egg quantum tunneled. You know. One or the other.

Creepy skullbaby ultrasounds can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aswiebe/sets/72157633529774431/

Worth keeping mostly because of the various awful ways I've screwed up trying to make a light tomato sauce in the past!

3 Tbsp. butter
1 clove garlic, minced
2-3 c. preserved tomatoes (canned or boxed)
1/4 c. chicken broth, double-strength
1 heaping Tbsp. dried basil

Put water on to boil for pasta. Melt butter. Lightly saute garlic. Add all other ingredients. Simmer for as long as it takes to cook the pasta, about twenty minutes including time to heat the water to a boil.

Could probably use fresh tomatoes and fresh basil with good results, might need to adjust fluid levels.

I'm going to be a radio star! Well, sort of. This Sunday, I'm joining local authors to talk about how e-publishing is changing the way we do our jobs! You can hear the radio show this Sunday, March 3rd, 10 AM, at KFAI.

Featuring (in alphabetical order): Abra Staffin-Wiebe, Conrad Zero, Dana Baird, Joel Arnold, and Terry Faust.

Minneapolis 90.3
St. Paul 106.7
Streaming live at http://kfai.org/
(At some point after the radio show, a recording will be available for streaming here: http://kfai.org/waveproject)

If you're on Facebook and want to get updates, join the event at https://www.facebook.com/events/399746143453877/

This is really tasty, and pretty easy to prepare despite what looks here like a long list of things to do! The time line for this is as follows:
Beforehand - prepare Korean BBQ sauce
Start slow cooker pork
An hour and a half before dinner time, prepare cucumbers
15 minutes before dinner time, start cooking tortillas and shredding pork, etc

Korean BBQ Sauce - make 3x this recipe. Can be prepared ahead of time.

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons Korean fermented hot pepper paste (gochujang) OR Sriracha
3 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons sesame oil

Whisk all together in small bowl until all sugar is dissolved.

Pickled Cucumber Mix
Prepare about 1 1/2 hours before meat will be done. The longer this sits, the less crunch it will have, but the marinating is important.

Ingredients:
1 large cucumber, sliced very thinly
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
3/4 teaspoon white sugar
1 teaspoon finely minced fresh chili pepper (or more depending on your tastes)
generous pinch of salt

[I am planning on trying this with added shredded carrot, radish, and perhaps cabbage, to give it more body--cucumber should still be the primary, though.]

Combine. Let marinate in fridge for at least 1.5 hours.

Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
( Read more...Collapse )

New MinnSpec writing podcasts are up! This update, we have episodes on using genograms for character development, writing horror, and breaking into the picture books business. The full podcast index can be found on the MinnSpec page on Meetup.com.

Episode 16: Genograms
Relationship counselor and de-stuckification therapist Rebecca Chesin explains what genograms are, how you can create a genogram for your characters, and how analyzing their family-of-origin can add depth to your characters. (Episode notes: Rebecca can be found at http://www.timeforclarity.com.)

Episode 15: Writing Horror
A roundtable discussion on writing horror fiction: what works, what doesn't, what used to work, and what will work in the future?

Episode 14: Breaking Into Picture Books with Barbara daCosta
Barbara daCosta, author of Nighttime Ninja, discusses how her picture book got published and explains all the ins and outs of the process. (Episode notes: Barbara can be found at http://barbaradacosta.blogspot.com/.)

http://www.aswiebe.com/writing/markets.html

The next update of Aswiebe's Market List will be after 3/15/2013.
Permanent link to this newsletter in the archives: http://www.aswiebe.com/writing/archive2012.html#021513

Editor's Note

How do you motivate yourself to write, day after day (assuming you're not a binge writer, that is)? As my writing time shrinks, thanks to my darling toddler, I've become more and more concerned about how to squeeze the words out during those brief times when I *do* have uninterrupted time for writing. I no longer have the luxury of dilly-dallying around all day in order to get my word count. I'm trying:

( Read more...Collapse )

Humans are primates, you say?



I suppose there's a good reason his latest nickname is Monkey.

I may have a pause in my day job projects now for a little while. Both my regular ongoing projects are wrapped up, one permanently and one on a "tentatively as-needed in the future" basis. The one-time project I've been putting in all available minutes on for the last week and a half is done and out the door.

Deep breath.

My desire to write is always strongest when I'm trapped in the middle of a day job project, partly from sheer creative frustration, and partly because I tend to listen to a lot of writing-related podcasts while I'm working. Of course, I can't usually DO any writing then, aside from the longhand snippets in my morning notebook (SPOILER: Jill totally boinks a faery). And now that the day job projects are over, I feel a bit lost and at loose ends. I haven't seriously written for a while. The pipes are clogged. I most want to write something new, but I have two works-in-progress, and Circus of Brass and Bone really needs to die in a fire--er, I mean, come to the satisfying and awesome conclusion that I have outlined. I'm just at that point in the project where I'm in the home stretch and I desperately want to be done.

But there are all these other novels waiting for me to write them!
The badass hidden species in space!
The vampires/aliens making light toxic so that humans can also only exist in the dark!
The intertwined fantasy/sci-fi Snow Queen retelling, now with hallucinations and military experiments!
The Burroughs-esque narration of The Last Earthling--or is he?
The Machiavellian plotting of the second-born of the space Tsar--it's for a good cause, he wants to save us all!
The cyberpunk Oriental Express!
The throwaway urban fantasy novel!
The exodus of the gargoyles!

Oh, yeah. I think there's something I'm supposed to be doing instead of writing this blog entry.

From Their Cradle to Your Grave is now available on Amazon.com! This includes my reprinted short story, "The Perfect Costume." This horror anthology is all about tales of terrifying tots, toddlers through teenagers. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but doesn't that sound like a great gift for the new parents in your life?



Marc likes vampires. A lot. One Halloween, he thinks he's found them. That's when everything starts to go bad....

This Halloween her son was ten--almost eleven--years old. She planned to make sure that Marc had a truly wonderful Halloween before he was too old to fully enjoy it. Although all the other years he had made do with a costume bought second-hand from Salvation Army, or from the half-price rack at Wal-Mart, this year she wanted to make him the perfect costume. This year, he would have a perfect Halloween.

She was disappointed that Marc didn't want a Halloween party for his friends. She wasn't aware that he had no friends, that he sat in the classroom isolated from all the friendly conversation and joking that surrounded him, that during lunch he sat alone and read one of the vampire novels he had smuggled out of the library when his mother was looking the other way. She didn't approve of young children (as she thought of Marc) reading dark stories like that. When he was little, she read him only the sanitized Disney fairy tales.

Marc didn't like them. He didn't like any fairy tales until he discovered an old version of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales. He much preferred "Cinderella" when the evil stepsisters sawed off their toes and heels with a knife in an effort to fit into the glass slipper, when they were forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at Cinderella's wedding. He laughed when he read "The Three Little Pigs" and found that the first two pigs didn't escape their substandard homes but got eaten by the big, bad wolf. He approved when the wolf got boiled to death by the last pig, instead of making friends with it. Although Marc thought "The Little Mermaid" was still a sissies' story, he liked it much better after he read the version where the mermaid felt like she was walking on sharp knives the whole time she was human, and where she died in the end. It felt right. His favorite fairy story of all was called "The Goosegirl," and he loved it because of its bloody, lyrical beauty.

Read more.