Tag Archives: food

02.09.13
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Read these things, the Nemo storm edition.

If you’re stuck inside with not much to do, take a look at the stories, essays, and interviews that have interested me this week:

Shimmer interviews my friend A.C. Wise, whose story “Tasting of the Sea” appears in issue #16.

Rose Lemberg collected speculative fiction poetry recommendations from various editors – read the list here.

Geoff Ryman’s famously sad novel, Was, is now available as an ebook from Weightless Books (their page has excerpts from the book).

Avi Steinberg talks writing and the Gilbert v Roth argument:

That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for whatever reason, you believe in it, and you believe in it because, for whatever reason, you need to believe in it.

Discover News says readers grasp digital media (aka ebooks) just as well as print.

Eddie Huang (author, chef, and tv personality) talks to NPR about Asian-American food, family, and masculinity. (podcast/interview)

NY Review of Books talks about Wes Anderson as a writer.

Stupefying Stories put together a free ebook of shorts by authors eligible for this year’s Campbell Award.

Wonderful Chet Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost” now on YouTube.

My latest appearance on the SF Signal podcast is now up: “2013 SF/F/H Conventions We’re Anticipating“. I mainly talk about how great Readercon is.

Oh, and I shared the introduction from FISH over at Dagan Books.

12.19.12
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Links, Updates, and Et Ceteras

I’ve been guest hosting over at Functional Nerds, with Patrick Hester and John Anealio. Our first episode together was posted online yesterday (you can listen to it here). We talked about a bunch of random topics, including web shows, comics, Duotrope, and Patrick’s interest in my legs. Recorded another one last night (more comics, whether we should change book covers for digital audiences, and only one accidentally unfortunate comment about me from Patrick) which will go live on the 25th. We’re doing two more shows in January too. John and Patrick are great guys to hang out with, and I’m flattered that I was their first choice to be a host after their format change.

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My indie comics column at SF Signal is going great. Next Tuesday will be two months that I’ve been writing about one of my favorite storytelling mediums, and the list of titles I get to talk about is just getting longer. Click on the links to read my latest reviews: Richard Sala’s Delphine, Ursula Vernon’s Digger, and Royden Lepp’s Rust. I’ve gotten some very supportive comments:

Thanks for reviewing this wonderful, intoxicating work. Without your review, I never would have fallen for this book. Speculative fiction comics need wider exposure; thank you for providing it in such a delightful way.

and

Thank you for reviewing this. I don’t often find people talking about Sala’s work and that is a shame.

and

Keep this stuff coming!

Comics can be amazing. Beautiful art, brilliant writing – I love that readers of speculative fiction novels are finding themes they love in comics too.

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I’ve started writing short fiction again. My novel is still progressing slowly, but it’s been months since I spent any time on a short story. I’m a person that needs small goals, short accomplishments, and while I get that from my column, I’ve never had a hard time churning out non-fiction. I like it but I find my opinion of myself as a writer isn’t as wrapped up in non-fic as it is in fiction. That’s where I find challenges and spend time perfecting a style. That’s where I need to do well.

It’s getting harder to write fast, though. I used to be able to do thousands of words in a day. Now if I can write two hundred I’m thrilled, and some days I delete more than I’ve written. It turns out that the better I get as a writer the more I can see my own skills and flaws, and the more I take my time writing. Words have to be perfect. Sentences have to flow, one into the other, and paragraphs are blocks of time that have to express a mood and distinct chunk of information. Writing takes work and time to perfect. I’d rather devote myself to that than churn out a thousand words of average (or worse) prose that I can’t be proud of.

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One last thing: food. Eating non-dairy has been great for my son, and eating a lot more fruits and vegetables (whole meals that way, instead of mostly carbs) means I’ve got more energy and am losing weight again. All good things. You know what else is good? A juicy medium-rare burger. A thick cut of steak seared in a cast iron pan… yum. Eating a lot more vegan dishes has been working for me, but I have to admit that am not ready to give up meat entirely. I tried it and what’s right for me is going to be balancing healthy choices with occasionally unhealthy delicious ones.

With food, or writing, or anything else in my life, I have to balance what I love with what I need, what drives me, and what makes me happy. I think that with a little effort I can have everything I want.

11.19.12
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Some Thoughts On Becoming A (Maybe Part-Time?) Vegan

Those of you who have followed my writing for a while will remember my cooking experiments from last year, where I practiced French and Asian cuisine, and even some dishes from the Moosewood Cafe cookbook (a vegetarian restaurant). You may have seen my Instagram photos of especially delicious-looking dishes from the last several months; just whatever I cooked up that day. Some people noticed that my plethora of meat dishes has, over the last year or so, become more veggie-centric, then vegetarian, and finally, lately, vegan.

Well. Yeah. Since folks have started to ask, I have to admit: I am a vegan.

Except when I’m not.

I’ve been a vegetarian before, a couple of times, but had never gone all of the way to vegan (and never quite all of the way back to carnivore - I still can’t stomach meat on the bone, and have to have it boneless/shredded/ground). As part of my dietary changes and losing weight the last two years, I slowly moved from eating a very unhealthy diet to one that still included the occasional junk food but cut down on fast food, included more vegetables, and even experimented with tofu. I made writer friends who happened to be vegetarian, vegan, or have dietary restrictions against dairy or certain meats, and I learned to cook foods they would like. Which happened to be tasty.

I also traveled more this year, which included eating bar food and fast food and getting to compare how I felt after a weekend of heavy greasy/meaty food to how I felt after a week of not eating that way. I had to admit that I felt better when my diet was more than just meat and starches. But how do you get from “eat more fruits and vegetables” to “vegan”?

It started with me wanting to take better care of my son. He’s had a milk allergy his whole life, so we’ve always had soy milk in the house, but his current special education director noticed a recurring rash he has and suggested he might be more allergic to milk that I’d thought. The only way to test it was to go dairy-free for a while and find out if it had an effect.

Continue reading →

12.20.11
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Bits and Pieces #1 – We All Have To Eat

First in an ongoing series about the little things we sometimes take for granted when we create characters, settings, or worlds. See the Bits and Pieces tag for all the posts in this set.

I believe that to write interesting, complex, and well-rounded characters, you need to know who they are. The little things which make up who your characters are also influence your stories in ways you may not expect. As you flesh out these people who live in your world, the one that you’re making up and telling us all about, their needs and wants and character flaws direct their actions. Knowing who they are helps you to see the story they’re living in, which may or may not be the one you intended them to have. But it will be a story that feels true to you and your readers.

When’s the last time that you wrote a character where you knew what he ate for breakfast every morning? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? What’s the strangest thing that you eat on a regular basis? What does your coworker eat? You know that thing that she brings from the corner market that isn’t really bad food but odd in a way that you can’t understand why she thinks it would taste good? What is the food that you absolutely won’t ever eat? You just can’t stomach the taste, or the texture, and so you never order it.

We all have these little quirks of our diet.

I like chicken noodle tacos. I take corn tortillas, fry them in butter until they’re soft (which just a little bit of a crispy edge), and then heat up a can of chicken noodle soup. I strain out the liquid, wrap the noodles in the cooked shells, and enjoy. I started doing when I was 20, living in my own apartment, and so poor. I don’t remember why I put these two things together, except that it must have been the cheapest food I could find, and I don’t eat it often. But – I do still think it’s pretty tasty.

You know what else is tasty? Pepper bacon, wrapped around Cool Ranch Doritos. I dated a big Russian guy who loved this combo – and while I recommend cooking the bacon, he actually ate it raw. I’ve tried that, and it was good too. While I have a pretty wide palate, and cook and enjoy foods from many different cultures, I don’t eat beans. I know I should, they’re a great source of protein, but I hate the texture. I’ve worked on this and over the years I’ve gotten to the point where I can put some refried beans into a burrito but not a lot. Continue reading →

09.16.11
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Tin House / Electric Literature Reading at Powerhouse Arena Bookstore – A Recap

Yesterday afternoon I saw a post by Small Beer Press (on Facebook) mentioning that Kelly Link would be reading at a bookstore in Brooklyn and right about there I decided that I wanted to go – no, NEEDED to go – and then suddenly had to figure out how I was going to do that.

I currently live in New Jersey, towards the middle, next to Trenton, which is just over the river from Philadelphia. The bookstore is in New York, the city (and the state) making it a whole other state away from me.

The problem is, though, that I had to go. Not only was it Kelly Link, whose work I adore, but Tin House and Electric Literature (warning, current cover art – posted on their home page – is NSFW), both great markets that are nearly impossible to get into, and it was a chance to adventure into Brooklyn, where I’d never been. It was also possible, thanks to a combination of trains and subway rides, and since I’m due to leave NJ for upstate NY in a few months (where there are no trains) it was a trip I won’t always be able to make. This particular event would never actually happen again. Add to that my feeling that as writers we’re not just supposed to write but also to read, to listen, and to learn from the writers we admire. To not attend these kinds of events is to sit alone in our apartments, only learning from ourselves. Continue reading →