Seven years ago I landed at Seatac International Airport and took a bus to downtown Seattle. I opted for a local route rather than an express, hoping to see more of what would be my new home. I meandered through suburbs I have never revisited, and marveled at the sheer amount of greenery. Read More
I’m a big fan of cross-cultural mashups, probably because I view myself as sort of third culture kid lite. If you’re not familiar with the TCK term, in my mind it describes people like my husband, who have one foot in Culture A and one in Culture B, and somehow mix them together into something new and wonderful. He physically moved from one cultural context to another when his family left what was then the Soviet Union. I had a different type of cross-cultural exchange, spending a year in Finland at age 16, and then a college semester in Russia as part of my nine (yes, *nine*) years of Russian language study. One of my early techniques for language learning was listening to tapes of Russian pop music, but I was introduced to “world music” very early on. Read More
Back in February I made unicorn poop cookies from this Instructable, because they were too awesome not to make. Since then, that single post brings in more views to my blog than any other one. (Dead Whale Tales is the other popular one, which sure says something about people on the internets.) I think it’s mostly Google image search bringing up my fantabulous photo, but I’m taking it as a sign that people are probably interested in seeing the other colorful cookies I have made.
A few weeks back I made a batch of rainbow cookies to add to the dessert table at a lovely island wedding here in the Seattle area. It was a little time consuming, but not complex, and so when I made cookies again this week for a fundraiser for my martial arts school, I used the same technique and photo documented.
I used the sugar cookie recipe from Joy of Cooking, which is my standby for baking. I made a double batch and used my scale to divide it into four equal parts. Then I mixed food coloring into three parts, and put them to chill overnight in the fridge. The next morning I had these lovely things, and great morning light to do photos.
When I made unicorn poop, there was a lot of rolling the dough into snakes, and I tried that the first time I was making rolled rainbow cookies. Very time consuming. Fortunately, there is a faster way!
Take a knife and cut some slices off, a little thicker than you want your rolled out dough to be.
Then cut the slices into strips. (I said this was “faster,” not “fast.” If you just want square rainbows, try this way.) Lay the strips out in rainbow order, or whatever strikes your fancy.
I did this on wax paper so that if it started to get too warm, I could easily slide it onto a cookie sheet and set it in the freezer for a few minutes while I checked what was going on on the facebooks. Or the tumblrs. Or the twitters. Or occasionally the pinterests. I am all about the social medias, which are all plural, of course, because they’re on the internets.
Anyway, once you’ve got a nice amount of stripes…
…then it is time to apply the rolling pin.
And of course, the cookie cutter.
Then you put those suckers on a cookie sheet, and bake according the recipe. Hopefully you don’t have an ancient oven like the one in our apartment that takes an hour to preheat. :6
But wait, you say. After I cut out one set of cookies, am I supposed to line up the little bits somehow? What do I do with the leftover dough?
Don’t worry! You can roll them out again and you will be able to make a tray of marbled, swirly rainbow cookies. They are beautiful in their own way, but maybe especially if you’re using a constrained palette of colors. A full rainbow will, of course, descend into a muddy muddle if mixed and rerolled too many times. So, cut out all your striped rainbow cookies first and save all the bits to roll out again at the very end to minimize the mixing.
In the end, you get trays of colorful cookies, to eat or share or make little dioramas with. I’m not judging.
You can also apply some shiny sparkly edible decorating gel, similar to the unicorn poop. I did this with the wedding cookies, but it makes them a little sticky if you don’t wait for the gel to completely dry, so I didn’t bother with the stars.
Whatever you do with your cookies, you should know that transporting them in a shoebox on the back of bike will only lead to tears. And crumbs.
Oops.
Actually, I made so many that a respectable number survived, and there were even some left over after last night’s event. I just want you to know that sugar cookies are sweet and delicate and brittle, and need to be packaged securely if you’re going by bike over potholes. Learn from my successes and my mistakes, people, and enjoy some pretty cookies!
The only way to illustrate this is with this adolescent photoshop effort.
Ashley and Coleman were our cats. Ashley Pitzman, by a certain formula, would be my pornstar name.
When I was in middle and high school, I was interested in writing and my parents were willing to encourage me, so I had a subscription to a few magazines. One of them was probably Fantasy & Science Fiction, and another was entirely written by teens. I noticed a certain formula in the teen-written magazine: pick something and exaggerate it. The example I recall was a short story about a boy who slept all the time. I decided to try my hand at the same thing, and recently rediscovered the result on a website from an era past, when I thought it was a good idea to post my teenage stories and poems online with my full name. Now I realize that a) publications don’t want things you’ve already published online and b) no publication would have published those pieces anyway. But I’m going to share this one anyway; I was quite proud of it at the time.
“I wish I knew why she won’t talk any more,” said her mother.
“Don’t we all,” replied the shrink.
Laurel watched them from her seat on the windowsill. She knew why she didn’t talk. She didn’t want to. She’d decided several months ago that it was a waste of time. No one seemed to understand her. Why waste time trying to explain when she could be pondering more interesting things?
She liked that word, “pondering”, it sounded (or in her case didn’t sound) big and important. It was pompous, which was another good word.
So she pondered the raindrops which fell from the sullen gray sky outside, following them down the window where they trickled off the outside sill and splatted onto the scraggly lawn below. It wasn’t very far below, only about two feet down. This was a shrink room, they couldn’t risk people jumping out.
Laurel considered what would happen if she jumped out this window. Not that she was suicidal – the thought came up with the notion of people jumping out. She would get a lot of little cuts from the glass and maybe some big ones and about the same with bruises.
The shrink interrupted her with a tap on the shoulder. She knew he had a name but she preferred to think of him as “the shrink”. She didn’t let him see that he’d interrupted her, she ignored him instead. Actually she didn’t really ignore him, just pretended to. It was easy, she was very good at pretending to ignore people. She thought of it as a game. How long could she ignore this new shrink before he gave up and left her alone?
She watched him out of the corner of her eye. His sandy brown hair kept falling in his face and he nervously brushed it away. She knew he was nervous because she made everyone nervous, even the shrinks who were over-confident. None of them stayed that way. Because no matter what they said or did, she didn’t talk.
She turned and faced him, staring because she knew it would make him uncomfortable. Her eyes were an unusual green-gray with yellowish rings around the pupils. Having unusual eyes helped when you wanted to make someone nervous. Sandy Hair the Shrink broke eye contact and reached for a paper on his desk. Laurel laughed silently to herself. This was one of the weaker ones. She could deal with him easily.
She watched him as he turned around again. “Laurel, do you see this picture?”
What a dumb question, did he think she was blind? She glanced at the picture. It showed a happy family rowing across a lake. She knew what this was about: she was supposed to write a story about the picture. They would analyze it and believe they had picked her mind. Which, of course, they wouldn’t have.
“What story does this picture suggest to you?”
I knew you would say that, she thought.
“I want you to think about the story you think goes with this picture. Then I would like you to write it down. Next time you come I would like to see the story.”
I knew you would say that too. I will write that it began to rain and Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Meyers bundled Andrea and Michael into the rain ponchos that were tucked under the seat of the boat. Then they rowed back to the lodge, where they dried off with fuzzy…purple I think I’ll have…fuzzy purple towels. And they drank hot cocoa and, since there is a sunset in the background, watched a movie and then went to bed. The End.
She blinked twice at him – that was how she was telling people yes now, just to see of they picked it up, and held out her hand for the picture.
She wondered briefly why everyone was so worked up about her not talking. She had never talked much anyway. Now she just talked less.
There were many interesting things to do, if the world would be quiet and stop bothering you. You could learn a lot with silence, as Laurel knew. Girls in the locker room never stopped talking when she came in.
“No, it’s just Laurel, she won’t tell anyone,” and Laurel would blink at them and they would smile back and continue their conversations. It certainly didn’t bother her peers much, that she’d stopped talking.
The teachers had taken a bit more time to adjust, she’d been taken to the principal several times and failed an oral book report before the teachers stopped trying. Laurel had become quite adept at blank-eyed stares when adults tried to talk her into talking. It was a waste of time, to talk a mute out of being so. The teachers, shrinks and her parents couldn’t attack the logic behind her silence, because they didn’t know what it was.
Her parents hadn’t even noticed until the second day, when a teacher called to complain and make arrangements for a drug test. They were absolutely horrified, but then, parents usually are, Laurel thought. When the tests came back, Laurel was found to not be under the influence of any substances, illegal or otherwise. By this time she’d learned enough to know who was under the influence of such things, and she smiled to herself.
A succession of doctors confirmed that her body was fine, and would be able to vocalize, if the mind controlling it so chose. Laurel’s parents moved on to testing her mental health. Enter the therapists, psychologists and shrinks, stage right. Refuse to exit.
The first suggestion was regression. The regression therapist attempted to explain to Laurel how at the root of this difficult period in her life lay only one problem, which was causing all of the others in her life. She had been stuck, briefly, in the fallopian tube as an ovum. What she need was to relive this memory and work through it and accept it. Laurel walked out in the middle of the session, wondering just who it was that needed therapy.
The next candidate was a man inspired by Freud, who gave long, searching, passionate and woefully inaccurate monologues on her relationship with her father.
Now, four months, several therapists and a great deal of money later, Sandy Hair wanted her to write a story.
She had written several stories besides those about pictures for shrinks.
When she had read them over for proofing though, she had realized that they were rewrites of books she’d read, different but the same.
People were like that, she mused, all different but the same. Except for her.
She was different, because she was silent.
In my quest for better writing skills, I joined critters.org a month or two ago, and started reading other people’s work and trying my best to offer thoughtful, noninflammatory feedback. It’s been fascinating to see the ways that a story can go wrong, seriously or subtly. The way things are set up, you can read the crits that others offered after the fact, which has been interesting to see what they catch in stories I think are perfect enough. And there’s always something.
One of my own stories went through the queue and came up for crits this week, and it’s been interesting. The Orchard Keeper’s Wife sprang from my mind last summer pretty much fully formed. I found a note I had written a few years earlier about an “apple wife” and suddenly there was a story. I chose a name – Alma, the Kazakh word for apple – based on the geographic origins of apple trees, sketched an outline and spent an evening writing up a lovely little fable that came in just at 2,000 words.
Then I sat on it, because I couldn’t imagine what to change in it but I couldn’t believe that a first draft could be perfect. Fortunately, the kind critters have helped me out. In addition to smaller issues, many pointed out a major flaw and source of confusion. I started in the middle of my story, then went back to the beginning. Always begin at the beginning, right? So simple.
Here’s the beginning I should have used, currently five paragraphs in…
“Alma, my sweet love,” he pleaded with her the first winter, “come outside for a bit.” He tried to tempt her with descriptions of sunsets, tales of a squirrel who would eat from your hand, the promise of a sleigh ride in the snow.
Alma sat at the kitchen table, her whole body curled around a cup of warm, weak tea.
“No,” she said, “If I walk outside now, I may blow away. Let me stay here, I like it here.”
When the days began to lengthen, though, she began to stir around the house, and even consented to poke her head out the door and look across the young trees of the orchard. Sometimes he found her in the root cellar, rearranging the apples in their bins and sinking her bare feet into the earthen floor>.
She took up the pink flowered fabric from the market and began to sew a dress. As the weather softened, she began to sing as she embroidered flowers and leaves along the hem.
And mid-stream beginning I had used…
Alma came back to him every fall. He’d be pressing apples for cider, or hauling in fruit from the orchard, and there she’d be, with a smile in her dark eyes.
“How is the harvest this year?” she’d ask, as if she didn’t already know how many apples he’d gathered. Then she’d stoop to help him, piling up the rosy fruit and balancing the basket on her hip.
For weeks, the little house took on the warm scent of apples as they cooked apple sauces, apple butters, apple jams. They spent whole mornings cutting and peeling apples, till they were covered in apple juice up to their elbows and a kiss inserted in conversation was always sticky and sweet.
When the last jar of jam was sealed, the last bottle of cider corked, they loaded the wagon and went to trade the bounty of the harvest for flour and salt, nails and hairpins, a new pair of leather boots for him, a length of pink flowered cloth for her.
With the supplies, they returned to the little house beside the orchard. The leaves of the apple trees scattered with the wind and Alma spent long days curled in the bed while the storms growled through the chimney.
Now I have some direction to revise the thing. Then I’ll look for somewhere to submit it to, the next step in a story’s lifecycle. Only first I have to finish the 15,000 novelette I’ve been working on for the last two weeks. It involves Beauty and the Beast, and was set off by the rather inspirational numbers here, on JA Konrath’s blog. If you’re a kindle user, keep an eye out because I’ll be e-publishing that under the pen name of Nicole Dreadful. And then, well, let’s just say that last night I started outlining for Nanowrimo, only to realize this morning that it is two months away.