The Furious Spinner

Hello darlinks. I have many words and not a lot to say. I've been feeling poorly today, so I tried to cure it with broth. Broth made me sicker. (I can't fast. I get sicker than a dog—whatever that particular idiom means.) So now I'm chewing on rice cakes to settle my stomach.

Anyway...I've been writing notes for my next novel. I'm not normally a note-taker. I don't outline. I do lots of research on many of my books, and I write some of that stuff down, but mostly I just read and think about what I'm going to write. Just before I begin a novel I often write down plot points. It's a list of scenes or major happenings in the novel. Then I write next to each plot point how many pages I think they'll be. 5 pages, 10, 20. (I try not to exaggerate or pump up the number of pages. That way lies madness...or at the very least an unfinished novel.) Then I count up the page numbers to see if it adds up to 300 pages (for an adult novel). If it does, I'm probably ready to go.

I have so many ideas right now for other books, too. I keep starting novels and putting them aside. Mario said he's never seen me so fecund. Yes, that is the word he used. It's true that the ideas are coming fast and furious. I haven't been writing them all down. (Quelles horreurs.) I gotta start doing that...

I've also been doing some cooking stuff. I took a knife class to learn...well, to learn about knives. Or how to use them. I thought they'd teach me something so that I'd be a bit speedier. Didn't really happen. Apparently I already know how to use a knife. Must be all those years of cutting vegetables. I guess I just didn't like cutting stuff up, too time-consuming or something. We bought a new knife, a sharp one, and now I realize that maybe cutting up veggies was a pain because our knives were dull. We'd never sharpened them. So we got the old ones sharpened, we bought a chef's knife, and we got a sharpening steel.

And I've been doing some cooking. Mostly with beans. Do you ever cook with black beans? Man, they are so gorgeous. I can't remember if I gave you this recipe before, but I'll give it again, just in case. Gingered Black Beans. It is so easy and so delicious. I adapted this recipe from The Self-Healing Cookbook by Kristina Turner, one of my fave cookbooks.

Wash 1 1/2 cups black beans. Soak overnight at least, with a bit of lemon juice. Drain. Put beans in 4 cups of water, along with a strip of kombu. Cook until tender. (Probably about two hours.) Add 1 tsp or more of freshly grated ginger, along with sea salt or soy sauce (to taste). Cook for ten more minutes. Serve. Mmmmm!



Last week, we went to Seattle so I could hang out with Theo Chocolate's superb chocolatier Autumn Martin and her crew. This was part of my research for my new novel. (Aren't I lucky?) I got a feel for what they do by observing and asking too many questions. I even stirred the chocolate for a bit to help temper it. Chocolate moves, it grooves, it's never still. Watching them was like watching artists paint. Autumn said one of the reasons she likes working with chocolate is because of its rhythm, flow; it's a magical medium.

I also went on a tour of the chocolate factory. I got to see a cacao fruit pod. Inside these fruit pods are seeds—commonly called beans—about 20 to 60 per pod, which eventually become chocolate after they're dried, fermented, roasted, and ground. It takes about 80 seeds to make one chocolate bar. (Theo's does the whole process: from bean to bar.)

Cacao pod


Here are some cacao beans after they've been roasted.


I learned lots of other good things, but I'll save that for the novel.

This last Monday, we went to the governor's mansion (in Olympia) and went on a tour of it, talked with the kind people there. (More research.) Then we walked down to the waterfront. We saw this statue, The Kiss. So we kissed in front of it.



It was Hiroshima Day. We found peace cranes (with sayings attached to them) all over the waterfront.





We hung out at Orca Books for a while before we headed home. It was a bit discouraging that they didn't have any of my books, particularly Broken Moon. (Come on! I'm a Washington writer, for Pete's sake!)

Okay, this post was going someplace, but I've lost the thread of it. So I better stop. I got my copyedited pages of Ruby's Imagine the day we went to the guv's manse. As I expected, it ain't gonna be fun. Never, ever gonna do a made-up dialect again. Not a "real" dialect either.

I'm hoping to start the new novel soon, so you may not hear from me for a while.

Then again, you may...

Labels: chocolate, food, photos, recipes

1 comments

1 Comments:

Well.... you may have thought that the post was going nowhere, but i loved it, and it was exactly what I needed to read today. Thank you!!!

By  kerrdeLune (cate), at 7:20 PM  

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