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Posts Tagged ‘help me o internets’

Nature details: how do???

I have a confession to make: I grew up in suburban Dallas, and I simply Do Not Grok Nature.

On the metric of effort-to-result, putting details about nature into my stories is probably one of the most labor-intensive things I do. And I don’t even mean long, rapturous passages of lyrical description about fog creeping over a pond at dawn or something like that; I mean that unless I make a conscious decision to go do some research, my characters walk through forests of Generic Trees, listening to Generic Birds make Generic Noises. When I do the research, it winds up being half an hour of effort for half a sentence of result.

I’m making an effort to improve at this, and having discussed it with some writers, I think a large chunk of what I need is simply better resources for the information, or better ways of finding the resources. Field guides are helpful, but even more helpful are books or websites that talk holistically about a specific landscape, so that I get integrated information like “down by a watercourse you’ll see these trees and these birds and these flowers,” rather than separated lists of all the trees found in a region, and all the birds, and so forth. I feel like this is relatively findable for the United States, but much harder for other parts of the world, especially non-Anglophone parts. Any recs for such things? I mostly use this for secondary-world purposes rather than this world, but I’d love to be able to have characters ride across grasslands that look more like Mongolia than Nebraska, or cope with environments like tropical jungles that we mostly don’t have here. Could be formal field guide-type stuff, or just somebody writing with really evocative specificity about not just the mood of a place, but the specific flora and fauna to be found there and how they behave.

(I know one bit of advice is “get out there in the naturez yourself!,” but that would mostly only help me learn to write about the northern California landscape. I do get out in the naturez, but I can’t just go hang out in Mongolia whenever I want.)

Songs in 5?

I need recs for INSTRUMENTAL music (no lyrics, or at least not in English) written in some form of quintuple meter: 5/4, 5/8, something more arcane, whatever. Songs which are only partially in such a meter are acceptable, though, y’know, not some complicated jazzy thing where it’s like a measure here and three measures there and so forth; I’d like it to be recognizably quintuple without following along on the score to see where it changes.

And now for something completely different

I could talk about how the Bay Area is officially going under a “shelter in place” order for the next three weeks, and the surreal sight of my local grocery store completely denuded of flour, rice, chicken, and other staples . . . but you know what? My brain is desperate for other material right now.

So! Please recommend to me what you consider to be the best recorded performances of each of Shakespeare’s plays. I do mean each: not just the ones that have been done a bunch of times, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but anything for which Shakespeare’s authorship is moderately certain. Cymbeline? The Winter’s Tale? Movies, TV miniseries, filmed stage performances, any of those are fine, but not adaptations that use the plot without the script (e.g. 10 Things I Hate About You).

This question brought to you by me thinking, hmmmm, I’ve written some Shakespeare fanfic for Yuletide — I wonder if I could sell some short stories in that vein? I need grist for the mill, basically.

(And feel free to pass the link to this post along to anybody who might have recommendations.)

Things they never teach you

Writing advice books tend to go into great detail on things like how to structure your plot, or develop character, or describe things, or whatever.

They do not — in my limited experience; hence this post — bother to say much about how to decide where to break chapters, scenes, or paragraphs, apart from telling you to start a new paragraph if you’re switching speakers in dialogue. Maybe a vague nod at “cliffhangers are exciting!,” but that’s about it. You’re just supposed to figure that stuff out as you go, apparently. Or else (and this is entirely possible) it never occurred to the writer of the writing advice book that there’s an actual skill buried in there.

But I haven’t read a huge number of writing advice books, so I’m perfectly willing to believe that someone out there has at some point unpacked this stuff for the reader. Any recs? Because it’s one of those things that I do instinctively, without much ability to articulate how the decision-making process goes — and since I enjoy teaching writing, being able to articulate it would be useful.

Scholarship in antiquity

I know I have at least a few people reading this journal who know a bit about this topic. 🙂

Scholars in the ancient world: what exactly did they do? What sorts of things did they write? “Commentaries,” according to the references in the things I’ve read, but what exactly was the content and purpose of those things? What other kinds of works did they produce?

What sparked this question was thinking about the Library of Alexandria and the scholars who used it, but I’m also interested in answers from other parts of the world (since the purpose to which I’d be putting this is not historical fiction). Ancient Confucian scholarship, ancient Vedic scholarship, those and more would all be interesting to know about, too.

Substitute for fennel bulb?

I’ve been given a nice-sounding recipe for pork tenderloin braised in white wine and elderflower liqueur with thyme, red onion, and fennel bulb. But I’m not a huge fan of that last item — what would the chefs among you recommend as a replacement? With or without altering other ingredients (e.g. a different herb, if something else would harmonize better).

Note that due to allergies and/or dislikes, mushrooms and squash are both out.

Goat cheese

The other day I was at the grocery store, and the cheese counter had samples out of something. Another customer was standing between me and the actual blocks of cheese the samples were taken from, so I had no idea what they were, but I went ahead and popped one in my mouth.

Train of thought: “Oh, wow, this is amazing, this is — UGH BLEAGH IT’S GOAT CHEESE GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT.”

I have no idea what’s going on chemically with goat cheese, but invariably I have this type of reaction, where for a second or two it’s lovely, and then I get hit by a freight train of something so unpleasantly pungent, it lingers with me for a good five minutes afterward. Much as with cilantro, I don’t think I could train myself into liking it if I tried for a year: when that taste kicks in, my brain utterly rejects the possibility that what I’m eating is food.

Those of you who like goat cheese — is that pungency a selling point for you? Or does it not even hit you in the same way? (Wikipedia describes goat’s cheese as “tart,” which is not remotely the taste I get off it.) I’m wondering if this is anything like the “supertaster” deal where some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide or propylthiouracil, while for others (I’m one) they are unspeakably bitter. I know my reaction to cheese in general is linked to the fact that I have a very strong sense of smell; your stinkier classes of cheese are Right Out for me because all I wind up tasting is the stink. But this wasn’t a strong-smelling cheese, and it still bowled me over with that unpleasant funk two seconds after I bit down. So I’m kind of curious what’s going on there, chemically speaking, and whether the experience is just qualitatively different for people who like the stuff.

Mains and sides

It’s the return of the Tin Chef!

As some of you know, I’ve finally started actually cooking, after thirty-some-odd-years of basically never doing it. I now have a nice array of recipes I like and can do, and enough confidence now that I’ll happily browse a magazine or cookbook and go “oooh, that sounds tasty, maybe I should try it,” as long as the recipe isn’t too daunting.

But almost everything I make is a single-dish meal, or if it isn’t, then we just throw some spinach on the plate as a salad. I’m still not much good at making a main dish and a side dish to go with it. Partly because that type of multitasking is still a little difficult for me — making sure things are ready around the same time, but don’t demand my attention at the same instant such that something winds up burning — but also just because . . . I have a hard time judging what things will go well together.

I know that to some extent the answers to this are a) it doesn’t matter that much and b) I can experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. But I’ve got a whole list of side dishes I’d like to try someday, and every time I look at them and go “I dunno, would that pair well with this main item?” I wind up going back to the single-dish things I’m comfortable with. So I put it to you, the cooks of my readership: how can I get better at this? I have two different “meat with balsamic + fruit sauce” main dishes I like — one chicken with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate juice, one pork chop with balsamic vinegar and dried cherries — and the fruitiness keeps making me second-guess whether a given side dish would make a good complement. And there are a lot of main dishes I haven’t even really taken a crack at yet. If I had some guiding principles for figuring out what combinations are good, I might experiment more.

Point and Click Adventure Games

I’ve always liked the “point and click adventure” style of video game. You know, the kind of thing Sierra was known for, back in the heyday of this genre: games where you wandered around talking to people and clicking on everything that was clickable to add it to your inventory, and then when you got to a challenge sticking your inventory items on it (or on each other, to make a new inventory item) until you figured out how to solve the problem. Many of these games were low-stakes, in that you could only die at a few specific points, and their overall focus was on story.

Does anybody have recmmendations for more games of that type? Either classics that are available on Steam or GOG, or newer games made in that mold. I’m a huge fan of the Gabriel Knight series, and I’ve also played various King’s Quest and Monkey Island games; I recently finished the more recent Blackwell series, and have also played Gray Matter, by the creator of the GK games. I like ’em because they don’t take too long to play and they don’t make me worry my character is going to die, and it would be nice to have some more to entertain myself with in my spare time. Fantasy genre preferred, but feel free to recommend whatever.