Reviewers Wanted!

November 14, 2015

This may be an odd request from someone who reviews books regularly, but I’m having a very hard time finding people to review my young adult/new adult e-book, Empire’s Daughter. In part, this may be because it doesn’t fit into any major genre and is difficult to classify. It takes place in a world inspired by Britain after the fall of Rome, but is not historically, geographically, or socially a direct copy. There is no magic. Human relationships cover all pairings, but there is no explicit sex.

You can check it out here:

http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Daughter-Legacy-Book-ebook/dp/B00TXFTZ3G/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24979052-empire-s-daughter?from_search=true

If you’d like to give it a try in exchange for an honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads, let me know and I’ll send you the electronic file of your choice for Kindle, iBooks, or Kobo (basically, any of .mobi, e-pub, or PDF).

Thanks,

Marian

Savoury Oat Cakes

November 11, 2015

BD is of Scottish stock, and oatcakes are a good Scottish biscuit.  Commercial ones contain oils he can’t eat, so out came the recipes and the baking paraphernalia for another kitchen experiment.

Now, true Scottish oatcakes aren’t to everyone’s taste. Made without sugar, they can resemble cardboard, I agree…but we all know (even if we’re not admitting it) that sugar isn’t good for us, so I was determined to make these traditionally, without sugar.  I prefer to save my recommended daily allowance of sugar for my tea and for my four squares of dark chocolate. But add spices  – pepper, chili peppers, rosemary – and they become something special.

I went recipe hunting on the internet, focusing on British sources because, after all, they are a British biscuit. Between two of my favourite cooks, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame, and Nigella Lawson, I found two slightly different recipes, combined them, and here’s the result.  You can play with this recipe a lot, as far as the spices go.

Savoury Oatcakes

1 cup scots oats/porridge oats.  (These are not rolled oats.  They are more finely ground, but not oat flour either – somewhere in between.  I found them at my local bulk food store, but you could make them in a good blender or food processor from rolled oats.)

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp olive oil

1/8 – 3/4 c  just-stopped-boiling water (explanation below)

Any or all of these spices: (or others).

1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

1 tsp hot pepper flakes

1 -2 tsp rosemary

Pre-heat the oven to 375 F.  Combine the oats and salt and spices in a bowl and make a well in the middle. Add the olive oil – and now is the tricky part – the very hot water.  You want just enough to mix the oats into a cohesive but not sticky ball, and you need to do this quickly.  The amount of water you use will vary with the texture of your oats. (I found with commercial Scots oats I needed about 1/3 c or just a bit more. You can always add a few more oats or oat flour if the mix is too wet, so err in that direction).

Roll out your oat mixture between two strips of parchment paper until it is very thin – about 1/8 inch if you can – and cut out rounds with a cookie cutter or a glass.  Place on silicon baking sheets or parchment and bake for 10 minutes; flip them over, and bake for another 10.

Cool them completely before transferring to an air-tight tin.  Personally, I freeze them: since they have almost no moisture in them, they thaw really quickly.  Serve as a base for cheese, or just butter them, or – as I do – top with blueberries and (unsweetened) yogurt for a healthy snack or breakfast. (Reputedly Queen Elizabeth eats them for breakfast, too.) Of course, BD, for whom I made them in the first place, can’t eat any dairy products, so he eats them as is. He may be a braver man than I…then again, he is a Scot.

Lest We Forget

November 11, 2015
Enid (Buckby) Thorpe Paris 1945
Enid (Buckby) Thorpe Paris 1945

In remembrance of my mother, Cpl. E. Buckby, Royal Signal Corps, who served with the British Army at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Forces Europe, stationed at Versailles.

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Siegfried Sassoon

O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

November 8, 2015

One of the habits I’ve kept from my working days (let’s rephrase that, my salaried working days, as I seem to be as busy as ever, except now I’m in control) is my late-afternoon or early evening Sunday soak in the bathtub.  I love baths, full of hot hot water and bubble bath. Along with my favourite magazine and a glass of wine, or scotch, they are my best way to relax, bar none.

I was banned from baths in 2014 for two months following major surgery.  I still remember how good that first one felt when I was allowed back in.  Baths ease my arthritis pain, keep me away from my electronics, and frustrate my cats.  Although I used to have one, an old, battered, rescued ex-tomcat who absolutely adored me, who would come to sit on my exposed tummy in the bath. Getting his paws wet was worth it to be able to sit on me. (Turned out he also liked to be bathed – as long as I did it – but that’s another story.)

It’s also private time.  We used to have a hot tub, until it began to irritate BD’s skin and the iron and manganese in our well water made the maintenance a pain.  But somehow we always soaked together.  My bath is only big enough for me.

And tonight my arthritic hip and leg are aching, the rash on my foot from the monkshood leaf that got inside my boot while gardening is irritating, and I’ve done enough writing, blogging, course work, and accounts for this week.  Hot water and a scotch are calling.  I’m going to say hello.

P.S: Here is JRR Tolkien’s take on baths:

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!

Landscape and Story

November 7, 2015

A few minutes ago I clicked on a Twitter link on marketing (vs. selling) e-books.  I read through the strategies, and sighed.  I don’t want to do any of this…but should I be?  And then I realized: no.  I quite like what I do, where I am as an author, where I’m going.  I don’t actually want to be a ‘best-selling’ author if that entails hours of publicity, marketing, talks…..that’s not why I write.

All my life I have explained my world to myself in words.  As I get further into my coursework in landscape archaeology, I realize that much of Empire’s Daughter, and much of Empire’s Hostage, the in-progress sequel, is actually, at one level, a fictionalized interpretation of the landscape archaeology of Britain in the post-Roman world.  I ‘kind-of’ knew that, but two days ago I opened a textbook to a map almost identical to the one I drew in the planning of Empire’s Hostage – the northern European world seen upside down – with north to the bottom of the map. An epiphany. Two of my deep passions melding, and a realization, that in my own way, like J.R.R. Tolkien, I am creating, in my writing, a world to mirror and interpret the real landscape that holds my heart.

So I will keep writing with a fuller understanding of why I do.  I’ll keep connecting, through my reviews and blog posts and Twitter, with other indie writers; some of those connections are pure serendipity, like the review I’ll be doing of Ian Cumpstey’s Warrior Lore, English verse translations of Scandinavian warrior ballads – ballads that just happen to play a role in Empire’s Hostage. I hope my reviews help other indie writers sell books. Some of them will take a look at or give a shout out to Empire’s Daughter. Others won’t. Either is fine with me, now I know, viscerally, why I’m writing what I write.  It really is for me, and for the landscape that tells its stories to me. Only, and all, that.

A Humbling Experience

November 6, 2015

Once a year, my alma mater, the University of Guelph, honours its faculty, staff and alumnae who have published, edited, or illustrated a book in the last year.  This year’s honourees included winners and nominees for some of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards, including Thomas King, Dionne Brand and Alison Pick…and alongside those well-known names was me.

campus author poster

Which was a humbling experience, let me tell you.  There I was, author of a self-published, moderately successful e-book for young adults, being feted in exactly the same way as these major authors, whose books are taught and read in schools and universities, who have won major prizes….I felt a little bit like a fraud, to be honest.  But, on the other hand, the University knew exactly what I had written and published, and they chose to include me (and others like me).  I thought that was wonderfully democratic and non-hierarchical….and also typical…

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Good Fences

November 3, 2015

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote, in Mending Wall.  Between our property and the neighbours on both sides, a split-rail fence delineates the property lines.  We built the fence ourselves, getting on for twenty years ago, pulling the cedar rails out of the brush of an old farm at the edge of the village, gladly given to us by the elderly farmer. When the fence was done, he walked down one day to see them in their new incarnation. “Good to see them used again,” he said, of the old swamp cedar rails, probably even then well over a hundred years old.

But in a massive thunderstorm earlier this year, with drenching rain and high winds from the east, unusual for here, the young butternut that grows just at the edge of our eastern neighbour’s property shifted just a little, leaning into the fence, and took down three rails. Oddly enough, it didn’t break them: the steady pressure on the fence snapped the wire that held them to the posts. But they couldn’t go back up – the trunk of the butternut was in the way now.

We debated taking the tree down, but I really didn’t want to. Another young butternut, at the edge of the maple swamp behind us, also listed in the storm, but it straightened itself up within a couple of weeks.  I decided to wait. Yesterday, mulching leaves, I took a good look at the tree, and realized it had grown straight again, but from about five feet off the ground, meaning its lower trunk still was an impediment to replacing the rails.

BD and I brainstormed, and decided the simplest thing to do was to add a post directly beside the one north of the tree. This would allow us to run the rails from the new post to the existing one south of the tree, creating a slight zig-zag (or, really, only a zig). We throw almost nothing out in term of wood, so hiding down with the compost bins was a huge old post that had once supported the far end of the washing line. Cut down and wired securely to the existing post, it was the perfect size.

It took us about half an hour to fix the fence, on a glorious November day, sunny, very warm, no wind. Overhead ravens swore at and chased migrating red-tail hawks. The chickadees went back and forth to the feeders, ignoring us, joined by two species of nuthatch and two of woodpeckers. The squirrels – black and red – are happy to have their highway contiguous again, and neighbouring dogs and grandchildren have their limits back. Good fences do, indeed, make good neighbours.

Raking Leaves

November 1, 2015

The winds that brought in a cold front a couple of days ago also brought down almost all the leaves hanging on to our two Norway maples. Norway maples – Acer platanoides – have, as their scientific name indicates – huge, plate-like leaves, and they don’t decompose easily. I have a couple of choices – I can rake them onto a tarp, and move them to the edge of the maple swamp behind us, in a (useless) attempt to smother the goutweed that someone planted there, long before our tenure in this house. Or I can mulch them into small fragments, and leave them to enrich the lawn. Burning isn’t an option – that requires a burn permit (if you’re at all law-abiding, anyhow) – and on our small property there is nowhere that meets the criteria.

I choose to mulch them into the lawn with the electric lawnmower. But first I have to rake them away from the porch, and the shrubs, and the garage doors where the wind has pushed them. It’s a cool last day of October, and this is just the right thing to be doing. Last year I was still on post-surgery restrictions, and the years before that I was working, gone from the house from dark to dark, and it seemed to rain every weekend. So for some years a landscape service has taken care of our leaves. But this year, it’s all mine, and I’m reveling in it.

I rake the leaves onto the front and side lawns into more-or-less even drifts, and plug in the mower. I start with the mower set at 3 1/2 inches, and go over the leaves, dropping the mower height down as the leaves are chopped. Across the road, a neighbour with a much larger property is burning hers: the smell takes me back to childhood, when we all burned leaves: the scent of fall.

It takes me about an hour and half to do the front and side lawns, clean the mower, sweep bits off the driveway and the walks. The leaves have been reduced to tiny fragments that will decompose easily, returning their nutrients to the soil, feeding earthworms and micro-flora, strengthening the grass and clover that make up our lawn.

There is something that just feels right about taking care of what we own ourselves, instead of paying a service to do it. I draw the line at the highly specialized or dangerous (BD and I are having a debate about our very tall chimney, which needs repointing. I think it’s too tall for him to do; he thinks otherwise. I point out we only re-shingled the one-storey additions and the garage ourselves, summer jobs, and left the high roof of our three-storey house to the professionals. And the chimney is higher than that roof. He’s ‘thinking about it’.) But raking leaves, cutting the grass, pruning…and inside, cleaning, painting, repairing….I like doing these, and they connect me to my house and my garden. I prefer to be a steward, with all the responsibility that implies, than a occupant, leaving the responsibility to others. Too often, in our working days, we felt more like occupants, renting services to keep the place going.

It rained heavily last night, so I can’t mulch more leaves today. I’ve still got twice as much to do – the other side lawn and the back, the the leaves from one Norway maple and a host of other, smaller-leaved trees – but that’s ok. The weather is promising to be warm all this coming week (unseasonably so, actually) and I have the time now. I’ll wave at neighbours, chat over the fence, watch the chickadees completely ignore me as they go back and forth to the feeders. What better way to spend a sunny, early November day?