Welcome Gentle Readers

This blog tends to wander from its main purpose -- updates on my fiction. I do have updates and excerpts of my work. But I also write about my obsessions -- food, friends and pop culture and my weird life in Los Angeles. Enjoy!

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Food Feats, Hat Tricks and Teasing Updates


The Hubs pointed out that I missed something really big in my blog last week. I'm a silly billy. After posting my fried zucchini flowers on the Facebook, I also tweeted a photo to Giada DeLaurentiis via the Twitter. She then re-tweeted it to her followers – that's a big compliment! Yes, I'm on Twitter. I'm on almost every social media that my readers and potential readers use. In Twitter's case, it's also where a lot of my favorite chefs hang out. I have kibitz with many of them. This has been my biggest reaction yet. I was really jazzed. I have no idea why I forgot to put it in the blog last week.

Speaking of cooking, I did a lot of it this week. I don't think I've done this much advanced cooking (that is cooking done in advance of the week as opposed to cooking that requires advanced skills) since April of 2010 prior to my second surgery. There was a lull in my editing gigs that coincided with a streak of cool weather for LA. Those occurrences gave me the opportunity. And then, there were some huge sales on all sorts of meat. Thus, I made vats of chicken and beef stock and slow roasted a lot of meats and even made a big pot of chili. I had really slacked off on the practice which makes life so much easier day to day where getting meals prepared is concerned. Since I cannot predict my energy levels on any given day, being able to defrost a tasty protein is more than half the battle for meals. And not to sound like too much of a carnivore, I also soaked and cooked three kinds of beans! Now I have to package all that food for the freezer. Geez.

Too Many Hats

I was two kinds of editor last week. There was the prose editing of Marguerite Lliteras' book, The Intern and then there was editing manga with Again Tomorrow. They were polar opposites in what they required. Switching between them was challenging. I'll get into more details about the obstacles I had to deal with in the manga in a separate blog. Let's just say that there a whole lot of ways to interpret the word freeloader, and the context is really important. At least with The Intern, I could call the really patient author and ask questions. I also had to do a final set of corrections on Ensnared Volume 2. My head was swimming in words from different eras and cultures. And then I had to wear the screenwriter hat and the producer hat to figure out how to make a change in shooting location for one of the projects on the front burner work. On at least two days last week, I was wearing all of those hats. Everything I needed to accomplish got finished to my satisfaction, but I am really mentally exhausted at this writing. I haven't even been able to think about the ramifications of the film project's progress. That's probably a really good thing. I think I would be really freaking out (from happiness and panic). As I have said before with film 'Oohh, Aahh, that's how all of this starts, but then later there's the running and screaming' – Dr. Ian Malcom Jurassic Park- The lost World.

Updates
Some big ones are coming soon. I have to go now. There's more football, and I need to just veg out for a while.

Stay tuned!

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