Envy--not just a sin any more!

My aunt and uncle own an apple farm, Jim's Apples. (The farm is named for my late Uncle Jim who mocked customers who wanted to buy Red Delicious apples and often refused to sell them.)
The orchard specializes in heirloom varieties of the fruit and feature apples you never heard of. My favorite is the Arkansas Black, which is darker than a winesap and deeply delicious.
I shop at three different supermarkets here in L.A. and they all feature varieties I'd never heard of when I was growing up. (There were Red Delicious, which I liked, Golden Delicious, which I didn't, and Granny Smith apples. My mother and grandmothers made pies and applesauce out of the Granny Smith apples, along with a southern delicacy called "Fried Apples"--ambrosial with pork chops.)
When I moved to L.A. I branched out in Pink Ladies and Cameos (a cross between Red Delicious and Golden Delicious) and Jazz.
I was still barely scratching the surface though. Just to give you an idea of how many different apples are grown for the table, check out this Wikipedia listing.
Yesterday I stumbled across the Envy Apple, a variety developed in New Zealand by crossing a Braeburn (not my favorite apple) with a Royal Gala (never had one). The result is ... the world's best apple.
Seriously.
It is crisp. It is sweet without being cloying.It's juicy.
It doesn't start turning brown for hours.
And it's beautiful.
There are a lot of red and gold apples out there, but Envy has pure colors and a wonderful scent.
They're not cheap. My supermarket sucked me in by offering them at $1.99 a pound (that's cheap in L.A.) but they now run $2.99. And they're big apples, heavy, so a pound is around two apples.
But--did I mention they are the tastiest apples in the world?

New Clarity of Night Contest

Jason Evans at Clarity of Night has a summer fiction challenge: Elementals. Contest is open until July 20, or until Jason receives 95 stories. At that point, he'll post a 12-hour countdown.

I've entered the last couple of challenges and enjoyed writing to specific word counts from a photo prompt. I think it's a great exercise. For more info, go here.

Megan Abbott's The End of Everything

Megan Abbott’s new book, The End of Everything, is a strong story about family secrets and misunderstandings and a girl who doesn’t really know what’s going on. Abbott underplays a lot of things and the most haunting; the most visceral moments in the book are very low-key.

When her best friend Evie is kidnapped, 13-year-old Lizzie Hood launches her own investigation into the crime, uncovering a series of lies that change everything she thought she knew about herself and her friendship with Evie.

As always in Abbott’s work, the characters are strong and realistic. Her view of teenage life is not unsympathetic but utterly without sentiment. When Lizzie starts hanging out with a couple of toxic teens who have their own theories about who might have taken Evie and even her own mother seems to be relishing the drama a little too much, it confirms our worst fears about suburban schadenfreude.

The plot is laced with a suppressed violence that’s almost poetic and ratchets up the intensity without being obvious. Lizzie’s imagined scenario about a character standing outside Evie’s house, smoking and dreaming, is beautifully written.

Abbott never overstates anything, never overdoes the emotion or lets anything get melodramatic. Lizzie is not a particularly credible narrator—she’s always remembering things slightly different from the way they happened—but that works for the kind of story this is.

There’s a lot going on here beneath the surface and in the shadows—the concept of “shadow” is important here, both explicitly and implicitly—and the consequences of both intentions and actions have weight.

Nominally a YA novel, The End of Everything occupies territory somewhere north of the paranormal fantasies and dystopian dramas that clutter the genre. It’s the kind of book that reminds us that labels on fiction are meaningless.

*****

Interview with Megan Abbott here.

More on L.A. Nocturne...

Review of L.A. Nocturne here. By someone I don't even know!!

Brotherly Love

There are times I think that being a freelancer is just another way to say "I'm a workaholic." Without the security of a day job to pay my bills, I keep a constant running count of cash flow in my head (as well as in Microsoft Money). My goal is always to have the next month's rent in the bank by the 15th of the month. If I don't, I kick into a higher gear, take on some editing gigs, write some book reviews for paying sites, scour the internet for paying markets for short stories, check my amazon sales stats obsessively. (I know, that last one is not particularly productive but I find it soothing.)

When I'm in "get the rent" mode, I am a machine. I can work most people under the table. Except my brother.

My brother makes me look like a sloth. He's an attorney, a sole practitioner based in northern Virginia. He's so busy it's a wonder his head doesn't explode. And on top of that, he has a family and two cats. I know how busy he is so outside of copying him on every single email I send out with a link to a story, I don't ask him to read everything I write. But he does. Which makes me happier than I can tell you.

He may not always like my stories, but he reads them. And when I sent him the story I'm submitting to the Machine of Death 2 anthology (there's still time to submit, see guidelines here), he vetted it for proper courtroom procedure. (I've been called for jury duty twice but never served, and everything else I know about the judicial system I learned from watching trials on TV.) It's a much better story now. I got lucky with my family. I know a lot of people who didn't.

So this is a shout-out to my brother. Thanks Rob.

L.A. Nocturne

I just sold my first copy L.A. Nocturne in the UK. Very exciting.

My second fiction collection: Toxic Reality & Other Tales will be out at the end of the summer. Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions is designing the cover and editing and formatting the text. Her striking covers for L.A. Nocturne and Fairy Story have been a big part of their success. They really stand out.

I know I judge a book by its cover, and figure everyone else does too.

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.