The Clown is Coming Back--the return of NoHo Noir

The first of a new cycle of stories will go up tomorrow on the new NoHo Noir site. Mark and I are tremendously excited about continuing the project. The first story, "Boys will be boys," has a more manga illustration style Mark's trying out. We're still fiddling with the website, adding bits and pieces, but my favorite thing about it is that Mark did portraits of us to run in the "About Katherine" and "About Mark" sections. I always wanted to be a comic book character.  Mark did a more "evil queen" version that I liked too. 

Feminist Fiction Friday--Miss Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Ten years after her death and almost 40 years after it was published, you can buy a digital copy of The Optimist's Daughter with one click. I hope she'd be pleased. She was a woman ahead of her times in so many ways, I'd like to think she would have embraced the ebook revolution.
The Optimist's Daughter was my introduction to the writer. My mother was reading it at the same time her father's long and painful final illness was coming to an end, and she found it almost unbearable to read.
I didn't have the same personal, viscderal connection to the material, so my reading was an entirely different experience.
It's not a novel with a lot of plot but her characters...her characters were so real and rich and right, that I knew her work was going to set the bar for me in my first fumbling attempts at writing my own stories.
Miss Welty (and such was the force of her personality, that even her most ferocious fans felt self-conscious about first-naming her) began, as so many novelists do, writing short stories.
Two of those stories, "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Why I Live at the P.O." should be required reading for anyone who wants to practice short fiction.
Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, The Robber Bridegroom came to the city on its way to Broadway.  An adaptation of Miss Welty's novella of the same name, a romantic fable based on real-life stories of robbers who used to ply their trade along the Natchez Trace. (Miss Welty was from Mississippi.), it was a musical with book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and music by Robert Waldman.
I saw the play five times, which probably had more to do with my appreciation of Barry Bostwick, who played the title role, than my love for Southern literature, but the play was charming. (And if you know Bostwick only as the bombastic mayor in Spin City or as Brad in Rocky Horror Picture Show, here's a clip of him performing "Fathers and Sons"  in the Studs Terkel musical Working.)

Whoa....

Last night I went to the opera and at intermission, my companion was chatting with a couple while I sucked down a bucket-sized iced tea in hopes the caffeine would counteract the effects of the all-nighter I'd pulled finishing up a project. They were discussing Wagner and suddenly, the woman went off on a rant about Armenians, Social Security checks and Lexuses.  (Lexi?) 
There was no segue for the rant, she just started spewing nonsense. It was odd and unsettling and we quickly retreated into the auditorium.
I was no longer sleepy.
Encounters with whack jobs tend to wake me up.
This afternoon I blogged about a friend of a friend's Kickstarter program and apropos of nothing, a guy calling himself John Rambo (completely without irony) posted a comment that had absolutely nothing to do with the post and everything to do with pathology.  (You can read it below, under the Empower an Entrepreneur heading.)
John doesn't like American women. As a group. As a class. As a concept.
He takes special issue with women who are educated and/or in the workplace.
He doesn't think American women want to get married.
He has apparently written a book and posting his anti-woman screed on blogs is his idea of a really great marketing ploy.
Here's a sample of his reasoned discourse:
Over 50 percent of American women are single, without a boyfriend or husband; so the fact is most American men no longer want to marry American women. Let these worthless American women grow old living alone with their 10 cats.

He goes on at some length to explain why foreign-born women are just better.
I say...good luck with those mail-order brides, John.
I think I can also safely say, on behalf of American women everywhere, "Not if you were the last heterosexual on earth, honey."
But you knew that already.

Empower an Entrepreneur

Writer/Artist Joanne Renaud sends word that Caoimhe Ora Snow's Kickstarter Campaign to fund a startup of her RPG fantasy game Wandering Monsters High School has stalled. She needs $200 more to reach her goal of $1000 before her time runs out in two weeks. Donations are as little as $1, so if you can help a sister out, go here.

Mincemeat Cake Recipe for Thanskgiving

In the Beginning Was the Recipe…

I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake.  It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriting and decorated with whimsical drawings. 

The recipe wasn’t in the manila folder where I keep the loose recipe cards and the torn magazine pages and the newspaper clippings and the scribbled instructions on the backs of envelopes, school notebook paper and old invoice forms from my grandfather’s general store.  (There’s even a recipe copied out on a soft paper napkin worn to the consistency of Kleenex.) 

My mother had a recipe box like all good mid-century housewives and she kept many recipes in that box, but the ones she cherished the most and used the most often were in an old school binder with a coarse cloth cover that was rubbed through to the cardboard beneath.  By the time I inherited the binder,  it was falling apart and I transferred the contents over to the aforementioned yellow binder.

A lot of the loose recipes in the folder are starting to fade with age.  Some of the oldest date back to the early 50s and the paper has browned and the ink lightened until you almost need to be a forensic documents examiner to piece together the instructions.  My mother’s recipes are written out the way she talked and almost seem interactive with their asterisks and inserted comments.  “I usually use twice the amount of ginger,” she notes on a recipe for ginger snaps, making me wonder why she didn’t just write out her version of the recipe.

#OWS Fiction--The Black Card

This is a story that's been percolating for awhile.

THE BLACK CARD

Peter Loftus prided himself on his street smarts.

He wasn’t too worried when he saw the roving gang of teens ghosting toward him.

Gangs of percenters were always roaming the area, looking for stray onesies they could prey upon, and Peter had taken pains to disguise himself as one of the 99.

Clocking their movements was just a matter of situational awareness, not paranoia and Peter didn’t even break his stride.

Peter was sure the wildlings would pass him by. There was nothing about his demeanor or dress that broadcast his wealth or status.

Still, Peter was glad he was wearing the money belt with the slotted buckle that was large enough to hide his American Express Centurion card. He normally didn’t carry it, but he’d been unable to complete his business online and had had to take the risk of going out on the street with the black card in his possession.

He’d learned from experience that taking the armor-plated Mercedes into the city only invited unwelcome attention. After two attempted carjackings, one that had resulted in the death of his driver, Peter began doing things the old-fashioned way, keeping his head down and going undercover as one of the rabble.

His disguise was flawless, a filthy raincoat over a faded t-shirt worn with jeans that were faded white at the seams and worn thin in the knees. His shoes were unpolished, their heels worn down, the toes scuffed and the leather sides thin and discolored. He’d bought the shoes online from a local Goodwill store and then had them specially sanitized.

Interesting People I Don't Know

I am a reader who always reads the "author's note" and the "postscripts" and the "why I wrote this story" headers. I read the "about me" in blogs and the "profiles" on Twitter. I like knowing about the writers whose books and stories I read. "Knowing about" is not the same thing as "knowing," of course, but in the era of social media, the lines get blurred.
I was a huge fan of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. I follow her on Twitter and have been extremely entertained by her Tweets. I started reading Dakota Cassidy's hilarious books because she was so damn funny on Facebook. (A former beauty queen, she live-tweeted the Miss America pageant and had me in stitches. If Billy Crystal hadn't stepped up to host the Oscars, she would have been a good choice.)
Last month I read Lauren Oliver's lovely book Liesl and Po and two days later one of her comments showed up in my Twitter stream. I immediately tweeted my love for the book and she thanked me and it felt like an authentic book-geek moment.
Keeping up with social media takes work, and it takes time. Time spent on Twitter is time spent away from the WIP. But as someone who spends most of my life in my home office interacting with my cats and the other human who shares their space, I love the sense of connection.