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.

Melancholy Monday Fiction--Pink Gift

Who doesn't love freebie fiction? Luna Station Quarterly, a magazine that focuses on speculative fiction by women writers, publishes stories on their site in between issues.
This week's story is Pink Gift by Lindsey Walker . Read it here. Mark your calendar for their annual drabble issue, coming soon and featuring (shameless self-promotion alert) my story "Courtly Love."

NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest Winners

Several months ago, NPR announced the return of their "Three-Minute Fiction" contest for flash fiction that could be read in three minutes (around 600 words). The theme for round 7 was "Arriving and Leaving."  The winners were announced tonight and you can read them here.
Here is my entry for the contest:

Exit Strategy

Toby saw the man stumble as he came out of baggage claim hauling a rolling suitcase and hefting a laptop bag over his shoulder.

He looked like he’d slept in his clothes, a white dress shirt that gapped over his belly and black suit pants that badly needed a press.

His face was sickly pale and he moved like he was drunk but Toby couldn’t smell booze on his breath or in his sweat as he walked past him.

That guy looks like a heart attack waiting to happen, Toby thought and then, as if his thought had summoned the action, the guy stumbled again, this time falling heavily against Toby.

“Sorry,” the guy mumbled, and dropped the handle of his suitcase to clutch at his left arm, which had suddenly gone rigid with pain.

Feminist Fiction Friday

I'm not much for labels. Defining a person by religious beliefs, political affiliation, sexual orientation or age has always seemed much too simplistic for me. One of the most liberating things about writing for the internet is that you can define yourself, circumventing any artificial limitations that might be placed on you in real life. Which brings me to gender.
I've occasionally written fiction under a male pseudonym, not to hide my gender in specific but to cloak my identity in general. I did it on the Dark Valentine site, for example, so that it didn't look like I was writing every other story in one of our flash fiction challenges.  I never really gave it that much thought, frankly. My writing is pretty gender-neutral and I write equal-opportunity criminals and victims.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Lately, though, I've been thinking about gender a lot. I think about it every time I read a script that refers to a flight attendant as a "stewardess" or worse, as a "stew," and every time a female college student is described as a "coed."
I think about it every time someone says "male nurse," as if the job description is gender-exclusive, like "mommy." I think about it when a woman refers--without irony--to her gender as the "fair sex." And I think about it every time I read a story that's set in a future where women apparently don't exist and if they do, it's in a role that has been outdated for at least 60 years. I think about gender when I see news stories about couples about to spawn their 20th child; stories about celebutants famous for their sex tapes; stories about a movement to outlaw abortion for any reason--including rape and incest. (I can't help but think of the famous feminist quote by Ti-Grace Atkinson--"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.")
I know this is a cranky-pants rant but bear with me...I'm getting to the point.
Yesterday Sandra Seamans posted a link to a blog entry by Kat Howard about the invisibility of female  heroines in speculative fiction. (Read it here.) I commented on it and Sandra commented back and the next thing I knew, I was scribbling lists of women writers whose books are driven by female protagonists. And I decided that today was a good day to kick off Feminist Fiction Fridays--mini-celebrations of women who write women.

A New Home for NoHo Noir!!

Yes, the evil clown is back!  Beginning Sunday, November 20, Mark Satchwill and I will be bringing you Volume II of NoHo Noir. And we'lll be bringing the noir as never before. New characters. New plots. Sex, violence, and dirty words without the asterisks.
The story starts off with a bang as a homeless man is found beaten to death just steps away from the campus of North Hollywood High. The detective investigating the case has her suspicions about who the killer might be but she needs hard evidence. Still, investigating the case gives her a good excuse to leave her family's Thanksgiving dinner early. North Hollywood, California--they don't call it "NoHo nice."
Please check out our new site here to follow us, and  follow us @nohonoir while you're at it.