Lilith Saintcrow

My weekly post is up at The Midnight Hour. It’s about critiques, and how to take one–and how NOT to take one. Enjoy.

Turkey Day finished with nobody sick, screaming, or crying. Well, the Princess has a cold, but that was a pre-existing condition. All the food I prepared was edible–brioche caramel sticky buns, ham, baked mashed potatoes (they taste better if you bake them THEN mash them), stuffing, asparagus and haricots verts (the Muffin cooked those, thank God), mixed-starter bread (which came out wonderfully well), and apple pie that I baked yesterday. All things were edible and everyone ate loads. I dosed myself with wine and the Bailey’s lasted the whole day (there’s still a little bit left over.) No holiday is truly complete without Bailey’s, says I. And of course the kids were able to watch a bunch of Looney Tunes, which made their day.

Today the house is quiet. I have copyedits to bash at and some yardwork to do, and if I get both reasonably done I will reward myself with a film later today. Rewards are necessary things, I think. Life cannot be all work, work, work.

Incidentally, I’ve been lucky enough to have the same copyeditor for most of the Valentine books and now the first Kismet book. I really, really love my copyeditor, because s/he seems to learn my style and idiosyncrasies, and take them into account. It is a Good Thing.

It just occurred to me this morning that the Little Prince has been toilet-trained for quite some time. I remember when he was as long as my arm and completely helpless. Now he wants to do everything “Bah MahSELF, Mahm!” It is truly amazing. It seems like only yesterday he could barely even get his thumb to his mouth, and yet now his favorite things include running through the house, somersaulting on the bed, and scurrying in when I fill up the sink to wash dishes. “I do it FOR you, Mummy!” he crows, and proceeds to get everything but the dishes soaking wet.

*sigh* They grow so fast. And the toilet-training for both of them went so smoothly; I wonder if I’m lucky or if the fact that we just didn’t worry so much about it and let the kids discover in their own due time had something to do with it. Kids WANT to learn and to be “grown-up”, one merely has to facilitate and they will do all the hard work.

Well, mostly.

Anyway, back into the wilds of copyedits, where my fabulous copyeditor has hacked a path through overgrown prose and fact-checked the thickets. Bless his/her heart.

Catch you later, Readers…

So I was up early this morning doing dishes (the decks must be cleared before I can engage in another bout of kitchen madness, since we have limited space–the breadboard would pick yesterday to go kaput) and letting the caramel sticky buns rise. Two whole pans of brioche caramel sticky cinnamon buns, put together last night and baked this morning.

They are deadly.

The mixed-starter bread is bubbling along. I needed something a little bit warmer than the fridge but not as warm as inside for it last night, so I put it out in the garage. I will check the odometer of the car to see if the starter went a-traveling later.

In about an hour and a half the potatoes will go in, then the ham. We’re going to eat early so I’m not doing dishes all night. Although I should probably make someone else around here clean up. The problem is, I tend to clean while cooking, so there’s not much left over, and nobody else seems to get the hang of properly loading the dishwasher in order to get maximum use out of it OR wiping down the bloody counters.

Or perhaps they just act like they don’t so I’ll get irritated and do it.

I am reminded this Thanksgiving of just how stressful family get-togethers are for me. My mum gets all worked up, works herself to the bone in the days preceding, and then when something goes wrong (which it inevitably does, as we live in an imperfect world) she blames us and the whole thing is Ruined. Cue drama. And of course my stepdad uses each family get-together as a means of delivering maximum emotional abuse under the cover of party noise. So between them, it’s a fun time.

I just keep breathing and reminding myself that I’m not in that situation this year. I have control of where I go and what I do, even during the holiday season. I don’t have to be stressed. I can be focused on cooking, but I don’t have to be stressed.

Which is awesome, and I’m grateful for it.

The Princess has a cold, and the Little Prince could care less about Thanksgiving as long as he gets to make his paper airplanes. The UnSullen One is waiting for his friends to come over once they finish other dinners, and the Muffin is reading about zero-point energy while he doses himself with sticky buns. Such is the state of our household.

Happy turkey day, everyone. May you have a minimum of family drama and a maximum of good eatin’.

That is all.

I feel almost bad, after bitching yesterday, about the flood of emails and comments I received saying “hang everything else, we the fans appreciate how close together the books are appearing.” I should have known I wasn’t the only one involved. *wry grin* Writing is such a mostly-solitary job (except for signings, conventions, and interacting with one’s agent/editor) that one often forgets everything except one’s own viewpoint.

So, thank you for the support. I had no ideas the larger, usually-silent mass of Readers felt so strongly about this, and I am glad you love the books enough to be happy when they come out close together. I can assure you, they all took a long time to write, and I hope they are all of a quality to suit you. I tried very hard.

Last but certainly not least, thank you for reading them. I would look mighty funny talking to myself out here, blogosphere or no.

Upward and onward, as Jewel the Unicorn said! Today I have to take the brioche dough out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to defrost. Tonight I make the caramel rolls–two whole pans of them–for tomorrow’s breakfast. Other things on the menu tomorrow are: a half-cloved ham (a ham in dishabille, for two of the three under-18s in the household are not fond of clove), asparagus and haricots verts, mixed-starter bread (from pizza dough starter today) or rye if I cannot manage, baked potatoes which will be scraped out and mashed with plenty of butter and sour cream.

Plus cookies. And two apple pies. Nobody in the house wants pumpkin. Apple is all they want. Good enough.

We’re lucky to have a lot of food. I can remember several holidays when I, as a young sprout, was seriously at risk of having it otherwise. Somehow things usually worked out, but I remember those times with a pain just under my heart, just like Dorothy Allison talks about the hunger of being poor.

There are two different types of hungry poverty. There is the actual grinding physical poverty, which is the worst. It makes you angry and sullen and fiercely ashamed, it gives you pride like a wrecking ball and malnutrition like a gun to the head.

Then there is the poverty of spirit, where food is used to bludgeon you and family gatherings are a means of mass torture. It’s not as bad as actually starving–nothing is as bad as that–but it is bad enough and gives one deep emotional damage.

It’s kind of funny (in that you-have-to-laugh-about-it-or-cry way) how _________’s (name blacked out deliberately, sorry) food troubles parallel my own. We compare notes sometimes about how food was treated as a leash, a chain, a punishment, a double-edged reward in our childhood and teen years. Part of learning to deal with something like this is talking to someone who went through it, who can validate one’s own experiences. Sometimes, just hearing that someone else felt the same way in a similar situation is enough to lift a huge weight from your back.

Learning to bake (and trying to learn how to cook) is helping, too. I feel I am taking control of an alchemical process that has wreaked havoc in my life–the bugaboo of food. I am so very glad the kids seem to view food as barely important–it’s fuel and it’s good, but they don’t have the angst and complex rage I remember feeling about food at their ages. To them, it’s just food…and that’s good.

Maybe this year I’ll be able to see the food as just food, and when I remember the pain and terror of family gatherings during the holiday season I’ll be able to wryly smile instead of cringe. Hey, it’s possible. Anything is possible, and now I know how to bake rye bread and brioche. Which is as much a miracle as anything else, in this world of wonders.

Since I was talking about music that inspired the Valentine series…

Well, this is actually a Final Fantasy fan video. BUT, the song playing–Virtue, by Jesse Cook–is the song I always played for Dante and Japhrimel. If they can be said to have a song, this is it. Listen, and enjoy.

Kudos to whoever created the video, and major kudos to Mr. Cook. It’s strange, but now that I’m not writing Valentine anymore, I’m not listening to nearly as much flamenco…

Commence bitching: Please…I wish people would stop leaving comments about how “close together” the Valentine series is. What people don’t realize is that it took me five years to write those books, if not more. They’re being released close together, sure–because Orbit is launching stateside and they wanted a fully-grown and developed series to launch with. Plus, they liked the books. Go figure.

A lot of people don’t realize that when one writes a book, it can wait up to three years to get into print even if it’s bought right away. There’s editorial and production and art schedules to take into account. Traditional publishing is not for the impatient.

I know people may not understand why the books are appearing so quickly, but I really kind of resent the implication in a lot of the comments I’ve seen that I cranked these puppies out one after another in order to profit from them. No, my ducks, each book took a minimum of a year and a maximum of three years to write, and they were mostly all written concurrently, in a strange overlapping pattern. I got better as I went along, I hope, but each book took an overly-decent amount of time to create. That’s because they were hard on me emotionally–not as hard as the Kismet books, but very stressful nonetheless. I needed a full year minimum to deal with each book.

End bitching. I suppose I’m just being thin-skinned. But it does kind of cheese my buns. If the commenters knew how long one has to wait to see one’s book in print, mayhap they would not comment thus.

On another note, much more pleasant in my humble opinion, while driving home last night from picking up the UnSullen One Sarah McLachlan’s Fallen came on the radio.

Heaven
Bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so…

I realized that the song pretty much sums up the whole Valentine series, or at least Dante’s journey throughout. I listened to this song obsessively from Devil’s Right Hand through the finishing lines of To Hell And Back, especially while out walking at the track and processing more scenes in my head. If there is a song that encapsulates the whole series, that one’s it. I have sometimes remarked that everything one needs to know about Danny Valentine can be found in that song.

Kind of funny when someone does in three stanzas, a chorus, and a bridge what you took five books and however many drafts to do. No, I’m not jealous…not one little bit…me? No way. *grin*

When Danny started out as a character she was very black-and-white. If you betrayed her once, she was done with you. There were lines she had drawn that framed her whole world.

Then Japhrimel happened. And a whole underlying theme of the series is Dante moving into these situations where, increasingly, there is no right choice. It is an education in shades of gray for this character, who started out emotionally stunted and pretty rigid in her conceptions of how the world should work.

I’ve known a lot of people, especially teens, that way (and was, I must admit, one myself.) In many ways I think the process of growing up is learning about shades of gray and those situations where there is no “right thing” to do, or the “right thing” has such horrific consequences a different way has to be found. Learning to deal with those situations with nuance and flexibility is a hard balancing act, one that human beings rarely get consistently right.

I have not yet decided whether this is a bad or a good thing. It certainly creates both opportunities for learning AND for angst. On the other hand, pain seems to be the learning tool most often utilised by humanity. As Todd McCaffrey said to me this weekend, “Screwed is subjective.” Which rather neatly sums up the whole damn deal.

The UnSullen One is taking a philosophy class this quarter–something about how to use logic. It is fascinating to see him learning this whole new language and figuring out that defining one’s terms in this way is the first step toward talking to other people rationally and in an adult manner about philosophical questions. Without the definition of terms, the debates can’t go on.

It strikes me (rather roughly sometimes) that many interpersonal problems spring from a lack of clearly-defined terms agreed upon by both parties. Expectations are really little good if they’re not communicated clearly and thoroughly, and unless both parties agree the expectations mean the same things trouble will loom on the horizon sooner or later.

Eh, enough deep thoughts. There is a reading lesson for the Little Prince to get to, and math for the Princess, and cookies I promised to bake today.

Philosophy is nice, but I’ve got cookies to bake. Which just goes to show that I’m more of a practical utilitarian than a philosopher.

And glad to be one.

Over and out.