09.24.06
Posted in cooking at 9:40 pm by Hanne Blank
After several years of tinkering, I have finally come up with a moros y cristianos recipe that really fires on all cylinders. I do not cook my beans together with my rice, because I feel that gray rice rather reduces the desired effect, first of all, of the black bean “moors” and the white rice “christians,” but also because I prefer to cook my beans from dried beans, and to cook them for so long with rice would result in rice porridge with beans in it. Instead I make my beans and rice separately, and serve them in soup plates: a few scoops of rice, topped with a couple of ladles full of beans. I made it today, and was very happy with it, so I thought I would write out the recipe in case anyone else wanted to give it a try (if you do, let me know what you think of it). Read the rest of this entry »
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09.23.06
Posted in Virgin book, blogs, cats, cooking at 1:24 pm by Hanne Blank
There is only one way that a person ever gets to take a nap in my house, and that is beset by cats. We’ve only got the two of them, yet somehow they seem like more when you’re napping. It seems to have something to do with their incredible self-plastering capabilities. Cats don’t just lie next to you, they have this strange semi-fluid property so that they flow into the negative spaces around you, draped all over you, as close to dead weight as anything that is still flicking radar-dish ears in hopes of the sound of stinky can food cans being opened can possibly be. It can make rolling over a bit tricky, on account of the sharp bits which, for cats, are their best and most instinctive defense against earthquakes. But the felines have broken me to their ways, and now a nap without at least one supervisor seems somehow wrong.
I am a little concerned, though, that the cats have begun to find ways not just to control my napping posture but to infect my dreams. During the nap from which I just woke up (ably assisted by Mrs. Calabash, the Elder Statescat) I dreamt that we all lived in a strange apartment in some foreign country in which the bed was meant to be placed in a sort of high shop-window, a waist-high platform accessed through sliding doors on the side that opened into the apartment, and surrounded on the other three sides by thick glass panes lined with sheer curtains that could be opened or shut at will. The idea, it was pretty clear, was that the bed would be warmed by the sunshine. See what I mean? Clearly a cat fantasy. Read the rest of this entry »
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09.22.06
Posted in arrrrgh, making book, writing at 4:52 pm by Hanne Blank
Proofreading galleys is one of the more miserable parts of being a writer. You spend as much time as you can stand, for days on end, sitting there with a stack of paper in your lap and a pencil in your hand, looking for things you screwed up. There are typos and punctuation errors, orthographic brainfarts, dangling prepositions, misplaced modifiers, number errors, and those weird places where you went in and removed some text but forgot to make the grammar of the resulting Frankensentence functional. You find that you have usage problems that make you consider looking for a methadone clinic, and tense shifts so completely crap that you figure you must’ve blown your clutch ’round about paragraph two. If you’re really lucky you’ll have written a book with a bibliography at the end, because it’s like having gravel soaked in engine oil for dessert: the nitpickiest, most form-dependent, least context-driven, and easiest-to-bollix bit for last, all its colons and semicolons and alphabetical orderings and italics and endless authors’ names that must be checked for correctness.
Proofreading galleys nearly always gives me headaches. I would blame them on simple eyestrain if I thought I could get away with it, but what’s really going on is that it’s an intensively self-critical process, stressful and trying. One learns from it–one had better–but the mounting evidence of one’s variegated pockets of ignorance and illiteracy is humbling, sometimes humiliating. There are a few mistakes, such as my evident inability to spell the word “foreign” correctly on the first try, or my penchant for using “which” when I should’ve used “that” and vice versa, that I’ve been making since the eighth grade, when Mr. Scott tried and failed to teach me better. It tends to make me feel puny and ineffective, and sort of stupid, like everyone else gets the joke but I have to have it explained to me. It also makes me distrust the people who tell me I turn in remarkably clean copy, a compliment I’ve gotten from more than a few editors: if this is clean, I shudder to think what they consider dirty.
The worst part of proofreading galleys, though, is seeing all the things you would’ve done differently and not being able to change them. By the time a book is in galleys, you’re not supposed to be rewriting. If you absolutely must change a word here or there, or reorganize a sentence that’s technically grammatical but has been puffing at the Dickensian hookah to a point that it takes even you two readings to parse it, you can do that. But altering much more than that means risking the wrath of your managing editor, and believe you me, given that this is the person who is responsible for making sure your book looks good when it hits the streets, this is not someone you want to have mad at you.
So instead you have to sift through countless infelicities. You realize your lamentable tendency to lean upon the progressive tense rather than grabbing the best and most active verbs you can find. Adjectives a thousand times more apposite than the ones you used leap to mind when you are proofreading just to torment you. The yearning for a machete with which to chop out modifiers and adverbs is so strong you can taste it. Just give me one more chance! you cry, womanfully resisting the temptation to stab yourself with your Bad Badtz Maru mechanical pencil, One more editing pass! I can make it all better!
But you don’t have one more editing pass. This is it. You have already crossed the auctorial Rubicon; the fact that you have your dirty little digits curled around the pages of your galleys is, in a very real way, hardly more than a courtesy on the part of your managing editor. You don’t get the luxury of making a whole book’s worth of cosmetic fixes. You only get to fix what is really truly broken.
During the galleys more than at any other time of the process of creating a book, I am aware that (as Elizabeth Bear so often says) every book is a broken book. It is the time when I get to see what I’ve learned about writing since I finished the draft, and, if I’m really lucky, I can think back to other books and compare my mistakes in this one to the mistakes I made with those. The goal isn’t to get to a point where I never make mistakes. The goal is to always make more interesting mistakes, a better class of errors… and to always make the next book a better book. But to get there, you have to know what kinds of crap happened this time. And there’s just no other way to get that awareness, or that perspective on your own writing, than sifting through the book sentence by sentence, clause by clause, verb by verb.
I did my best, and I finished combing through the galleys today, just in time for Rosh Hashanah to start. I timed it this way intentionally. Maybe it’s superstitious of me, but I want to be able to send this book back to New York as soon after the start of the New Year as I can, and whisper to it as I box it up: L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem, may you be inscribed and sealed for a sweet and prosperous New Year.
And so may all of you! Good Yom Tov!
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Posted in administrative at 5:47 am by Hanne Blank
You know what? I’ve tried LiveJournal. I’ve tried Vox. I’ve tried Blogspot and Blogger.
I’ve come back to hosting my own damn blog, and have decided on WordPress as my software because it’s the most congenial one I’ve found. Plus it’s open-source, so what’s not to like?
It may take me a little while to get the hang of everything, so bear with me if there are periodic bumps and glitches. Golly, it’s nice to have some control over my blogily functions again.
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