I found them deep in the bottom of my clothes drawer. Don’t they sort of make one’s feet look otherworldly and alien-like? Also they incite a wild urge to wiggle one’s toes.

I like them!

————–

I added Gail Carson Levine’s Writing Magic - Creating Stories That Fly to my Amazon shopping cart to get free shipping on something, and have decided that I’ll probably give it away when I’m done reading and reviewing it.  It’s geared towards Young Adult and Children’s fiction, I think.  For those of you who don’t know, Levine is the author of Newberry Honor Book Ella Enchanted, and many other Young Adult novels.    Does anyone want my copy of it?  If you do, comment and I’ll put you in the drawing list again for when I finish with it.

8D Lucky for me, my mom makes it almost every month, and I get to help her!

For those of you who don’t know, banh cuon (literal translation: rolled cake) is a crepe-like roll with ground pork, minced wood ear mushroom, & sweet onions.  The batter is made with a mixture of rice flour, water, and vegetable oil, and it’s a common Vietnamese breakfast dish that’s usually serviced with blanched bean sprouts, fried dried onions, and nuoc cham, a sweet & salty Vietnamese dipping sauce.  The roll, when made well, has a soft, silky-smooth consistency and almost melts in your mouth when you bite into it.  Then there’s a burst of sweet-salty flavor when you reach the filling.  The texture that the minced mushroom adds is nice.  You just have to taste it to believe it.

A quick run-down of the process:

• Batter: rice flour, water, bit of vegetable oil.  Stir it all together until it is liquidy, like thickened milk.  Let it for an hour, stirring occasionally.
• Filling: Ground pork & finely chopped garlic, combined with sugar, just a little bit of salt, and pepper.  Marinate for a few hours, then take out and fry in pan with minced onions and wood ear mushrooms until cooked.  Set filling aside.
• Process: Heat a pan, medium-high heat.  Add a tablespoon of vegetable oil.  Pour batter on to form a thin sheet.  When it looks cooked, bring the pan off the stove quickly and over a big dish.  Plop the pan upside down to get the sheet of rice flour onto the dish.  Spoon some filling into the center, fold in two parallel sides over the filling, then roll it the other way.  Use a spoon to help, because it may be too hot to touch with your hands!  And then slide the roll off your dish into a storage container (possibly lined with paper towels).

Okay.  Pictures

The set-up.

The batter cooking on the pan. Looks better than this irl.

We made a lot.

Ready to eat~ *__*

To me, one of the great things about being a writer is that you notice things others don’t. As a writer, mundane details such as the coffee stain on a desk or the beauty mark underneath someone’s eye become richer, fuller, bursting with potential. And that’s always been the beauty of writing. It opens up the world.

So I see the coffee stain and imagine the trigger than must have caused such carelessness, or I think to myself that this person with this beauty mark would make a great side character. And then, as everyday life gets in the way and pushes more and more details in my direction, each more distracting than the one before it, I forget about the coffee stain and the beauty mark, and that story, those characters, are lost forever.

If only I had written it down.

These days I carry a composition notebook with me everywhere and jot down quick impressions as I ride on the bus or sit down at a table for lunch. The world is a treasure trove of ideas. No lie.

“But what do I take notes of? When will I ever use these notes?” you may ask. There’s no way of telling, for either of those questions. But I would suggest taking notes on absolutely everything that you find interesting. The professor whose mouth froths at the corner with spit as he lectures energetically in front of a class, the rows and rows of old photos on a restaurant’s wall, the cat who hops onto your balcony every night at 8 like clockwork. You may not have any use for it now, but maybe one day, when you’re in need of ideas, you can flip through your pages of notes and find interesting characters, settings, and situations in them.

I found no less than ten snippets of notes from my 2006 notebook that I’ll be turning into story bits for NaNoWriMo.

Remember: the more detailed your notes are, the more vivid and real you’ll be able to make your writing. So don’t skimp on the details. I find that labeling your notes with a header (CHARACTER, or SETTING, or IDEA) helps when trying to find things to fill one’s story. Another thing to keep in mind is that your notes don’t have to be accurate. Many people get caught up in finding just the right word to describe something they see faithfully, instead of writing down what the situation could be about. Use your imagination in your note-taking. A woman is crying on the bus. Is that all you write? No. You should write why she’s crying. You should write what happens when she gets off the bus.

Challenge: Next time you’re in a public place, take notes on everything that interests you, gathering as much detail as possible. Then go home and try to compose a short story or snippet using your notes. (I’d also love it if you shared what you came up with!)

Write your novel this November!

Each year, thousands upon thousands of writers gear up and plunge themselves into a crash-course adventure in noveling. National Novel Writing month is just two months away, and I’ve gotten all that I can out of my copy of Chris Baty’s guide through the thirty days of novel-madness that is NaNoWriMo.

So I’m giving it away so it can get better use.  It’s in pretty good condition, minimal wear and no unsightly stains.  It really fired me up the first time I did NaNo, and is a really well-written and amusing read.  Something I would buy again, except I’ve read it five times already, and I’d like to pass it onto someone else.

So if anyone wants it, comment and tell me about what exciting thing you’re writing this November. I’ll do a drawing for the winner on October 1st, and have it send out by the 15th.

=D Good luck!

I can’t say it’s the best thing ever, though it is one of the few pieces that I’m very proud of.

Here’s the piece in its entirety:

House Husband
My father is a rock on the hills overlooking the distant horizon, waiting for my mother, the soldier, to find her way back to him. He sits, still and silent, and the raindrops are his only tears, the wind his only sigh. He doesn’t shift, doesn’t complain, doesn’t mind the wait. He is good at waiting–just as he is at cooking, cleaning, changing the fish tank, carrying heavy loads of laundry up and down moldy stairs, vacuuming the carpet, taping my mother’s soap operas, mopping the floors, putting me to bed. So he grows moss at the base of his stone-feet, and the water falls into his ever-open eyes, and when the soldier comes back from her long battle with customers and invaders and employers and herself, he can no longer speak, or see, or hear, or taste, or feel. He is the rock on the hills overlooking the distant horizon, waiting.

So the next time you’re at the music store, pick up something at random in a genre you enjoy, and see if any of the song titles inspire stories or characters for you. What about the cover art? Or, has there always been a song you’ve really liked for its details and its impact on the soul? Try to write a short story to explore the characters and situations in the story.

Happy writing!

Easy way out: Pillsbury Doughboy cookies.  But those never turn out the way I want them to.  Too brittle and dry and tastes exactly like what there are: something you bought at the store.   So I ventured out into the internet, and found this recipe  for soft-batch choco chip cookies at allrecipes.com.

Pictured above are the actual chocolate chip cookies. I was too busy eating the cinnamon raisin cookies to take any pictures, I’m afraid. But it’s practically the same thing.

I’ve made cookies using the recipe linked above as a base three times. The first time I didn’t change anything, and the cookies were edible, but not fantastic. The second time, I added some spices, and a bit more sugar (because I have a sweet tooth). Here are the spices:

• Cinnamon sugar
• Nutmeg
• Allspice

Not a lot.  Maybe for the full recipe you’d add half a teaspoon of each.  If it smells good after you’ve blended everything in, then you’ve done good.  If you can’t smell any difference, add more.  Then, when everything’s done, I fold in raisins instead of chocolate chips.  I bake until the cookies are golden brown and immediately take them out. They remind me almost of gingerbread, though not a strong–a softer flavor. They smell so great you can’t help eating several all at once.

I’ve found that adding allspice and nutmeg (in small quantities) to most sweet baked dishes gives them a nice toasty, spicy taste that makes them more special. Try it!

Made from a soft-batch recipe from allrecipes.com. Perfect.

Lately I’ve been having a pretty hard and stressful time, for a variety of reasons not appropriate for public consumption.  I’ve noticed that on the days when things really seem crappy, all I want to do is stay home and bake.  Obviously, because I have a job, I can’t just stay home and bake.  So I get up extra early or stay up extra late instead.

I’m a food enthusiast, but for a long time what really got my enthusiasm going was the eating of the food.  Because food = yum.   Over the past month or so, though, I’ve come to realize why there are so many people who buy cookbooks and trade recipes.

It’s a way to pass the time in the pleasantest way possible.  There are mornings when I sit at the dining room table, eyes closed, just soaking in the glorious aroma of vanilla and cinnamon and nutmeg that floats in the air sometimes for hours after the baking is done.  As the cookies bake I read a book or brainstorm for my writing, knowing that there will be the oven alarm to ping me out of my fantasy.   And when that ping does comes, there is deliciousness that makes me smile when I taste, no matter how down I feel.  There’s also this incredibly mellow and sweet sense of accomplishment, that for me, lingers until all the baked goods are gone.

And then I make more.

Despite being slightly broken, this flan was creamy and sumptuous.

But the novel I’m writing won’t be about my memories, though hopefully I can still put the  part of myself that loves Vietnam and thinks it’s beautiful into the piece. It’ll be about the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was a major historical event that has been written about probably a hundred, a thousand times over.  Still, for years now, I’ve wanted to write a novel about the war and the people that it affected–people who lived and loved and created memories in Vietnam that must be even more vivid and wonderful than that of my four-year old self are.

I grew up in America listening to Vietnamese songs written before 1975, which were very good and often inspired by war, since Vietnam has a history of being colonized by other nations.    I’m not a particular fan of patriotism or nationalism, so when I take time to consider it, I’m often surprised that I love so much of the stuff.  So much so, that I’m actually writing a book inspired by the songs, based on the lives of the composers who wrote them and the lives of the people they were written for.

I really can’t say with any confidence what they novel is actually going to be like.  I can only tell you what I want it to be about.   And this is it–I want the novel to be about:

• Why words are written, and how they bring people together
• Loneliness and belonging, and the sense of home
• Love
• Guilt and sacrifice
• Music writers and performers
• Memory, and an era gone by

In fact, the actual novel is going to revolve around the lives of Vietnamese immigrants who experienced the war and, twenty years later, as still trying to let go of who they were before the war forced them to change that.  They are all getting ready for a get-together (for some as-yet-unspecified reason) at an aging composer’s house, where something interesting will (hopefully) happen.

This is my chance to learn more about what happened in a place I might have called home and still remember so vividly after having lived there for less than four years of early life.   It’s my chance to really understand the millions of Vietnamese who live and work all around the world, and who, deep in their hearts, still think of Vietnam as home.   I’m probably not going to pull it off, but if I do it will be pretty special.

Here are some Vietnamese songs below for your listening pleasure:

Title translations, in order: Saigon–A Memory Without A Name, Winter Night, and The Moon Fading On The Street.   The first two are sung by legendary Vietnamese singer Khanh Ly, whose voice is actually mentioned in the first song’s lyrics (where are the rainy-season days walking under our coats, holding hands, whispering quietly, as the flower stalls and music shops ring with Khanh Ly’s voice) and who sang many popular songs of the day. Her voice remains one of the most unique and beautiful Vietnamese singing voices on stage, even today.   Winter Night is about the loneliness of a traveler who watches the world around him as day gives way to night and longs for his homeland.   In the third song, the writer tells the story of a chance meeting with a boyhood friend who has now become a soldier, and how he will only be able to spend a night in his familiar, mostly-unchanged hometown before he has to go in the morning, no longer a boy.