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Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith


Last Updated: 6/19/2009

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City: SEATTLE
Country: US

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July 9, 2009 - Thursday 
Life has been a bit overstuffed this week. So nothing today. Perhaps not tomorrow.

I hope your week has been and will continue to be exactly as exciting as you would like. If you have anything particularly fun/interesting/appalling to share, feel free to do it here. I'll be reading but probably not commenting (I'm busy, not gone).
17:53 
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July 7, 2009 - Tuesday 

An eye for an eye a tooth and tooth for a tooth an eye... See this article in the Telegraph:
The procedure began when one of Mr Jones' canine teeth was removed and converted into a holder for a special optical lens by drilling a hole in it.

The tooth was then inserted into his cheek for three months to enable it to grow new tissue and blood vessels. Then finally came the delicate operation to insert the tooth, complete with the fitted lens into Mr Jones' right eyeball.

Within two weeks of the final operation to implant the tooth in his eyeball his sight returned and he was told he had almost perfect vision in his right eye.

(thanks, Cindy)
Do you ever wake up and think that life is just getting weird?
15:29 
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July 7, 2009 - Tuesday 

The Lambda Literary Foundation is compiling a database of all past Lammy winners and finalists, so if you're a Lammy finalist or winner from the past 21 years, please send your contact information. If you're not but you know someone who is, please point them to LLF.

LLF is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/LambdaLiterary. And pretty soon there will be a new website to play with. (No, I'm not doing it. You can all heave a sigh of relief.) More as and when...

01:01 
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July 5, 2009 - Sunday 

Another hot day coming up. I'm not going to tax your poor tired brains with anything difficult. Instead, we're going to go LOUD. But first, an aside about Kelley's stepfather, Arthur Woodbury.
Art is a musician. He was the first person, I think, to use the Stanford mainframe to compose. He was one of the first people to work on artificial intelligence there. He edited the first incarnation of Source magazine. He taught at the University of South Florida for more than twenty years. (Now he lives up the street.) But for our purposes today, all you need to know is that he played, briefly, with Blue Cheer in the early days.
Until two days ago, I had a vague notion that Blue Cheer hung out at the Fillmore, dropped acid, and played Big Brother & the Holding Company type hippie music. Ha! Wrong wrong wrong. Two days ago, FoAN Pierce, put up four YouTube videos of music for hot summer days on his blog (all fab--go look), one of which was Blue Cheer doing "Summertime Blues":

It completely did my head in: Blue Cheer were the first speed metal hair band! Whoa! (Okay, Status Quo maybe--maybe--were first but Blue Cheer, wow, just listen to them. Judas Priest, Metallica...all those people wouldn't exist without this sound.)
So, hey, watch it again, and this time turn it up to eleven.
19:14 
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July 4, 2009 - Saturday 

Here's a cartoon that I stole from the New Yorker (who appear to have unilaterally cancelled my digital subscription, so I'm not much inclined to play by the rules). It's by Farley Katz. (Go buy something of his.) I keep looking at it and grinning.

I find that I'm in the mood for something like this, something insane and slightly dangerous--but recoverable from. You ever feel like that?

17:24 
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July 3, 2009 - Friday 

This week I'm in book shark mode, cruising relentlessly after a Hild plot thread that won't quite let me catch it. I will catch it, and soon--see definition of 'relentless'--but it's meant not much sleep or attention for other things.

Update: Ha! Got it! Shook it and tore it to bits. Now I get to write a battle scene! (My version of swimming and sleeping with my eyes open. Picture me with a big shark smile...)

16:56 
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July 1, 2009 - Wednesday 

We were having dinner the other day with a friend and her new sweetie, and talking about food. Kelley had cooked the meal (butternut squash soup, pot roast--with potatoes tossed in butter and oregano, steamed cabbage tossed in butter and black pepper--followed by rhubarb and apple crumble with delicious local cream). K was explaining that she generally did the baking and for-guests cooking and that I was the one who just made shit up sometimes. She said I was the "MacGyver of food." I was really taken with that description and so thought I'd share a recent MacGyver meal.

We had one potato, one onion, two carrots, a bag of mushrooms, a variety of herbs, half a bulb of garlic, some frozen vegetable juice, left-over cream from the crumble yumminess, left-over wine, half a bag of lentils and a variety of nuts. I made nut-and-lentil loaf with mashed potatoes and carrots and red wine cream sauce. The next day for lunch I had a nut loaf sandwich with Branston pickle. (Butter bread, warm up slice of nut loaf in microwave. Smear Branston pickle on one side of bread. Slap together. Eat. Trust me, it works.)

Here's the narrative version--how I approached everything. (I've included more orderly instructions at the end for those who like their recipes to look like recipes.)

Put the lentils in a bowl to soak and get out the veggie juice (saved from things like steaming cabbage) to defrost. Combine the hazel nuts (say half a pound), almonds (quarter of a pound) and walnuts (half a pound). Grind them up to meal in a food processor. Drain the lentils, put them in a pan with the vegetable juice and some extra water and boil until very, very cooked (doesn't take long--forty minutes maybe--but don't, do notnotnot, add salt at this stage; they'll turn all leathery). Then chop up the mushrooms very fine (I'm guessing there were about 6 ounces of mushrooms, maybe two cups when minced--but, eh, I'm just guessing) and mince the onion and a tiny bit (one or two cloves--it's a delicate taste we're after, not something to drive the vampires away). Set aside one or two mushrooms for the sauce. Saute the onion, garlic, and mushrooms in olive oil until it turns translucent. Then glug in some wine (half a cup?) and cook the whole thing down. As it reduces, add herbs to taste (sage is good--but anything kind of hot-weather dusty, e.g. oregano, would also work). In a large bowl, combine lentils, nuts, herby wine glop and smush about. Turn into a non-stick loaf pan (or oil up a non-nonstick pan) and pat into a loaf shape (I use a wooden spatula to kind of push down the sides), cover in foil, and bake in the oven at 350 for, oh, hmmn, dunno, fifty minutes?

I assume you know how to make mashed potato and have a favourite way to prepare carrots. (I like carrots almost anyway you can think of; they're a practically perfect vegetable--but this would also work with a green veg like cabbage or Brussel sprouts--love those things but they've gotta be fresh.)

For the sauce, melt butter in the frying pan you used for the glop earlier, slice thinly the mushroom you set aside, saute, pour in more wine, cook down. Before serving stir in some cream. You don't really need the sauce--the loaf is moist enough if you don't overcook it--but it looks pretty and sorta pulls it all together.

If you just happen to have a perfectly ripe nectarine to share for dessert it's even better. Also, note that if you futz with the sauce (use oil instead of butter, flour instead of cream) and the mashed potatoes (mash without butter), then the whole meal is vegan.

For those of you who like their recipes to look like recipes, here you go (but remember, every single number here is a guess):

8 oz walnuts
8 oz hazelnuts
4 oz almonds
8 oz dried brown lentils
6 oz mushrooms
1 large onion
1/2 cup red wine
2 small cloves garlic
pinch of sage

Grind together nuts to coarse meal. Cook lentils. Mince and saute vegetables in oil. Add wine to saute pan, along with sage, reduce by half. Combine everything in large bowl. Turn into non-stick loaf pan, pat to shape, cover, bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 mins. Serve with mashed potato, vegetable of your choice, and creamy red wine sauce.
Delicious, nutritious and cheap.
19:33 
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June 30, 2009 - Tuesday 

I remember the last century fondly. In 1996 email management was easy: answer it all the same day, every day. Inbox Zero was my default. Now, oof, Inbox Zero looks like a mythical beast. (A brief definition: inbox = the list of emails newly arrived and/or marked as new so I remember to respond. Ha ha ha.)

So how many of you have ever achieved the nirvana of Inbox Zero? Have you done it this century?

How do you manage your mail?

Some people manage it like laundry: just leave it lying around, and then it either gets so stale you can throw it away without a qualm, or it becomes magically fresh again, i.e. interesting, and you're motivated to respond. Some people despair on a regular basis, delete everything, and send a cheery general email: just lost my email, so if you didn't get a response, email me again.

I used to organise and save my mail. I had a massive 12-year archive, which I lost in a hard drive meltdown in 2005. I was mostly relieved--though very sorry to have lost the couple of dozen emails from Carolyn, my sister, who died in 2001.

I have, in fact, achieved Inbox Zero once this year--around February, I think. I wish I'd thought to take a screenshot of the momentous event. Today I'm going to do the cull-the-stale thing (requests for blurbs for books long-since published; requests for essays for journals already in press; requests for auction items for causes long-since failed--are you seeing a pattern?) and reduce the inbox by about a third.

So how about you? How do you deal? Check as many answers as apply.

(sigh, it looks as though MySpace isn't allowing this poll--go to my webpage or Ask Nicola
....
17:57 
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June 29, 2009 - Monday 

...and it's a good thing. Look at these two young women. They've just been voted "best couple" by their senior class at a South Bronx high school:

Mention the South Bronx to marriage equality advocates in New York, and many think of State Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr., the fiery Pentecostal minister and legislator from the area who vehemently opposes same-sex marriage. Ask young lesbians Victoria (“Vikky”) Cruz and Deoine Scott about that kind of resistance, however, and it barely seems to square with their personal experience as an out couple in an area high school.

Vikky 17, and Deoine, 18, were overwhelmingly voted “best couple” by their peers in the graduating class at Mott Haven Village Preparatory High School, a first for the small public high school located in the senate district represented by Diaz, Sr. Vikky, who participates in the Radio Rookies program for aspiring young journalists sponsored by local public radio station WNYC-FM, reported on the historic experience in this piece that first aired on Thursday.
Sometimes I try to imagine how my life might have been if the world had treated me and my first girlfriend this way thirty years ago. And you know what? My imagination utterly fails me, it just fuses into a lump. The differences, for me, are literally unimaginable. Wow. I can't begin to tell you how pleased I am for these two girls. What an amazing life they have ahead of them.
18:19 
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June 28, 2009 - Sunday 

It was cool to meet so many of our neighbours--some people who have only been here for a year or two and others who have seen the place go from unincorporated farmland to a city neighbourhood. One man, with a six year-old daughter, started to introduce himself to a neighbour and she said, "Oh, you're the Eagle Scout who knocked on my door all those years ago and signed me up to learn CPR!"

The food turned out better than any potluck has a right to. The beer was cold, the sun warm, the conversation lively. It turns out our neighbours are heartier partyers than me--I lasted about two hours but many people were there for four.

Here for your delectation and delight are two pix (taken by the lovely K). This is the commons:

This is a view from the other direction (our driveway on the left):

16:48 
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June 27, 2009 - Saturday 

It's getting towards the end of Life Away From Keyboard week. I should be back, paying full attention, on Monday. Today we're prepping for our big neighbourhood garden party/potluck BBQ on the commons next to our house. We've invited about 30 families; no idea how many will show. But we have two grills, a badminton net up in a neighbour's garden, shady trees, coolers full of beer.

It'll be good to meet some of the people who live a couple of blocks up the street. You never know when that apocalypse will make us glad to be a community. Plus they might, y'know, bring good food...

The weather looks perfect: low 70s clear sky, light breeze. No is currently mowing their lawn, reroofing their house, or hammering on their deck, so it's peaceful, too.

I hope your Saturday is shaping up well.

19:04 
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June 26, 2009 - Friday 

I met Kelley 21 years ago today. I'm still delighted. And so far we're having a practically perfect day.

I wonder if anyone at this year's Clarion or Clarion West is falling in love? One day, someone's going to write a romance novel set in a 6-week writing workshop.

Two pics of us, then and now:

21:07 
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June 24, 2009 - Wednesday 

This is still Life Away from Keyboard week. Here for your ponderation is an article from the Telegraph:

Women gardeners' voices speed up growth of tomato plants much more than men's, it found.

In an experiment run over a month, they found that tomato plants grew up to two inches taller if they were serenaded by the dulcet tones of a female rather than a male.

How many of you talk to your plants, inside or out?

22:04 
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June 23, 2009 - Tuesday 

I promised a while ago that I'd write a piece on The Woman Question, that is, my approach to gender in historical (and fantasy) fiction. And I will. Very soon. It's something that I'm actively engaged with as I write Hild.

But this is Life Beyond Keyboard week. (Yes, I do have friends, neighbours, a sweetie, social and community obligations, and responsibilities to/for a couple of organisations. Hey, it's not *all* about the writing--just mostly.)

So for now I'll leave you with this, as true now as it has been throughout history (and all cultures, as far as I can tell):

"Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them." Discuss.

19:03 
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June 22, 2009 - Monday 

Last year, FoAN Karina Meléndez made Sun on Dragonfly, a video response to my story, "Touching Fire." It blew me away. I'd never seen anything like it (well, except this). It occurred to me yesterday that recent AN readers might not have seen it. This week is Busy Week for me, so it seemed like an ideal opportunity to reshow the vid. Enjoy. (Depending on your work rules, it may or may not be Safe For Work. I think it is--but, eh, I'm not always the best judge.)


Here is the original audio the vid is based on:
 
(direct link)

If you prefer the written word you can download the "Touching Fire" .pdf for free here. Of course, you can also buy With Her Body, my short collection ("Touching Fire," "Yaguara," and "Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese").

If you like the vid, go over to YouTube and drop a comment for Karina.
16:28 
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