From A to B

February 20th, 2013

Hello, friends! The lake is frozen, it’s snowing like crazy, and I’m dreaming of this Galangal and Coconut Milk Soup. (Don’t heed the blogger’s advice to substitute ginger for galangal. Go galangal, or go home!) I’m also thinking about my chaotic, haphazard, impulsive version of the writing process.

Digression: I am moderately interested in cars. I am married to someone with an obsessive interest in cars. Together, we have made children who are deeply, excessively, hypernormally interested in cars (also trucks, fire engines, buses, construction vehicles, etc). We have a small collection of bashed-up English car magazines dating back to 2005 that, appropriately deployed, can hypnotize both of the children for at least 15 minutes. They are a precious commodity in a house without a tv. Anyway, what I’m saying is that cars are high in the Top 5 subjects discussed in our house. I can confidently state that none of us has ever used the phrase, “So long as it gets me from A to B…” with even a fleck of sincerity.

But “getting from A to B” is one of the things I enjoy most about writing. I love to sit down, create a starting point, and then wonder, “Now, how will I get this character to where I need her? What should happen next? Does that ring true? What if something else happened? What if…” And I’m off. It’s almost always surprising, startling, satisfying. The vehicle matters.

What are your favourite parts about the writing process?

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The Year of the Snake!

February 13th, 2013

Hello friends, and Happy New Year! Are you celebrating the Year of the Snake?

Before Nick and I had children, I would often go back to Vancouver to see my extended family for Chinese New Year. That’s all in the past, I’m afraid: can you imagine dragging a couple of little kids 5000km each way, just for a short holiday? Oh, the jet lag…

Still, I’m sad that my young children won’t have early, fond memories of the holiday parties, the feasting, the family time. We do our own small celebration in Kingston and I imagine they’ll be nostalgic about those memories, but it’s not really the same.

Funnily enough, though, my son’s school is creating its own celebration. Today in his kindergarten class, one of the teachers is cooking dragon noodles; there will be red paper envelopes with lucky money (a chocolate coin) inside; and my son and I baked almond cookies to share with everyone, to symbolize a sweet year.

And this is one lovely place where my far-flung family and my current community meet: in my mother’s recipe for Almond Cookies, which she’s made every year since I can remember. Here it is.

Almond Cookies

9 oz flour
6 oz butter
4 oz icing sugar
2 egg yolks
2 oz ground almonds
Almond essence
Vanilla essence
.
That’s the entire recipe, as written! They were cryptic in the olden days.
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Clarifications:
- I use whole spelt flour and granulated sugar with no troubles
- I don’t measure the “essences”, but a 1/2 teaspoon of almond and 1 tsp of vanilla seems about right
- You need whole, blanched almonds for decoration, 1 per cookie.
- The recipe makes about 3 dozen small cookies.
- This is a crisp, subtle cookie. If you’re looking for a super-sweet, ooey-gooey, over-the-top cookie, you’ll be disappointed. If you love shortbread and almonds, though, they’re utterly addictive.
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Directions:
  1. Preheat oven to 350F. Butter two or three baking sheets, or line them with parchment paper.
  2. Cream together the butter and sugar, then beat in the egg yolks, almond extract, and vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour and ground almonds. Add the flour to the butter mixture. The dough should be stiff.
  3. Roll spoonfuls of dough into 1-inch balls, press a whole blanched almond into the top of each cookie, and arrange on baking sheets. These don’t grow much, so they can be 2 inches apart. Bake for 9-11 minutes, until pale golden.
I hope you enjoy them! We certainly do.

 

 

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Rethinking Richard

February 6th, 2013

Hello, friends. Have you been following the recent news about the identification of Richard III’s bones? History nerds all over the world (your humble blogger included) are jumping for joy. The past is a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle, and some people in Leicester just got a corner piece.

The whole Richard conversation perfectly encapsulates what I love most about writing historical fiction: exchanging ideas, puzzling things out, realizing what I don’t know, and figuring out how to learn it. Is this how your brain works, too?

This is a short blog post because I’m hard at work on Rivals in the City but I’ll leave you with a photo. Kristan Tetans, who writes the Victorian Peeper blog, made my morning when she shared this on Facebook:

Happy Wednesday!

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Caroline Heldman’s Sexy Lie

January 30th, 2013

Hello, friends. You may have seen this already but this week, I wanted to highlight Caroline Heldman’s crisp, powerful TEDx Talk, “The Sexy Lie”. In thirteen engaging minutes, Heldman defines objectification; teaches us how to identify it; and outlines a few strategies for how to deal with it.

This brilliant talk is aimed at young people and it doesn’t talk down or attempt to be chummy. Instead, it takes a fraught subject and distills it. I know I’ll be taking its lessons and teaching them to the young people in my life. I hope you will, too.

What did you see or read this week that really impressed you, made you want to share it with everyone, and maybe even realigned the way you see things?

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Mary Quinn, in new guise

January 23rd, 2013

Good morning, friends. Um. It was -36 degrees C in Kingston this morning, if you factor in the wind chill. (That’s -32.8F, if you’re wondering.) I realize that’s just a regular winter day if you live in, say, Saskatoon, but I have never been happier to put on my merino longjohns. I feel sorry for everybody who has to work outdoors today. But I did NOT feel sorry for the FedEx guy, when he trudged (unhappily) up my path, bearing THIS!

Yes, it’s an early paperback copy of The Traitor in the Tunnel, which will release next month. And I know I’ve been in raptures about beautiful cover art recently, but I hope you’ll humour me (again) in admiring this one. Candlewick Press puts so much time and love into each book, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be published by them.

Until next week!

 

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A Spy in the House, redesigned!

January 16th, 2013

Hello, friends! I just received an absolutely wonderful surprise in the mail. (If you’re thinking that authors often receive delightful surprises in the mail, you’re right. As if we need another reason to feel privileged…) It was a bulging, oversized sack containing a envelope full of this:

Yes, that image is massive. Can you tell I’m excited? Ideally, I’d like to be able to see it from the moon.

This is the redesigned cover that’s now on the UK and Australian editions of A Spy in the House. The full cover looks like this:

I love everything about this cover: colour, font, background image, the Mary Quinn logo that looks like a cameo, the rubbed and weathered effect around the corners… I have one front and centre in my study and every time I glance at it, I smile.

The old cover, the first UK cover, looked like this:

I still think this is a strong cover. The gloves glow, the fonts are well chosen, and I love the map of London in the background. It’s also a great homage to classic mystery design (think Agatha Christie), which often shows key plot elements in a kind of still-life.

But this one? This one is a stunner. I’m so glad that my UK publisher, Walker Books, redesigned it for this new printing. And I’m ecstatic to know that it’s now out there, in bookstores.

What do you think? Thoughts, impressions, preferences?

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The cure for perfectionism

January 9th, 2013

Hello, friends. Yesterday, my four-year-old was on the brink of tears because the picture he was drawing failed to live up to the picture in his head. I watched him and thought, “Oh, my darling. You too?”

Don’t get me wrong: I am very glad and grateful to live in a world filled with perfectionists. I wouldn’t have the courage to drive a car or heat my house or, generally, live my life, if the world were maintained by the casual and the feckless. Still, I feel for the boy.

We had a chat about how even talented artists can’t always create what they see in their heads, how professional musicians can’t always play what they hear inside. And I mentioned, casually, that I can’t always write what I want, either.

It was oddly liberating, admitting that to a child. It was useful, too, articulating what’s been bogging me down with Rivals in the City. And because I was talking to a child, I had to frame it gently. And that was perhaps most useful of all: the quiet, matter-of-fact acknowledgement that even a finished work will be imperfect, will not quite attain the vision I had for it. And that’s acceptable, too.

I offered my son a parent’s clichés: effort counts; practice equals progress; if you give up, you’ll never find out what you’re capable of. Banal as I sounded to my own ears, I thought the clichés were right, too.

How about you, friends? Are you perfectionists, or happy-go-lucky approximators? How do you deal with perfectionism?

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2012 in books

December 26th, 2012

Hello, friends! If you celebrated Christmas yesterday, I hope you had a blissful, delicious, festive day. This year, I included brussels sprouts in the meal (using this recipe) and they were superlative – the highlight of the meal for me. Unlikely, but true.

But I’m not here to talk about cruciferous vegetables. I wanted to share my absolute favourite books of 2012 with you:

Non-fiction

You saw this one coming, didn’t you? I’ve already blogged about Charles Dickens: A Life twice (once at the start, and again on finishing), and raved about Claire Tomalin many, many times. It was splendid. Highly, highly recommended.

Fiction

May I jump on the Hilary Mantel bandwagon? And yes, isn’t it a rather crowded bandwagon? Nevertheless, my favourite two novels of 2012 were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Each book haunted me for weeks after reading it, and every time I casually open the book to a random page, my eye lands on a perfectly pitched, devastatingly good sentence.

Picture book

Am I the only person in the world who hadn’t heard of Jon J Muth? Nick picked out his telling of Stone Soup quite by chance, in a busy bookstore a couple of days before Christmas. It’s the Stone Soup story you already know, transposed to historical China, featuring three Zen monks. The illustrations are profoundly beautiful – this cover image I grabbed doesn’t begin to do justice to the light in the paintings – and the story is deeply, solidly rooted in a love for China and Zen Buddhism. It’s one of the few picture-books I want to gaze upon for a long, long time.

And these are my end-of-year selections. What were your favourite books of 2012?

 

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A little hiccup

December 19th, 2012

Hello friends, and apologies for the lack of blog post this week. We’ve undergone a small obstacle course of lesser ailments for the past week, which culminated in an impromptu urgent-care visit this morning (we thought the 4yo might get appendicitis for Christmas, but it’s just gastro – oh joy!). Today is my second-last day of childcare before the holidays start, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to dive into Scrivener now.

2 thoughts, before I pretend that the internet does not exist:

1. I love publicly funded healthcare. Love. It.

2. Blissful Holidays!

I’ll see you here next week, on Boxing Day, with my favourite books of 2012.

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Negotiating with tradition

December 12th, 2012

Hello friends! We celebrate Christmas in our house, and we’re still figuring out our traditions. I come from a family whose only tradition is to not have any traditions (even the Christmas tree was hit-and-miss throughout my childhood, and I doubt we’ve ever eaten the same Christmas dinner twice), and my spouse, Nick, is from a family with very strong, sentimental rituals. He and I have talked about what kinds of traditions we want to cultivate. The problem? Our lives are so hectic right now that it seems as though every year, we crash-land in the middle of December with no fruitcake, no lights, and the vaguest of plans to get a tree “soon”.

We have to get our act together.

So this morning I was thinking, what are the most important Christmas traditions for our family? Clearly, we’re going to have to be selective, this year. For me, it’s about a special family meal that we look forward to each year. There will be small menu changes, but it’s not going to be Chinese food one year, followed by Italian the next. For Nick, it’s about the tree and the excitement of Father Christmas for little kids. Following in his dad’s tradition, Nick will create tiny reindeer hoofprints for the kids to find on Christmas morning, as evidence of Santa’s visit. For our four-year-old, it’s all about the gingerbread house, aka an excuse to eat unlimited amounts of Smarties and buttercream icing. And our littlest one is just learning about Christmas, which means she’ll be very forgiving of any amount of last-minute holiday anarchy.

As the kids grow, become more independent, and develop interests of their own, our traditions will evolve. We’ll get to the Christmas baking, the crafty ornaments, the homemade Advent calendar, the big Christmas party – one day. In the meantime, we’ll focus on our dearest rituals and enjoy them to the fullest.

What are your favourite, most-loved holiday traditions?

P.S. There’s a nearby family farm that raises heritage-breed bronze turkeys. The birds roam outdoors, get lots of sunshine, eat organic food (and bugs), and generally have happy turkey lives. We’re all set – for 2013, that is. Yes, we’re waiting on a turkey that hasn’t even been born yet. We are going to be SO ready next year!

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