I perked up a little at the discovery of frozen gluten-free waffles, which can, in a pinch, substitute for bread… quite deliciously in fact.

But then, glory of glories, I learned of a magical breadmaker that has a dedicated gluten-free setting. What does this mean, you ask? Well, to be honest I’m not 100% sure. But I think it has to do with a) the fact that you have to mix and knead the shit out of gluten-free breads to make them even moderately elastic and bread-like, which is something that regular breadmakers don’t do. b) the paddle has to be really sturdy to support those super-dense gluten-free flours without cracking. c) there’s maybe one less rising cycle? Gluten-free baking is a finicky art. Some things work out really well (ie my now-famous gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free bacon chocolate chip cookies) and other things are total failures.

Then for my birthday this year, some of my friends, no doubt tired of listening to me complain, chipped in to buy it for me! So far, I’ve made 4 loaves of bread with my magic breadmaker. The first one was mediocre because I got too impatient and didn’t wait for all the ingredients to become room temperature. The second one was transcendent. It had the taste and consistency of real bread. I used it for a SANDWICH. I don’t know if you realize how amazing that is. The third loaf was a total flop because again, I got impatient and didn’t use the right ingredients. However! I did use the bread-like product to make croutons. The fourth loaf was good. Not great, but good.

But the point is, even GOOD bread is a revelation to me. I can dip it in things! I can put things on it! Toast! This breadmaker is amazing. I’ve only used the GF setting, but it has several regular bread settings, as well as a “dough” setting for if you want to mix and rise dough but then cook it in the oven (for, say, rolls or bagels), it has a “pasta” setting for, I can only assume, making pasta. AND it has a “jam/jelly” setting for making jelly. I find this last setting a little inscrutable, but I trust my Breadman implicitly. I know he wouldn’t let me down, not even for jelly.

I may not be able to blithely toss bags of bread into my shopping cart like the rest of you, but now I can make delicious alchemy out of sorghum, teff, and a whole bunch of other weird grains you’ve never even heard of!

Gluten-free vegan red velvet cookies with vegan cream cheese icing. Roughly pilfered from this recipe.

Pan-fried chicken hearts with a side of golf sauce.

Feels good to eat the heart of another animal and wash it down with a crapload of sugar. Mmm. Happy Valentine’s Day!

I found this movie barely watchable. The dialogue was irritating to me… almost on par with Juno, it had a strange combination of melodrama and cutesy aloofness, as well as one of the movie tropes that I find most aggravating. I don’t remember the conversation about the movie when it came out, so can someone tell me what I missed? What does everyone like about it?

As it is right now, I’m thinking I might have been better off watching the Superbowl. Is that one word?

Wouldn’t that be nice to hear? I’d love some definitive advice on novel writing. But it isn’t to be. Each novel, they say, is different. Each writer is different. Each writer is different while writing each different novel. How irritating is that? So I found when I turned to Twitter for advice on whether or not to start editing my novel from the beginning before finishing the first draft.  The resounding answer? Yes! And also: No!

What’s a girl to do? I decided to do both. When I feel inspired to write new stuff, I plow ahead in the rough draft. I’m not much of an outliner, not yet anyway, so I usually set my sights on a distant plot point and try to swim steadily toward it. When I’m feeling more analytical, I take a look at my first chapter, ripping it up, writing new stuff, taking notes, thinking about character. And you know, this method has been working really well for me. It satisfies both my need to create new stuff and to feel like I’m making progress toward a story that actually makes sense and that I wouldn’t be upset about the world seeing if I got run over by a bus.

I’ve also been steering clear of buses, just in case.

But of course, if there’s any advice to be given about writing, it’s that no one way works for everybody. And I’m always open to new ideas… so does anyone have new ideas to share? What writing/editing combo works for you in shorts or long stuff? How much has the advice of others worked for you?

Check me out as I intermittently guest blog over the next couple of weeks for the fabulous Jeff Vandermeer… Maybe the practice will help me get going here too.

Happy Support Our Zines Day! As the proud parent of one of these ‘zines, I can’t tell you how important it is that we all (writers and non-writers alike) continue to read and financially support short story zines.  I feel a little bit like a panhandler with a Starbucks cup in downtown Chicago, trying to stand out in the crowd as the one worthy of your change, but whether you support Brain Harvest or any of the scores of other worthy zines, I hope you will do something.

Caren, Shane, and I started Brain Harvest in March of this year with nothing but a vision of the kind of weird fiction we wanted to read, an awesome website, and some change in our pockets. We’re lucky in that BH doesn’t have much overhead (as a flash fic market with no print counterpart), but it’s too expensive for us to pay for all on our own, being aspiring un- and underemployed writers ourselves. But we are adamant in our desire to provide a quality pro-rate market to our community. And so we rely on the generosity of our loyal readers to help us through.

Because of this low overhead, even a donation of $5 is huge. $10 gets you a hand-knitted mustache (by yours truly — see Paypal link on the main page. You can also send donations directly to our Paypal account at fresheyes(at)brainharvestmag(dot)com)). $25 gets you a critique by one of us (and ask our Clarion West classmates — we’re pretty damn good at critiquing). So if you like what we do and want us to keep doing it, won’t you chip in?

And while you’re at it, check out what our other comrades are producing — make a point to read and comment on at least 2 online stories today! And check out this page to see what more you can do, if donating just isn’t in the cards for you.

Long live the short fiction zine!

Check out all the details here. This is going to be a fabulous book… I can’t wait to get my copy so I can read the shit out of these stories!

1. As I’ve said before, and will probably say again because I’m self-absorbed (and hey, isn’t that what blogs are for?), I have three publications coming out on or around October 1st – in M-Brane SF #9, the final issue of Farrago’s Wainscot, and the SF queer anthology Things We Are Not. This queer anthology is going to be especially awesome. You can pre-order the book starting on 9/28!

2. My beloved Clarion West classmates and I will begin our second annual writing contest on October 1st. Spearheaded by the dashing Shane Hoversten, this contest involves a rigorous set of rules, a complex point system, and an addendum that I added yesterday which requires the competitors to good-naturedly heckle each other. The basic gist of the contest is to write as many “structurally complete” short stories or novel segments as possible between midnight October 1st and 11:59pm New Years Eve. Extra points for submitting the story to markets during the contest window.  The winner will receive the prize of his or her face on a coffee mug, which all of the participants will buy. That way everyone wins, but everyone also knows who really won. Last year, the prize was a t-shirt where the winner was depicted behind bars “in the prison of his own genius.” (Pam has some nice pictures of herself, Kira, and An in these shirts, which you can see here). Shane was the big winner last year because he cranked out an 8000 word story a day for the last week of the contest, stunning us all into silence. Not so this year! I will triumph and they will all drink out of my face!

3. To be fair, this is unrelated to fall or October 1st, but it is related to writing. On Thursday, I had the pleasure of meeting Jamie Grove of hownottowrite fame. He was in Chicago at a big fancy conference for his super-awesome job, and we met up at a bar downtown.  We talked about the stuff writers talk about — you know, writing — and tried to hear each other over the terrible 90s music that was blasting from the speakers. The reason I bring this up is actually two reasons. One — Jamie is awesome. Two — he just wrote an interesting  blog post about meeting other writers. It’s so easy to make connections online, and yet sometimes it feels just as hard to take that first step as it is to introduce yourself to a stranger at a bar.  I’m terrible at it, personally. But we need each other. Plus it’s no fun to toil away all alone in your dank apartment. This way, you can toil away in your dank apartment… with lots of Twitter friends. And everyone wants Twitter friends. So check out his post. And then check out my “Writers” links to meet some great writers and awesome people. Tell them I sent ya.

4. Oh, and one last thing to look forward to — as we speak, Mr. Jeff VanderMeer is making his list and checking it twice, judging who will be the winners of the Brain Harvest Mega Challenge! So keep an eyeball on the Brain Harvest page… we’ll be posting the winners very soon!!

Nextly, check out the news and updates from the Things We Are Not blog. Chris is a master of publicity and is very generous with praise for his writers… he calls Brain Harvest “probably the single best venue for flash fiction,” (WOW!) and has some very kind things to say about my stories. This book is going to be so awesome, you’ll barely be able to keep your head from exploding. So be sure to buy it! And if you have some spare change in your Paypal pockets, donate a buck or two to help cover the costs of publication. Indie publishing is no easy task, friends, so if you love fiction and want to see more good stuff and less Dan Brown, please do what you can.

Thirdly, I have lots of stuff to report, but I’ve come up against a familiar brick wall… which is that I hate blogging. There. I said it. I know I have to get over it, but I just had to get that off my chest. Maybe I can blog about hating blogging. Or, better yet, maybe I can outsource blogging responsibilities to someone else. Any volunteers?

1. Cheese.  I miss cheese. And though it’s a selfish and petty thing to say, I really think more scientists need to be working on an acceptable non-dairy cheese alternative. Because really, the stuff that is available is just wretched.

2. Beer. Again, there are gluten-free beers. They taste like a wrung-out dishrag.

3. Pizza. The tragic combination of gluten and dairy. If you can find a cheeseless pizza, it has a gluten-ful crust. If you can find a gluten-free crust, chances are it has cheese. Everywhere I turn, heartbreak.

Which is what makes the rest of this story so gloriously triumphant. Yesterday, I made gluten-free pizza crust from scratch… and it was delicious! And though one of the pizzas had goat cheese (which I can eat, sometimes) they were otherwise free of all the things I can’t eat. Plus, one had tomatoes and basil from my garden. Look how pretty!