Biscotti-like Shortbread Cookies

Well, I made a disastrous first attempt at Shortbread Cookies last night.

I’ve been hurting pretty severely these last two weeks, and only sleeping about 4 hours a night, if that, so I’ve been prowling around trying to find things to distract me.  When I hurt this bad, it’s hard for me to do any one thing for very long.  I can’t concentrate to write, TV doesn’t hold my attention, and I can barely move, so gardening or anything physical is out.  I did read several Dean Koontz novels and both of the books by Patrick Rothfuss, so that helped some.  But I got the idea last night that I’d give shortbread cookies a shot.

For the record:  I cannot bake!  Now it’s not really something I worry about, but since I’m actually pretty good in the kitchen, it’s kind of embarrassing that I’m sooooooo bad at baking.

Chicken and dumplings, I rock.  Thanksgiving turkey, people rave.  Smoked bacon & chipotle bbq sauce on smoked tri-tip sandwiches, they line up around the block.  Shortbread Cookies?  The way mine turned out you could slap a coat of floor sealer on them and have a drink coaster that would last for eons.

I’m a “splash-of-this pinch-of-that” kind of guy when I cook.  I like flavorful food, and so spices are my friends.  I’ve got kind of an intuitive sense of how to season dishes and when something is fully cooked.  Don’t know where it came from, and haven’t really tried to hone it, but it’s there nonetheless.  If you want a great grilled steak, I’m your guy.  Stir-fry?  Look no further.  Baked goods?  Keep on walking.

A few years ago, well, maybe over a decade, my sister gave me a stand mixer.  (My sister, btw, is an absolutely phenomenally amazing cook and baker.  I’m just sayin’.)  However, her attempt to nudge me into baking with a really good mixer, failed.  The mixer looks cool on the counter, but in all these years I’ve never used it.  Not a single time.  I know, I know, what a waste; honestly, if you could see my face right now you’d see that I’m thoroughly ashamed!  And so, faced with mind-numbing pain and a cloak of shame, I slid the mixer into a more prominent position on the counter and assembled my ingredients.

As a side note:  I make really good chocolate chip cookies – I mean really, really good; and I don’t measure anything very carefully, but you can get away with that on chocolate chip cookies.  At least I have.

But in true baking, you need to measure, and measure carefully.  Paula Deen, I’ve been listening.  So I got everything ready, which was actually only three ingredients, and I let the disaster begin.

First, my butter was too cold when I put it into the mixer.  I missed the part where it was supposed to be room temperature.  So, step one, which was supposed to “cream” my butter, resulted in the wire mixer thingy getting filled with two sticks worth of cold, unmixed, completely congealed butter.  Refusing to admit that I could be that stupid, I carefully picked all the butter out of the wire mixer thingy, turned the mixer back on, and proved I really was that stupid since all the butter once again jumped inside that silly wire mixer thingy.  (Wire Mixer Thingy:  a hideously evil contraption that most people would identify as a whisk.)  Since by that time it hurt too much to stand, I took a break and let the butter reach room temperature while I tried to do the same.

So, a long while later (it took me longer to “cool off” than it did for the butter to “warm up”), I finally got back to it, deciding I would just throw the sugar in there to help “cut” the butter into the much-sought-after creamy stage.  And it kind of worked.  (Just FYI, Rascal does NOT like the sound the mixer makes.)

So, according to the directions I had printed out, my next step was to take my concoction and add in flour, mixing it by hand with a wooden spoon.  What?  Why use the mixer for anything in the first place?  I could have just nuked the butter and tossed in some sugar if I was gonna have to do the hardest part with my hand.  (People with RA do not hold wooden spoons very well.  And hand-mixing, forgetaboutit.)

So, after spending ages trying to scrape the “creamed” butter-sugar mixture off the satan-spawned wire mixer thingy, I added my flour.  I learned that the cookies are called “shortbread” because you add the smallest amount of flour you can until you reach the desired texture.  What I didn’t learn was what the “desired” texture really was.  But I winged it, figuring the right texture was the one I reached when my hands hurt too much to continue stirring.

Next, the directions told me to divide the mixture between 3, 8-inch round cake pans.  Um...  Well, since I never bake anything you can’t really expect me to have 3, 8-inch cake pans, now can you?  Or even anything resembling a cake pan, for that matter.  I did find a ceramic dish I use to make broccoli-rice-cheese casserole.  So, since it was good and deep, I just threw all the “dough” into there and pressed it down hard to flatten it out evenly.

The directions said 30 minutes at 325.  I know my way around a stove, so that part was easy – or should have been.  At the 30 minute mark my dough was still the color of raw flour and as goopy as soup.  I left it, checked it again in 5 minutes, then 5 more, then 10 more, still goop.  So, at the hour mark I said...well, my mom might read this so I’m not going to tell you what I said, but needless to say:  I gave up.

Much to my delight, the goopy mixture began to harden as it cooled.  Whoopee!  But it just kept hardening...and hardening...and hardening – is there a mathematical symbol for hardening to infinity?

Once I managed to chip them out of the dish (using a chisel and hammer), and broke them into pieces using an even larger hammer, my shortbread cookie (pieces) weren’t that bad.  Well, as long as you soaked them for half-an-hour in some coffee.

Shrug.  Did I mention I’m not so hot at the whole baking thing?  I did?  Good, because that should pretty much sum up the experience.

Inserting HTML Line Breaks

Something has always bugged me about my uploads to Amazon.  When I have Davina’s Magical Radio as a Word doc, it looks amazing, format-wise at least — would I lie to you?

But, I then convert it to html for Amazon, and they convert it to the Kindle format.  And — drumroll please — it doesn’t look so hot after that.  It’s kind of squished.  All the spaces are missing, like between the chapter title and the first line of that chapter.  No biggie in some ways, but looks like I don’t know what I’m doing — amateurish — which may be true, but I don’t want everyone to know.

And along comes the magic line-break.  Years ago, believe it or not, I knew HTML — way before it was even cool to know it.  I actually designed one of the first web pages for a city I contracted with — it wasn’t beautiful, but it was still one of the first.

However, html has flown from my brain, as have so many other fine tid-bits of info.  But I knew, deep, deep down, I knew there was a way to fix my line-break problem.

And last night I found it.  Now it is probably not the fastest way — those of you who really know html can go ahead and laugh, I really don’t mind — but it is A way.

I use/insert <br/> at the end of a line when I want a break before the next one.  I convert the Word doc to html, and then use Notepad to modify the html code.  It takes a long time to insert all the line breaks I want, but it makes my happy when I see the final result:  No more Squishy!

So, the next time you’re reading Davina’s Magical Radio on a Kindle, and you come to a pretty line break, you can say, “Not only did he write the book, he made it pretty for me too.”

Forgetting to Blog

Okay here is something I hate to admit, yet I’m doing it with a smile at the moment:  I seem to forget a lot of stuff these days.

I have 5 versions of Davina’s Magical Radio (master copy, print copy, 1 copy for each of the 3 major ebook-readers), so when I spot a formatting or grammatical error in one, I have to change it in every version.  Yet, here I am, a month of solid work on finding even the smallest errors (especially formatting), and I keep finding things that I know, or think I know, I’ve corrected before.  Often I will spot something wrong in one version, but when I check the others I’ve already fixed it there.

Most of the time I have every version open at the same time, and when I’m making an adjustment I go down the line and fix every version, so I have no idea how this keeps happening, other than I must simply forget what I’m doing right in the middle of doing it.  I hate to think that’s correct.  My family will have a field day because now when I make a comment about something I think should have been taken care of, they can say I never told them, or I forgot to tell them — a little mean on their part, but they may zone me out because I repeat myself, forgetting I’ve already said something.

Wow, all that is confusing.  I mean, I don’t have Alzheimer’s (thank Goodness), but for a guy who used to have an exception memory (one of the things I privately was very proud of), I now seem to be habitually forgetting things.

By the way, I haven’t posted about this already have I? — ha, ha.

Apparently I've been forgetting to blog lately too.  But I've been assembling some Indie publishing notes these last few weeks, so I'll try to get some of those up soon.  I hope they help those of you who've been asking about publishing your own stuff.

The Dark Days of Dark Courier

There’s nothing like having to fix a mistake a million times to teach you not to ever make it again.

For the last few hours I’ve been making corrections to Fighter’s Bane.  Not the normal kind of corrections you might expect, but instead corrections needed because of a “technical” snafu, boggle, insert your own word for stinkin’ mistake.

A while back I did some research on the preparations for manuscripts prior to sending them out to publishers or agents.  Font was, of course, a consideration.  For the most part I was pointed to Courier as an acceptable choice.  One author suggested Dark Courier since it showed up better on the page and thus saved some eye strain from those I hoped to win over to my side — that seemed like a no-brainer.

So I converted Fighter’s Bane into Dark Courier thinking that one day I might try to send the book out to an agent.  For whatever reason, that font seemed to not like spaces between sentences, and often — following no pattern I could discern — would just drop a space and squeeze a couple of sentences together.

So, not really liking that, and not wanting an agent to think I'm an indiscriminate spacer, I meticulously picked my way through 100k worth of words, looking for missing spaces.  I kind of didn’t like Dark Courier at that point.

Now, fast forward to a few months ago when I made the brilliant decision to be my own man and publish my own material — I don’t need no stinkin’ agent, editor, publisher, etc., etc., etc., I cried, my fist thrown triumphantly in the air.  (No offense to any of you who actually hold those jobs, because I wish you really were a part of my life at this point.)

So, ready to make my bold debut in the publishing world, I’m momentarily slowed down when I learn Dark Courier really won’t cut it for E-books or CreateSpace — not only does it seem to go wonky when you convert it, but it drops even more spaces when you convert it from Word to PDF, which really limits your ability to love it since you spend so much time grumbling under your breath while you hunt for more missing spaces.

So, out with Dark Courier and in with Garamond — which is a TrueType font and can be embedded in PDF documents; something CreateSpace really likes. 

But does Dark Courier go without a fuss?  Oh no my friend, it does not! 

Much to my dismay, it not only once again tosses out blank spaces like a fastidious baker throws out moldy bread, stinkin’ Dark Courier decides not to share italic formatting information with Garamond; meaning that I have a 100k document without a single italicized word.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to hunt through that many words, trying to find the ones that need to be italicized?  Now I’m not a complete idiot, so I did keep a copy of the old document still in Dark Courier, allowing me to search for italicized words in that document, and then, finding one, switch to the Garamond document, again hunt down the word, and finally apply the much needed italics.

Honestly, stuck at home because of my medical condition, it’s not like I have a ton of things pressing on my time — other than constant pain, medicinal side-effects, and those kind of things — so I have the time to do all this hunting and correcting.  But do I want to?  NO, I most certainly DON’T want to.

Now, I’m sure that one day I’ll find out there’s a simple way to fix all my problems — at least my font conversion problems — but for now, here I sit, taking a break and writing this up for you, so that you can give me much needed sympathy when I once again start tracking down all those naked words so desperately needing to be clothed in italics.

You are NOT my friend Dark Courier, and you should most definitely not expect a Christmas card this year.

Tomatoes, Co-Writers and Delays

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing, blogging, et cetera.  (As a side note:  et cetera can also be written as one word, which is becoming more popular, and is abbreviated etc. – it must always be followed by the “period.”  Some people make the mistake of using “ect.” – I admit I have slipped – but ect. is wrong.  Et cetera means: and so forth.  I share all this because I just looked it up.  My mind went blank when I started to write the abbreviation – that happens to me sometimes, and not just when I’m writing abbreviations.  Now that I’m done sharing, I’ll get back to the post.)

I’ve mentioned I like to garden, and on the advice of a friend, I’m trying a new type of tomato plant (big boys).  (New to me at least, I normally grow cherry tomatoes.)  I planted the big boy seeds in 6 inch pots a while ago, and let them grow indoors in the kitchen window, thinking I had plenty of time to get my tiny garden space ready (it’s a tiny garden because whoever lived here in the past buried their garbage over most of the back yard and after a year of uncovering buried trash I finally found a small area they hadn’t gotten to yet).

Well, one thing led to another and the big boys got 4 feet tall and started taking over the kitchen, but I still hadn’t felt well enough to get the garden ready.  So, this last week, in desperation and terrified that the plants would eat one of the cats, I started working on the garden.  Now I’m only good for an hour or so, and I need constant breaks, but today, with Ademar’s help, I finally got the garden ready.  I got a few of the plants out of the house, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m beat.  Most of this last week I’d work for an hour, clean up, and then hit the pain pills, heating pad and bed.  So, no writing.  But each day I seem to be a little worse, and I can feel that I’m heading downhill quickly and a major flare-up is imminent.  Fearing that I’d lose another week before I could post, I’m humbly submitting some current thoughts now, just in case.

I’ve wanted to talk about my co-writers for a while now, and this finally seems like the perfect time.  “Co-writers”? you say; but I only see your name on the book.  Well, I’m stingy that way I guess – at least I’m giving them credit now.

Mattie with her favorite toy

Let’s start with dear, sweet Mattie; an elegant lady if there ever was one.  Well, maybe not so elegant, - yes, that's her back leg in the air - but she’s darn cute.

Mattie is the best-behaved co-writer I have (and the only one I can trust alone in my office).  If she gets tired from the demanding schedule I keep, she just plops down and naps right on the floor, even though she normally sleeps on a pillow inside a cardboard box.  See, what a trooper.  If I ask her about a plot twist or how a character should behave in a certain scene, she’s filled with dozens of ideas, meowing her little head off the second I say, “Mattie.”  It’s a bit annoying that she thinks best when I’m brushing her belly, since that kind of takes away from the actual writing, but undaunted, she flops down at my feet and rolls onto her back, signaling the beginning of a deep-thinking period, at least seven or eight times a day.  I swear that one day she will be an Internet sensation, if I ever shoot the video, because she loves to floss her teeth, and come on, how many other cats have you seen do that?  (By the way, never let a cat EAT dental floss, since it is extremely dangerous to them – Mattie always throws her dental floss away.)

I've almost got it dad!

Previously I’ve written about Pip’s efforts to help in my office, so I won’t post much on him right now.  However, he’s currently asleep on the printer, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that he’s managed to keep all the other cats away from the printer today, fearing they might waste paper – which happens all too frequently since they think it’s a hoot to step on the print key and watch paper come shooting out of the machine.  Overall, Pip is very helpful – here he is untying my shoe for me.

To know me is to love me!

Rascal snuggling with his sister

Another frequent co-writer is Rascal.  Hold on to your chairs girls, because I’m about to reveal a huge secret: I consult Rascal on every romantic scene I write.  His cuddling skills are unprecedented.  He never misses an opportunity to snuggle, and he gives some pretty amazing Eskimo kisses (albeit, slightly wet ones).  He frequently points out that if you love someone, tuna breath shouldn’t be a problem.  And, he says that if you’re feeling neglected, don’t be shy, just jump on a person’s chest and rub your face against theirs until they give you a hug – it works for him every time.  

  

Rascal snuggling with Pip

All clear here dad - you're safe for now!

He’s very protective too.  For some reason he thinks I hate paper towels, and he often hunts them down and kills them for me. That's Balto with him.

 

Yes, I am this cute!

And speaking of Balto.  He's the strong silent type.  He doesn’t talk much – unless he wants a drink from the faucet – but if I read a scene to him, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll just yawn and go back to sleep.  One time he was sitting on top of my monitor, and I read the first page of a new story to him, and he promptly turned around and started swishing his tail back and forth across the screen – clearly indicating I needed to erase the whole thing and start again.  He’s always pushing me to be a better writer that way.

 

Boo winking at the camera - I told him the teeth were a bit distracting

  

And I can’t forget Boo; he’s the oldest of the bunch and is determined to single-catedly bring the word “aloof” back into the common vernacular.  He doesn’t come by the office very often, he mostly prefers the wide outdoors, but he’ll stop in from time to time to offer moral support, catch a quick cat-nap using my foot as a pillow (I wear thick, padded socks), and complain a bit about the weather.

So there you have it.  Not a page gets written without one of them having some kind of input.  I’ve often wondered if “two many cooks in the kitchen” applies here, but at least I don’t have a mouse problem.  (Just FYI, Ghost, the little female snuggling with Rascal above, now lives with some dear friends of ours and goes by a different name.  We miss her terribly, but I hear she is spoiled out of this world and glad she doesn't have to share a cat-box with three messy brothers.  By the way, that's her yawning in my avatar.)

And as for “Delays.”  I had hoped to get Fighter’s Bane ready for publication this month, but since I’m running out of month, I’m now predicting May for the release date.  I’m still waiting for some readers to get back to me, and just today I thought of a little twist I want to add, but all-in-all, I’m close to being finished.  Gray Area needs a bit more work, but it’s close too.  When the tomatoes get into the ground, the cats and I will try and pick up the pace some – well, maybe, apparently Mattie wants to think about it since she just plopped down at my feet and rolled onto her back (clumps of cat-hair and minor back pain here I come).

New Pages

I finally posted about my medical condition.  Since it was so long, I put the post up as its own page under My Disease Rant.

I also put up a new page with a sneak peek at the first chapter of Fighter's Bane.  The book's finished at 107k or so words, but I'm having a bit of a formatting problem.  I didn't write the story in a single document, instead writing different parts at different times.  When I pasted them all together I realized that I'd used different formatting settings and lately I've been going over the document section by section and fixing the bugs.  A number of things I was able to fix with global commands, like changing all the text to the same font, but little things are still popping up.  (I miss the old days of WordPerfect where you could actually see every formatting code.)

I seem to recall already posting blurbs about the storyline in Fighter's Bane, so I won't do that again, but I thought I might explain a little of the "kookiness" (hum, is that spelled correctly?) that went in to writing the story.

When I was a wee-lad, a certain role-playing game came out.  I got hooked, big time.  I enjoyed the game with friends, and played for years and years until computer versions of fantasy-adventure role-playing games became popular.

I still don't know why, but when I was thinking about writing Fighter's Bane, I got this nutty idea that it would be fun to create a dungeon and some characters, and then write the story by rolling the dice and having the characters work their way through the dungeon based on how the dice landed.

For instance, I used an 8-sided die to determine which direction my characters took, e.g., a 1 or an 8 was north, a 2 or a 7 was south, a 3 or a 6 was west, etc.  Seemed fun at the time - but do you have any idea how many times I had to roll that die in order to finish the book?  But once I started, I stuck with it.  Like I said: nutty.

I also used dice to determine the outcome of battles, treasure, etc.  I kind of really got into it.  And most definitely some weird things happen to my characters as a result of "chance."  Someday I'll post more about the details, but for now you just need to know that I rolled myself up a 100k plus (word) book.

I'm still working on the cover, but one of the die I used is so old and so worn from the adventure, that I'm thinking of honoring it by sneaking in a small picture of it on the cover.

My fervent hope is that I rolled up a winner.  I enjoyed writing the book, and I hope you enjoy reading it when I finally finish all the silly formatting garbage (which is, unfortunately, an important part of actually reading the thing).

Looking Back - March 20th, 6am

I'm a bit obsessive about forgetting things, so I tend to take a lot of notes.  Most of the time when I'm working on ANYTHING I have a blank Word page open so I can jot down thoughts I don't want to forget.

Most of the time of course I FORGET to save the notes or I forget where I saved them at, but that's fodder for some other post.

Today I'm sharing one of those "forget me not" notes because when I found it a few minutes ago it made me remember when I wrote it, and that made me laugh.  I hope you laugh too, but I'd settle for a chuckle or at least a snicker.

Here's the note:

Createspace – Davina’s Magical Radio - March 20th, 6am

I just finished uploading all the information for Davina’s Magical Radio to be published on Createspace.  I would not recommend the process for the timid.  At one point I had 13 different applications/programs open at the same time, just trying to get the details on the cover right.  And at this point I think I’m approaching 30 revisions of the cover, most of which I saved just in case I screwed up the next attempt.  However, I uploaded something, let’s hope it sticks. 

I’ll be happy even if it sucks so bad people talk about it and laugh.  That’s publicity, right?  By the way, I had to pick up the basics for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrater in order to make the cover.  Prior to this attempt I’d never used either program.  And I’d just like to say, if anyone knows who designed those programs, please kick them in the shin or stomp on their toes (not really, I don’t want to be libel).  But come on, why must "cut and paste" be so difficult?  I’m sure lots of folks love the “layers” thing, but it drove me crazy for the first few days. (Now, of course, I love the "layers" thing.)

Formatting the “interior” pages for the book wasn’t that bad, but I did struggle to find the correct information because I’m working with an older copy of Word (I can’t afford an upgrade until you buy a lot more books).  There was plenty of information on Word, and I'm thrilled about the many joyous hours I spent searching through web sites that didn’t mention their information only applied to Word 2007.  Not.

By the way again, I’ve got Taylor Swift's “Forever & Always” blasting in my ears so loud it’s a wonder I can even write a single sentence the doesn’t include the phrase: “back up, baby back up.”

Everyone was asleep when I hit the final “Complete” button on Createspace, so I opened a can of tuna to celebrate with the cats.  They weren’t even finished with the first can when they started begging me to upload a second book so we could celebrate some more.  So I threw a toy to distract them and then ran into my room and closed the door.