Holidays, Food, and Character Traits

Thanksgiving’s in a few days, for Americans. It’s like the "om nom nom" starter’s pistol for the season that lasts through the beginning of January. This is why I finally joined a gym.

I’m a pretty good cook, and I like working in the kitchen. I’ve been saying for years that the first Thanksgiving after my maternal grandmother passed, her spirit touched my hands and gave me her gravy-making skills. Watching that smooth, rich, brown gravy come together exactly as planned was a beautiful moment.

Some of my characters are good cooks. In my first (trunked awaiting rewrite) book, the horror plot was relieved by lots of good cooking. In my Falcone and Driscoll series, not as much, although I do manage to work in how to make homemade Sicilian pizza.

Other hobbies of mine, like knitting and playing musical instruments, aren’t as universal as cooking and eating. After all, Patricia Wentworth created the best detective-who-knits in Miss Silver. Is there a musician detective? I don’t recall one.

I’ve learned a few things as my characters have informed me of their talents and quirks. I know the techniques of cello playing, how to research someone’s ancestry, online RPGs, navel piercing, and all-natural foods.

Have you ever been so interested in a book’s MC that you wanted to learn to do what they do? In my own case, I got so irritated at Miss Silver’s continual “knitting in the Continental manner” that I taught myself that method. (I knit a lot faster now, and two-color knitting is a breeze.) Have you ever researched something for a book and ended up incorporating the skill into your real life?

I’ll be happy to share my recipes with anyone. And then we can head to the gym together.

Neatness Doesn't Always Count

Cricket McRae

Yesterday I cooked.

I made beer-cheese soup. Brown the sausage, drain. Brown carrots, onion, celery. Add chicken stock. Simmer. Add grated raw milk cheddar dredged in flour, salt, pepper, Worchestershire, dry mustard, sausage and a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale.

Kind of made a mess.

I made bread. Easy peasy if you use the method in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which I highly recommend. But I mixed enough starter to last for two weeks. In a bucket. With my hands.

Messy.

Then there was the butter. Call me weird, but I like cultured butter but I don't like to pay eight dollars a pound for it at Whole Foods. So I mix piima culture into a jar of local cream and two days later let the standing mixer beat it to death until I get butter. And buttermilk. The real stuff. Salad dressings, pancakes ... mmmm.

Simple, but it can get a little messy.

This weekend I worked on a new writing project. First draft stuff. Notes all over my desk, stacks of books with post-its poking out, character's names changing from page to page, a notebook full of clustered plot ideas.

A real mess.

Lengthy descriptions here, not enough detail there, so many adverbs I'm surprised they didn't spill off the computer screen. Too many of the qualifying words that are my weakness -- just, only, sometimes, quite.

Blech. Such a mess.

This weekend I cleaned the kitchen. Wiped down the counters and the cupboards, scrubbed the sink, swept and mopped the floor. I did the dishes and scoured pans and shined up the appliances.

And this weekend I edited some work I wrote last week. Trimmed words, clarified dialog, rearranged awkward grammar, added sensory detail, eliminated an entire scene and sketched out a new one.

Last night I ended up with good food, and hopefully good prose. And watched the Broncos game, recorded from earlier in the day. Which was a real mess.

Not the Hands of a Writer

Cricket McRae

I went for a manicure yesterday. Apparently, I should go more often, because within seconds of sitting down, I detected the distinctive sound of tsking under the nail technician’s breath.

Finally, she asked, “What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

That usually results in a question about what kind of writing I do. Not this time. This time I received a single quirked eyebrow and a look that said, “Sure you are, honey. These are not the hands of a writer.”

Which is true. I have the hands of a gardener. Of a cook. A soap maker. And that’s just the beginning. I’ve kept chickens, made cheese, baked bread (and a lot of other things), canned and pickled and dried a ton of food, made jerky … hell, once I even butchered a deer in my living room when I was a starving college student (not as messy as it sounds, honest). And for the record, I’m not a farm girl.

I know, I know. Nutso. Crazy. Wacky. They’re coming to take me away, ha ha.

Ha.

Seriously, why does anyone do this stuff? I mean, I canned grape leaves for dolmades last week, for heaven’s sake. I make my own cultured butter.

Frugality. Nostalgia. Uniqueness and/or a gourmet touch. Self-sufficiency. Creativity. Tradition. Stubborn neo-Ludditism. A Martha Stewart complex.

All these apply to me to some degree, except the last one. But mostly? It’s about knowing how things work. About being in on a process from the ground up.

Of course homemade soap is satisfyingly practical: inexpensive, better quality than commercial soap, milder, customized with my scent blends, a source of creativity while at the same time providing sudsy cleansing goodness on a daily basis.

And yes, my great-grandmother saved her bacon grease all year, and each fall she and her neighbor built a fire under an iron tripod in the driveway between their two houses in Sheridan, Wyoming, where they spent the day making the lye soap she used to wash everything from her toes to her clothes.

But I don’t know if she thought about how cool it is that you can mix oil (acid, sort of) and lye (alkaline) and through the chemical process of saponification end up with soap (which is essentially a salt, however weird that may sound). But I do. Think about it, I mean.

Okay, I know not everyone is fascinated by how yeast creates maltose and alcohol as bread rises, or what a mesophilic cheese culture will produce as opposed to a thermophilic one. I know I’m a little odd that way. But you know who is interested is finding out what makes things tick? The protagonist in my home crafting mysteries, Sophie Mae Reynolds, that’s who.

I’m often asked the ubiquitous question, “Is Sophie Mae really you?” I always used to give some variation of the answer, “sort of.” Now I’m starting to wonder whether the qualities that cause me to research natural fiber dyes and actually consider using the traditional mordant to set those dyes (urine, honest-to-God, and no, I’ve not gone down that road), are the same qualities that make her not only run a handmade toiletries business, but also poke her nose into the whys and wherefores of neighbors dying and cases of botulism that make no sense. She’s curious. She wants to know the guts of how something happened.

And you know what else? Between her gardening and chickens and preserving and soap making, I have no doubt Sophie Mae is badly in need of a manicure. Let’s just hope her friendly neighborhood nail tech isn’t a tsker.

What are you nerdy about? What odd fascinations do you have that aren’t exactly cocktail party fodder? Come on, give.

Instant Gratification

Cricket McRae

The day before yesterday I cooked up a big ol’ pot of that Colorado staple, green chili. Chopped up a pile of pork, chilies, tomatoes and garlic, then browned and seasoned and cooked for four hours. Slow food. Not to mention how much time it took to grow the tomatoes and chilies, roast them and process them for the freezer last fall. All this for what is, more or less, a sauce.

A really good sauce, mind you.

Yesterday three men came and spent two hours laying five thousand square feet of sod in the backyard. There had never been grass back there before. I’m not a lawn person, but my guy is, and I had to admit the weeds were getting old. At least we put in a super hardy fescue blend that will require half the water. For the last twenty-four hours I haven’t been able to pass by a window on that side of the house without stopping and admiring the expanse, dreaming of bocce ball and badminton and evenings spent with friends around the fire pit.

But a whole lawn in two hours? That is SO cheating! There’s a tiny part of me that’s actually offended by the notion. I know that’s a little nuts in this snappy, wi-fi, buy it now pay for it later, let’s just go through the drive-through on the way home world, but there you go.

Is that why the first thing I ever wrote, other than the required stuff in school or for work, was a full-length novel? Or why writing a series of homecrafting mysteries about the same character is so comfortable?

I’ve tried short stories. They always explode into long stories. I’d really like to craft delicate essays, precise poems, and meaningful shorts, but the idea of “and then what happened?” has always made me go further. At least so far.

Most people don’t work into their writing career that way. It’s not even advised. But the fact that I’ve gone about choosing my writing projects in a bass-ackwards way is not entirely surprising to those who know me.

How about you? Do you find the short form easier or harder to write? Are you good at both? Do you read both?

'Scuse me. I have to go start another flat of vegetable seeds now.