A Baking Adventure

I know my way around a kitchen.  I’m a pretty decent cook, if I do say so myself.  And while I’m not one of the great grillmasters of America, I certainly do know how to cook good stuff on the grill, and it’s been a long time since I’ve grilled anything that was charred on the outside and pink on the inside.  My friend K– can attest to the fact that I grill a mean turkey.  And my shrimp jambalaya, while not necessarily to Jennifer’s liking, is purty dang good.

I cannot bake, though.  I have warned people of this.  I have told people that when I make cookies from a package of instant cookie mix — the kind where you simply squeeze the dough onto the pan and bake for a certain amount of time — they end up tasting like soap, no matter how pristine my baking environment is.  When I make pie, the resulting pastry squirms.  When I make cupcakes, mothers threaten their children with them (and the children obey).  And a court order prevents me from ever again approaching brownie mix; parts of Davis are still uninhabitable.

People think I’m kidding.  I’m not.

For our Halloween potluck tomorrow at work I promised to bring the famous kitty litter cake that I brought two years ago and that was such a hit.  The plan was originally to wait for Jennifer to come home from rehearsal, and then she’d bake the cake.  I thought I’d be a good husband — it’s my office, after all — and bake the cake before she arrived so that all that would be left would be to crumble up the cake with the pudding and the cookie bits and mix it all up together in a fresh, clean litterbox.

So, I had two packages of Duncan Hines cake mix: one white, one spice.  I mixed the ingredients — the cake mix, the eggs, the oil, the water — exactly as specified on the box.  I blended them, I beat them for exactly two minutes, as specified on the packages.  I stuck them in the oven, noting carefully the size of the pans and how long I should bake the cakes given the fact that I was using two pans approximately 8″ on a side.  Set the oven to exactly the temperature specified in the directions.

When the timer goes off, what do I have?

Two pans of…  something.  I’m not sure what to call it.  They roughly resemble cake in that they smell like cake and are in cake pans.  However, they have swollen up dangerously, and they… wobble.  When I move them, their surfaces jiggle in a way that can’t possibly be right for something that is supposed to be more or less solid all the way through.  There are waves.  I took a toothpick and stuck it in through the top of the bulge and pulled it out, and it came out dripping of uncooked cake batter.  The bulge sort of popped.  I swirled the toothpick around and watched the liquid batter pool up through the wound in the cake’s skin.

Hm, I thought.  Fascinating.

I figured okay, the cakes just aren’t finished baking.  So I put them back in the oven, figuring, oh, what the hell, another ten minutes should take care of it.

Ten minutes go by.  I take the cakes out.  They still wobble, the toothpick still comes out dripping; the only difference is that now the surface of the cake is burned at the edges.

Something, somewhere, doesn’t want me to ever bake.  Ever.  People think I am simply making excuses when I say I don’t bake; they think I’m trying to pawn off the chore onto my wife.  This evening’s fiasco proves, I think, that I am not.

I can grill steaks and fish and burgers so that they’re perfect on both the outside and on the inside.  I find it ironic that I just can’t do the same with a simple cake mix.

Little Twinkies Needed

Do you all remember that wonderful 80’s film Ghostbusters? Remember that scene where Egon is comparing the average day’s paranormal activity as a Twinkie, and then proclaiming that his numbers pointed to a giant Twinkie looming on the horizon?

I need a bunch of little Twinkies to pepper through my 2007 NaNoWriMo project, The Return of Deacon Dread: odd supernatural events (ideally not actually involving ghosts) that result in someone’s tragic (or, better yet, hilarious) death.

Any ideas? Anyone? The ideas that I really enjoy and end up using will feature the death of the person who suggests it to me (or someone else of that person’s choosing). Since TRODD is just a NNWM project at this stage, I’m not going to worry about potential liability issues.

I’m thinking currently of one Twinkie per chapter, but since I have no idea how many chapters there will be, I can’t say how many Twinkies I want.

The point of philosophy for a writer

So, I’ve got a degree in Philosophy. Everyone to whom I’ve told that has asked me Why. “What did you think you were going to do with that?” they ask, incredulous. “Did you think you would do anything useful with a philosophy degree? Is what you’re doing now at all philosophical?”

Usually, I tell people the truth. I majored in Philosophy because by the time I’d reached my sophomore year at UC Davis, I’d already gone through about a dozen different majors and couldn’t make up my mind. I’d started out with a degree in Biological Sciences, fully intending to be a doctor specializing in prosthetics, but a disastrous quarter of Chemistry and Calculus quickly put to rest any illusions I might have had about making that work. Then in the spring quarter of my sophomore year I took a course called “The Philosophy of the Biological Sciences” with Dr. James Griesemer, noted philosopher and population geneticist, and I was hooked. I’d always had, as a kid, a passing interest in philosophy, and I enjoyed reading books by folks like Bertrand Russell, even if I didn’t quite get them. So this course really set my brain on fire, and I happily filled out the paperwork to change my major officially, and spent the next few years taking philosophy and any other course that struck my fancy. As a philosophy student, I could do that; only 52 units in Philosophy were required for the degree, but I could take up to 225 units before they made me graduate.

Mostly I stuck with the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, symbolic predicate logic, and courses which related to those specialties. What I’m doing now, though, isn’t particularly philosophical, although as a programmer the tools I learned studying logic are quite useful. Then again, as a writer I’m always influenced by the things I learned as a philosophy student. You may not think it when reading my short stories, but everything I write addresses a timeless, deep philosophical conundrum that has perplexed mankind through the centuries.

Or, maybe, you know, not.

Anyway, today my good friend Jennifer (not my wife, another Jennifer) pointed me at this article in Newsweek: “I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood“. It’s an article written by a philosophy student who tries to answer the same questions I faced, and who does it quite succinctly. I wish I could have been that eloquent when I was a student. I particularly like his definition of what a philosopher does:

What I do, in a nutshell, is this: I find a question or puzzle that interests me. I try to figure out a solution, usually reading what others have had to say about it along the way. If I come up with anything good, I write it down and see if anyone is interested in publishing it.

That works really well for me.

And, in a way, it really does apply to what I do as a writer; to what many people do as writers, really.  We come up with questions and puzzles that intrigue us, that we think ought to be examined and pondered, and then come up with stories, characters, tales, and so on, that will help us explore those questions and just maybe come up with some answers (or help our readers find some of their own).

It’s not true of every writer, of course.  I won’t name any names, but I can come up with at least one prolific fantasy writer who works a little bit of philosophy into each of his novels (he calls it “stealth philosophy”) and at least one prolific fantasy writer who probably couldn’t care a whit about that sort of thing.  I don’t know if one approach is better than the other, but I do know that I prefer the former’s books to those of the latter.

What about my writer friends who peruse my blog?  What do you all think?

I suppose…

…that I have a lot to catch up on here. Life has a funny way of periodically overwhelming then underwhelming you, to the point where you simply don’t have the energy to sit down and write about everything that’s been going on. But things have actually been going on. There’s Dragon*Con, which Jennifer and I went to at the beginning of September. There’s Daikaijuzine, which officially launched on September 21. This past Monday I went to Berkeley with some friends to see Neil Gaiman speak and give a reading. There’s all kinds of fun stuff happening at work. And finally there’s Monster World, a little project I’ve been playing with just for kicks.

Of course I’ve been writing, too. I’m still plugging away at The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster as well as a few short stories, but National Novel-Writing Month is just about here, and I haven’t finished the first draft of Solitude as I’d hoped I would by now. I have a good idea of what I will be writing for this year’s noveling goodness, though, and I think it will go smoother.

So, anyway, various updates and reports.

First, Dragon*Con. This year’s Dragon*Con was probably the most fun I’ve been to out of all the times that I’ve gone. I didn’t participate in the advanced writers’ workshop this year, or even the beginners’ workshop. I did go to a few writing panels, though, but I don’t feel like I learned very much. I did do some networking, though, and I even passed out my card to a few different editors. That felt good. As always, the best part of any con was the people. I had a number of good chats with different people, and even met up with a friend that previously I’d only known through LiveJournal. She’s a graphic novel writer, which I found really interesting; I’ve got a few story ideas kicking around my brain that could work as graphic novels, so it was nifty to get her insight (all I need now is someone who knows how to draw).
This year we stayed at the Hilton, instead of the Hyatt or the Marriot as we have in years past. The Hilton was, I think, the best of the three. The room was nice and clean, and furthest from the bulk of the con, so our room was quiet. Quite the change. Though I spent enough time, even late at night, wandering the Con and looking at things and listening to music that I basically only went back to our room to crash completely.

Second, Daikaijuzine. This is the webzine that I decided to start last year. It officially launched on September 21, with something like ten original stories and poems. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, and I have great plans for how it will go forward. We pay minimal rates for stories and poems and articles now, but someday I’d like to pay professional rates. I’d also like a print edition, a podcast, maybe even a publishing house… but that’s all pipe dreams for the future.

You should check it out.

Third, Neil Gaiman. That was a blast, and very inspiring. Gaiman is a wonderful storyteller, both in print and in person. He made the audience laugh with his jokes and stories, and read some selections from Fragile Things, his latest collection. But after I came home, I confided to Jennifer, I found myself despairing just a bit. I’ll never be as good a writer as Neil Gaiman. To which Jennifer replied, “Well, you’ll never be Neil Gaiman; on the other hand, he’ll never be Richard S. Crawford.” Which was oddly reassuring.

I think the thing that surprised me the most about Gaiman was his appearance. I’ve only seen headshots of him before, like on the back of the paperback edition of American Gods, and these photographs have always made me think that he was a pretty tall, thin guy. Instead, I’d say he’s probably between 5’8″ and 5’10”. Roughly my height. And instead of being built like Morpheus, as I’d always thought, he’s actually quite broad-shouldered, and shaped sort of like an inverted triangle. But he was dressed completely in black, which is exactly how I thought he’d be. Apparently that’s pretty much all he wears.

This coming Sunday, Jennifer and I are going to see Terry Pratchett. These two guys are linked inextricably in my mind, and that’s just fine.

Finally, Monster World is a project I decided to start up a couple of weeks ago. Mostly it’s just a place for me to dump the vignettes and short shorts that I write in response to my writers’ group prompts; the basic idea behind the ongoing series of stories is that some experiment in the late 1990’s resulted in the world being overrun by vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, and so on. Not the scary type; their cheesy horror film incarnations. This gives me room to play and write up goofy stories. These stories aren’t meant to be deep or scary or frightening; they’re just meant to give a good laugh.  I’m also experimenting with the idea of creating complete stories with a complete arc and plot within 1,000 words or so; I think that if I can perfect that form, then my writing will be tighter and more cohesive.

So, that’s about it for now.  Not much else going on.