Sink your Teeth into High Court and Revolution: Raud Gríma and Myadar Sölbói cupcakes

Raud Gríma (red) and Myadar Sölbói (blue)

Buenos Baked Goods, Cherished Blog Audience!

Do fictional characters ever inspire you to bake things?

Even when stories they belong in have nothing to do with baking things?

Me, too! Assuming your answer was “yes”.

The other day, while I was doing whatever (probably wistfully contemplating car crashes whilist going 150% the speed limit), inspiration struck. Hence, half a block of cream cheese and a jillion dirty dishes later, Raud Gríma and Myadar Sölbói cupcakes! Those who’ve read Sophia Martin’s The City Darkens (Raud Gríma) (hereunto CD), know that Raud Gríma is a character in a bit of folklore from Myadar Sölbói’s locale. Said locale includes a big city where Myadar and her son Bersi venture to upon the summons of her basically-always-absent courtier-husband Reister. Then they get there and SHIT GOES DOWN. Shit that’s much more action-packed than a nice Protestant woman making cupcakes in the suburbs. Nevertheless, this cupcake experience, like CD, was not without twists and turns!

Dun… dun… DUUUUNNNNN…

The final product didn’t match up with what I had originally envisioned. I wanted the Raud Grímas to come off as a force to be reckoned with; the kind of cupcakes you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley. So I decided they would be red velvet cupcakes with black frosting (yes, one can accrue the resources to render frosting black). But somewhere in the process of halving the already-halved recipe, I put in twice as much cocoa as was called for. What went in and came out of the oven was maybe a little red, but not enough, IMO, for there to be both black frosting AND associations with our masked, folklore hero. So I had to alter the frosting color to make up for the lost hue.
 

Halving the already halved

For Myadar, I thought it would be Right and Proper to make something boozy, like blonde Irish Car Bomb cupcakes; Myadar Moltovs, if you will. Mind you, my idea for Cupcake Booziness wasn’t justified by the revolutionary strand of the novel. Which strand justified it? Well, wouldn’t YOU like to know! (Read the book.)

Blonde car bomb concoctions, however, would require me to buy booze, and I hadn’t a clue what a nice, straight-laced Protestant woman like me would do with the leftovers. Now that Stephanie lives a seven-hour train ride away, there’s no easy way to pass off the leftover hooch to my klepto/nympho/probably-alcoholic sister. This is when I came up with the idea of halving the already halved recipe at the opportune time and omitting the red dye and cocoa from the Myadar part, despite small suspicions that it would taste like sour cream sprinkled with sugar.

The final product of the Raud Grímas weren’t bad. They were intense, but not as intense as other chocolate dessert items I’ve tried. I liked the Myadars better: if that’s what sour cream sprinkled with sugar tastes like, I’m surprised people don’t sprinkle sugar on their sour cream more often. Given the minor confusion with proportions of ingredients, I don’t exactly feel qualified to stamp the recipe I “used” with an official endorsement. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I used twice the prescribed amount of milk.

That being said, having read it hella times, I am qualified to put my stamp of approval on CD. And not just because it has no calories and costs less than the sum total monetary value of the milk and eggs alone! CD employs the perfect proportions of the following ingredients to effectively make it disel(perhaps deco)-punk delicious:

• gay love!
• theocracy!
• intrigue!
• clove cigarettes!
• “airplane” spelled “aeroplane”!
• men slicking back their hair with tonic!
• last but not least: [CLICK HERE FOR LAST INGREDIENT BECAUSE IT’S A SPOILER]

This magnificent e-tome is available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

#forthecupcakes

Book Review: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Written by Mary Wollstonecraft, Illustrated by Danielle Parado

When I initially found A Vindication for the Rights of Women (Illustrated) (for the name of the illustrator, see the title of this post), I was certain that it would be The Love of My Life.  I had been languidly flicking through endless the “Recommended for You” list on my e-reader, increasingly convinced that no one in the freaking world understands me, judging by how Amazon was so CLEARLY MISSING THE MARK on what I would want to read…* when this title stopped me. It was too good to be true: a classic text that I knew from experience would kindle my feminist spirit, paired with illustrations, which, judging by the cover, would be so bad ass that they may even prove to be tattoo-worthy.

However, the high expectations for the pictures in the book were not met. Yes, I read the sample. I figured that perhaps the cooler illustrations would be hidden later in the book, because once the concept of an illustrated Vindication was introduced to me, it was too good to be given up on. Thus, I paid the two bucks it cost and dove in.

Of course, I knew what to expect from Wollstonecraft, the literature itself was as rich and intellectual as I remembered, even if it did take time and patience to readjust to the parlance of 18th century prose. It’s also convenient to read Vindication on Kindle, because all the fancy lingo merely requires a poke to be defined.**

But, yeah, the illustrations. They were a series of simply rendered portraits. Nothing I’d have drilled into my skin, but nice enough. At first, I figured they were various forms of Wollstonecraft with artistic license, then I came across portraits in which Wollstonecraft suddenly took on the uncanny resemblances of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and I oh-so belatedly realized that these were all portraits of DIFFERENT feminist figures throughout history. I couldn’t recognize them all, and wished the ebook had some kind of answer key to who was who. Alas, there was none to be found. These portraits weren’t a HORRIBLE choice. I don’t feel like I was ripped off, or insanely misled like I did with the Faerie Queene. They merely didn’t meet my expectations. And that’s okay.

Of course, it turns out that the artist responsible for the cover was not the same artist who provided the portraits, which explains a lot.

There are some errors in the text of this edition. The content isn’t misrepresented per se, but there are paragraph breaks where there shouldn’t be – at least compared to the Dover Thrift Edition, which I’m more inclined to believe, paragraph-break wise.

Highlighting is a sketchy experience. This is more Kindle’s fault than an edition-specific error. Every so often, there will be a phrase underlined with a dotted line and a note of how many people highlighted it. This is eerie, and annoying. Being a heavy annotator, it makes me a little self-conscious, as well as guilt-tripped because I’d loathe to contribute to this annoyance by highlighting anything. I don’t know if other e-readers do that, or if it’s just Kindle.

Thus, if you’d like to read Vindication, you could just as easily save yourself two bucks and find it at your local library. That or download it for free – she is public domain, after all.



* Such is life when one leaves it to corporations to fulfill their utmost desires. ‘Murcia.

** Mind you, the dictionary on my Kindle didn’t know what “Mahometan” meant (archaic, Muslim, I don’t know if it’s derogatory). Judging by the ways Wollstonecraft uses it (offhand, not very much, and employed as an adjective to describe something else), I don’t think she thinks very highly of Islam. It kind of makes me wonder how Islam was perceived in England and France in 1792.

Book Review: The City Darkens (Luka's Chosen) by Sophia Martin

The City Darkens (Luka’s Chosen) (hereunto CD) is a diselpunk novel set in a theocratic dystopia. It features country-dwelling Myadar who, with her son Bersi, is reluctantly whisked away to the city of Helésey by her domineering mother-in-law – the first of a succession of snotty characters – to join Myadar’s cold husband for the coronation of the konunger. The husband, Reister, lives in the city and seldom sees Myadar (who, by the way, is not snotty at all), but has summoned her to this coronation because, as Myadar soon finds out, court life is like high school on steroids, and jarls are expected to show up with their respective counterparts. And then the unexpected occurs, but such intriguing events are too wonderful for me to spill in a book review, because y’all should go read it for yourself and BE AMAZED. (Or read a slightly wordier blurb on GoodReads.)

CD may be Sophia Martin’s debut in high-fantasy*, but her talent for world-building attests to what must be a finely tuned fluency in such genres. Her descriptions of Helésey’s people and architecture, as well as the 1920s fashions floating around court, are thorough and immaculate – quite different from her Veronica Barry series, which is set in the very much not fictional city of Sacramento. The reader’s transportation to Helésey is further aided by strange titles for royalty and nobility – konunger/konungdis , jarl/jardis, etc. – but nothing for which a glossary is required. I found that the foreign words were successfully woven into the context of the narrative, so they did not break the spell or leave me puzzling over their meanings.

All the rich detail, however, does not drag down the plot. Perhaps because CD began as a serial novel, none of the chapters can afford to slow down for too long to luxuriate in sensory description. Each section of prose is dynamic with the increasing action of the novel: a well-paced whirlwind of the good, the bad, and the sexy that keeps turning corners until the very end.

More points of interest include airplanes, robots, female empowerment, and gay love – albeit, of all the sex acts in the novel, there is far more hetero than homo. Fans of Norse mythology will delight in the abundance of references to assorted gods and goddesses.

CD is only available in ebook format, and can be found for purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.


* A term I have little authority in wielding, so I hope I didn’t wield it too inaccurately.

A New Novel, a Psychic Protagonist, and a Head Full of Writerly Aspirations: interview with Sophia Martin

Good news for paranormal mystery enthusiasts! Yesterday, self-published authoress Sophia Martin put the finishing touches on The Plane and the Parade, which will be available for electronic purchase EXTREMELY SOON!

In Plane, the third in the Veronica Barry series, the reader will find our psychic heroine right where we left her: same house by the train tracks; same loyal BFF; same dashing, detective boyfriend. And, of course, Veronica still has visions, this time featuring both plane crashes and bioterrorism. Additional dust is kicked up with the return of an old flame, known among the characters for his past mischief in the novella, Veronica in Paris.

Recently, I had the privilege of interviewing Martin via email…


KB: What inspired Veronica Barry?

SM: I've always felt a little psychic (and that phrase always brings to mind Daphne Moon from Frazier: "I'm a little bit psychic."). And I love the show Medium, as well as Law & Order. Plus, I liked the chemistry between Melinda and her husband Jim in Ghost Whisperer, and have had a crush on Daniel Dae Kim since he was on Angel. (I watch too much TV.) Since I couldn't find novels to read that had all (or even most) of these elements, I wanted to write a novel that let me include them. It's actually pretty surprising to me that there aren't more psychic detective novels. There are a few, but not many. Of course, having your detective be psychic does make keeping her from unraveling the mystery too soon pretty challenging.

KB: How did Plane come about?

SM: I think the main inspiration was how angry I felt (and still feel) about the behavior of the Westboro Baptist Church's fanatical leaders and congregation. I realize Westboro disavows violence. I made sure that my pseudo-Westboro church's pastor clearly stated that as well. However, I think the actions of fanatics like Phelps and his followers embody another kind of violence, and I could see some member of the congregation deciding to take things a step or two further, as a result.

I also had decided a while ago that the next book would see the return of Eric.


KB: Okay, I gotta ask: bioterrorism... where in your milieu and imagination did that sprout from?

SM: That actually took some hammering out. At first, I just wanted a bomb, but I needed a reason to have one of the villains be in a plane. I did a lot of brainstorming and asked for help on AbsoluteWrite.com's forums, and eventually hit on bioterrorism instead.


KB: Veronica lives in Sacramento. Why the state capitol? In a future novel, will Veronica have visions about the government?

SM: I lived in Sac for six months and really loved it. It's a city but it's not as overwhelmingly large as say, San Diego. Veronica's duplex is pretty much exactly what my place looked like.

Veronica is probably going to stay out of politics, but really, you never know. If a politician manages to do something that gets under my skin, we might end up seeing Veronica go after a character loosely based on him or her.


KB: How do all these teenagers manage to crawl into your books?

SM: I'm a high school teacher, and the students my school serves often come from very disadvantaged backgrounds. They are frequently hard to work with, both on a day-to-day level in terms of cooperation, but also because I hear the most awful stories. Writing about them is a way to both attempt to get past my frustrations or distress over the interactions I'm having with them (Lola was very much inspired by a student like this) and to process those terrible true stories.


KB: Murder mysteries have a bit of a reputation of being mind candy. Am I right to surmise that it can be hard writing about murder? How difficult was Plane compared to the others?

SM: It's certainly hard for me. I can't speak for all authors, and my impression of some of the violence I read is that it's a game for the authors to write it. They don't see it as something real. But who am I to judge? Speaking for myself, violence always gets to me. So when a story calls for a scene that involves violence, I really have to push myself to get through it, and to reread it. I also think it's important not to sugarcoat it, although I may not get into minute details when I describe it. It's important not to downplay suffering. Even though it's a fictional story, these are situations that really happen to real people, and I want to recognize that. I think I have this compulsion to write violence despite the fact that it bothers me so much because I'm trying to honor victims of violence and hold perpetrators accountable. There's something I like to tell my history students: "Sometimes the only justice you can give someone is to remember them." Again, these are novels, so it's a little different. I just really want to say something real with the violent stories I tell.

Plane wasn't different than the rest of my novels in this respect. My writing often arises from outrage when I write about someone experiencing violence, and Plane definitely has that.


KB: What keeps you coming back to writing ghost stories?

SM: I don't know. I also recently realized that dreams figure in all of my stories. I don't know what that's all about.


KB: So, you've got the Veronica series, and you've started publishing a serial novel, The City Darkens, but only one stand-alone novel. Would you say you prefer the series/serial form? Why does that appeal to you?

SM: Yes, I do like the series form better. In fact, I'm starting to work on a sequel to The City Darkens, as well. I prefer to read books in a series, so I suppose it follows that that's how I think when I'm writing. Broken Ones, my only stand-alone, represents a moment when I broke through some serious writer's block and depression and started writing again after many years, so it's probably just a different kind of work than the rest. Nowadays I write to entertain myself and process things that are bothering me.


KB: When you've committed yourself to writing a series, at some point, is it hard to come up with new material? What are the pros and cons of working within the limitations of Veronica's world (if you would call them limitations)?

SM: So far, so good. I guess my take on it is to not expect to continue past the book I'm on. Then later, if an idea comes to me, fantastic. With the Veronica books, it helps that I'm still fascinated by law in general. In another life I went to law school and worked my way up to becoming a DA. Or maybe a Supreme Court Justice.


KB: The second in the series, The Fire and the Veil, does some exploration of religious subculture (...if one could call one of the world's largest religions subcultural). Louise, the protagonist of Broken Ones, is a professor and cultural anthropologist. Of the three majors you went through, was cultural anthropology among them?

SM: Actually, no. I did study a lot of cultural history, though, which is related.


KB: For those who dig the Veronica Barry novels (paranormal, mystery, etc.) and want to read something like them, what would you recommend?

SM: That's a tough question, because I haven't found a psychic detective series that I personally enjoy. I would recommend the Stephanie Plum mystery series, though, and for paranormal mysteries, Kim Harrison's The Hollows series.


KB: Self-publishing. How's that working for you? Are there any self-published indie writers you'd recommend?

SM: I wish I had a long list. Currently I'm reading Moonlight, Murder and Machinery by John Paul Catton, and it's well written, but I still feel like it needs a beta-reader to catch typos, the occasionally awkward phrase, and dialogue that is too modern for the setting. You should offer him your services, Kathryn! But all in all, it's one of the best indie published books I've come across. Too often people publish books that are not very well written for myriad reasons. I love and hate indie publishing for that reason. On the one hand, it levels the playing field in a very democratic way. I probably would not be published without it, and I've had my own share of typos turn up in works I thought were spotless, so I'm not judging on that level. It's more like there are authors who are publishing the first novel they ever wrote, and they aren't running it by beta readers or writing groups first. You kinda have to do that because when you're new to writing, you don't know what some of the common mistakes are.

I haven't read Joe Konrath or Amanda Hocking (because they don't write genres I read), though, and they must be doing something right because look at how wildly successful they are. There are also a lot of authors earning enough to live on, like Michael R. Hicks. It's more the latter that inspire me, because I really want to get to the point where I'm living off of my writing. At the moment, that's far from the case, but my sales did double this month already. So I'm hopeful!



UPDATE (April 16): The Plane and the Parade is now available on Kindle!

UPDATE (April 17): Also available on Nook! 

Book Review: The Fire and the Veil, by Sophia Martin

Tortured psychic and high school French teacher Veronica Barry is back! As of just last week, Sophia Martin’s The Fire and the Veil is available on Amazon. A few things have changed since the last book, The River and the Roses. Veronica has a new boyfriend, and no car. Her best friend’s daughter has changed schools, and is now one of Veronica’s students…

But what hasn’t changed is the recurring, internal struggle of a psychic, and the deep empathy Veronica has for those she has visions about. The psychic’s condition is further explored in Fire on the subject of powerlessness. Veronica understandably gets frustrated with the duality of having urgent information, and being unable to disclose it without revealing her second sight. There are situations where it would be so much easier if she could just tell someone straight up what kind of trouble others are in instead of piecing together limited external evidence to justify actions that need to be taken. Save for the very few who know about and accept Veronica’s gift, laying out the facts as she knows them is not an option for Veronica, even when people are in pain.

Veronica’s internal dilemmas and monologues are something I was pleased to see carry over from the first book. I like other things about Fire, too. I like smooth, accessible flow of the narrative. I like Veronica’s dreams. I like the bits of exposure to other cultures (that alone is worth the read). I like the best friend Melanie, who is always available for pancakes and solidarity…

I do not like it when characters “out” other characters without their consent. It lowered my opinion of the one who did the “outing,” but not enough to smash the like-ability of the character altogether. Coming out of the closet was for the closeted person to do, not for anyone else to do for them. I don’t care if nobody ended up with targets on their backs or became an object of scorn because of it. It’s their news to tell.

For those who are liable to have a similar reaction: it’s also worth mentioning that this “outing” is only a small portion of the book, and therefore will only hurt for a minute. It is also a part of the story. Because of this, I can appreciate how it made me feel differently about the certain character. It made them all the more human.

So, if you like being transported to a place where teachers play a lot of hooky without the administration asking about the influx in sub-calls, and if you like a good psychic murder mystery, I advise you to take a look at The Fire and the Veil. To the readers who haven’t read River: don’t worry about getting lost. All the information from the first book that’s needed to get through the second is explained at the beginning of chapter one. It will feel like explaining, but there’s enough show-not-tell to save the recap from being the snoozefest it could have been.

To check out Sophia Martin’s blog, click here.

Book Review: The River and the Roses, by Sophia Martin

It’s true that a good way to make an afternoon disappear – or several afternoons if you’re a slow reader like me – is to download and open up Sophia Martin’s novel The River and the Roses. River features high school French teacher Veronica Barry, who, once she overcomes the denial of the psychic abilities she was born with, has a knack for having visions and conversing with the dead. Her involvement with a homicide investigation kicks off with a terrible dream from which she wakes up holding a freshly murdered woman in a park. Tendrils of subplots weave their way to a conclusion, and Bob’s your uncle, there’s your psychic/ghost murder mystery.

It’s also true that, should you choose to make your afternoon(s) disappear in this way, you will be exposed to an insightful message about self-discovery and sacrificial love. Veronica’s ways of willfully ignoring her second sight come to an end when the daughter of her friend-of-twelve-years, Melanie, does not come home from the Valentine’s Day dance. Veronica reluctantly gives in to Melanie’s forceful pleas to use her gift to locate the lost daughter, Angie. After Veronica’s visions lead to the recovery of Angie from the side of a riverbank in another county, Veronica makes the decision to stay tuned in to her clairvoyance, a choice not unaccompanied with struggle.

As external risks go, Veronica faces the potential scrutiny of looking like she’s crazy, and definite scrutiny of being suspected for a con. What living into her gift also means is inviting situations that can be uncomfortable: giving into seeing the visions of past, present, and future that come to her, opening herself up to seeing ghosts and letting them into her head.

Veronica says that finally accepting her gift and purposefully living into it makes her feel, “stronger, and – uncomplicated.” But, like I said, Veronica does continue to grapple with it, a lot. There is no one event where all the emotional lumps smooth out, leaving her with no qualms about her purpose. The dilemmas and uncertainty on her path to self-discovery are explored in introspective monologues, a characteristic of Martin’s writing that can also be found in her first novel, Broken Ones. These dilemmas about risks and negative connotations can be about as discomforting as the more sensory unpleasantries like being surrounded by ghosts at a funeral home. There are times when Veronica wonders if the second sight has any use at all but is “a nuisance, like an eye twitch or an allergy.” There are occasions when she wishes intensely that she could go back to rejecting prescient dreams. But despite all this, Veronica’s psychic purpose wins, as Martin eloquently articulates: “Spiders of shame still crawled in the back of her mind but they had lost their power.”

Traveling the road less comfortable is not primarily motivated by making spiders powerless. It is recollections of Angie’s rescue from the riverbank, and Melanie’s profound gratitude for her daughter’s saved life that fuel Veronica’s determination to go forward. It is for sacrificial love, not the pursuit of personal wholeness, that Veronica stops anesthetizing her second sight. This not only helps Melanie and Angie, but invites opportunities for Veronica to help ghosts and the living alike, running the gamut of aiding murder investigations to saving pet fish.

So there you are. If you want to curl up with a paranormal whodunnit that not only satisfies a craving for murder mystery brain candy, but also dips into the inner life of someone who loves her friends, The River and the Roses is just the ticket. Although, there is a subplot with a fraudulent ex-boyfriend that begs to be developed. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Martin will publish a separate novella on the thread, like she did with Veronica in Paris. Oh, and if you’re sensitive to ghost imagery, there was a brief, visual description that resulted in me sleeping with the light on. Just a warning.