Thoughts on the nature of Lunch

I hate lunch. Lunch is the lame duck meal of the day; the awkward middle child of the meal family.

Look at Breakfast - Breakfast has defined cuisine. Waffles, french toast, cereal, oatmeal, fresh fruit, muffins, omelets, fritatas, sausage links, pancakes - I have no argument with any of it. And it's tough to ruin breakfast food. Shari's makes good breakfast food. That's saying something.

Then there's dinner. It's much more common to spend some time preparing dinner, so there are some wonderful entrees out there. I made this really wonderful pork chop recipe involving pork chops cooked on the stove with salt and pepper, with chopped hazelnuts at the end to toast, then a spash of cream mixed with lemon zest. Yummy, yummy stuff.

But lunch? Lunch is the sandwich meal - and it's not hard to screw up a sandwich. Airlines do it all the time. Forget a condiment and it's toast. And after any length of time, sandwiches become dull eating.

There's leftovers, but that means that your dinner leftovers will be lessened, if not obliterated (in some households, the obliteration occurs during breakfast). You can also go the traditional "soup and salad" route, but soup is tricky to move, as is salad unless artlessly wilted greens are your thing. And the soup is either fresh - making it a leftover - or canned - making it high in sodium.

Because we only get a short window for lunch, we'll often go with high-sodium convenience foods. And let's not forget that lunch brought us the invention of Lunchables (for people who want to call highly preserved deli cuts and crackers a meal) and the oddness of crinkle cut carrots.

Those well-meaning women employed by the public school systems, the heavyset, hairn-netted, intimidating women? They were not Breakfast or Dinner Ladies. They were Lunch Ladies.

Of course, without Lunch Ladies, we'd be left with a serious whole in Children's publishing.

P.S. I have known some lovely, trim ladies who prepared and served lunch is schools. They just never worked at my schools.

P.S.S. It's entirely possible this blog is the product of late-night lunch-related panic. I really do hate lunch. Unless, of course, it's from Café Yumm.

I love you, sensibly

I'm starting to think that I kind of suck at writing romance. This is a problem, because most editors in my genre want a romance storyline.

And I'm fine with that. I understand. Romance sells. I'll get them together in the end. It's just the drama I have trouble with.

Good romance, written, is all about drama. The thing is, though, is that the mark of a good realistic romance is the lack of drama. I mean, when you ask couples how they met, there's not a lot of "well, my dad was a mafia boss - you know how that goes" or "I almost moved to Saint Tropez, but then Fred ran on onto the tarmac and stood in front of the plane to stop me. That's how I knew." And rarer still, "There was this snafu with my inheritance, I had to marry someone within two days, thanks goodness I met Bob! The only problem was, he had an insane wife in the attic at the time..."

Here's what I've experienced with the two books I've worked on in the past, one completed, one nearly complete. I'm great when the two characters are not supposed to be together. Really great. Nice drama, superb tension (tension being the lifeblood of story).

But by the time I've cleared the obstacles (about two-thirds through the book) for these two to really, truly fall in love, what then? They fall in love. Big whoop.

I'm going to solve this, truly. And I have no concerns (no concerns, especially if my agent or editor is reading this) about my ability to craft a lovely little romance. But it's tricky, you know? This is a book about the Amish. Now, if I could only have some Canadian mobsters with a vampire or two while someone (the guy) gets hit by a car on the way to the Empire State Building, things would be a lot easier.

Mini-rant: Pants

This makes me SO mad.

It's tough being a tall woman in a world where clothing designers design for women who are 5'7. Pants especially. Because if the pants aren't long enough, your options are pretty limited. A lot of the time with trousers these days, there's a pretty deep hem. If you're lucky, you can rip out the hem and re-sew/perky bond (magic stuff) a new hem a lot closer to the actual edge of the fabric. But if there's not a deep hem, and the pants are two short, there's nothing you can do.

I pull out this argument a lot when short women complain. They don't like re-hemmed pants. But, you know, you've got options. You've got fabric, whereas tall women usually get bubkes. Nothing.

Things have gotten a bit better the last few years. Gap has a tall line, and J.Crew is pretty reliable. Mind you, these are usually for pants that are JUST long enough for flats. I keep reading in magazines that they recommend buying two pairs of pants at a time (since pants and money grow on trees) and having one hemmed to wear with heals. Technically, the edge of your pants, with heals, is supposed to be no higher than one inch off the ground.

Are you kidding me? They don't make pants that long, and it's not like I'm that tall. Despite common belief, I'm two inches under six feet. There are scores of pants-wearing women taller than me. Most of them play basketball.

So here I am, 5'10, and I marry a man who stands just over 6'4. He is taller than I am. But here's the thing: we can buy his pants at Costco. And Fred Meyer. Most places make men's pants with a 34" inseam. In fact, they'll give you the option of choosing your waist size and your inseam. Finding a 29"-34" range for inseam is pretty common.

I ask you - why is it that designers acknoledge that men have many different lengths of legs, and women (if they're lucky), are petite, regular, or tall? Or in many cases, just regular?

Tall women are clearly being discriminated against and we don't even have an organization for our advancement with a clever acronym.

Don't even get me started on how rarely you'll ever see the words "hand wash" or "line dry" on menswear. Usually it's "Wash on the tough cycle and dry till crisp."

Resolved:

Granted, New Year's Eve was a few days ago. Today is Epiphany, the day the wise men showed up with gifts for the baby Jesus. We attended a White Elephant gift exchange (does anyone want a turtle-shaped flute? An inkjet cartridge refilling kit?) that discussed the advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas, not the song. I like the idea of Christmas lasting that long, although I'm ready for my tree to go away.

(Nothing against the tree. It's a great-looking tree. I've just been irrationally bitter about it since it arrived, damp and unshaken, at our tiny apartment.)

Today, however, I've scored the assitance of my lovely sister to help me with the take-down of the tree. Seems if she's given chocolate (preferably Dove) and if Gilmore Girls is playing on the background, she'll agree to any number of tasks.

But I was thinking around New Year's about resolutions. I'm not much for resolutions - I don't like to resolve to do things and then not do them in two months. One year I resolved to buy a pair of gray pants - that one was pretty cut and dried. This year, I've made two decisions.

1. When there are people on the side of the road holding advertising signs, dancing, waving, and possibly dressed as a gorilla, I'm going to wave back.

2. I resolve to limit the amount of time my clean laundry spends in my hallway.

The latter will be the tougher one. We have a washer and dryer conveniently located in our hallway closet. Clean clothes come out of the dryer and land on the floor if I'm not immediately prepared to deal with them. They may spend a lot of time afterwards on the floor. One pile in particular spent a great deal of time there before Christmas (granted, this is when I was sick), and when I folded everything up before a trip I was amazed. Who knew our hallway was so large?

So here's hoping the resolution helps.

It's going to be a busy next few months. The book is due at the end of April. I want to be finished at the end of March and spend April doing dry edits (dry edits are when I've printed up material and edit on real paper). To comfortably reach that (very neccessary) goal, I need to be putting out two chapters a week for a while. If I kept it up throughout this month and the next, I could conceivably be done by the end of February. The idea of not worrying anymore about the deadline has a certain appeal.

So here's hoping. On top of that, I have a mound of wedding photos to be edited, as well as a Heart Gallery shoot (and subsequent edits) coming up tomorrow afternoon. There's a lot to be done in the Lodge household.

Including folding laundry.

"I'll be home for...crap."

I kid you not. During my sister's piano recital (which she RULED, by the way), one sweet little boy stepped up to the piano, played the opening chromatic chords to "I'll be Home for Christmas," but had a little trouble with the beginning lyrics. The above title is a direct quote.

It's Christmas Eve Eve, the equivalent of "Dead Week" for last minute shoppers of the family. For other families that day would be tomorrow, but my family celebrates the Birth of Christ on the evening of the 24th, which moves everything up a bit.

This has been a difficult Christmas season in some respects. I love Christmas, and I love everything that comes with it - the baking, the tree, the lights, the choosing of gifts. I was sick - the first time - when we went out for our tree. It sat undecorated for a while, until I felt better enough to go on a rampage.

I've learned a lot about myself and sickness this month. I've discovered that if I'm sick for a while, the moment I feel a bit better I'll go on a bender. All of a sudden, come hell or high water, I find myself 100% devoted to getting something done. The first time it was the tree, which I decorated myself (Danny was sick by then). In my infinite wisdom, I started the lights at the top and worked my way down. It seemed logical at the time. Now...less so.

Things were equalizing, we were both healthy, until I got sick last week. Again. So when I started coming out of that one, I began wrapping gifts. All the gifts. I blew my nose, then wrapped more.

I take wrapping pretty seriously. There is something deeply, deeply troubling to me if the identity of the gift can be guessed just by looking at it. Starting at a young age, I learned how to ID my gifts. I thumped the front, feeling for a plastic window. I felt around the edges to see if it was a Nordstrom box (they had wide edges at the time). I pressed the paper down to try to see through it. I shook. I rattled. I annoyed my parents with my startling accuracy.

Oh, and I had my patented question: "Is it in its original box?"

Seriously. After that, my parents took the wrapping up a notch. Clothes for my American Girl doll were wrapped inside a standard garmet box...along with a seatbelt clip and some bolts. Christmas has never been the same. What's funny is that I married someone who does not have the same compulsion to examine his gifts. He's happy opening them and being surprised. Can't understand it.

Anyway, I got sick, I felt better, I wrapped. There is one gift I'm particularly proud of in its sneakiness - not only is the item entirely disguised, but I disguised it using a collection of objects I've been trying to get rid of for six months.

Then my Christmas cards arrived from Costco Printing, and I started in on those. Fifty cards. Twenty-four hours. I'm actually quite proud.

My sister's Christmas recital was the night before last. She played "Falling Slowly" from Once, and it was incredible. But as the rest of the 75-minute program progressed, I had some time to think about music. Particularly Christmas music.

Such as...have you ever though about how creepy the song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" really is? It makes him sound like a KGB operative...he knows everything. Scary. I mean -

"He sees you when you're sleeping,

He knows when you're awake,

He knows if you've been bad or good,

Because he wiretapped your place. Hey!"

(Note: I tried to put in a line about printing seditious pamphlets, but I couldn't get it to fit. "Pamphlets" is a tricky word to rhyme with

Other songs I dislike:

"Have a Holly Jolly Christmas" - Too cute-cutesy. Like the phrase "fro-yo", but worse.

"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" - I'm not sure how this works, since most people put their trees in corners or against walls. Maybe the line "Rockin' back and forth in front of the Christmas tree" didn't make it past the test group stage. Either way, there's no lyrics with any meaning or cleverness, and even if there were, I'd likely resent it anyway.

"We Wish You a Merry Christmas" - BO-ring melody, and that line about bringing us the figgy pudding has always set me off. I don't know anyone who has ever baked fig pudding, so demanding something so disgusting and likely unattainable is doubly rude.

There's my riff on Christmas music. As far as the rest of life, I need to work on my book today, which I'm officially halfway through. The plot is progressing well, and my character is currently outside of Amish country, which makes my life easier. I've had a copy of Amish Grace sitting around for a month, but I haven't been able to get myself to read it. Having read about everything to do with the Amish, I think I've found my limit.

Ideally, I might bake today. We'll see. But whatever happens, it won't be to the tune of "We Wish you a Merry Christmas," because I'm clean out of figgy pudding.

P.S. Australia review coming soon. In the meantime, go see it.

Notes on Illness

I guess I jinxed myself. In my last blog I boasted of being healthy again.

Hah. Whatever. I just had all of the kleenex wads thrown away from the last bout (granted, some were Danny's), when I woke up with a tonsil twenty times it's normal size.

Seriously. It's like it took a cue from the Grinch's heart (that grows until the magnifying glass breaks, if I remember right). And my lymph node on that side is all huge and swollen. Hasn't been this big since I had mono, which was the last time I blogged about such a topic.

I hold to my previous statements (which can be found on my old blog at www.myspace.com/hillary_on_writing), such as the fact that Progresso soups are the best. They still are. In fact, the times I've tried some of the Campbell's (recently, their Italian Wedding soup), I've been kinda grossed out. The bits o' pasta were so far from al dente that it makes me queasy just thinking about it.

Puff's plus - still my favorite tissue, although the most recent set of four I've purchased feels like an entirely different tissue, and not in a good way. I may set out to pick up a box of Puff's Plus Lotion, Aloe, and whatever other deluxe options they throw in. It's like buying a car, I guess, and the baseline model just isn't acceptable.

I had hoped I'd be lucky. I found a white patch on my tonsil and thought, "woo hoo! I'll go to my doctor, get antibiotics, get better, bada bing, bada boom."

No dice. White patch went away, strep test was negative, it's a viral throat infection that basically means my throat is trying to strangle me from the inside out. I get to drink tea. Lots of tea. Tea every hour.

I'm trying to figure out how to spice up some of the chicken soups. I added crushed red pepper to the last one, but I couldn't really taste it. I don't know if that's because I can't taste much - I only have one working nostril presently - or if I didn't add enough. I'm thinking of adding some curry to my creamy chicken corn chowder. Any ideas to mix it up? I don't think I'll be eating anything but soup, applesauce, and pudding for a while. Threw some cinnamon and ginger into the applesauce and warmed it up...that was yummy. I'm a little heartbroken because I've been to the grocery store twice, and I keep forgetting to pick up tapioca. Warm tapioca pudding would be good.

Anyway. Hoping this somehow manages to blow over fast. Most of my shopping is done but there are a couple stragglers. Wrapping is still nil, but worst case scenario I have quite a lot of gift bags and even more white tissue (referring to the wrapping kind, although I do have a lot of the blowing kind). The one upside is that when my head's not entirely fuzzy, I'm getting some good writing in. It's like writing late at night - fewer inhibitions.

Hopefully I'll get better soon. And until then - there's soup!

Twilight and the Evils of Voice-Over

I know this review has been a long time coming; all I can say is that I got sick after Thanksgiving weekend, and when I began to improve, Danny caught it.

Now I'm healthy (with just the tiniest cough), I'm 90% done with the Christmas shopping (although in denial about the need to wrap), I finished a chapter two days ago, and life is back on track.

So. Twilight.

The initial hype and fervor has passed, but impressive while it lasted. Before the film opened, all of the conversation fluttered around whether or not the movie would gross enough to warrant the sequels. I had a hunch it would - after all, this was a movie for the same demographic who made Titanic successful (weepy, squealy teen and preteen girls).

When we went, the theater was full of, yea verily, many weepy, squealy girls. How squealy? The scene: high school in Forks, Washington. Bella, sitting, minding her own business when who should enter (in slow motion, so you get all that good hair bounce) but the Cullens? There's Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, Alice (perhaps not in that order, but there isn't a poem for them like the reindeer) and...wait for it...wait for it...



It was like sitting in a theater full of happy shrieking eels. A bit overdramatic if you consider this particular vampire borrowed his hair from Elvis.

Back to the movie, except, if I'm going to talk about the movie, I need to talk about the book.

Twilight and its successors, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, are prime examples of how good storytelling sells. Stephenie Meyer was extremely successful is writing books with a compelling enough story to launch the reader through a 2" thick book in 48 hours. The forbidden love story is classic in its archetypal roots and for that reason strikes a chord. The books are really less about Vampires than they are about a Romeo and Juliet story in which Romeo has impressive incisors and the ability to climb a pine with his bare hands.

The supporting characters are strong, particularly Edward's "siblings," and there's enough romantic confusion and romance to keep things entertaining. This is not to say that the writing didn't need a few more passes through the editing department. But we believe Bella as a serious, thoughtful teen who has completely fallen in love with a man who wants to eat her.

I know some people became frustrated with Bella as the series progressed; I thought it was unfair. She's 17 and dealing with International vampire culture. That she doesn't collapse into a paroxysm of trepidation is really to her credit.

The movie is so wrapped up in the thing which Twilight has become that it has difficulty really exploring its space, settling in, and becoming its own entity rather than a book adaptation. No one looks comfortable in their movie skin, with the exception of Elizabeth Reaser's Esme Cullen. For the Twilight fan, the film is a chance to see the book come to life. For the outsider, a lot of the plot developments and character motives would remain a little too mysterious.

The first half takes too much time trying to develop, but speeds up well during the second half. Funny, because the book did the same thing. Difference is that the book managed to entertain when nothing much was going on but Bella's reflections on Edward's physical perfection.

I would see it again, and enjoy it (unlike Bond, which I did see a second time and zoned out through the last half), and I'm genuinely looking forward to New Moon.

I was looking forward to it even before the directorship was handed off to Chris Weitz. As the director of Golden Compass and About a Boy (one of my favorite movies), I think he'll help bring the production values up a notch. Or ten. Because there's nothing wrong with making the movie not look like it was made for the Sci-Fi channel. I think the hand-held camera is great and looked terrific for the Bourne movies, but for films with a fantastical element I think the camera needs to be grounded more often, to aid with the suspension of disbelief.

Haven't heard anything yet about the script, IMDB still lists it with Melissa Rosenberg, but if they hand that one off, I think that's great. The film opens with a lot of voice-over which should have been cut IN THE FIRST DRAFT PEOPLE, DID WE LEARN NOTHING FROM FILM SCHOOL????? If you're going to use first-person narration, you had better be writing the great American film, and there had better not be vampires involved. Or werewolves. I'm sure this was all covered in class. In a perfect world, I would have the producers court Steve Kloves (of Harry Potter fame) or Jan Sardi (The Notebook), with a co-writing credit for Delia Ephron (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), a writer who has no issues getting into the heads of teen girls (She used voice-over in the form of letters, yes, but it worked).

This is really less of a review than a discussion. I'm okay with that. If you want to know what the movie's about, read the book. It'll take about 48 hours.