SUMMERRRRRRRRRR!
We have a dear friend, Miguel, who was actually the model for Beto, the King of Halloween in Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit. Let’s just say he hosts a killer barbecue. My daughter was waiting at the bus stop in high school in late May as school was wrapping up and he drove by and slowed down to say, “Summerrrrrrrrrr!!!!” She said it was the best feeling ever, this proper acknowledgement of the change of the season by exactly the right person. His voice has been in my head a lot this month as I have a magical window of a few weeks between teaching and teaching and I am doing my favorite things: reading, writing, cooking.
In May, we had a totally packed but joyful schedule as I finished my semester at Cal State LA, my daughter graduated college, she and I had an epic cross country drive home from New York in a rented Ford Explorer we named Arabella, packed with four years of stuff. Our first stop was Pittsburgh where we got to hang with Chiwan Choi and Judeth Oden Choi, which seemed appropriate as their publishing company Writ Large Press launched my second horror novel THAT MORNING!
My daughter, Reed and me with dear friend (and publisher!) Chiwan Choi
The book is being launched as a serial via newsletter, and if you want to catch up on the story thus far, follow this link or click on the image of the cover below. The whole book is ten dollars (the use of the word subscription bumped some folks. One friend asked, “Ten dollars a month?” I would never do that to readers—It’s ten dollars ALL IN for the whole novel). Click, order and the following Monday you will get ALL EPISODES THUS FAR dropped into your inbox. You will then get one new episode a week—this is two chapters of text in a phone friendly email! Read it on the bus on the way to work or while waiting for your plane or on the beach! I love how Writ Large is pushing the boundaries of publishing, as they circumvent the larger machine of distribution which results in a zero sum game for most authors. This has been a really fun ride so far and I’ve been getting a few texts WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN? as Sophia, Curtis, and Jonathan move through their increasingly creepy days in Hollywood. Again, big shout out to Ana Chaidez who painted the cover after reading the book…she captures the feel of the book so well.
If any of you ARE reading the book and want to blurb it (you don’t have to be a writer!) just with your reaction to any given section, send it to me I’ll feature your blurb everywhere!
Writ Large Projects (the Press is a small part of it) is working on a huge, beautiful community centered project in Braddock, PA, opening a bookstore and community center. Read more about it here: https://www.writlargeprojects.com/donate
And if you are LA local, please come check out the gorgeous art for sale in their silent auction, event on July 28th at Ren Gallery in DTLA. You can order tickets here.
Shortly after we returned to LA and returned Arabella to the car rental, I hopped the train to San Diego for Stokercon! I kicked off four days of the annual HWA horror hang with my horror bestie, Lisa Morton, and we went on a haunted tour of The Whaley House in Old Town San Diego. Spoiler alert: It did not feel terribly haunted, but the tour was delightful and I was most interested in this 19th century Whaley guy who bought property on the cheap because it used to be the town gallows, built a house and made a ton of $ off his private residence, from running the courthouse out of one room, a shop out of another and a theater upstairs. Afterwards, with dear friends Ricky Grove, and Eric J. Guignard (who is a marvelous writer and editor), we went down the street to the speakeasy Oculto 477 and had some trippy drinks set on fire and smoked and such. It’s always a creepy time with Lisa.
The rest of the con was jam packed with intense fun, panels, readings, etc. to recount here but you can check out my Instagram to see the panoply of awesome horror folks I hung with. I traveled to the con with friend Aaron Dries and Alpha Cheng and got to hang more deeply with LP Kindred and Arley Sorg, who are excellent humans. Devious things were plotted. We rode out the Stoker Awards in the bar and we ended up going to the Nebula conference the following weekend together, which was a wild ride. I meet so many good for the planet excellent people in genre writing and am working on putting a few of those together with each other.
To celebrate summer, and having about two seconds to read for pleasure, I dove into Sarah Langan’s A BETTER WORLD, which I feature below. I also have to crank up the old jalopy of a writing practice as my teaching load diminished my writing to nihil for a few months there, so below I’m including a handful of prompts I have gathered for the teaching month ahead. I’ll be writing with my students. And with fresh basil affordable and plentiful at the local market, we’re making PESTO this week! Our cat’s name is Pesto, so there are a lot of jokes floating around our house about that. He is not amused. Enjoy your summer! Enjoy your pesto. And eat up some books!
Read.
This book has been burning a hole in my coffee table for several months now. My spring Fiction students at Cal State LA were so brilliant and prolific my reading time was spent on their stories. I promise you the future of good reading is SECURE. I am loving this generation of writers coming up.
Anyway, I was stoked to read this book by Sarah Langan. It’s a grim future and a family has to work very hard to get themselves into a corporate owned enclave, where the air is clean, the houses and nature are glorious, there is plenty of food and water, and so what if some of the local customs are a bit…bizarre? Linda is just happy to have her kids in a safe place and to spend a day or two not laid up with asthma. This book has a slow layered burn as each new revelation bubbles up new horror. Langan’s writing is crackerjack sharp and the subjects she tackles remind me a lot of the way my mom looked at society in the time she was writing. Langan gets inside the relationships of the characters to make you really truly care (finally a REAL family!), while taking on global warming and complex geopolitics along with the dangers of allowing corporations to take charge of our well-being. Enjoy!
Write.
Find fifteen minutes in a day, on a hammock, on the floor or in front of a fan, (I know so much of this country is submerged in heat now) somewhere irregular for you to sit, set a timer and pick a prompt at random from the below. WRITE.
1.Start by writing down five rules.
Write breaking one.
2. This did not go according to Plan.
No, no, no, that story is all wrong, here’s what really happened.
If we weren’t all so damn tired... (try first person plural, collective voice)
5. My old room was...
6. It's all gone. All of it.
7. Write a list of everyone you've ever loved. Write.
Don’t ask too much of your prompts, or the writing produced there, let yourself go. These are raw materials. return to them in a week or so, let them speak to you. see if you find stories there. When in doubt, try to merge two. Sometimes the energy from two different pieces can create a whole new story.
Cook.
Pesto
It’s kind of a nobrainer thing, but having made pesto for years, I have learned a thing or two about alternate ingredients and ways to enhance it. When I was growing up, basil came in big time in Connecticut in July. My Dad came home with a giant paper shopping bag full of it and my mom got the best idea, make pesto for the whole winter! Well, if you know anything about Tupperware in the early 80s (it warped and opened in the freezer) and about food in Connecticut during that period (the pine nuts were off by the time they got to us) you’ll know that my deep hatred of freezer burned nasty rancid pesto was hard won.
Fast forward to California, and a variety of fresh nuts, and basil year round, it is beyond delicious. You CAN use pine nuts but I find them very pricey, and I’ve now gotten accustomed to the toasty taste of pecan in our pesto. it is a variable thing. Today, I’m using walnuts because…too lazy to go buy more pecans. We also get a lot of Armenian lemon basil in our neighborhood, so that affects the flavor. The most important thing is really good olive oil.
ALSO if you don’t happen to have the perfect blender or mini blender you can use a mortar & pestle or, as I’ve done here, just mince everything on a board until it’s pulverized and mix it after. Never underestimate the power of a knife, that rocking motion and repetition back in forth. Only a knife and board were used for this recipe.
Ingredients:
2 bunches basil leaves, washed, stripped off stalks
2 cloves garlic (unless it is SUPER FRESH PUNGENT then just one)
1/2 cup olive oil (get the good stuff! not the mixed vat, but only from spain or only from CA)
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, or combined with Romano
about 7 pecans, or 1/4 cup pine nuts, or 1/4 cup walnuts, toasted in a pan makes it richer
(optional) zest of one lemon
(optional) 1/4 tsp ground red chili
I started by chopping the basil, back and forth back and forth at an angle with a sharp knife until it was fully minced, added in garlic, and walnuts, did the same until it was totally minced (You can use a immersion blender for this process or a teenytiny blender. In my experience a full sized blender is a bit of a headache as the nuts and leaves tend to get stuck.) Then I chucked it in a bowl, grated a lemon’s rind into it, (just the rind, no pith) and added a quarter teaspoon of pepperoncino and the cheese. Mixed it all up and it was ready!
Cook pasta until done (or a little al dente) add the mixture to taste. If cooking for a lot of people toss the whole mixture in and serve in a giant bowl. Top with freshly grated cheese. Those of us craving protein, shred chicken into the mix as well. Or roast chicken with salt and pepper and serve with Pesto spread on top. Enjoy!
Thanks to Ko for the glamor shot of finished pasta
Have a fabulous summer, folks. More to come in August. Read everything, write what you can and eat well! Thanks for reading….—-Kate