Visit www.foodsafety.gov to find more food safety tips.

The Amgen Biotech Experience empowers teachers to bring biotechnology into their classrooms to spark students� love of science and features a hands-on curriculum that introduces students to the excitement of scientific discovery.

Simple steps for Alzheimer's planning.

AARP The Magazine spent 24 hours filming the emotional day in the life of caregivers across America

Joey Fatone: IN SINK

With this bold new campaign, St. Baldrick�s shows kids as their truest selves � fun-loving, carefree, refreshingly honest, and always a little goofy. Donate today at StBaldricks.org.

Video of legally-blind photographer living his Whole Day, as he captures a celebration of senses and movement

Exclusive sneak-peek of how Andrea gets her #BrilliantSmile holiday ready in Episode 7 of The Smile Show.

Tony Bennett talks about what it means to have Keep Memory Alive�s 20th annual Power of Love� gala honor him with a 90th birthday celebration on May 21, 2016

Talk About It! PSA with Greg Grunberg

Charlene Su, mother of a cochlear implant recipient, shares her daughter's hearing loss story. Learn more about hearing loss treatment options at IWantYouToHear.com.

Behind the scenes with Elizabeth Goodman Artis, Natalie Morales, Danielle Brooks, Padma Lakshmi and Sara Bareilles at the 2016 MORE/SHAPE Women�s Half-Marathon in Central Park on April 17.

Lenine Cunha, Portuguese Paralympian and Win for Meningitis campaign ambassador

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Miami Gala celebrity B-roll for download

On occasion of the 165th year of Income Tax Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman ji has announced that the much-awaited new direct tax law would soon be introduced in 2025

In this article, we shall cover the common documents required for APEDA registration, the eligibility standards and additional documents required for the same.

Government of IndiaMinistry of FinanceDepartment of Revenue(Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs)North Block, New Delhi. Dated:30th October, 2024To All Principal Chief Commissioners/Chi

Knifedads and youtube celebrities Karate Johnathan and Steeliest Daniel train the Appleton County High Security Elementary School on resisting drugs and witchcraft.

The Knifedads talk about the meaning of Knifedaddery, and how to survive a Florida Drugfight

A brief chat about weapons, self defense, senpais, fantasy replica weapons, and assorted chicanery, with Phil Elmore.

The model kit for the most basic-ass white bread Gundam of all (Johnathan Gundam is its name, I believe) is only $11. I am eager to escape reality. Now that's what I call a formula for adventure!

Hi, all. Waiting is hard. So here are some pretty pics to distract you. 

Friday was the day I'd scheduled to take some time off, go for nice walk, and get some pictures of the fall foliage.

In typical 2020 fashion, it didn't go quite as planned… 

So I went with it.

Everything is great.

Here are some scenes...

...of October...

... in Massachusetts...

...just for you.

Now for some pictures of inside things. I don't know about you, but this is a pretty stressful time for me, and I'm using every tool in my toolbox to stay healthy and well. One of those is — always — writing, and hardly anything gives me greater comfort than having fun with my writing tools.

I've explained before that I write by hand. Then, when I've written a sufficient amount that I start to worry about the house burning down, I transcribe my writing into a Word document, using voice recognition software. If you're curious about the kind of notebooks I've written in previously and what my writing used to look like — and if you're a writer who wants a reminder of how normal it is for writing to be hard — go check out my old post, Pictures of a Book Being Made. 

In recent years, I have some new tools.

Writing by hand has always been my way, even before I developed a disability that makes typing prohibitively painful. I'm left-handed, but not too long ago, after doing some realistic thinking about how much pain I work through on a daily basis, I began to teach myself to write right-handed, so that I can increase the likelihood I'll be able to write forever. 

Now, after much practice, I alternate between hands pretty regularly as I work. The right-handed writing is slower and messier, and my hand gets tired faster. But it's fine.

I've also started using smaller, lighter notebooks. This is partly to save my hands, and partly because the most recent books I've been writing feel different, and have been asking me for new supplies.

In particular, they're asking me for smaller, lighter, less intimidating notebooks — and stickers. :o)

I've been hunting for stickers that feel like my books. Stickers that match my characters, my plot, the feelings that imbue my story. Then, as I write, I plop the stickers onto the page… And it helps. It gives me ideas; it slows me down, so that my writing is more thoughtful; it gives me joy. 

The two stickers on the left are the work of Katie at BearandFoxCo. The sticker on the right is the work of Audrey Miller at CloudCatArts.

I'll share some pictures of my stickers… And include, with some of them, samples of my right-handed writing, so you can see what I mean about that. Anytime you see handwriting, that's my right-handed work. And anytime you see a sticker created by an individual/independent artist, I have gotten permission to share it.

Here goes.

Made by Katie Harmon at PinkPolish Design.

Made by Katie Harmon at PinkPolish Design.

Made by Katie Harmon at PinkPolish Design.

Made by Katie Harmon at PinkPolish Design.

This is an image from a cityscape washi tape, superimposed over some pale-blue sky washi stickers I can no longer find a link to.

Made by Katie Harmon at PinkPolish Design. (I colored her right eye red!)

I got a whole series of ship pictures on Etsy, but alas, they no longer seem to be available.

I found these butterfly/moth washi stickers on Etsy.

There's one more artist whose work I wanted to share, but I didn't get permission from her in time. Her Etsy shop is on a short break at the moment, but keep the shop of Helen Ahpornsiri in mind; she creates animals using pressed flowers and plants, and the results are beautiful.

And that's my distraction for today.

Everyone, give yourself a break over the next few days and then however long this takes. Try not to check the news compulsively; wear masks to protect the vulnerable; forgive yourself for being stressed out. And hang in there.

♥♥♥

There's still time to register for my virtual book events happening today and tomorrow. For those of you who receive my blog post as emails, your email got weirdly cut off yesterday right before all the event information. You also missed some photos of my notebooks while I was writing Winterkeep. Sorry about that. For event details and to catch up on what you missed, please visit yesterday's post on my Blog Actual! http://kristincashore.blogspot.com/2021/01/winterkeep-ish-stuff-for-release-week.html

Connie Willis's Doomsday Book is one of my favorite books, and also one of the best books ever written. It is a masterpiece.

It's also extremely sad, and happens to be about deadly epidemics. So I'll start by saying that depending on what you've experienced in the past year, this may not be the book for you right now. Alternately, it might be exactly the book for you right now. I think it depends on whether and how much you're grieving, whether you've been traumatized, and whether it helps you, as you process, to share those feelings with people inside a book. For me, this can be a touch-and-go sort of question… When is a book comforting, and when is it exacerbating my difficult feelings? I've read this book before, so I knew what I was getting into last week when I sat down to reread it. For me, it helped me access, and settle, my own overwhelmed, confused feelings from the last year. But I say that as a person who is not a COVID nurse or doctor and has not lost a loved one to COVID-19. I am, however, a person with PTSD. As such, I'd advise that if you've been spending anxious time at someone's sickbed — or not been allowed to spend time at their sickbed, only allowed to imagine it — or if you're one of the overworked caregivers — this might be a book to save for another time. Among other things, it contains a lot of graphic descriptions of human sickness and suffering. It also puts you inside the head of a character who's gradually being traumatized by the sadness and death around her. Please spare yourself, if that's not a good headspace for you right now. (This post, on the other hand, will contain no graphic descriptions, and I don't linger on the trauma.)

I'll also say that, maybe moreso than the other posts in my craft series, this post will contain some plot spoilers. Not all the plot spoilers! Willis does some excellent weaving that creates surprises for the reader I won't reveal. But it's impossible to talk about this book without revealing some important plot points. If you don't want to know, stop reading now. (If you're undecided, I can say that it's thrilling reading even if you know what's going to happen.)

First, a little background: The conceit of Connie Willis's time travel books (each of which is wonderful) is that in the mid-twenty-first century, historians in Oxford, England conduct fieldwork by traveling back in time to observe other eras. This is not the kind of time travel story we're all used to in which the plot hinges on the time traveler changing the course of history, or the story getting wound up in complicated paradoxes. The "net," which is the machine that makes time travel possible in this book, doesn't allow time travel that will alter the course of history. And though some of Willis's other time travel books do deal with the paradox issue (sometimes hilariously), that's not the point of Doomsday Book. This is a different kind of time travel book.

In Doomsday Book, Kivrin, a young Oxford historian in December 2054, is set to travel back to the Oxfordshire of December 1320, to observe the lives of the locals at Christmas in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, on the very day of Kivrin's travel, a new influenza virus arises in 2054 Oxford, and the tech responsible for running Kivrin's travel coordinates (or, "getting the fix"), Badri Chaudhuri, falls ill. He doesn't know he's ill — no one knows Badri is ill — until it's too late. In the disorientation of his illness, Badri gets the coordinates jumbled, and Kivrin is accidentally sent to December 1348 — which is when the bubonic plague reached Oxfordshire. The circumstances of Kivrin's passage ensure that it's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get her back to 2054. Kivrin is trapped.

The novel then alternates between 2054/55, where a frightening new influenza epidemic is arising, and 1348, where Kivrin is gradually coming to realize what's about to befall the people around her. Connecting the two timelines is an Oxford historian named Mr. Dunworthy, a deeply caring and pessimistic man who is desperately trying to figure out how to rescue Kivrin from her accidental fate, and bring her back to 2054/55. (For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to keep referring to the future timeline as 2054 from this point on, even though the year turns to 2055 partway through the novel.)

Incidentally, that plot twist I just casually revealed — the one where it turns out Kivrin is in the year 1348 instead of 1320 — isn't revealed to the reader until page 384. Willis's slow and brilliant pacing, her careful, drawn out reveal of the horror that has happened and the horror that's coming, is one of the magnificent accomplishments of this book. It's not what I'm planning to talk about today, though. In truth, I could write a long series of craft posts about "Things a Writer Could Learn from Doomsday Book." But today I'm going to single out one of the things I took from my latest reading: namely, her construction of parallel characters in separate timelines.

All page references are to the 1992 Bantam Books mass-market edition, though I've also listened to the 2008 Recorded Books audiobook narrated by Jenny Sterling, which is excellent (and deliciously long!).

Before I dive deep into Willis's construction of parallel characters, I want to speak more generally about the potential for parallels — echoes — inside a book, when that book takes place in multiple timelines. Many books do take place in more than one timeline, of course, whether or not they involve time travel! And there's so much you can do with that kind of structure. As you can imagine, life in Oxfordshire in 1348 is dramatically different from life in Oxford in 2054. But Willis weaves so many parallels into these two stories, big and small things, connecting them deftly, and showing us that some things never really change. I suppose the most obvious parallel in this particular book is the rise of disease. The less obvious is some of the fallout that follows the rise of disease, no matter the era: denial; fanaticism; racism and other prejudices; isolationism; depression and despair; depletion of supplies (yes, they are running out of toilet paper in 2054). She also sets these timelines in the same physical location, the Oxfords and Oxfordshires of 1348 and 2054 — the same towns, the same churches. Some of the physical objects from 1348 still exist in 2054. She sets both stories at Christmas, and we see that some of the traditions are the same. She also weaves the most beautiful web between timelines using bells, bellringers, and the significance of the sound of bells tolling. 

Simply by creating two timelines, then establishing that some objects, structures, and activities are the same and that some human behaviors are the same across the timelines, she can go on and tell two divergent plots, yet create echoes between them. These echoes give the book an internal resonance. (Are you starting to appreciate why it was so thematically smart for her to bring bells to the forefront of her story?) They also give the book a sense of timelessness. It becomes one of those masterworks that presents the best and worst of humanity in all times, for the reader to see and recognize. Epidemics lay us bare. In all times, people are bound by the limitations of their scientific knowledge. In all times, people (the good ones and the bad ones) struggle to find a bearable framework, a way to conceive of the horrors without succumbing to despair. And in all times, some people respond with kindness and generosity, working themselves to the bone in order to help others; and some people allow their fear to turn them into selfish, craven, unfeeling hypocrites, striking out at others in defense of themselves. By letting these echoes ring across the timelines of her book, Connie Willis captures her themes magnificently.

And now I'm going to focus on the echoes in her character-building: on the way she creates characters who are unique individuals, yet who strike the reader with extra force because of the ways they parallel each other across time. I'll offer a range of examples. Some are small, isolated moments in which characters from 1348 and 2054 perform similar activities. Some are people who have similar attitudes or spirits, even as they perform different roles. Most of them are loose parallels, drawn with a light touch. One of the parallels is quite clear and deep, two people who are characteristically similar, to the point where you feel like one could practically be the 2054 version of the other. This is one of Connie Willis's special skills: she draws her parallels lightly in some places, heavily in others, never hamfisted, none of them tied too tightly, all of them open to interpretation, and all of them reaching for her larger, more timeless themes about what it means to be human. 

 

Smaller Parallel Moments

I'll start with a few moments that are brief, but also plainly deliberate.

Here's one: There's a moment when Agnes, a five-year-old girl from 1348, tries to feed hay to the cow, but is clearly afraid of the cow. First she holds the hay out "a good meter from the cow's mouth" (304), then she throws the hay at the cow and runs to safety behind Kivrin's back. 

Skip ahead to page 551, where Colin Templer, a twelve-year-old boy from 2054, is trying to feed a horse. He offers "the horse a piece of grass from a distance of several feet. The starving animal lunged at it and Colin jumped back, dropping it" (551).

Moments like this are brief and might seem insignificant, but they do a lot of heavy lifting in the text. This particular parallel is funny, but also sad, because while Colin Templer is one of this book's bright gifts to the reader — he's incorrigible, he's funny, he lives — by the time we see him feeding that horse, Agnes has died of the plague.

Here's another detail that resonates within the book, and will also resonate with present-day readers: Both in 1348 and 2054, people with medical knowledge implore laypeople to please, please, put on their masks. (This happens here and there, but see pages 345 and 440 for a couple examples across timelines.)

And here's one last small behavioral parallel: In 2054 Oxford, Mr. Dunworthy's assistant, Mr. Finch, is stuck caring for a team of American bellringers trapped in the Oxford quarantine. The bellringers, who start out as pretty annoying characters, gradually begin to endear themselves to Finch (and to the reader), and Finch begins to practice bellringing with them. He gains a true appreciation for how heavy the bells are and how challenging the art of bellringing is. Then we see the bellringers begin to come down with the influenza, and cease to be able to ring their bells (Chapters 21 and 24). 

At the very end of the book, this is echoed when Kivrin, still in 1348, is trying to toll the church bell to send the souls of the dead to heaven, and Mr. Dunworthy, who's traveled back in time to find her, is trying to help her. She's injured. He's having an influenza relapse. Between them, they can barely manage it (pages 566-567). The physical challenges of bellringing connect across time.

Broader Character Parallels

There are also some broader parallels drawn between characters, especially between characters' roles in their respective pandemics. For example: In Oxford 2054, Dr. Mary Ahrens is at the head of the effort to locate the source of the influenza, sequence it, and find a vaccine. She cares for her patients tirelessly. Her 1348 parallel is Father Roche, who of course has none of her scientific knowledge, but has a similar fervent devotion to helping other people. Roche hardly sleeps in his efforts to care for his parishioners as they fall sick with the plague. 

The reader cares deeply for both of these characters, probably because of their tireless competence and their selfless dedication to other people. When first, Dr. Ahrens dies of the influenza, and then, Father Roche dies of the plague, it is, at least for this reader, the book's most heartbreaking echo.

I'll note that one of the things that makes this parallel so effective is that it doesn't map perfectly. Dr. Ahrens and Father Roche are drastically different in their approaches — one is pure science and one pure religious faith — and also, they aren't each other's only character parallels. Kivrin, too, tirelessly cares for the plague victims in 1348, with a lot more scientific knowledge than Father Roche has. In 2054, many different kinds of doctors and nurses are caring for lots of patients, in lots of different ways. Twelve-year-old Colin is also caring for people, in his cheerful and forthright way. Mr. Dunworthy's overburdened and tireless assistant, Mr. Finch, is constantly in the background of the 2054 timeline, moving mountains to turn college halls into infirmaries, find food and supplies for everyone stuck in quarantine, and care for the American bellringers. A lot of varying people step up to become caretakers, differing from each other and paralleling each other in all kinds of fluid and inexact ways.

Also, the book is chock-full of characters who don't necessarily map onto parallels with anyone, but have other important functions in the book. In 2054, a young Oxford student named William is having liaisons with practically every female nurse and student in the quarantine perimeter. Also in 2054, archaeologist Lupe Montoya is excavating a historic site nearby. A secret love story is unfolding between a married woman named Eliwys and her husband's servant, Gawyn, in 1348. Also in 1348, Rosemund, Agnes's twelve-year-old sister, is struggling with her obligation to marry a leering older man. All of this character development matters, but often for purposes other than creating echoes and resonance. 

When done well, this kind of layered, complicated character development — some characters paralleling others, some not, and each character having more than one function in the text — goes a long way toward making a fictional world feel real. It also allows the author to touch on themes without beating them to death. And yet, sometimes this kind of light touch is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve. In my experience as a writer who often writes complicated plots, it isn't until later drafts of a book, when my structure is more solidly in place, that I finally have the space to sit back, breathe, and look for places where I can create little connections, or spots where I'm pushing a theme too hard.

Deeper Parallels: Mr. Gilchrist and Lady Imeyne

There's one character parallel in this book that I find to be drawn with a heavier pen, and appropriately so.

In 2054, Mr. Gilchrist is the acting head of the History Faculty. Self-important, self-righteous, ignorant about how time travel works, and focused on his own glory, he supervises Kivrin's travel to the Middle Ages with little care for Kivrin's safety. Ultimately, it's largely Mr. Gilchrist's fault that Kivrin ends up in such a dangerous and traumatizing place, and gets stuck there. 

When Gilchrist's culpability becomes clear, he blames and threatens everyone else. For example, when the tech, Badri, collapses onto the net consul, clearly ill, Gilchrist decides, out of nowhere, that Badri must be a drug user. Here's the way he talks (to Mr. Dunworthy): "You can't wait to inform [actual head of the History Faculty] Basingame of what you perceive to be Mediaeval's failure, can you?… In spite of the fact that it was your tech who has jeopardized this drop by using drugs, a fact of which you may be sure I will inform Mr. Basingame on his return…. I'm certain Mr. Basingame will also be interested in hearing that it was your failure to have your tech screened that's resulted in this drop being jeopardized…. It seems distinctly odd that after being so concerned about the precautions Mediaeval was taking that you wouldn't take the obvious precaution of screening your tech for drugs..." (64-65). Agh. Every time he opens his mouth, he says something pompous, repetitive, obnoxious, and untrue.

In 1348, Lady Imeyne is part of the household where Kivrin ends up living. Self-important, self-righteous, sanctimonious, selfish, and ignorant, she ignores the imprecations of wiser people, and, for the sake of her own status, invites visitors to the household — who turn out to be carrying the plague. It is essentially Lady Imeyne's doing that the plague comes to her town. 

When this becomes clear, Lady Imeyne blames everyone else. While others in the household are working themselves to exhaustion trying to care for the sick, she kneels in the corner, ignoring the need for help, and praying. "Your sins have brought this," she tells her daughter-in-law Eliwys, the one who's in love with her own husband's servant (432). Later, she turns on kind, patient Father Roche. "You have brought this sickness," she says. "It is your sins have brought the sickness here." Then she begins to list his sins: "He said the litany for Martinmas on St. Eusebius's Day. His alb is dirty…. He put the candles out by pinching them and broke the wicks" (444).

"She's trying to justify her own guilt," Kivrin thinks. "She can't bear the knowledge that she helped bring the plague here"… But Kivrin can't summon up any pity. "You have no right to blame Roche, she thought, he has done everything he can. And you've knelt in a corner and prayed." (444-445). Similarly, Mr. Dunworthy sees right through Mr. Gilchrist, even at one point considering him Kivrin's murderer (484).

Mr. Gilchrist and Lady Imeyne are UNBEARABLE. They're the characters in this book that you most hate, or at least that I do — maybe especially in 2020/21, when we're plagued in real life by dangerous people like them. Later, in possibly the book's most satisfying moment, we learn that Gilchrist has died of the influenza. The book doesn't revel in his death; none of the characters revel. But I sure do. Good riddance, you harmful, self-important, lying hypocrite. This is one of fiction's safe spaces: the intense, guilt-free satisfaction of an asshole being punished.

Similarly, Lady Imeyne dies of the plague. It's a relief. But it's also a bit harder to revel, because with the exception of Kivrin, who's immune, every character in the 1348 timeline dies of the plague. Every single character. It is so desperately sad, not least because it's exactly what happened in 1348. As the book reminds us repeatedly, entire towns were wiped out. There was no one left to toll the bells, or bury the dead. No one is left but Kivrin. Our hearts break for her.

I'm glad that Connie Willis teases out the parallel between Mr. Gilchrist and Lady Imeyne more than she does with a lot of the other character parallels. I think it's important; I think that these two characters embody a clear and recognizable type of human who will always exist in eras of human suffering. I'm relieved she kills them; and I'm relieved she doesn't kill everyone we love. In particular, she doesn't kill Mr. Dunworthy and she doesn't kill Kivrin… Which leads me to one last powerful character parallel in this book.

 

Mr. Dunworthy and Kivrin, God and Jesus

This character parallel is in a different category from the others. It doesn't stretch across the 1348 and 2054 timelines, or not exactly, anyway. It exists on a different plane: It's a parallel between the story of Mr. Dunworthy and Kivrin, and the story of God sending his son, Jesus, down to earth to live among humans.

The people of 1348 believe the story of God sending his son down to earth. They believe it literally; it's one of their guiding principles. Kivrin, Mr. Dunworthy, and many of the people of 2054 do not believe that story in the literal sense. Kivrin and Mr. Dunworthy don't believe in God. 

And yet, there are times when the vocal recordings Kivrin is making for historical purposes begin to sound like pleas to God: "Over fifty percent of the village has it. Please don't let Eliwys get it. Or Roche" (467). "You bastard! I will not let you take her. She's only a child. But that's your specialty, isn't it? Slaughtering the innocents? You've already killed the steward's baby and Agnes's puppy and the boy who went for help when I was in the hut, and that's enough. I won't let you kill her, too, you son of a bitch! I won't let you!" (493). 

And Father Roche, who finally reveals to Kivrin that on the day she arrived, he saw the net open and Kivrin appear, believes with all his heart that Kivrin is a saint, sent by God to help his parishioners in their time of need. "I feared that God would forsake us utterly," he says, as he's dying. "But in His great mercy He did not… But sent His saint unto us." He says, "Yet have you saved me… From fear.… And unbelief" (542-543). He means what he says. Kivrin's ministrations to the sick and to Roche do save him from despair.

And back in the Oxford of 2054, Dunworthy lies sick in his hospital bed, considering Kivrin, whom he's sent to a terrible place. As a rather unbearable character named Mrs. Gaddson stands at his bedside "helpfully" reading him Bible verses, Dunworthy thinks to himself, "God didn't know where His Son was.... He had sent His only begotten Son into the world, and something had gone wrong with the fix, someone had turned off the net, so that He couldn't get to him, and they had arrested him and put a crown of thorns on his head and nailed him to a cross…. Kivrin would have no idea what had happened. She would think she had the wrong place or the wrong time, that she had lost count of the days somehow during the plague, that something had gone wrong with the drop. She would think they had forsaken her" (475).

I love the questions these moments raise for the reader. Who represents what here? What is God, really? Why, when Badri became ill, did the net send Kivrin to that particular time? Who, or what, are we talking to, when we shout our fury to the universe? Maybe Mr. Dunworthy, sending historians into the past from his lab in Oxford, is a kind of god. And maybe Kivrin is a kind of Jesus, or a kind of saint. Maybe Father Roche has the right idea when he believes what he believes, even if he has some of the particulars wrong.

Near the very end, Kivrin speaks into her recorder addressing Mr. Dunworthy: "It's strange. When I couldn't find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute" (544).

And then, with great difficulty, Mr. Dunworthy comes for Kivrin. He finds her in 1348, heartbroken and surrounded by the dead, and he brings her back home. "I knew you'd come," Kivrin says (578). There's a way in which the justified faith of these characters — Father Roche's faith in God's saint Kivrin, and Kivrin's faith in Mr. Dunworthy's care — show the reader that even in the darkest, most death-ridden times, love doesn't forsake us.

That's a pretty timeless theme. 

***

If you've made it to the end of my post about character parallels in Connie Willis's magnificent Doomsday Book, I hope I've given you a sense of what a powerful tool this can be. It's pretty closely related to some of my other writing lessons here on the blog. Creating webs like Tiffany D. Jackson did in Monday's Not Coming; creating connections like Victor LaValle did in The Changeling. Writing is often about finding the internal connections that'll best support the themes of the story you're trying to tell. I think that especially if your book takes place in multiple timelines, character parallels can go a long way!

Usually I end my craft posts with a photo showing the book filled with post-it flags from my careful rereading, but this time around, I reread by listening to the audiobook. My paper copy is flag-free — but I took eight pages of notes while I was listening! So here's a different photo of my process.

 

Listening like a writer.

 

 

 

Hi again everyone,

Just an announcement that I think I've successfully migrated all email subscribers to a new working email service (MailChimp). I tried my best to transfer all verified subscribers to the new list -- and not to transfer any unverified subscribers. Time will tell whether this blog post goes out successfully as an email. (There's a box in the dropdown menu on the left of my homepage for anyone who wants to subscribe to my blog posts via email.) 

If there are problems with the new service, I expect I'll realize it pretty soon, and I promise I'll do my utmost to rectify them quickly. Apologies in advance if anything goes amiss! 

In the meantime, I have another craft post planned, and a few other thinky posts too. So, more soon. Thanks for your patience with all of this, everyone!

Hi everyone,

I’m deep into revising the next Graceling Realm book (starring Hava), which is why I haven’t been here on the blog. It’s also why over on Twitter, mostly I’ve just been tweeting pictures of candles. I am Very Absorbed. Also, we moved to a new apartment last month. Also life. Also the pandemic and self-care. I hope you’re doing well.

Gareth Hinds’s adaptation of the Graceling graphic novel comes out in November! He's been tweeting some lovely stuff on Twitter, and Graceling: the Graphic Novel is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold. Including at your local indie.

I’ll be back when there’s more news and/or when I have a minute for blogging, whichever comes first.  Until then, leaving you with a few of my recent candles…

 

Today, Gareth Hinds's beautiful graphic novel adaptation of Graceling hits stores. Join us for an event! Here's a link to all your options.

Check out the latest developer updates for Google Earth and Google Maps Platform, including grounding with Maps.

Here are all the latest updates for Google Maps, Earth, Waze and our developer platforms.

Here's how we built adaptive audio in Meet, which transforms multiple laptops in close proximity into a unified audio system so you can create ad-hoc meeting spaces IRL.

Browse 2024’s most popular gift ideas with Google Shopping’s Holiday 100.

I did not expect an immersion blender to become a kitchen essential for me, but that’s where I am now. I originally thought it’d be great for making milkshakes, but then I figured out water-in-oil emulsions, and realized that homemade mayonnaise is a million times better¹ than what comes in the jar.

Summarizing: the immersion blender turns the very technical and tedious process of emulsification into something that is so simple I got it right the first time, and haven’t failed at it yet. Here, then, is a very basic recipe for homemade mayo:

Basic Homemade Mayonnaise

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon mustard
• 1 cup avocado oil

Equipment

• An immersion blender with its own blending cup
• Measuring spoons & measuring cup
• A fridge-friendly container for the finished product

Instructions

1. Put everything except the oil in the blender cup.
2. Gently pour the oil atop the other stuff, and then wait a moment for things to separate. It’s very important for the oil to be on top.
3. Gently sink the blender head to the bottom of the cup, positioning it like a dome over the egg, tipping it on the way down to get the air out.
4. Blend at high speed, keeping the blender head at the bottom of the cup. Slowly lift it, and allow yourself to be amazed as it makes your mixture into mayo on the way up.
5. That’s it! Scrape it into a container and put it in the refrigerator. It’ll keep for about a week

You may be asking if you can use something other than avocado oil. You can, but I recommend starting with avocado oil because I want your first batch of mayo to taste good. Olive oil will, for organic chemistry reasons I don’t fully understand, respond poorly to the emulsion process, giving the mayo a flavor I describe as “sawdust adjacent.”

You may also be asking how this even works. Traditionally, mayonnaise is made by vigorously whisking the eggs and the watery stuff while slowly adding oil. Adding the oil too quickly will cause things to fail, and the failure mode of mayonnaise is that it separates, and the oil floats back to the top. The immersion blender, coupled with its special made-to-fit cup, solves this problem by drawing the oil down into the blend. This is why you start at the bottom and gradually lift. You’re “slowly adding oil” by slowly giving the blender head traction on the oil above it.

Emulsification is Magic

Emulsification is when two immiscible (“not mixable”) liquids get mixed with the help of something else. In the case of mayonnaise you are mixing water and oil by giving the tiny droplets of watery ingredients (the vinegar and the lemon juice) a nice coating of egg proteins.

Fun fact! Butter is also a water-in-oil emulsification. By weight it’s about 80% milk fat (cream), 20% water, and maybe a couple of percentage points of milk proteins, sugars, and “bad at math.” This may seem like useless information, but if you’re looking for a dairy-free recipe substitute for butter, you can substitute almost any other water-in-oil emulsification. The tl;dr— Yes, you can use mayo instead of butter in recipes.

Cow-milk products are pretty complex things. There is a LOT going un under (udder?) the hood, and I’ve found that the best way to swap out a milk product is to swap in something similarly complex. Mayo can be pretty bland (it is literally used in comedy routines as a stand-in for “so bland”) but if you increase the complexity a bit it’ll do just fine as a stand-in for butter.

Sandra is allergic to dairy, mustard, wheat, and yeast, but she loves Hollandaise sauce on Eggs Benedict—a dish which, if prepared traditionally, is the Yahtzee in the game of “Sandra can’t eat this.” We prepare it non-traditionally by taking a nice Hollandaise recipe and swapping out the butter for homemade no-mustard mayo. Then we serve the sauce and the eggs on a bed of wild rice, which, if I’m being completely honest, is a healthier and tastier option than an English muffin.

Dairy-Free Hollandaise

Ingredients

• 5 egg yolks (set aside or discard the egg whites²)
• 2 tablespoons champagne vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons finely minced shallots
• 1/2 cup homemade no-mustard mayo
  • OR sure you can just use a stick of softened butter instead of the mayo, but then it’s not dairy-free, obviously.

Equipment

• Immersion blender & blender cup
• Measuring spoons and cups
• Knife & board for mincing the shallots
• 1 pint canning jar with ring and lid
• A small hand-whisk or maybe just a fork that will fit into that canning jar
• Sous vide bath, because let’s do this the easy way

Instructions

1. Separate the eggs, and put the yolks in the blender cup. What you do with the egg whites is your business², but they don’t go in your Hollandaise sauce.
2. Add the vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and minced shallots. Don’t be lazy and expect the immersion blender to mince the shallots for you. It’s not a food processor. Cut them up fine using your knife!
3. Add the homemade mayo.
4. Blend with the immersion blender. You’re not trying to emulsify, so just blend away. The mix should end up yellow and a little runny.
5. Pour the pre-Hollandaise into the pint jar, and put the lid on loosely.
6. Put the jar into the sous vide. The water level should be below the lid, but above the level of the stuff in the jar.
7. Run the sous vide at 160°F for 90 minutes.
   —90 minutes later…
8. Remove the jar (carefully, it’ll be hot) and remove the lid. Whisk the contents vigorously, then (and I cannot stress this enough) shove that whisk into your mouth and slurp the delicious Hollandaise from it. Then put it into the sink, NOT back into the jar. No, not even if you live alone.
9. Lid the jar and put it into the fridge. It should keep for at least a week, assuming your whisk was clean.

When the time comes to serve the sauce, it’ll work well cold on sandwiches, or you can microwave a little bit of it for Eggs Benedict.

The Plot Thickens, AKA “I See What You Did There”

19th-century French chef Antonin Carême famously declared (in a book that got lots of traction) that there are five sauces mères or “Mother Sauces”: Espagnole, Velouté, Béchamel, Tomate, and Hollandaise. All other sauces are sauces petit, variations on the basics.

Of Carême’s five mother sauces, four are thickened with roux (butter and flour)³, while the fifth is a water-in-oil emulsion. My inner taxonomist screams, because that’s really just TWO basic sauces, so maybe the system should have been sauces mère et père, or just “saucy parents⁴.”

The point here is that an ultra-simplified water-in-oil emulsion is literally THE MOTHER OF ALL MAYONNAISE⁵.

Let me restate this more usefully: once you reduce water-in-oil emulsification to water, oil, and a binding agent, you can make any emulsified sauce you want to. In mayonnaise, the vinegar and lemon juice are “water,” the avocado oil is (SURPRISE!) “oil”, and the egg is the binding agent. The salt and mustard are irrelevant to the emulsification (provided you don’t add so much that they become relevant.)

You can make flavored mayo by messing around in the “irrelevant” column. Mother said it’s okay, really! For instance, you can make a nice Southwest seafood taco sauce by replacing the lemon and the vinegar with lime juice, using a dash of Cholula instead of mustard, and throwing in some cilantro. Did you want “spicy mayo” for sushi? Use rice vinegar and maybe two tablespoons of Sriracha instead of lemon juice, then toss in some minced ginger. As long as the general ratio of “watery” to “oily” stays the same, your mixture will emulsify deliciously.

Metrics For Science

The measurements in my recipes are all Imperial, which is problematic for two reasons:

1. Imperial. Ugh.
2. Milliliters are better than rounding to fractions of cups and spoons.

I’d switch to metric, but that would mean buying a bunch of kitchen stuff and learning new things, so it’s a project for a more ambitious day. Still, I recognize that if you really want to get fancy with your oil-in-water emulsifications, you’ll find that the metric system provides more consistent (especially with regards to the consistency of the sauce, hah!) results.

I’ve found a workaround, though, and that’s by using the lines on the immersion blender cup. My watery ingredients for a proven emulsion come halfway up to the 3-ounce line. The egg takes me up to the 3 ounce line, and I’m using 8 ounces of oil. This means my ratio of water to emulsifier to oil is 1.5 : 1.5 : 8. When I start messing around with other ingredients, I keep that ratio in mind, and use the lines on the blender cup to help me get the ratio correct. I also use it to keep track of what I did in case I need to change things on the next pass.

Would metric measurements be better? YES THEY WOULD please leave off with the pestering of the cartoonist and go update all the gear in your own dang kitchen.

But start by getting an immersion blender, because homemade mayo is, as I stated at the top of this essay, a million times better¹ than what comes out of a store-bought jar.

— notes —

¹ “A million times better” is sloppy math, but that didn’t stop me from using it twice. Fine. Let’s instead say that homemade mayonnaise is the thing casting the mayo-from-a-jar shadow on the wall of Plato’s Cave & Delicatessen.

² Now that you know how to make The Mother of All Mayo, those egg whites might be the elemental emulsifier for some (sorry-not-sorry) very saucy experimentation. You could also use them for an egg-white omelette, or perhaps a nice meringue.

³ Since roux is butter and flour, and butter is a water-in-oil emulsion, it should be possible to make a no-dairy/no-wheat roux using mayonnaise and corn starch and why are you looking at me like that?

⁴ My taxonomical howling is about a hundred and fifty years too late to get this bit of wordplay into all the best cookbooks. And even if I could yell back in time I’d be yelling in English, and I’m not a chef, so I don’t think Carême would listen to me.

⁵ Water-in-oil emulsion is also the mother of butter, and the mother of a long list of non-edible things, including industrial lubricants and hand lotions… although I suppose you could make your own hand lotion from edible ingredients and this is why I am not and never should be a chef.

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