Cover story

I know I already bragged up the artwork, because beautiful; but here's the actual finished cover for my short story collection from Lethe Press, due out this fall. The artist is Elizabeth Leggett (and if you want a print of the original artwork - without text, that is - for your bathroom wall or wherever, they are available from her...).



Just sayin', but I do feel extraordinarily lucky.

Wabi-sabi: or, That My Cooker Is Broken Speaks Well of the Impermanence of All Things

The nice cooker-mendy men have been and gone. The cooker, alas, is not mended; parts must be ordered. They will return in a week. Hey-ho.

Meanwhile I have two working burners and many, many apricots. I think everything that happened last night was good: the chutney, the cake, the puree. And Dave bore off a significant poundage of excellent fruits to be dried in Katherine's dehydrator. And yet, and yet. A greater poundage still remains.

I think I may make more chutney, because I always incline towards spices; and the four jars I made yesterday were not spicy enough for me, so I totally have an excuse for a second round. Possibly with more ginger this time, as well as an excess of excellent chillies.

Meantime, I have a yen to write an SF story about the principles of wabi-sabi, that should begin:

Everything lasts forever.
Everything is finished.
Everything is perfect.

...and then goes on to prove it. Just because. This may be what fiction is for.

Apparently I have to think of everything

I'm fairly sure there's at least one Biggles story where his aeroplane won't take off because "the mixture is too rich". How else would that phrase mean anything to me, if I didn't pick it up from Biggles? (Unless it was Algy or Ginger or Flight Sergeant Smyth.)

Sometimes, this is how I feel about Mars. There is just too much, and I can never actually finish anything: too many ideas per cubic centimetre (of my brain, or else of the planet, either one), there's insufficient airiness to allow a plot to ignite.

Today - a propos of I remember not what - I was thinking about A J Raffles, for the first time in a while. And in fact I misremembered, I thought he had gone off to the Boer War when he made London too hot to hold him and faked his death there, but no: he faked a death by drowning, and then when his second life imploded he and Bunny both went off to the war, where Raffles is genuinely killed.

Allegedly.

Of course this is not the case. Of course that second death is equally fake, and he and Bunny both assume new names and emigrate on an aethership from the Isle of Man to Mars.

Where - well. Adventures ensue. If there's enough oxygen to ignite them. At the moment I am engrossed by the notion of the Wabi-Sahib, who has imported Japanese potters and made a fortune out of Martian clay. This morning I thought I was going to draw something wholly different out of the wabi-sabi aesthetic, but apparently I can't get away from Mars. It might be nice if I could just stop thinking about it and get something actually, y'know, done.

Apricot boysenberry cake

Because Mindy asked: this is what I did, to make the cake. It's adapted from a Nigel Slater recipe for an apricot raspberry cake.

(I'm sorry, I can't put this into volumetric measurements; I have no idea how you measure apricots into cups, eg. Besides, measuring flour by cups can vary by 25% - I read - depending on your method of filling a cup. This is suboptimal, people. Buy a scale.)

250g ripe apricots, stoned and quartered
175g softened butter
175g raw sugar
175g self-raising flour
100g almond meal
2 eggs
2 tbs milk
a bowlful of fresh-picked boysenberries (sorry, I didn't come near weighing them; Nigel says 170g of raspberries. Which of course you could also use)

Butter a 9" springform cake tin, and line the bottom with baking parchment. Butter that too.

Cream the butter and sugar till pale and fluffy (this takes longer than you think, 'specially if you do it by hand; a food mixer makes it easier. Even when your food mixer is making very anxious-making noises). Beat the eggs one by one and add them to the mixture. Mix the flour and almond meal together and add that, little by little. Add the milk. Fold in the fruits, and scrape the batter into the cake tin (it'll be too thick to pour).

Bake in the middle of a preheated 350-degree oven for an hour and ten minutes, till a skewer comes out clean (or test it on your lip if it's metal, as I do: if it burns, it's ready). Cool ten minutes in the tin, then ease it out onto a rack. Once it's cool, dust with powdered sugar. I served it with apricot puree adapted from another Nigel recipe: 900g of stoned apricots, boiled down with 150g of raw sugar and a splash of water, whizzed in a food processor, brightened with lemon juice and left to cool.