Bragging on a grand and some good writing

 

Morgan Alter on the left

So proud of Morgan Alter, my Tomball granddaughter. She and her team placed first in the food innovation regional competition of FCCLA (Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America). Now they go to the state competition. They had to prepare a lunchbox meal modeled on such delivered-to-your-door dinners as Hello Fresh. They came up with their own recipes, did taste tests, and did marketing research. Morgan, a high school junior, has been cooking for years, a big help to both Mom and Dad. On Father’s Day, she always fixes Colin’s dinner—last year was Beef Wellington. She’s more ambitious than I am, but I’m so glad to see a grand take up my foodie interests. Proud of her.

My own cooking was only so-so over the weekend. Last night Jean came over for an early supper, and I made my very first frittata—broccoli and mushroom. Between us, Jean and I cooked it too long. The flavor was good, but the texture should have been softer. Lesson learned. I tried to interest Jordan, because she likes her eggs cooked like concrete, but she didn’t want it for her lunch.

Tonight, I’m going to experiment—you’d think I’d learn that is not a good idea. Jordan brought me some smoked salmon, which I adore, and I’m going to try a pasta with a creamy sauce of cream cheese and sour cream, some green onions, maybe those hearts of palm in the fridge. I’ll get all that cooked and only then add the salmon because cooking it changes the taste and texture to me.

Tomorrow night I’ll get back to cooking for the family—baked cod with a buttery crumb topping. I think I’ll make a lemon sauce recipe I found on my favorite new food website—Kitchn. (Note there is no “e” in that!)

The snow has melted, the sun was bright today, and I’m just sure this will be a better week. I made good progress last week on the mystery I’m writing and yesterday I realized I was almost but not quite to the point of having half a novel. I was also to the point where I was about to go off the rails and needed to stop before I just kept adding words. (I swore this time I wasn’t going to write by word count, but it’s a hard habit to break.) So today I started reading at the beginning, filling in descriptions and other bits, correcting typos but that was only incidental. I am more concerned now with the structure of the story. And as I read each chapter, I construct an outline. I’m calling it a retrospective outline.

There's been a long thread about structure on a listserv I follow, with many people advocating various approaches, including one nice summary of the classic hero’s journey. But to my mind it all comes down to the basic Shakespearean plan—an instigating event, rising action (takes you into Act IV), climax—the high point where thing cannot get any worse or more complicated, and then the denouement, with its sharp drop-off in tension, the resolution of whatever has happened.

So far, I’ve only gotten three chapters into my manuscript, but I am pleased to see the complicating factors that I’ve scattered along the way. I may be ready to send it to one of my beta readers for an early look-through.

I guess my grad school studies are showing with my reference to Shakespeare. Last night I complained to Jean that I had to memorize Beowulf in grad school. She countered that she had to memorize it in high school and could still recite. Whereupon she began, “Whan that Aprilles with his shoures suite ….”

“That’s Chaucer,” I said. “Canterbury Tales.”

She decided she’s never read Beowulf, and I told her she was lucky.

I was distracted a bit today when at my desk because the yard guys came to take out all the dead stuff in the back yard—I left the front for Christian. It’s his domain. But they took the dead hyacinth grape vines off the fence (I really hated tooking at that), cut back the oak leaf hydrangea, pulled up the dead fountain grass, and took out the mums that were so gorgeous in the fall. It’s still a bare, brown winter landscape, but it’s not as straggly. And I figure it’s a step toward spring.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”—Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Okay, this English major is signing off.