Summer Activities List (Updated):

Hiking
Tennis
Camping
Blackberry picking
Listening to live music
Canoeing/kayaking
Picnics
Something involving a fire on a beach and hot dogs
Going on a boat
Wine tasting
Art galleries
Daytrips (Gualala/Mammoth Lake)

So I decided to go blackberry picking today. I drove out to the country and started to pick berries from the bushes on the side of the road… and quickly discovered that this was a dumb idea. Picking the berries was messy and tedious. Every time a car drove by I felt exposed and shy. And then, a big spider scared me.

I decided to go home instead.

A couple of weeks ago, Marcia and I were lamenting the lack of molecular gastronomy restaurants in San Francisco. What is molecular gastronomy, you ask? It is a branch of cooking where chefs use physical and chemical processes of cooking to create different, creative dishes. For example, they might use sodium alginate and peach juice to create faux caviar, which they would serve on top of oysters. Or they might print a menu out on edible “paper” that you are expected to eat. Or they might use liquid nitrogen to make ice cream. (Here is an article on the subject if you want to know more.) While there are only a few restaurants in the world that specialize in this cuisine, somehow it seemed like one them should be near me. This doesn’t seem to be the case, however.

I don’t have access to liquid nitrogen or edible paper, but I was interested enough in this to experiment with some of the easier-to-understand concepts. Therefore, the Molecular Gastronomy Dinner Party was born. We invited 10 friends to my house and treated them to a multi-course meal with molecular gastronomy-like twists. We served the meal tapas, or small plates, style.

It sounds very complicated but it really was just us having fun. At some point, Marcia looked up at me and said, “We are playing restaurant!” And that is what it was. We were pretending to have a restaurant and all our friends were the guests.

Marcia in my kitchen

Everyone who came helped out by making some food, loaning us their silverware or glasses, or by cleaning up. Sous-chefs! Here is how the party went:

Appetizers:

Reversed Martini. Kyle thought this one up. Since vermouth is a traditional aperitif for fancy dinners, we had vermouth aperitifs with olives touched (barely!) with gin. It was a twist on the American martini, which is gin with a touch of vermouth and a side of olives.

Deconstructed Pesto, which Justin and Stephanie made for the party.

Dinner Part I:

Drink: Champagne Cocktails with Creme de Casis “Bubbles,” which you can read about here and here. With the champagne, we toasted everyone’s accomplishments since everyone I know seems to be getting promotions or moving or making other life changes. We also had non-alcoholic ice tea.

Zucchini “Spaghetti.” Raw zucchini cut to look like spaghetti, tossed with olive oil, garlic, parmesan, pepper, basil, and fresh tomatoes. Everything came from the garden.

Nasturtium Flower, Grapefruit, Spinach, and Roasted Beet Salad.

Vichyssoise. A vegetarian soup (also from the garden) served in shot glasses. Here is Leona drinking it.

Salmon with White Chocolate Wasabi Sauce and Faux Caviar. The caviar are tapioca pearls that I soaked in soy sauce and vinegar and then rinsed in oil. This dish surprised me. The flavors were pretty good. (Did I mention that I hadn’t made any of these dishes before?)

Jalapeno Fire and Ice. We have a bunch of jalapeños from the garden, so we prepared them two ways: One, I made a spicy salsa and served it with veggie chips. Two, I made a jalapeño sorbet, which we served in frozen limes.

Dinner Part II:

Drink: Champagne Bellini with Peach Foam. Marcia got this cool contraption that lets you make foam using a pressure valve of some sort. I don’t know how it works, but it’s neat. We made the foam by mixing egg whites, peach syrup, and fresh peach juice together and poured it on champagne.

Veggie Bruschetta made by Krista

Cuban Cigars that Marcia made. The ingredients of a Cuban sandwich wrapped in phylo dough to look like a cigar.

Duck with Pear “Onions.” This was the only dish I didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. I had this plan to cut pears to look like onions and stack it on a duck breast. It didn’t work out, so I just ended up sautéing a duck in pear/onion sauce and serving it. It tasted fine.

Cheese Plate arranged by Troy

Fig from the cheese plate

After all this, we hung out and eventually had dessert: Strudel that Avi made and “Coffee and Cream,” Italian coffee ice served in coffee cups and topped with whip cream.

Then we played Rock Band.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this dinner party sounds insane and you would never put yourself through something that elaborate. I confess that the next morning I woke up and thought, why did I just have a giant dinner party with all that weird food? I guess sometimes I do random, complicated things and drag my friends along with me. However! I the party was a big success and very fun. And I am so very grateful to Troy for helping with the dishes:

I wrote an article on homeschooling for this week’s issue of the Pacific Sun. I grew up in a church basement school and have been around homeschoolers all my life, so I was surprised to learn that a. a lot of people actively dislike homeschooling, and b. homeschoolers are very protective of what they do, to the point that it was difficult to get people to talk to me. Much of what I found out when I did talk to them surprised me. Excerpt:

Ever since homeschooling came under fire last February, Marin homeschoolers have been nervous. A ruling from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal in a case looking into abuse in a homeschooling family stated that parents must have teaching credentials to educate their kids, something that has never been required before.

“When that court case came down, people freaked out,” says Tamara Markwick, a homeschooler living in San Rafael. “It seemed like the majority of the way people are homeschooling might become illegal. People didn’t want to talk to the press and have their name out there. They didn’t want to say something that could come back and bite them.”

More here.

I keep meaning to put pictures up of the elaborate dinner party I had last week, but I haven’t had time. I will put them up sometime this week. There are so many other things going on right now that the dinner party seems like old news.

I like lists, so here is a list of life right now:

a. Last week I had three deadlines, one of which is 6,000 words of mini-reviews for a book contest.
b. Just visited my parents in Miwuk (up by Yosemite) for the weekend.
c. While there, I went through all my childhood toys. As a child, I drew a lot of pictures of women in beautiful dresses and comic books about wisecracking dogs.
d. I also carried on passionate correspondences with my pen-pals, a practice I now envy. I don’t know if I am capable of writing as good of a letter now as I was then, if judged on honesty, time, and intensity alone.
e. Kyle’s birthday is Tuesday. We are just going out to dinner.
f. I’m seeing Nellie McKay tonight and Dar Williams later this month in Petaluma.
g. Kyle is going to Tahoe in the middle of the week for his company off-site—a team-building getaway some former cheerleader thought up.
h. I am going on a road trip with Marcia to Humboldt County later this week.
i. I haven’t really looked at Humboldt with adult eyes, so it will be interesting to see what I think of the place where I grew up.
j. I hope there will be decent weather. That place is perpetually foggy.
k. We are staying at a Bed and Breakfast in Trinidad with a separate entrance and a view of the bay and lighthouse! Plus they will bring us breakfast at 8:45 in the morning. Classy!
l. Apparently, Kyle and I might also go camping later this month
m. In early September, we are going to Kentucky for over a week.
n. I said I wanted to go hiking in Kentucky, and Kyle said he had never heard of anyone doing that.
o. I am opening a bank account specifically so that we can put money aside for trips and vacations. Travel is very important to me. The first place we are going to is Puerto Rico. We’re thinking of going this winter.
p. Puerto Rico:

Well hello. I interviewed singer Nellie McKay for the North Bay Bohemian last week. It is on newsstands now. Excerpt:

Nellie McKay may have artistic ADD. The singer-songwriter, who performs at the Mystic Theatre on Aug. 18, doesn’t just write songs. Recently, McKay has acted on Broadway and in the movie P.S. I Love You, shown up in rap videos on YouTube and written book reviews for the New York Times. This is on top of recording three albums of her own music, most recently Obligatory Villagers, released last September.

“I’m jack of all trades, master of none, you know,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I have a short attention span. I wish it wasn’t so, truthfully. But there are two ways to approaching something creatively. One is to focus on the good stuff and aspire to be like that. That’s the depressing way. The other is to focus on all the bad stuff and pat yourself on the back when it comes out OK. That’s my approach.”

I plan so see McKay when she performs in Petaluma on Monday. Here is a sample of her music for the uninitiated:

Mother of Pearl by Nellie McKay (mentioned in the article).

Columbia is Bleeding by Nellie McKay

I’m judging a book contest again. In general, the books are much better than last year, but I have a few thoughts on character names.

Character names are deceptively important. The name you give your main character is a word your reader is going to read over and over again throughout the book, so it’s important to pick a good one. Here are some things I have learned not to do from my reading the last few weeks:

Don’t pick obviously symbolic names. Don’t name the wife in the book Jewel or the honorable politician Noble. Just don’t do it. Odds are, you are not being as clever as you think, and your reader will roll her eyes and have prejudices against you that you don’t want her to have.

Don’t give important characters names beginning with the same letter. If you repeat the first letter of a name, the reader will mix the characters up. Last night I read a book about two brothers, Greg and Gary. I am still not sure who is who. I kept confusing them and confusing their points of view. If the writer had simply named them Greg and, say, Bobby, this would have been avoided.

Avoid long/difficult last names. According to a random website I went to, the longest last name in the world is: MacGhilleseatheanaich. You know what would be a bad choice for a last name of a character? MacGhilleseatheanaich. Unless the whole point of the story is that the character has the longest last name in the world, stick to something simple and pronounceable.

Avoid melodramatic names. This is especially for all your fantasy writers out there: every character cannot be named Zapphora, Emerald, Lady Gondara, and Willow. Sometimes people are just named Susan.

To be clear, I’m not saying that every character has to be named Tom and Jane. I just think you’re better off with simple names than trying to be clever or dramatic. If your character is well-developed, he or she will fill the name up and give it life, not the other way around.

The song “Emancipated” off of Ani Difranco’s new album, Red Letter Year. Happy she’s back to the funky beat, not digging the mixing of the drums or the harmony on the chorus. Overall, I’m looking forward to this album, released next month.

I know this is jumping the gun because I haven’t written a book yet, but the idea of going on book tour frightens me. Going up to strangers, reading to an empty room, networking, and having to make endless small talk is my idea of a nightmare. I will do it if I ever get the chance, of course, and who knows? Maybe I’ll learn to like it.

I bring it up because novelist Ann Patchett has an article about being on book tour in The Atlantic. It sounds about like I would expect it to be:

When I published my first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, in 1992, I was told I wouldn’t have much of a budget for publicity. Of course, I was free to stretch that budget, to drive rather than fly, go cheap on motels and food, keep the collect calls to a minimum, and therefore get to more stores. As green as a soldier first reporting for duty, I practically leaped to my feet. “Oh, yes!” said I. This was my book, after all, the rock-solid embodiment of all my dreams. I wanted to do anything I could to help it make its way in the world. My publicist at Houghton Mifflin set up my itinerary. I covered about 25 cities and kept my expenses under $3,000. With one good dress in the trunk of my car, I would drive to Chicago, find the McDonald’s closest to the bookstore, change clothes in the bathroom (say what you will for the food, they have the cleanest bathrooms), go to the bookstore, and present myself to the person behind the counter. That has always been the hardest part for me, approaching the stranger at the cash register to say that I am the seven o’clock show. We would look at each other without a shred of hope and both understand that no one was coming. Sometimes two or three or five people were there, sometimes they all worked in the bookstore, but very often, in the cities where I had no relatives to drum up a little crowd, I was on my own. I did freelance writing for Bridal Guide in those days, and more often than not there was a girl working at the store who was engaged. We would sit and talk about her bridesmaids’ dresses and floral arrangements until my time was up; then she would ask me to sign five copies of stock. This, I was told, was a coup because signed copies cannot be returned to the publisher, so it was virtually the same as a sale. (Please note: this is not true. I have pulled seemingly brand-new copies of my novels from sealed cartons and found my signature in them. Somebody mailed those copies back.) But none of that mattered, because my publicist told me that the success of book tour wasn’t measured in how many books you sold that night. What mattered was being friendly, so that the girl at the cash register, and maybe even the store manager, would like you, and in liking you would read your book once you had gone, and in reading your book would see how good it was and then work to hand-sell it to people for months or even years to come. And I believed this because if I didn’t, I had no idea what the hell I was doing out there. After saying all my warm goodbyes, I would leave the store in the dark, drive the two blocks back to the McDonald’s to change out of my dress, and put in a couple of hours on the road to Indianapolis, where I was scheduled to appear the next night at seven. I was exhausted and embarrassed, and yet I told myself the experience had been worthwhile because I was friendly and would be remembered for that.

Then again, she is a very successful novelist, so it probably did help her. However, I still think it’s dumb to make introverts pretend to be salesmen and celebrities to sell their books. As Patchett says:

I can never get very far from the niggling belief that something about book tour is inherently wrongheaded, that the basic premise of authors selling their books is a flawed one. Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician . . . We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit.

Word.

I have an article in this issue of The Writer, which you can get in the magazine section of your local bookstore. It’s about product placement in books. How often are publishers putting paid mention of a product in books? Is this something writers may have to contend with in the future? Given the way the book market is going, is product placement in books, as the headline says, inevitable?

Check it out if you have a chance.

There is an Internet trend involving Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon (Buffy creator) and I almost missed it! It’s called Dr Horrible’s Sign-Along-Blog. It is musical about an evil genius and his nemesis and you truly must watch it. Here is a sample from when Dr. Horrible gets a letter from Bad Horse.

More here.