Sometimes you have an idea so grand, it simply cannot live in just a few pages. Hence why author Jim C. Hines decided to tell a longer tale than the one he originally created with his newest novel, Kitemaster. Come along in his Big Idea through the whirlwind it took to get here.
JIM C. HINES:
Kites are really damn cool.
That was my big, exciting revelation twenty-plus years ago that eventually led to Kitemaster.
It started while I was reading a Zelazny novel. I don’t remember the title and I couldn’t tell you the plot, but it included a reference to fighting kites. I’d never heard of fighting kites before. I remember my fascination at learning people would coat part of their kite lines in ground glass and glue and fly them forth to battle other kites, trying to cut each other’s lines.
Learning more about fighting kites led to me writing a short story called “Gift of the Kites,” about a child who fights to save his grandfather by battling Death’s kite. But that was just the start.
Historically, kites have been used for pulling carts and wagons, for fishing, even to lift soldiers into the air to better observe the enemy. We’ve used them for everything from scientific research to pulling kitesurfers across the water. The world’s longest kite was more than 6000 meters in length (a dragon kite flown at the 2015 International Kite Flying Festival above Chongqing City, China).
I developed a character, Nial, who could control kites and the wind. Then I built a world for her, one where the winds never stop, where giant ribbonlike serpents fly among the clouds and the stars themselves flow with the wind and kitemasters pilot kite-and-sail-powered ships through the sky.
I wrote another short story, this one called “Kitemaster.” But the short story was too, well, short.
Remember that kernel of “Oh, cool!” that began with fighting kites? That was the heart of my worldbuilding as I developed “Kitemaster” into a novel-length work. I wanted more wonder and amazement. I wanted cliffsides that created neverending music as the air rushed past the cave mouths. I wanted spirit kites carrying the dead to the stars. I wanted—
Well, I can’t spoil all the surprises.
The resulting book, Kitemaster, has its share of trouble and darkness. Nial is a widow trying to find a path forward. Her friends Xao and Vikaan carry trauma of their own. Like most worlds, theirs has its share of cruel and unpleasant people.
But there’s also joy and wonder. I loved writing the scene where Nial first goes up on a kiteship. The circumstances aren’t exactly ideal, but that can’t stop Nial’s excitement as they race away from the ground, as she feels the wind’s growing power flowing around and through her…
Amidst all of this is the quieter wonder of Nial reconnecting with the world and with her newfound friends. The trust and love she builds with them are as powerful as anything in this world of magic and endless wind.
That’s where Kitemaster came from: love and wonder and excitement and really cool kites.
When I got home yesterday from getting some stuff from the pet store and the hardware store I had news for bunny_hugger. She'd wondered when the Joann Fabrics in our local mall would close. The answer: 55 minutes. We dithered a small bit about whether to go; would it be just depressing, or might we get something useful like really cheap Easter egg dye kits or bolts of fleece or stuff?
We got there to learn that they didn't have any fleece left. Or Easter egg kits. Or almost anything, really; they did well at keeping the store open until they ran out of stuff. All the remaining merchandise was on two small shelving units up front, and most of that was decoration letters. If you need a box of Z's, we could set you up, except that Joann's is now closed for good and all. Someone working the tiny remaining stock was urging people to buy boxes of toothpicks with lobster or shrimp cutouts atop them. We're not sure why anyone would get these at all, even if, as she observed, they won't spoil. I had the feeling this had turned into some minor silly retail obsession, waiting to see if anyone would ever take any of this.
We also wandered around the shelving and fixtures, where another employee was doing her best to find some piece of hardware we would take home with us. Apparently some of the thread spools are also a good configuration for storing Hot Wheels cars, in case you have a hundred-plus Hot Wheel cars that need storing. But we don't, nor anything close to that. Some of the pegbord-with-bin shelving seemed like it might be useful in our basement, if it weren't too big to fit in our basement.
And yet as we were leaving I noticed they had boxes full of pegboard racks, like, the metal or plastic rods that stick out and you can hang stuff on. So we got a box of that, for five bucks, and have the promise of organizing more things in our basement and garage if we ever get to that. I also, maybe foolishly, bought a couple boxes of some silicone sheets that are meant to be pressed around mugs or other ceramic things. I don't know what to do with them but have the feeling there's probably something decorative we can do. bunny_hugger sees in them mostly a thing we'll have to get rid of at some point. I suppose either will do fine.
And that was our last Joann's visit.
Now to what I hope was merely the most recent Kennywood visit, drawing as you can see nearer its close.
Almost at The Phantom's Revenge's station and this gives a view of the exit queue. (Also the entrance for people with mobility needs, like the guy in a wheelchair coming up the other way.)
Lanes to get your seat for the ride. Note there isn't that automatic gate that keeps you away until the operator decides you may approach.
That gift shop again, now seen by night. Also showing off the Small Fry's, that place where you can get the same fries as at The Potato Patch but with less of a wait. And yes, per Kennywood: Behind The Screams, it is based on the entrance to Wonderland at Revere Beach, Massachusetts. (Yes, if you looked at that link, you saw an 'Infant Incubators' building inside Wonderland. Early 20th century was weird.)
Sitting at the top of the reflecting pool in Lost Kennywood, looking out over a beautifully clear sky and the Black Widow swing ride.
Over that way's the swing ride. Oops, accidentally got a tiny bit of a view of bunny_hugger in there. Sorry, won't do that again.
And here's how the pool looks by early night.
Trivia: Charles Babbage invented a mechanical time clock in 1844. Source: Time's Pendulum: The Quest to Capture Time --- From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, Jo Ellen Barnett.
Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.
I hope you’re observing it in the manner you believe is the most appropriate for you. For some it’s quiet contemplation, and for others it’s grilling hot dogs, and for some it’s both. And if you’re not in the US, it may just be Monday. Among other things I spend the day thinking about the freedoms and ideals those whom the day commemorates fought for, and how to make sure those freedoms and ideals continue to survive in the current day. Would be a shame to lose them now. Let’s all try not to do that.
"That is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was."
This work of speculative fiction starts with the premise that women have evolved a power, a skein that grows on their chests and gives them the tremendous power to generate and harness electrical energy. It turns out that this power is not universal among women; there are, of course, genetic variations. But the impact of this power, the power to hurt or even kill another being, on societal structures, norms, and deviations provides a world in which author Naomi Alderson can fully explore the role of power in human relations and organizations. Her novel is timely. It is also engaging and adequately complex to address the issues on the table.
Memorial Day is the traditional time, here in the State, that we put flowers on the grave sites of our departed relatives. I have put pots of flowers on my parents grave site, both my grandparents grave sites, and my aunt and uncles grave site. I went out last night to water the flowers. There were a couple of fake flower arrangements on my aunt and uncles grave site. I assume from their kids. They have 4. There was nothing else on my mom's parents grave site or my parents grave site besides the pots that I have put there. 3 kids in my family and 4 cousins and apparently they can't honor our grandparents or my parents.
And don't even get my started on the VFW who still have not honored my dad with a military flag holder and flag. :o
From the new "Lilo & Stitch" comes a "Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride". For those of you considering seeing the new "Lilo & Stitch", and can only say, I've seen it twice so far. lol..... It's great. :)
J. D.: There's nothing a woman hates more than her fiancee's best friend. He knows all the secrets she's going to spend the rest of her life trying to find out.
Margo: Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.
It comes from the 1950 classic, "All About Eve". The story of an ambitious young woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants, and she doesn't care who she steps on to get it. And talk about AMAZING cast: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Georte Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Thelma Ritter, and a young Marilyn Monroe.
And now I can reveal what my errand of yesterday was. Nothing big, I just didn't feel up to writing it up before deadline is all. It was my blood donation, rescheduled from Monday and from Tuesday.
Actually it was a platelet donation, my first time. I'd always donated whole blood before and for not a whole lot of particular reason tried the alternate approach this time. Platelets here are the parts of blood that allow for blood clotting, and they can't be stored more than a couple days, so there's always a steady need for them. They're collected by taking blood from your arm, filtering the platelets out of it, and putting everything else right back in. Your body, all going well, replaces the platelets in a couple days and the platelets themselves go off to cancer, transplant, and major-surgery patients.
The catch is all this takes much longer than a whole-blood donation where they just let you bleed on purpose for maybe fifteen minutes and then stop it. Long enough that they set you up in this reclined, sculpted seat, legs above your chest, with TV to watch and everything. The nurse offered me the chance to pick what I'd like to watch on Netflix, and I thought well surely she's using 'Netflix' as synecdoche for all the streaming services they have and so I could watch stuff on Disney+ or Hulu as on the other buttons on the remote that didn't work for me at first. But no, I've never had reason to think I wasn't basically neurotypical, why do you ask? Anyway she got the remote working and I got to thinking what do I even want to watch that's about 90-100 minutes? A movie? Okay, quick, think of a movie! Not so easy, is it?
Finally I realized I could just pull up a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, as I've finally started watching the Netflix seasons and I could get to the next one I hadn't seen (Starcrash). Getting on board several years after everyone stopped thinking about it I have to say: unless this season takes a major turn for the worse after this episode I don't see why anyone wasn't thrilled with it. There's stuff I'm not sure I like about it but the movie riffing is so wonderfully playful.
The nurse came back to check a couple times, the first none too soon because my headphones had fallen loose and with needles in both arms I couldn't re-adjust it myself. And near the end I started to feel a pringly, pins-and-needles feeling across my body, a known side effect that would pass once the process was all done. I also got to feeling cold and a little ... nauseous is too strong a term but very weird. A couple juice boxes when I was done healed most of that, and I of course followed direction and stayed in the waiting area having snacks and fluids for a good fifteen minutes before cautiously getting back up and heading out.
As reward for the donation I got a Red Cross Emergency Lantern, a solar-powered lantern that also provides USB charge. bunnyhugger wondered if this were an ironic statement on their own power outage; no, they'd been planning to give these away the back half of May anyway. We've slowly been getting more sources of emergency lighting in the house an the LED lantern should help. You know, in case something improbable like a massive, intense storm front with tornado-level winds rolls across the lower peninsula a third time in three months or something.
That's all fun, but you're wondering, what did it look like back last summer when we visited Kennywood? Please, enjoy what you see here:
The stairs leading up to the operator's booth on Racer, placed as nearly center as I could get my picture.
Everyone wants to get in on the Racer appreciating. I don't know when the landmark plaque dates to.
And here's the ACE Roller Coaster Landmark plaque, put at a time there were three wooden Möbius-strip racing coasters.
The park's Musik Express, included here because it's quite pleasantly colorful and also there's people who want to see pictures of these rides.
Hair scrunchies tossed on top of a blue concrete-block building you pass on the way to Phantom's Revenge. According to a 2001 thread on CoasterBuzz it houses (housed?) an electrical distribution center for this area of the park. And it's where Lightning Loop, which we rode at La Feria Chapultepec and hope someday to ride at Indiana Beach, was located, with the ride on top of the building, which was also a second park entrance(!). The loop started about where the left end of the building, with the upwards hill to the left of this picture. Its service as a second entrance is why there's the huge Kennywood sign painted on something otherwise just tucked within the Lost Kennywood Municipal District.
Lift hill and one of the mid-ride hills of Phantom's Revenge, seen from the hilariously long queue approaching the station.
Trivia: The Ordnance Survey of Ireland begun in 1824 struggled against the heavy fogs that often would not burn off. Thomas Drummond developed several tools making the survey possible, including improvements to the barometer, photometer, aethroscope, and heliostat; but the big solution to the fogs was the ``pea-light'', a pellet of calcium oxide lime which, burned with an oxyhydrogen flame, produced a light so intense it could be seen as much as a hundred miles away. Source: On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, Simon Garfield. And this is the ``limelight'' of fame.
Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.
Long-memoried readers may recall a couple weeks ago I broke our atomic-clock-based wall clock, the one that uses time signals from WWV to adjust to the current time. The clock itself was and is fine, but the glass plate protecting the clock face from the elements was shattered into so many pieces. More than you're thinking of. More than that.
My father recommended that if there's a place in town that sells stained glass or art glass that they'd likely be able to cut a thin, eight-inch disc of glass. It happens there's a stained-glass/art-glass store so nearby it's even closer than the nearest convenience store. But I kept failing to actually check with them to see if they could do the work.
Today I finally got to doing something about it. But because of another errand, details of which I am not yet ready to make public, I got to the shop just before it closed. They were turning off the lights and everything, and I went back to the car but a guy waiting behind the shop said she'd gone back in, go talk to her.
So, wary that I had interrupted someone's departure-for-the-long-weekend, I entered and explained my need. Without saying a word she turned the clock upside-down, dropping yet another shard of glass out of it. Then took the clock over to a work table and did some measurements, and then back behind a counter. Finally she spoke: they can do that. She gave an estimate of about $20, extremely reasonable, and while it could have been done while I waited if I had gotten there earlier, now, I would have to wait. When could I come pick it up? Tuesday, unfortunately, I'm squeezed between office and pinball league, so we have to wait for Wednesday for the clock's return. (They're closed Monday for the holiday.) But they're going to cut a fresh piece of glass and install it and that seems to be everything we could hope for. Now I just have to stop instinctively looking for the time on the kitchen wall, the one surface in the house where it will definitely not be.
You know where we definitely were, back in July last year? Kennywood. Here's photographic proof.
Jack Rabbit dispatched and making its way to the first drop, which thanks to the terrain-hugging track, is well before the lift hill.
And there's the station. They've got LEDs providing the light of the stars now but at least preserved the shape and color of the neon.
Jack Rabbit's centennial logo, with the nice long ears for the K.
The new National Historic District sign doesn't have that post-facto correction about when the coaster opened on it. For what it's worth the Roller Coaster Database does think Jack Rabbit's double-dip ``camelback loop'' is a unique feature although ... boy, it sure seems like 'two hills in a row' would be an obvious feature for any terrain coaster.
View from just outside Jack Rabbit of the Racer and, above it, the Steel Curtain scenery.
Racer's new National Historic District sign has been modified to reflect the loss of Montaña Rusa at La Feria Chapultepec. And avoids any allusion to Blackwood's Grand National.
Trivia: In France in 1907 Wilbur Wright --- maybe souring from the bad progress of contract talks --- wrote his sister Katherine that the Notre Dame cathedral ``was rather disappointing as most sights are to me. The nave is seemingly not much wider than a store room and the windows of the clerestory are so awfully high up that the building is very dark'', and after visiting the Louvre, judged ``the Mona Lisa is no better than the prints in black and white''. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.
Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.
I resent that you woke me up for this. On a Saturday.
Totally fair. Go ahead and ask your questions.
Ugh, fine. First: Have you, in fact, written thirteen novels in ten years?
I have not!
So much for Mister “oh, I never miss a deadline” over here.
Two things here: One, I do actually only rarely miss a deadline, and then for good reason, and also usually only by a couple of weeks at most, so there, and two, my release schedule is primarily dictated by Tor, my publisher, so if I didn’t write 13 books in ten years, it’s mostly because Tor decided that schedule was not actually what they wanted.
So how many books have you written in those ten years?
For Tor? I’ve written eight: The Collapsing Empire, Head On, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, and The Shattering Peace, which comes out in September. Outside of that I’ve written four novellas, a bunch of short stories, some which have been made into two published collections, and two collections of essays. Plus four screenplays for Love, Death + Robots. So I would say I haven’t exactly been slacking.
I mean, I guess.
Thank you.
Why didn’t Tor want all thirteen of those books within ten years?
That timeframe was partially built on the idea that three of the novels I wrote would be young adult novels. Putting out those novels would run on a parallel track, because the YA market is not the same as the adult SF/F market, so we could release them on a schedule not too far off from by main releases and not worry about them cannibalizing sales. But then I didn’t end up writing the YA books.
Why not?
For a combination of reasons. One, in the ten years since the contract was signed the dynamic of the YA market has changed considerably, and yes, that is a euphemism, and two, the adult science fiction I was releasing was doing really well in terms of sales and market presence. So the question came down to, do we want to spend the time/effort to try to crack a wildly-changing market, or keep building sales and audience in the market we’re already strong in? Guess which we picked.
What’s going to happen to the YA books on the contract?
As a matter of the contract, we’ll convert those books from YA to adult books, so I will still owe the three books, I’ll just write them for the adult market, and put them in the adult market release cycle. The YA books I was planning to write weren’t science fiction novels, so I’ll come up with new ideas for those novels. Which is fine. Coming up with ideas has never been a problem for me.
As for the ideas I came up with for the YA books, a number of things could happen with them. I could pitch them as film/TV ideas — and in fact one of them had already been optioned for a TV series a few years ago, I “sold it in the room” a while back, but it didn’t pan out in development — or I could retool them and write them as novellas, or I could hand them off to another writer to build out, or whatever. There are options. They just won’t be YA novels from me at this point.
Even at a “one novel a year” schedule, you’re still slightly behind, you know.
Maybe. On the other hand I can’t complain. For example, I didn’t have a novel come out in 2024 because, as it happened, the one day Tor had open on its schedule for a book from me was Election Day in the United States, and oh boy we didn’t want to put a book out that day. We bumped When the Moon Hits Your Eye to March 2025 instead. That turned out to be a pretty smart maneuver, not just in avoiding election nonsense, but because the previous book, Starter Villain, has had some really strong legs, and we were able to promote the paperback release in October, putting the book back into bestseller lists for weeks at the end of the year, and into the holiday season.
The long-term contract isn’t just about “a book a year, every year” even if, on average, that’s the goal. It’s also about having the long-term flexibility to map out the best course for all the books we have to work with. Sometimes, as in the case with Starter Villain, that means letting them have a little extra time in the spotlight. The schedule is a guideline, not a rule.
That sounds like something a slacker would say.
Well, I’ll have two books out in 2025, if that’s really important to you. And another in 2026. And so on, for a while.
So your “ten-year” contract looks like it will take fifteen years at least.
That’s about right.
And everyone’s just okay with this lackadaisical schedule.
It seems so. One, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not like Tor or I am losing money with this release schedule; we ran the numbers a while back and this contract’s been in the black for everyone involved for years now. Or to put it another way, hey, remember last year, when I got a ten-book extension to the already existing contract?
Yes, I do, you woke me up for that one, too.
Sorry.
No you’re not.
Anyway, my point in mentioning that is that we’ve done well enough on the first contract that we’re pretty sure Tor’s already in the black for what they’ll owe me for the extension.
So they got you for cheap, is what you’re saying.
That’s not what I’m saying.
Discount Scalzi.
No.
Half-Price Hugo Winner.
No.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings.
Stop that.
I promise nothing.
Fine. They’re not getting me for cheap, I assure you. I will be buying whatever questionable guitar I like for some time to come. What they are getting, and by design, is a pretty safe bet. I sell decently out of the gate and extremely well in the backlist and it’s all set up so none of us is reliant on a single book being “make or break” for the whole enterprise. There’s flexibility and margin, and in publishing, that’s a rare thing indeed. It’s a contract designed to weather storms, and these days, that’s an extremely good thing.
You’re talking about the whole “The US is currently run by a dickhead working very hard to destroy its economy and global standing” thing, aren’t you.
Not just about that, but certainly about that too, yes. I sell a lot of work to foreign markets and the current administration making the country look bad isn’t a great thing for any US-based author. It means I have to think about what and how I write — for example, whether I write books that take place in the US, as Starter Villain and (largely) When the Moon Hits Your Eye do. It may be that for the next four years at least, I spend more time in space, and in futures where the current administrative fuckery will be less of a drag on my potential sales. We will see what happens! The nice thing, however, is that we — me and Tor — can plan and prepare as well as anyone can for what the (immediate) future brings.
Hey, a decade ago, weren’t there a bunch of dudes who were furious about your deal, or arguing you could have done better for yourself, or that you should have self-published, or whatever?
There were!
Man, what even happened to them?
I suspect at least some of them are asking themselves the same question. In a general sense, it’s possible that they should have spent more time focusing on their own careers and work, and less time focusing on the careers and work of other people.
If you could go back in time to 2015, would you sign the same contract again?
Pretty much? I understand this sort of contract is not for everyone; not everyone wants to know what they’re doing professionally, and who with, for a decade or more, or wants the pressure of being on the hook for multiple unwritten books. But as for me, back then, I was pretty sure in a decade I would still want to be writing novels, and I would want to be doing it with people and a publisher who were all in for my work. Turns out, I nailed that prediction pretty well. And from a financial and career point of view I can’t say that it hasn’t benefitted me tremendously.
Now, to be clear, other writers have sold more than me, or gotten bigger advances than I have, or have won more awards than me, in the ten years since that contract made the news. But I’ve sold enough, been paid enough, and have been awarded enough to make me happy and then some. I’m happy with the work I’ve done in this last decade. I’m happy with how it’s been received. I’m happy with where I am with my career and life. Much of that is because of this contract. So, yeah, I would do it again. I kind of did, last year, when I signed that ten-book extension.
With that extension you’ll be writing until 2040 or so.
Barring death or significant brain injury, yes, probably.
What will you do then?
I’ll be 70 then. I have no idea what 70-year-old me will want, except possibly a nap. Ask me then.
Do I have to?
I mean, you’re my fictional interlocutor, you literally have no other function, so, yeah, probably.
"The study, published in Nature Food, investigated how well each country could feed their populations in seven food groups: fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish, meat, plant-based protein and starchy staples." China and Vietnam produce enough in six of the seven categories. Out of 186 countries, 65% overproduce meat and dairy.
Concerningly, "...six countries – Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Macao, Qatar and Yemen – did not produce enough of any food group to be considered self-sufficient in that category." Dr. Jonas Stehl, first author of the paper, said that a lack of self-sufficiency is not inherently bad and can be due to any number of reasons: lack of water, bad soil, etc. But at the same time, "... low levels of self-sufficiency can reduce a country’s capability to respond to sudden global food supply shocks such as droughts, wars or export bans..."
The study was based on the World Wildlife Fund’s Livewell diet, which "... describes itself as “a flexible diet that involves rebalancing our protein consumption toward plants, eating more vegetables, pulses and wholegrains, and fewer foods high in fat, salt and sugar.”"
So all's fine around here. Little chilly; this is looking to be the coldest Memorial Day weekend in a long while. But that does mean I don't have anything worthy of reporting today. Sorry, dear bunnyhugger. Please instead enjoy Kennywood photos.
Boat going up the Pittsburg Plunge to produce a whole lot of water splashing around!
A gift shop and couple of food places in the Lost Kennywood area. We knew the area generally was themed to the old Luna Park, Pittsburgh, this particular set of buildings was themed to ... some Massachusetts park, I believe it was.
The fountain at the head of the Lost Kennywood reflecting pool. Also people eating from the Potato Patch's auxiliary outlet.
There was a booth selling miscellaneous weird old stuff that looked like someone was cleaning out a surplus room. We didn't get anything but there were things we had to photograph, like this Kennywood picture from the 70s(?) listing a Smithsonian list of top coasters. Note that the Great American Scream Machine there is the one in Atlanta, not the Great Adventure one. The Coaster at Dorney Park is now known as Thunderhawk and we've been on that. I think #5 was what we knew as Montana Rusa at La Feria Chapultepec but can't swear to it.
A leftover or maybe never-used T-shirt design with lots of Kenny Kangaroo.
And here's a leftover or maybe never-used T-shirt with a more beak-snouted Kenny Kangaroo than usual, and a lot of plush.
This must be an un-used t-shirt design for Exterminator, from before they decided to use a crazed rat theme. Or when they thought maybe they could make a licensing deal that didn't pan out.
Steel Phantom was the original incarnation of Phantom's Revenge. I'm not sure this was the Steel PHantom's original design. Looks a little Doctor Doom-y to me.
At some point during the day I broke away from bunnyhugger to ride Aero 360, the elongated rigid-arm swing ride. Wasn't much of a wait!
Here's Steel Curtain, which didn't run that year. It hasn't run since a week or two after our KennyCon 2023 visit.
In the evening light this color and shade really caught my eye.
The queue for JackRabbit, which has been spruced up with some nice paint and some very pixellated renditions of old park photos. Note the old Jack-Rabbit station overhang on the right there.
Trivia: Though he conquered Venice, without the city putting up any defense, Napoleon never set foot in it. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel.
Currently Reading: The Harvey Comics Companion, Mark Arnold.
Just in time for Memorial Day, a hefty stack of New Books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound! What here would you like to have for your long weekend reading? Share in the comments!
Man in Norway Wakes Up to Find Huge Ship Has Crashed into His Backyard: 'It Was So Unreal' The container ship was just a few meters from Johan Helberg's home when it ran aground on Thursday, May 22
At my age, I have started to have more and more friends decide to start families. Settle down, get married, have kids, the works. So many of my peers and even close friends are choosing this path, and it’s been hard for me to think of ways to support them through this journey of theirs. Sometimes I feel disconnected to my friends because of it, since I just can’t relate at all to what they’re going through, but at the end of the day I still want to be there for them and be a good friend. But I couldn’t figure out how.
About a month ago, I was scrolling on Tik Tok, and this video from Mad About Food popped up (click on it if it doesn’t show up for you or if the window here is wonky):
meal prep for a new mom I dropped this food off to a friend who recently had her first baby because there is nothing better when you’re a new parent than someone else cooking for you. Full recipes at the link in my bio! meal prep breakfast sandwiches stuffed shells with meat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies apple cider vinaigrette
Meal prep for a new mom. It was genius! How had I not thought of that? Food is basically my love language. I should’ve realized sooner that making food for my friends was the answer I had been searching for. It’s helpful, practical, and something I can do to help that doesn’t involve dirty diapers!
The menu seemed simple enough: breakfast sandwiches, stuffed shells, and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. All of that seemed pretty cheap, easy to make, and convenient to have on hand to bake whenever they were ready. So let’s talk about if it actually was, in fact, cheap and easy.
Step one was gathering ingredients for everything. I had to assess how much I had on hand already, and what I needed to go buy. The recipes themselves are pretty simplistic. There’s nothing you wouldn’t be able to find at the store, and no special expensive ingredients or anything like that.
For the breakfast sandwiches, I needed to go buy all the ingredients. The breakfast sandwiches required a dozen eggs, but the cookies also required eggs, so I bought an 18-count of eggs. She uses bacon in the video, but I opted for Canadian bacon so I didn’t have to actually cook any bacon.
First, you blend up a dozen eggs with a container of cottage cheese and bake it. I thought that was a strange mixture of ingredients, but it baked up so nicely and came out perfect! Once the eggs cooled and I cut the sheet of baked eggs into twelve squares, assembling the breakfast sandwiches was so easy. Just split the English muffin, put a square of egg on it, top it with Canadian bacon and a slice of cheddar cheese (I used Sargento), and that’s really it.
Like she does in the video, I individually wrapped each one in foil and put each one in its own freezer sandwich size Ziploc bag.
Let’s talk dishes. I used a mixing bowl and an immersion blender, a 13×9 baking dish, a knife, and a baking sheet. Not bad!
For the stuffed shells, I did in fact need to go buy every single ingredient. The recipe contains a lot of common pantry items though that you might have regularly, like the pasta and the marinara, and I’m sure some of you have a log of ground beef as a regular grocery you buy. I will say normally I have Italian seasoning but I had just ran out last week so I needed a new bottle.
Anyways, the stuffed shells were not too complicated. You cook the meat, and you mix the meat with the ricotta, parmesan, and mozzarella. I did this in a stand mixer, but you can totally do it by hand if you want. You cook the shells, you wait for them to cool, and then ya stuff ’em. Top the shells with sauce and more mozzarella and bada bing bada boom, stuffed shells. Easy peasy! Do not bake it after you assemble it, whoever you’re gifting it to will just throw it in the oven when they’re ready to have it!
The dishes count on the stuffed shells was considerably higher than the breakfast sandwiches. I used a pan and spatula to cook the meat, the stand mixer bowl and attachment, a pot to boil the pasta, a strainer, several measuring cups and measuring spoons, and a spoon to scoop the filling with.
Finally, for the cookies, I can’t believe I’m saying this but I had every ingredient on hand! Please, hold your applause until the end. Though, my brown sugar was sadly rock hard, so I bought a new bag of light brown sugar. Other than that, I didn’t have to buy anything for the cookies.
The cookies were second nature to me, as cookies are my favorite thing to make and I do it semi-regularly. Plus, when making cookies, the stand mixer is your best friend. So, it was no trouble mixing the butter, sugar, egg, vanilla, and dry ingredients, and folding in the chocolate chips. It was quick and easy and honestly the biggest issue I faced was spilling some oats all over the counter.
In the instructions she says to chill the dough before rolling it into balls, and usually I’m tempted to skip this step because I’m impatient, but I actually listened. And thank goodness I did because even after that hour chilling, when I was rolling the dough into balls it was definitely like, very heat sensitive. I don’t know if my hands were just hot as heck for some reason or what but I almost had to put it all back in the fridge because the balls were just becoming hot messes.
But, I managed to make all the balls and instead of baking them, you just freeze the balled dough. Then the person you’re gifting them to can bake as many as they want at a time. They could just take two balls out and bake up one or two cookies, or they could put the whole tray in at once. Very convenient.
Dishes for cookies were the usual suspects, the stand mixer bowl and attachment, various measuring cups and measuring spoons, a rubber spatula, nothing too wild.
I bought everything at Kroger, and after buying the ingredients as well as disposable trays like in the video, plus some Ziploc bags and aluminum foil to cover stuff with, my total was a little less than a hundred dollars. And the time I spent actually preparing the food was probably about five hours, six if you count the time it took to do dishes and clean up. Admittedly I am sort of slow when it comes to cooking, though. Things that take “only thirty minutes” will take me double that time, if not more.
So, it took like a full afternoon and a decent chunk of change for ingredients, but honestly I think it’s worth it and I’m just happy I found something that I can contribute to a friend who is going through something as monumental as becoming a parent. My friend was so happy to receive the food, and that made me happy in return! It was a great feeling, and I can’t wait to do it all again for my other pregnant friends. I have a lot of those right now, it seems.
Do you make freezer meals often (this was my first time)? Do you like Canadian bacon? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
Richard Williams "The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music" (Faber & Faber)
A wonderful narrative on how Kind of Blue was made - and what a digression from Miles' progression it is - and how it resonates and influences the next 20 years of popular music. How well you like this depends on your musical tastes - for me, the sections following the natural path through Coltrane and more free forms of jazz were fascinating, as were the chapters on The Velvet Underground and Brian Eno.
The line starts with Gil Evans, George Russell and the "birth of the cool" in jazz, makes its way through Kind of Blue and Miles' second great quintet to Coltrane, minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and ECM. It's a line, not a story -- and not a particularly straight line at that. Williams gives himself freedom to go off on extended riffs that relate little, if at all, back to Kind of Blue. In particular, his treatment of Terry Riley is extended, and fascinating stuff. Williams' account of Brian Eno is as authoritative as you'd expect from someone who's championed Eno's work from the very beginning. This book (in a similar way to Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful) showed me the direction to deeper appreciation.
My humor blog this week started with the silly, turned incomprehensible to people who don't know that I read something about Heroic Comics for a trivia item last week, went back to being So Random, and then took a turn into Peanuts news. So here's what you've been missing:
For this year they rethemed the Grand Prix bumper-car ride to ... the Potato Patch. I don't know why the cars are now fry baskets but there we go.
The far side of the wall is full of Kennywood materials, including a Lincoln Highway sign (the Lincoln Highway goes along a part of a British military trail used in the French and Indian War) and a jackrabbit crossing sign.
Kennywood and sister park arrows. The weight limit refers to the date of Kennywood's opening.
The Turtle gets a shout-out here, as does Potato Patch mascot Potato Man. I'm not sure the significance of the blobby traffic signal. Probably references some Kennywood thing I'm not hep to, like the Thomas the Tank Engine section (since rethemed).
Slightly better view of the fry-basket cars and somehow a more in-focus picture of the back wall.
And now the Kangaroo, last of the flying-coaster flat rides, with the car behind number five there showing why it's a flying-coaster.
It's not a big hop but it is a heck of one and you don't have other rides like it.
Picture of the car after landing back on the track.
Here's the new Kangaroo facade seen from behind.
Now over to The Whip, a ride nearly(?) a century old now, although not in this location.
The Whip is on the left, and that's the Pittsburg [sic] Plunge shoot-the-chutes to the right and above. And hey, what's the line for Exterminator like? If it's a reasonable wait we might just go in and enjoy ---
Oh, it's a 76-minute wait for the spinning wild mouse coaster. Never mind.
Trivia: 86 percent of French people [ as of about 2005 ] have never flown in an airplane. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb. The book was published in 2007 so the data is likely accurate to two-to-four years before that.
Currently Reading: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss.
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At my age, I have started to have more and more friends decide to start families. Settle down, get married, have kids, the works. So many of my peers and even close friends are choosing this path, and it’s been hard for me to think of ways to support them through this journey of theirs. Sometimes I feel disconnected to my friends because of it, since I just can’t relate at all to what they’re going through, but at the end of the day I still want to be there for them and be a good friend. But I couldn’t figure out how.
meal prep for a new mom 
meal prep breakfast sandwiches 
stuffed shells with meat 
oatmeal chocolate chip cookies 
apple cider vinaigrette 
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