Food Part 2: Ichirou and Grace Discuss Vegetarianism

This post goes out to Lanetta, who gives me many things to think about in the comments. (Yes, you too, dear readers, can use the comments section to ask questions, make observations, or even just say hi!)
Yesterday Lanetta observed that Ichirou (a vegetarian) and Grace (the protagonist and omnivore) would inevitably have a discussion about Ichirou’s vegetarianism, and that we could develop the two’s personalities (and their friendship) through the conversation. I’m going to give this conversation a try:

We sat crosslegged on the floor of the cabin — rather, I sat crosslegged, while Ichirou sat seiza, I think just to show off. Ayana handed us each a bowl of steaming ramen soup. I noticed flat green pieces of what I suspected was seaweed and bits of soft white tofu. Ayana had also put a handful of snow peas and one of spinach, a much more elaborate ramen than I’d had before.

“Do Japanese people really eat ramen?” I asked as I took the spoon and tried to capture the noodles.

“Cut the noodles,” Ayana instructed. “I didn’t think to ask my accomplice to get chopsticks when he outfitted this place for me.” Ayana moved to the couch and put her bowl on the coffee table.

I didn’t tell her the secret Greg had asked me to keep, that I had met him when she hadn’t. “So how would I eat this with chopsticks?”

Ichirou took his spoon and held it parallel to the bowl he held in his other hand. With a smile, he pantomimed bringing noodles up to his mouth using chopsticks — and slurped loudly and long.

“That’s so impolite!” I shouted, slopping a little broth on my lap. “That’s your fault, you know.”

Ayana hid what I expected to be a smirk behind her hand. “It’s not impolite if you’re Japanese.”

I turned my attention back to Ichirou, who grimaced at his spoon. “Ichirou, why are you a vegetarian?”

“Lacto-ovo-vegetarian,” he shot back.

“Ok, then. Why are you a lacto-ovo-vegetarian?” I turned to my bowl and fished out a piece of silky, mild tofu.

“Well …” He set his bowl down, unfolded his now lanky body and wandered back into the tiny kitchen area. He returned with three forks, and handed one to each of us. He sat back on the floor, this time crosslegged. “I’m vegetarian because animals’ fates shouldn’t be decided by whether they’re cute, majestic, or malevolent. They just are, and they have just as much right to be as I do.”

“Oh,” I said, at a loss for words. “But we’re higher on the food chain, aren’t they?”

“We decided we were at the top of the food chain.” I saw Ichirou’s jaw set, which changed his face from darling to — interesting.

“But — what would you do if there was nothing to eat but meat and you were starving?” I blurted out.

“I would eat the meat because I had no choice.” He set down his half-empty bowl; I had abandoned mine a few minutes before.

“But you wouldn’t be a veg — a lacto-ovo-vegetarian — anymore,” I prodded.

“Vegetarianism has nothing to do with what I can’t do, only what I am willing to do.” He picked up his bowl and began to eat again. His deep brown eyes glanced up at me and in that moment I couldn’t remember why I thought him so young.

Food and your Story

Seasoned writers often recommend that, if you want to enrich the scene you’re writing, you include food, What can food do for a story?

Sometimes food drives the plot — the poisoned glass of elderberry wine in “Arsenic and Old Lace”, for example, or the cookbook in the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man”.

Sometimes the food drives the theme — for example, the lavish descriptions of food in “The Hunger Games”, or the lavish presentations of chocolate in the movie “Chocolat”.

Sometimes the food develops the characters — the residents of the ecocollective “Barn Swallows’ Dance” in my Gaia series eat mostly vegetarian diets they’ve grown and raised themselves.

Sometimes the food sets the mood — if a character picks at his food, we know him to be upset or distracted; if he gobbles the food, he’s rushed or famished.

Sometimes the food simply engages the senses in its descriptions. A character eats freshly fried, breaded cheddar cheese curds — are you hungry yet?

So let’s play with this: You have a character, female, college age. She hasn’t been able to eat for several hours, because she has been involved in a clandestine operation to stop the bad guys who wish to hijack a large political event. The action she and her group have taken has been marginally successful, and the group chooses a restaurant to eat at. She feels ambivalent about what she has done, because she has had to exercise the secret power she dislikes having. What will she eat, and how will she eat it? Will she gobble the food? Savor it? Eat it mechanically, not really tasting it?

How will this differ from her co-conspirator, a college-age Japanese man who practices vegetarianism and feels compelled to use his secret power to fix the world?

Utopian Musings

When the front passed through last night, and the air cooled, I slept …

In my dream, Richard and I drove into a town with colorful old buildings, showcase windows cluttered with the wares sold inside. It was like the small town I grew up in, except the wicked decrepitude of my home town had been replaced by benevolent wisdom.

Richard dropped me off at what looked to be a coffeehouse to write, while he consulted a mechanic to check out a noise the car made. I stepped inside the coffeehouse, and found myself in a large space with worn wood floors, weavings and carvings and peacock-hued jewelry. A table toward the center displayed baked goods, paper plates, and plastic forks. I had expected the goodies to be behind the counter for sale, but people walked up to the table freely after they’d bought coffee.

“We’re having a party,” a tiny woman with white hair and glasses smiled, brandishing a fork. “Please, join us.”

I’m sure I hesitated, and a middle-aged man with white-blond hair said behind me, “No, really. You’re welcome.” I felt welcome — I had never felt welcome anyplace, any time in my life.

Richard walked in. “Richard, we have to find a way to live here. This is where I was meant to be.”

**************

In this current age, we hold utopia suspect. Dystopia sells, because it speaks to our mood. Dystopia helps us say, “See? Those are my scars, the ones I hold secret. This is my damage.” We all are damaged, we all need to speak our damage, but we walk through life feeling we have no home.

We mistrust utopia. To be that loved, to feel true communion, bears risks — what if they disappoint me? What if they change their mind, what if they quit loving me? In reality, everyone we love disappoints us and changes their mind because they’re as human as we are. But utopia is the moment where we find ourselves loved, frozen in time.

*************
(You’re damned right I’m going to use this in my writing.

Nocturne

The FEMA app on my phone announces that the three-day heat advisory has expired. The air outside hangs heavily. I feel its weight in my chest, as if it has settled in my soul.

Too much time to myself, too much time to think. Too many heavy questions — why does my childhood self walk through my dreams? What does she search for?

I wrote this song twenty years ago. Why does it repeat over and over?
To dance naked in this pool of light
is all the moment requires of me —
eyes closed, as if I were alone
but I know you are there, almost —
almost close enough to feel,
almost close enough to touch;
my hand reaches out to touch your face
and touches air — you are not close enough …

Why do the fleeting moments when we know we’re loved fade and leave us doubting again?
Why have we all been wounded?

When the cold front moves in tonight, it may rain or even hail. Perhaps that will clear the air.

Kansas City, 2065

Sometimes, I worry about climate change, and fear we have come to the point of no return. I deal with this in a distinctly Buddhist way, telling myself it is what it is, as I have limited control over climate.

However, that doesn’t mean I cannot change the future in my books:

Berkeley, a time traveler hiding in the parched Chaos of Kansas City 2065, sends his protege Ian Akimoto back to 2015, purportedly to protect Berkeley’s former protege, Kat Pleskovich. Kat, the top daredevil in the game Voyager, doesn’t trust this enigma from the future, but when he warns her during a sabotaged Voyageurs stunt called “jumping time”, Ian gives her the chance she needs to survive. After several attempts on their lives, Kat and Ian, with the help of Berkeley, deduce that Harold Martin and Wanda Smith, Kat’s friends, are behind the attempted murders. With the help of Berkeley and Kat’s estranged mother, Agnes Faa Pleskovich, they discover that the archived notes of the Voyageur’s files reveal a pattern among the daredevil deaths. Then, when Berkeley sets them to deciphering Time Physics, a tome that Ian’s deceased parents wrote, Kat and Ian discover a plot that runs from 1930’s Kansas City to the environmental devastation of 2065, and a possible way to reverse it …

Yes, this is a magic solution to climate change — find its historical roots and keep it from happening. But the story allowed me to explore a ten-year drought and its effects — monocultures of adaptive but noxious giant hogweed in empty lots; bombed and burned-out buildings from civic unrest; lawlessness and evidence that the rich hole themselves away in bunkers hoarding water. It also gave me the opportunity to create consistent rules for time jumping and changing the future and develop underground subcultures for the Travellers (in this case time travelers) and Voyageurs (daredevil time travelers).

If only the reality was this easy to fix.

The Nature of Poetry

Did I mention that Josh Young — one of my characters — taught me to write better poetry? Given that Josh doesn’t exist except for pages in a book and in my mind, this would seem impossible. But when I wrote Josh, I created him as a talented English major who got teased in grade school because he was too beautiful, and who has grown into a formidable young man with mystical leanings. (Whether he is still beautiful or not, I expect, depends on personal preference, but his girlfriend/wife Jeanne thinks so.)
Josh, as an avid student of English literature and composition, learned about the same things I learned in that poetry class in college, but he took them more seriously. He identified as a poet, so he understood metaphor and developed the ability to distill his thoughts in the purest way possible. I, on the other hand, wrote entirely out of emotions, and my poems are of three sorts: “There’s this guy, I’m so blue, and I’m so blue because there’s this guy”. (My husband would argue this is still the case, bless him.)

When I wrote Josh’s poems in “Gaia’s Voice”, I had to write as Josh. In reality, that meant pulling up all those technical things I learned in my poetry class (long LONG ago), and pull Josh’s thoughts through that process. In my imagination, it looked more like this:

Josh stood over my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him approaching me, and I blamed my hearing as much as I credited his Aikido training. “Have you thought of holding back your passion?” he inquired as he read the words over my shoulder on the screen.

“Holding back?” I asked dumbly. I defined myself, if by nothing else, by my passion. I highlighted a block of text to delete it —

“No. Don’t deny the passion. Channel it. Play with it. Hint about it. Concentrate it like a laser beam and zap someone with it at the end of the poem.” I turned around to see him push that unruly lock of black hair out of his eyes.

I stared at my words on the screen. They made “How do I love thee” sound coy. They bludgeoned, they overwhelmed. They didn’t tease the way first love would. They did not capture Josh’s feelings. Moreover, they did not capture mine.

“Poetry captures an experience, not a speech,” Josh noted. Then, just as quickly as he had appeared, he walked off into the white existence of my imagination.

I wrote a fun section of my Work in Progress yesterday I wanted to share. To give a little background, A shadowy group called Second World Renewal have chased Grace and Ichirou, prodigies in viola and art prospectively, and Ichirou’s chaperone Ayana, across Poland. The three have boarded a ferry from Gdynia, Poland to Nynahshamn, Sweden as an attempt to get to their home countries. As they boarded the ferry, Grace noticed the porter resembled one of Second World Renewal’s hired muscle. Because Ayana brushes off Grace’s fear, Grace suspects Ayana is in league with the group.

Ayana sends Grace and Ichirou off to the disco while she claims to set a trap for the group’s thug. Having no choice, they dress up and go to the disco, where Grace gives in to her fatalism in a .

Let me know what struck you, what questions you would ask.

*****

Music blared in the disco, enough that I thought I saw the walls move. A few people sat at the bar tables and even fewer danced. The blue lights — can lighting, neon accents — rendered the clientele almost anonymous and the wooden tables and chairs and walls a greasy black. The performer, dwarfed against his equipment, hit knobs and slides and created loops of sound that slid against each other. The couple that slow-danced when everyone else on the floor couldn’t figure out whether to dance fast or slow took the anonymity offered to start locking lips. I wondered what that would be like …

Ichirou and I finally sat at the edge of the disco. We sat silently, not watching the performer, not looking at each other. I thought about Stockholm Syndrome and whether I could truly escape Second World Renewal’s plot and why they wanted me in the first place, given I wasn’t a real prodigy like Ichirou, and if I would survive to get my first kiss —

Tears overcame me.

Ichirou reached for my hand.

I yelped — “Don’t do that, you little pervo —“

A tall man wearing a crew uniform stopped by our table. “Is there a problem?” he asked in a low pleasant voice. That was all I could discern of him given the lurid blue lighting.

“No,” I gulped. “Everything’s okay. I’m just babysitting and — “

“You decided to bring your charge to the disco?” the white-uniformed man chuckled.

“Well, I …” Ichirou had turned away with his arms crossed as I spoke.

“It’s okay. Just so you don’t let him drink any alcohol.” His face bent close to mine, and I saw freckles, dark eyebrows, and a thin nose.

“We’re not drinking,” I shrugged. As far as I was concerned, Ichirou wasn’t drinking. I myself considered trying Sex on the Beach if I was about to lose my freedom to Ivanov’s goons.

“Why not? You have a chaperone.” He shared a significant look with Ichirou, of all things, and Ichirou nodded. “May I get you something to drink?”

“Sure, if you’re not going to drop a roofie in it.”

The man nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hard not to worry about that, isn’t it? I assure you, nobody’s going to tamper with this drink. What would you like?”

“Sex on the Beach,” I mumbled.

“I couldn’t hear that,” the crew member grinned.

“She wants Sex on the Beach,” Ichirou chirped. I laid my head on the table, hoping the blue lighting hid my flaming cheeks.

“Ok, one Sex on the Beach for the lady, and for you?” I heard the crew member ask Ichirou.

“I’m fine with mineral water. Sparkling if you have it,” Ichirou replied. And do they have any vegetarian food?”

“Lacto-vegetarian?”

“Lacto-ovo-vegetarian,” Ichirou corrected. “I don’t want her drinking on an empty stomach.”

“You’ll make a fine salaryman someday.” I saw the crew member wander off as I lifted my head. If I survived this trip, not even I would believe the story.

“Please, no, not a salaryman,” Ichirou breathed when the crewman had walked out of earshot.

“What’s a salaryman?” I queried.

“The stereotypical Japanese man. Works in a company, lives for the company, spends more time drinking with his co-workers than with his family. Dies of overwork.”

“Oh.” I wondered if being a salaryman would be better or worse than being a kidnapped prodigy.

The anonymous crew member interrupted my thoughts wielding a tray. “Here you go,” as he handed me an icy drink off his tray.

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“You take care of her, all right?” The crew member pulled out a phone, scrutinized the screen, and trotted quickly out of the disco.

For the Love of Coffee

On Facebook, coffee is a sacrament. Have you noticed this? Coffee jokes, coffee witticisms, coffee mugs. If you subscribe to writing-related pages on Facebook, you’ll quickly become convinced that coffee is the fount of all inspiration. For many of us, it is. (Those of you in the United Kingdom don’t understand this because your coffee usually is Nescafe instant and some boiling water. That is not coffee.)

Some of you reading this don’t fancy coffee and prefer your caffeine another way. For example, tea — sweet, unsweet, green, oolong, Earl Grey. Most of the people I’ve met who drink Earl Grey were English majors or Star Trek: Next Gen fans. Or Mountain Dew — all the people I’ve met who prefer Mountain Dew are computer programmers. Read on, because it may help you understand us coffee drinkers.

Why do so many writers prefer coffee? It could be because of the allure of coffeehouses* as places to write. Perhaps it’s knowing the mystique of the coffee’s journey from coffee cherry to processing method to grinding to brewing. Maybe it’s just that coffee is a socially sanctioned form of stimulants.

Coffee drinkers, like writers, appreciate the history of coffee. The apocryphal story of the discovery of coffee goes like this: An Arabic shepherd, feeling weary, sat under a bush to rest after making a fire to boil water. After he let the water cool, he notices one of his goats take a drink and then bound around the pasture with leaps and hops. The shepherd witnessed this, took a drink of the water, and no longer felt tired.**

Can you write without coffee? Yes — any ritual will help you get in the mindset, and writers have plenty of rituals — Using a fountain pen to write, writing in a dedicated Moleskine book, writing in a blog as a warmup, listening to music … Coffee is just another ritual. With caffeine added.***

*****

* You will find the best ambience in indie coffeehouses. Consider yourself lucky if you have access to these. Chain “stores” that sell nationally recogized brands, not so much. Only one Starbucks in the US, in my opinion, has true coffeehouse ambiance, and it’s the Starbucks at Northwest Missouri State University, in the library. I work at that university and hold some of my office hours here.

** I question this account for a couple reasons: 1) I’ve seen goats. They dance like they’re overcaffeinated ALL THE TIME. (Meet the crazy goats at Goats Gone Grazing Acres for an example.) 2) The herder boiled his water to be sanitary, only to drink it after a goat slurped it up? I prefer the story without the dancing goat.

*** Full disclosure: I am a coffee snob. In this household, we buy small lot green coffee beans and roast them at home in a small-batch drum roaster. We brew in a French press. We check for flavor notes. It’s really quite obnoxious. Really.

Procrastination

We procrastinate for several reasons:

Because the tasks lack challenge (Housework, for example)
Because the tasks are too challenging (Getting up in the morning?)
Because the tasks are monotonous (Housework, for example)
Because of fear of failure (Why I have five manuscripts that I haven’t marketed aggressively)
Because of fear of success (Honestly. Success changes lives)
Because we just dislike the task (Housework, for example)

In other words, we want to perform tasks that are challenging but not too challenging, have enough novelty to engage us but utilizes our skills, and offer reasonable success that doesn’t fall outside our comfort zone. If we don’t perceive that the task will grant us all that, we procrastinate.

Many factors inside and outside ourselves can create an atmosphere ripe for procrastination. Illness and worry can ramp up our belief that tasks are too challenging. Depression can enhance our feelings of failure. Jarring background music may burden us with more challenge, while bland or crowded surroundings may increase our perception of monotony.

The process of writing yields all sorts of procrastination pitfalls. Some tasks — proofreading, for example — can be boring. Revising a novel or poem can challenge writers to the point of stress. Search and replace on a document can be monotonous (Scrivener, which is what I use to compose my writing, has no automatic replace). The difficulty in breaking into the market with one’s writing can enhance fear of failure, and daydreaming can enhance fear of success. Some parts of writing, such as writing a synopsis, can be annoying.

We can trick ourselves out of procrastination. Some tricks I use are:

Breaking the task into smaller pieces. For example, I lay out the outlines for my books in quarter-chapters. Instead of feeling that sense of accomplishment only after finishing a chapter, I feel it with every quarter-chapter. (Small, frequent doses of accomplish reduce the fear of failure and the monotony).
Switching up where I write (this is why writing retreats are so popular)
Skipping forward to a more rewarding part of the book (more challenge, more motivation)
Skipping forward to a less challenging part of the book (in my current book, that means writing in the Michigan hideout part of the story — less challenging than piecing together the malls in Gdynia (which is pronounced Goo-DOON-ya for you English speakers)
Starting my writing day by promising myself I can quit writing after 10 minutes (I’m dealing with minor depression today — this is my best strategy for writing with depression).

Procrastination is not our friend, but we can negotiate a cease-fire with it.

Thanks for reading. I love you all.

The Joys and Sorrows of a Playlist

Many of my fellow authors make playlists to inspire them to write. It makes sense — music helps people muster up feelings which can energize, soften, or entrance.

Football (by which I mean American football) and soccer (by which I mean everyone else’s football) use popular songs and team anthems to fire up the audience.

In movies, a playlist can make all the difference in the viewer’s perception of the movie. Guardians of the Galaxy‘s well-chosen vintage soundtrack may well have been some of the reason for its success. For an example of how a soundtrack manipulation can influence our perception of a movie, watch this trailer.

Back to writers — yesterday, I read a Facebook post from one of my favorite romance authors, Robin D. Owens. The discussion centered around soundtracks as motivation, and I was reminded of all the pitfalls we writers have when trying to put together playlists:

Unlike James Gunn, who could afford the time and money to go through thousands of songs to complete the Guardians soundtrack, writers rely on what they have in their MP3 collection, songs they can recall, and suggestions from their friends.
A song with words might have the right words but wrong musical feel, or vice versa. Here is a sad song about child abuse whose tune doesn’t fit its words:
A song you thought was suitable doesn’t flow with the rest of the playlist. I wanted the playlist for Prodigy (Grace, the main character, likes that one) to incorporate a lot of classical, because that’s what she would be listening to. I, of course, wanted the pieces I picked to fit the mood of the segments of the book, which include a lot of running and a counter-attack on the protagonists’ part. I put the playlist together, and realized that one of the classical pieces sounded like the background music to a 1930’s Superman movie.
iTunes Store has little talent for this type of search. Type “eerie” and you get songs called “eerie” in their title and albums called “eerie”. Most of these will be death metal (not eerie), rap (not eerie), or Halloween music (NOT EERIE, ironically enough.) No theremin music (they can even make “Over the Rainbow” sound a little scary.)
Almost nobody can make your playlist for you because they can’t get into your head, which is the only place your characters and plot live when you need a playlist. Perhaps a playlist goddess can. Or the person who listens to you prattle about your book daily — my husband has gotten pretty good at playlists.

Try a playlist — not just for writing, but for motivation. For working out, for running, for housework, for getting up in the morning. I had a partner for a presentation back in college who walked into the room where I was putting together my poster, said, “excuse me”, and dropped the needle on “Also Sprach Zarathrustra. He then breathed, “I’m prepared now.” It turned out that this was his ritual to get through public speaking, as he was an introvert.

Just understand that it’s a work in progress. Like you are.