Book Review: Shades of Grey

Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde Genre: Dystopian (Young Adult Appropriate)

I enjoy dystopian novels.  I believe part of it is because they play into my biggest fears. What would happen if there was a nuclear war?  What if the religious right were to take over the world?  What if our government collapsed?  In Jasper Fforde's novel Shades of Grey, the question is: What happens when people are subjugated to a certain lifestyle because of the colors they can perceive? 

I found this theme quite unnerving.  We already deal with discrimination based on what color a person's skin is, but what about when we further discriminate because of what colors a person can actually see.  The idea that one could only see shades of blue, or green, or yellow, or purple, or, Munsell save us, grey was eerie.  I can't imagine my world being limited to seeing 72% blue.  Not even the full blue spectrum, just 72%.  And what makes someone who can see 29% purple better than my 72% blue? 

I enjoyed following the changes that Edward Russett (even your name is delegated to your color perception) as he begins his journey as a compliant follower of the Great Munsell.  He is poised to marry up-color and is on a pointless task to make up for a practical joke at school.  He follows his father, a healer, to a town on the outer-edges of their world where he starts to see things differently out here further away from the big city.  And lo and behold he has to go and fall in love with a Grey!  Oh the shame!  But Jane Gray (love the name) doesn't just steal his heart.  She infects his mind with new thoughts and challenges his way of thinking.  Soon young Edward finds that life isn't so black and white.

Tinted with fabulous double entendre using color words to not only describe people, but also to help the reader see what life would be like with a limited color spectrum, Shades of Gray is a fabulous read, even for people who don't normally pick up dystopian books.  About the only thing that I can say that bugged me about this book's writing was the use of "artificial color."  I am still having a hard time understanding how if someone has a limited color spectrum how they can see "artificial colors" but not real colors.  But then my world is surrounded by color and my eyes function as they should (provided I am wearing my glasses!)

What I'm currently reading:  Invincible Summer by Hannah Moskowitz Genre: Young Adult Contemporary

Knitting in my office

My office is my writing space.  This is where I come to pen words.  I have a variety of dictionaries (my favorite being the Merriam-Webster's Compact Visual Dictionary - is very useful for answering the question, "What is that thingy called on a bell that makes it ring?").  I have books and magazines on the art of writing.  I have character development workbooks and books of quotations.  I have sticky notes for plot development.  My calendar is even one of women reading. 

Intertwined, though, in all these words are parts of my other life.  My knitting side.  For instance in the cup of pens, markers, pencils, and other office supplies are a pair of knitting needles and a crochet hook.  There is a ball of yarn on the desk as well.  I have a painting that my son made for me of sheep grazing on a field and I own a Sheep Incognito print (Silence of the Lambs) which hangs on my wall.  And then there is my Intwined Pattern Studios software on my computer.  It is the best knitting design software I have found on the market and Heatherly is one of my friends, so I love supporting her creation.  It is a great break sometimes from when I am at a loss for words.  I pick up my needles and will go cast on and try a new stitch or new cast on technique that I read about.  The other thing that I find myself doing in my office is watching movies on my laptop while I knit. 

Sometimes I think that I should limit my office to only writing, but this area has always been a space of art long before I decided to seriously put my stories into print.  When we first moved into this house I was deep into rubber stamping and so the remains of that craft are all over the shelves in this room.  I rarely use them anymore and keep thinking I'm going to drastically pare down the rubber stamp, inks, paper (oh the paper), and the plethora of embellishments and turn this little nook into a "real office and fiber arts design studio."  It's just hard to let go of stamps that I fell in love with.  I have Very Much money invested in all those wood mounted rubber stamps. 

I have this vision of having my stamps confined to a small area while the rest of the office is dedicated to books and knitting.  I'll have baskets of yarn on the shelves instead of paper cutters.  There will be all my needles, neatly organized instead of a jumble of colored markers.  I will replace the tool-turn-around full of spritzers and bone folders with knitting implements.  And the back wall will house even more books.  I should do it.  I have too much unused crap as it is.  Books would be used (I pull down my aforementioned visual dictionary at least daily).  Fiber would be used.  This space would become a place that fulfills me in so many ways than just writing and feeling peered down on by neglected and spiteful Past Crafts. 

Ten on Tuesday: Love Songs Edition

Love songs.  Le sigh! Love songs are old.  They date back to, well, a really long time.  The Greeks and Romans wrote love songs to their lovers.  Unfortunately, they didn't have a good way of recording or notating their music, so we don't know the melodies, but we have some of the words left behind as poetry.  The Song of Solomon is one big love song written almost one thousand years ago.  In fact Solomon apparently loved to write love songs.  The French troubadours went around singing their little love ditties (and probably breaking hearts everywhere they went).  Sort of like medieval Beatles. 

Most of the love songs I love are fairly old as well, although not as old as Solomon or the troubadours.  I just don't have many current songs on my list of ten favorite love songs. So brace yourself, you are heading to Retroville:

1. Michelle by the Beatles (Hey, if my spouse had Paul McCartney sing Michelle to me I would be so thrilled!)
2. As my Guitar Gently Weeps (the Beatles)
3. In My Life (yep the Beatles again)
4. And I Love Her (Do you see a theme here?)
5. Love Me Tender (Elvis, although Norah Jones' cover of it was very good too)
6. Only Fools Rush In (Elvis)
7. Don't (Elvis - can't you just imagine those words being pleaded in your ear :shiver:)
8. When I fall in Love (Nat King Cole - I also like Linda Ronstadt's version is good, too)
9. Have I told you Lately that I Love You (Van Morrison version, although Rod Stewart will do in a pinch)
10. Anything for You (Ludo - hey, it's from this century - even this decade!)

The Sweater Survey

Alrighty roo cowgirls and cowboys! Here's a link to the survey. Please fill it out and pass the link on so I can get more sizes. For those who don't remember, back on April 25th (you do not need to remind me that that was nearly two months ago) I ranted about how sweaters didn't seem to be any kind of real size, so I wanted to know what people's sizes were.  Real people, not what Brand XYZ said a size is.  I was frustrated at how patterns for knitting never seemed to match up with what real people wore.  And that sweaters (in particular) seemed to be built around some odd formula that was applied to one size without test knits being done on other sizes.  So now I'm wanting to collect people's measurements.  You can remain anonymous.  I'm not going to come hunt you down with a measuring tape to verify, but I would appreciate if you are honest (you should be anyway because otherwise you knit sweaters for yourself that don't fit correctly). 

If you get a message that says something like "exceeded monthly limits" let me know and I'll send the survey to you another way. 

Thank you!

Spiritual Sunday

Everything I know about religion I learned from Star Trek.  OK, not really.  But Star Trek was a huge influence in my spiritual beliefs.  I was raised as a cradle Episcopalian.  Have a mother who is an Episcopla priest.  I like to think that I put her through seminary.  We would have long theological discussions based on various papers she was writing or classes she was taking.  I had never really questioned my beliefs until I started truly paying attention to the themes of Star Trek and not just the plots.  The plots were essentially the same.  Kirk pokes the snake with a stick.  An intergalactic space being threatens to unleash cosmic power which will end all life as we know it.  Picard rushes in and saves the day and Reiker gets the girl.  But the themes were what started making me question what I really believed. 

Over the years I called my self a Star Trekian philosopher.  I believed that there could be all kinds of truths in the world and not just the one I had been raised to accept as truth.  It wasn't until one day when I friend of mine asked me what my spiritual beliefs were that I found out there already was a "Star Trek" religion.  It was called Unitarian Universalism.  Wow.  There were entire congregations of people all over the world who were living the Star Trek philosophy that I thought I had discovered.  (Silly me.)  It wasn't until after September 11, 2001 that I actually sought out a UU congregation.  I had lots of questions and mainstream religion wasn't helping.  I was told I was wrong for speaking out against the President of the United States and for daring to say that was was not the answer.  (Despite my Star Trek background, I am a pacifist.)  Fortunately, in the UU church I found others like myself who felt the same way, including members of the US military. 

As the blog progresses I will expand on how my beliefs meld in with my writing and knitting because I do see my beliefs on the pages and in the yarn that flow through my fingers.  I can't imagine how one can't be influenced by their spirituality.

Birthday Cakes!

Today is my birthday. My forty-sixth birthday. I'm not afraid of "growing old" or reaching a big number like fifty or sixty or ninety. In fact if I reach ninety I'll be tickled pink. Although my goal is to get to my eleventy-first birthday and then I'm going to have a hobbit birthday party and give everyone presents. But today I am just forty-six. It's just a number. Saying I am twenty-nine is not going to make me twenty-nine. And besides when I was twenty-nine I had a two-year old and was pregnant, so it wasn't very fun. I like being where I am. I've enjoyed growing in maturity, wisdom and understand (stop laughing) and still retaining my youth and frivolity.

Cakes and birthdays go hand in hand. And I love birthday cakes. I would have to say that my very favorite birthday cake is actually yellow cake with a traditional real buttercream frosting. Although yellow cake with a creamy chocolate frosting is pretty high up on the enjoyment list. I'll never refuse chocolate cake, though. In preparing for this post, I wondered what kind of cakes are made around the world and throughout history. I went to that compendium of never-failing information, Wikipedia (yes; you may laugh at that) to see what it had to say about birthday cakes. They're pretty old. In fact there are references that date back to the Greeks and Romans. I knew about medieval birthday cakes, but the recipes I have found for medieval cakes are more like sweet breads rather than what we think of as cake today. They were yeast risen and contained fruits and nuts. Think more German Stolen than Betty Crocker. It wasn't until the the middle of the eighteenth century that we started getting cakes that actually look like what we envision as birthday cakes today. Tiered cakes dripping in icing and floral decorations.

When searching for literary references for birthday cake, Google was somewhat a failure in producing anything truly useful. Although there was a Wiki question asking what color Bella's Birthday cake was in New Moon (It was pink.) And I did find this quote: “Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake.” So go eat cake. (BTW, cake wasn't referring to cake when Marie Antoinette suggested that the peasants go eat cake. The actual word was brioche not gateau. Brioche was a savory bread made with eggs and milk rather than starter and water. Both, though, require flour, which the bakers had none of, but Marie did not know this and thought one was just a substitute for the other. And it is also doubtful that Marie Antoinette actually uttered the words.)


This is my favorite recipe for a good basic yellow cake:

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
2-1/2 cups white sugar
3 eggs
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2-1/2 cups buttermilk
3-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2-1/4 teaspoons baking powder
2-1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Bring the butter, eggs and buttermilk to room temperature!

Grease three 8" or 9" pans. I like to sprinkle mine with a little flour as well. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Using a mixer, cream your butter and sugar together until it is soft. Next add in your eggs one at a time and beat this for a good 5 minutes. You want a nice light fluffy cake. Add your vanilla and buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk you can substitute regular milk, but add a dollop of Greek yogurt or sour cream to add just a pinch of tartness to it which will work well with the amount of sugar that is in this cake).

While your wet ingredients are beating away, sift together your flour, baking powder and soda. You do not need salt because everything you need is in your powder and soda. Trust me. It will be fine. Slowly add your dry ingredients to your wet ingredients, scraping the bowl as you go. Let it mix for just a few more minutes. Evenly divide the batter into your three prepared pans and bake for 35 minutes or until it tests clean.

Remove them from the oven and let them sit for 5 minutes before removing them from the pans and letting them cool on racks.

Sometimes I like to add a bit of orange or lemon zest to this recipe just because it is so darn good. In those instances I will sometimes bake this as a loaf and slice it, toast it and put butter on it. No frosting needed. But most of the time I put frosting on it.

What kind of frosting you ask? OK, here's my favorite recipe for that: Go to the store, look for the tub that reads, "Duncan Hines Milk Chocolate." Spread liberally. But when I do make my frosting from scratch this is what I use:

1/4 cup butter
2 cups confectioners' sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons milk

It's pretty easy and fairly foolproof. Just mix the first four ingredients adding the 2 tablespoons of milk a bit at a time until it is spreadable. It's simple, basic and so delicious on cake.

Catching up and a new challenge

I keep thinking about really cool things that I want to blog about. I'll even make a note about it. Sometimes I'll even find the perfect graphic to pair with it. And then you know what? Nothing. That's right. Nothing happens. I think about blogging, but thinking about it and actually doing it are two different things. So I'm challenging myself for the summer (starting today) to blog every single day, even if it is just a line or two. And since I love lists and schedules are like lists, I've decided that I am going to have a schedule so even my readers know what I'm supposed to be blogging about. Radical, eh? Not really, but I'm pretending it is.

What's your schedule? I'm so glad you asked. Here it is:

Mondays: Mindless Ramblings (this could really be about anything)
Tuesdays: 10 on Tuesday (I get these e-mails so I might as well utilize them, right?)
Wednesdays: Adventures in Knitting
Thursdays: Book Reviews
Fridays: On Writing and/or Publishing
Saturdays: Sumptuous Saturdays (look for recipes or cooking tips)
Sundays: Thoughts on spirituality and how that relates to my love of knitting, cooking and writing

But, today is Friday and this doesn't look like a post on writing or publishing. You are so write (write - as in writing, get it, hahahahaha - I'm so lame). Seriously, though, yes; today is about writing and/or publishing and my journey there.

What is going on? I'm back into that wonderful flurry of writing where I have a million book ideas all screaming to get onto paper first. I love when this happens because I find that I am creative in other aspects of my life as well. For instance I get knitting patterns in my dreams (that actually can work, not the abstract three-dimensional hat knit on seven needles and needing two other sets of hands to accomplish). I have also finished a major re-write of the first book of my witch trilogy and have a few friends who are beta reading it for me. I'm working feverishly on a synopsis and good query letter for it. I think it is one hundred times better than the previous rendition. I've also finished a major edit on my NaNoWriMo book and have started a sequel to it which is going very well. This book also deserves a synopsis and a query letter.



So why aren't you writing these synopses and query letters? Because I suck at writing synopses and query letters. They always seem lame or I feel like I'm rambling. I've read probably twenty books on writing query letters and mine always look either cookie cutter or really lame. Sometimes I think of writing a really bad query letter with all that agent's pet peeves written in a very sarcastic-yet-understand voice, but never send it because I doubt very seriously the agent would ready it with the same voice that is going through my head.

Are you doing anything to try to remedy this lack in your writing skills? I am. It doesn't mean that it is getting any better, but I am trying each day to write a two-paragraph synopsis of my book. It usually ends with me deleting the entire thing before I toss my laptop across the room, but I am working on it. I was supposed to go to a writing workshop this weekend, but there weren't enough participants and it was cancelled. I signed up for the one in July and hopefully it will make.

Can you tell us about the book(s) you are working on right now? Kind of. As I mentioned earlier I am writing a sequel to my NaNoWriMo book which was about knitting a sweater for a boyfriend. This one is about knitting a wedding veil. The other book I am working on is written in the voice of a dystopian man who lived through the changes that happened in his world and is now dying.

That's about it. Tune in tomorrow when I will be talking about Birthday Cake! (Because it will be my birthday and cake and birthdays go together even though I'm having tacos and margaritas tomorrow and not sure if there will be any cake at all, but that's a post for tomorrow.)