Summer Cafe Blog Hop: Michelle Browne and Nicolas Wilson's Euphoria/Dysphoria

Hello hello!

I have a special post for you today--as you can see, there's an awesome blog cafe event going on, and I have included some very cool prizes. A necklace featuring the cover of Euphoria/Dysphoria and three ebooks, including Euphoria/Dysphoria, After the Garden, and The Underlighters, are all up for grabs.  You can participate in that below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

But that's not all. Since our feature is the romance in Euphoria/Dysphoria, Nicolas Wilson and I have a very...special...recipe for you this week. Let's just say that in a dystopia, sometimes you have to get a little creative with your meat sources. This one is abundant, local, and tastes great with garlic.

That's right! Tonight, we're cookin' with rat. Of course, you might want to substitute chicken, but that's up to you.

Roasted rat with garlic sauce (from The Food Network) 

Ingredients

1 (5 to 6-pound) roasting rat
Salt
2 heads garlic, cut in 1/2 crosswise
3 stalks lemongrass

3 stalks rosemary 

(optional: oregano, basil)
1/2 large Spanish onion, thickly sliced
4 carrots cut diagonally into 2-inch chunks
2 large gold potatoes, cut into 6 pieces
4 tablespoons butter or lard, melted

Optional: 

rice

vodka

2 cups water

Instructions: 

Salt rat inside and out and leave in ice box for two days. Preheat fire to medium heat (if you have an oven, 425 degree F will do nicely). Salt the rat again and stuff with rosemary and lemongrass, or similar herbs if you can't get those two.

Tie the legs together with kitchen string and tuck the arms together, underneath. Place rat and chopped vegetables in a roasting pan. Scatter onions, carrots, and potatoes around rat. Brush the outside of the rat with lard or butter (if you can get butter).

Roast the rat for 1.5 hours, or until the juices run clear when you cut between the thigh and leg. Remove the rat to a platter, cover with foil, and continue cooking veggies for 15 minutes. When the veggies are cooked, carve the rat and place slices on a platter, surrounded by the veggies. Drizzle some pan juices over the meat and veggies.

This makes a very good leftover stew, if your rat is large enough to last for more than one meal, and can be stretched by serving the whole thing with cassava or cornmeal. It can also be made into a soup to stretch for more meals. If vodka is available, you can also deglaze the roasting pan and make a sauce for further meals when food is scarce. Store the soup or sauce in a clean, airtight container, in a cold place if possible.

That's all for today! Enjoy your roasted rat, and whether you're on an Engineer or Poca floor, or down below in the lower levels...try not to starve to death. 

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Thanks for dropping by the nest once again. Leave your comments, rebuttals, and vehement agreements below. Don't miss any of the phuquerie--get on the mailing list. Find Michelle on Twitter, Facebook, and on Tumblr, and find her work on Amazon. Check back on the blog to see when one of the irregular posts has careened onto your feed. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out! 

Starry Nights: A Science Fiction Romance Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop!

Hello hello! 

Today I have a bit of a treat--a snippet from After the Garden, my next work, written specially for the hop!

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Ember squinted up at the stars, her eyes widening to take in the light. The sky hadn't been so clear in several hundred years. She remembered looking up at them in her last life, how faint they'd been back then. 

Kerrick coughed. "This'll sound strange, but I almost miss them being harder to see," he said quietly. 

Across the fire, Chris and Eva were talking quietly, paying no attention to them. Ember smiled, feeling old for a moment. 

"Me too. We went up there once, you know. Hundreds of years ago now. Shame we never got past the moon, really."

"What do you think happened to the people up there?"

"In the colony? Oh, they died."

He nodded. "I thought so." 

The silence felt heavier for a moment. Ember edged closer to him and poked at the dying embers. A burst of flame from her fingertips reignited them for a moment. Kerrick smiled a little to himself. 

"Well, we're still alive. Not just us. All of us. Humanity," she said, straightening. 

"So? We're alive, but we're barely back on our feet. We've lost hundreds of years."

"It's still not too late," she maintained. "We could go back."

"To the moon?"

"Farther. We could get past it."

Glittering overhead, the stars made no reply. She could see the doubt on his face, but she smiled. 

"Can you see it?" Kerrick avoided her eyes. She knew what that meant, but a stupid, fluttering thing inside her couldn't help fighting it. After all, they were still alive.

"No, not that far into the future. It only works on people I know. But..." she poked the fire again, this time with a branch. "I can't see, but I can hope."

***

Guess what? The Underlighters is part of the giveaway package for the Starry Night contest! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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You can catch more by checking out the following links.

Amazon 

Tumblr

Twitter

*****

Thanks for dropping by the nest once again. Don't miss any of the phuquerie. Find Michelle on Twitter, Facebook, and on Tumblr, and find her work on Amazon. Check back on the blog to see when one of the irregular posts has careened onto your feed. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out! 

Blog Hop from Dianne Harman

Hello hello!

This one is straightforward. Just a blog hop, and four questions about my work and how I do it. So, let's not waste time--here you go.

1. What am I working on?

After the Garden is a book I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, and it's currently in rewrites. I have Monsters and Fools, The Meaning Wars, and Synchronicity in my queue to write and (in the case of the last) rewrite. I also have a few other things planned, but those should be out in the next year or two. Plus a few short stories here and there.  I'm reluctant to give you dates because deadlines tend to go whooshing by all too quickly, but ATG should be out this spring or summer.

2. How does my work differ from others in my genre?

I like to focus on issues of equality in my work, but I try not to do it in a preachy way. The best way, to my mind, is to incorporate the characters and treat them as normally as possible. I also like that sometimes focusing on characters with various levels of ability/diverse backgrounds means they have a more challenging platform to work from. It's also just more interesting than the same Cod Piecington, Noble Space Prince or Humble Browsley, Noble Farm Boy type adventurers that we've been fed for the last hundred years.

I also like to genre-bend. I work mostly in subgenres because I have a deep love for post-apocalyptic and dystopian settings, and that's been 'a thing' since I was in seventh grade. I also like steampunk and urban fantasy, but the last few years have seen a love for urban fantasy horror and spooky elements grow in me. Those have entered my work, and I think it rounds my feel out nicely. There's nothing as fun as scaring the pants off your readers and a little madness. Encountering Lovecraft and the Warhammer 40K universe planted the seed, and with a history of my own nightmares to draw on, I am proud to say that I have given multiple readers cold chills and nightmares with my own work. Neil Gaiman and Chuck Wendig, two of my other best-loved inspirations, also play on scary themes in their work, so really, the genre-bending and scary elements were inevitable. 

3. Why do I write what I do? 

Because it's what I want to read. Because characters walk across the stage inside my skull and start narrating. Because cinemagraphic clips play on the screen in there at random. Because writing is a compulsion. Because writing and reading are a sickness that I cannot and will not get over, and because I live for words. 

4. How does my writing process work?

I'm a pantser at heart. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of very shitty plots and messy, messy endings. In my last book, The Underlighters (previously also published in The Loved, The Lost, The Dreaming, a thematic anthology) I learned how to plot and found an outlining strategy that works for me. So, here's how it goes--I start off with some flashes, usually scenes. I stick them in a document and type them out as I see them. Then I slowly get other flashes, and then I start writing down notes for other scenes. When I have some bullet points, I start working on flow charts or mind maps. The maps let me plot out possible plot ideas and connect the plot events in chonological and logical order. It also lets me follow multiple personal plots at the same time, which is useful. I often use a timeline to refine the results of the map when I have them nailed down. I write down flashes of scenes as they come and then I slowly work through them, expanding on the bullet points and notes. If working on a series, I often reread my own book.

When I hit the revisions stage, I get to work on ensuring I have continuity and that I don't have any exposition dumps or ugly stuff. Then it goes off to my beta readers and critique buddies, and then, when it's all corrected, off to the formatter. After that come the publishing stages, of course. Large chunks of time may pass between the first few stages because I haven't nailed down my self-discipline yet, and my editing work sometimes interferes. 

The lovely Dianne Harman tagged me. She's a friend, an editing client, and a very fun writer. You can get hold of her in the following places:

Amazon: http://ow.ly/s6pN5 

Smashwords: http://ow.ly/u4Fb2

 Web Site http://www.DianneHarman.com

Blog: http://dianneharman.com/blog/

 Twitter: @DianneDHarman

And now...I tag Zig Zag Claybourne, Nic Wilson, and Corinne Kilgore! Get writing, guys!

*****

Thanks for dropping by the nest once again. Don't miss any of the phuquerie. Find Michelle on Twitter, Facebook, and on Tumblr, and find her work on Amazon. Check back on the blog to see when one of the irregular posts has careened onto your feed. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out!