Words are what we wretched writers are. William Gass.
I’m planning to keep this website pared to its essentials: publications as they come out, the occasional link, and a serialized novel or two. I’m currently looking into some self-publishing options for a couple novels, and this will be the place to come for that, too.
Bill Kte’pi, writer of wrongs
Mile High Club editor Rachel Kramer Bussel interviewed me for the book’s blog.
This is a story I wrote some years ago while in the process of moving and reading unrelated travel books.
Mr Marquand’s Travelers Guide to Tango (2nd edition)
This is a story with a life far beyond anything I’ve given it, thanks to Michelle Dockrey, for whom I wrote it in 1997, and who proceeded to turn it into the song “The Girl That’s Never Been,” available on Escape Key’s album Shadowbeast. Needless to say, I find that immensely cool. I have a remix I’ve written of the story, influenced in turn by that song, and I’ll post it at some point if I decide I’m still reasonably happy with it.
But for the moment, here’s the original, now over 11 years old. This is probably the oldest thing I’ll let anyone read. To be fair, there are things about it I’d be too old to think of now, which is appropriate.
One of the effects of working from home and living alone is the time you have for cooking and the control you have over your kitchen. I’ve fallen into certain patterns, certain regular activities that keep my kitchen going:
Brown butter. Simmer ten sticks of cheap butter — about six bucks — in a pan until the water has cooked off and the dairy solids have browned. Use a mesh strainer to divide the results into shelf-stable clarified butter, which you can use in place of other cooking fats, and brown butter solids. Brown butter solids are a great addition to both sweet and savory sauces, in addition to other uses. (They go well with duck and root vegetables, so they’re a good winter thing.) “Ten sticks” isn’t the most convenient unit — if you buy three pounds of butter you’ll have two sticks left — but it creates just the right amount of clarified butter to fill a plastic Fluff container.
Duck confit.
In sour cherry season, pit sour cherries, freeze a bunch of them, candy a bunch of them.
In citrus season, make marmalade, make candied lemons and other citrus, make citrus-infused sugar (sometimes with cinnamon, vanilla, or Szechuan peppercorn), freeze sour oranges, and make infusions.
Fill ice cube trays with lemon and sour orange juices; store the cubes in freezer bags.
Cure ham in January, hang it at the start of spring, until the end of the year.
When in season, freeze fresh and roasted tomato purees, lima beans, fava beans, fresh corn, black-eyed peas, ramps, and okra. I always freeze too little tomato puree, though freezer space is a factor.
Make pectin-free strawberry preserves when in season. Nothing but strawberries, sugar, lemon juice, and time.
Pickle ramps when in season.
Make stock with roasted bones, with at least two days of simmering. Reduce stock to very very strong demiglace and it’ll keep forever.
Make greens, with smoked pork stock and at least a full day of simmering.
Make pimento cheese, which has actually become pimento beer cheese: shred sharp Cheddar in Cuisinart, then replace grating disc with blade. Process shredded Cheddar with just the right amount of beer, before adding pimientos (jarred or home-grown and roasted), ramps (pickled or fresh), Louisiana hot sauce, a bit of mustard (prepared or powder), and mayonnaise (preferably homemade, yes).
Strain yogurt. Start with a quart of unsweetened unflavored yogurt with active cultures, and dump it into a strainer lined with cheesecloth (or a clean kitchen towel), over a big bowl. Leave overnight. You can call this yogurt or labneh, doesn’t matter. I like it for breakfast with fruit or any of the aforementioned jams or marmalades.
I made the mistake today of buying a supermarket hamburger.
Now, I know cooking. I know a lot about cooking. I wouldn’t be surprised if more of my friends and acquaintances think of me as a cook than as a writer. Working at home, coming of age in New Orleans, growing up with a garden instead of individually wrapped packets of carrot confetti, all these things contribute to being good at cooking.
So I normally scorn the tendency of meat departments around here to offer a dozen different kinds of marinade instead of, you know, an actual variety in cuts of meat. Today I went to the supermarket looking for chicken livers, because I loved the fried livers with pepper jelly that I made earlier in the week. Didn’t see them. Asked at the counter. They were out. Asked about skirt steak. They don’t carry it anymore. Well, at this point I had taken up enough of their time that I felt I had to get something — which is silly, but nevermind — so I bought two of the bacon-cheddar pre-made hamburgers at $4.99 a pound.
I make a lot of burgers. I cook mostly on cast-iron, and that’s perfect for burgers, which as many burger bloggers and burger bookwriters have noted in the last couple years, are best griddled, not grilled. Cooking on a hot flat surface gives you a good sear and a crust, maximizing the Maillard reactions and getting the most flavor out of the beef.
So I got home, preheated one of the little cast-iron pans, put one of the patties on it …
… and the kitchen was silent.
No sputtering fat and juice. No sizzle. No sound at all. I actually thought I might have turned on the wrong burner. But no, it was cooking. When I flipped it, the “sear” had a weird look to it, the way meatballs do after you’ve rolled them in flour and browned them. This seemed to fit with the fact that when I picked up the thin uncooked patty, it didn’t sag or risk breaking at all — it was as inflexible as a hockey puck.
So I looked at the ingredients, and the problem was evident right away. This bacon-cheddar burger had more than half a dozen ingredients, of which bacon was the last. Bacon being last is fine if beef and cheese are the only two things in front of it, but there’s more potato starch in this alleged burger than bacon. Potato starch!
What resulted had snap like a Slim Jim, a hot dog saltiness, and a firm texture like meat loaf. Whether or not you think that sounds appealing, it’s nothing like a hamburger.
The other patty will probably be chopped into bits and tossed into an omelette. It’s not terrible, it’s just … nothing like a hamburger.
Two things well worth noting:
My favorite webcomic, Garfield Minus Garfield, is coming out in paperback.
The blueberry Aviation: Fill a jar with wild blueberries and Luxardo maraschino liqueur. Let sit for at least a few days. Shake, with ice, 2 oz gin, 1 oz key lime juice, 1 oz blueberry maraschino. Repeat as desired.
Parts of this have appeared many places over the years, in a variety of forms. Its antecedents were message board posts, emails, blog entries, and conversations stretching back to the 90s. When people started requesting a repost or copy of the original thing, I started jotting new notes on the same old crumpled napkin. When my professional writing activity extended beyond fiction, I rehashed or amplified some of this stuff in various articles on sex and/or relationships. The current version is an amalgamation of all those things.These are just things I know. There are other things I don’t know. Some of it I learned from mistakes I made, some from mistakes I saw, some from mistakes made against me. If you and I don’t want the same thing, it shouldn’t be a shock if my map leads you somewhere you didn’t mean to be.
Substitute pronouns as appropriate.
Steve Gerber was a profound influence on the way I approach ideas, not to mention one of my favorite writers since I was 8. After Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, he was one of the first comics creators I knew by name.
… but we all find it’s necessary to point these things out sometimes, and what better time than now? I’ve been told that you can substitute “freelancer” or “telecommuter” or other permutations of “people who work at home” for the appearance of “writer” in most of the following.
1: Writers write. If I put work aside every time there was something else to do, nothing would ever get done — not spec, not assignments. This is why I don’t own any video game consoles, The Sims, or that digital cable package that would give me all the Phoenix Suns games (I do watch most of the Red Sox games on NESN, though).
2: If I have time to email you but not to talk on the phone, that’s not some crazy weird mysterious thing — it follows pretty handily: I can jot an email quickly, or respond to a longer one in the inevitable breaks of writing, but a phone call is a monolithic block of time in which I’m doing nothing else, and I can’t tab back and forth from it.
3: Just because I had time to go to a movie in the afternoon one week does not mean I am free all the time forever at the drop of a hat; it means my schedule is not as static as yours. Some days I’m busier than others! It’s such a simple thing that I have no idea how to explain it. It’s like saying “hi, I have feet.” Where do you go from there? I DO have feet. If you don’t understand that, I don’t think it’s my fault.
4: Calling me a workaholic is not going to make me see the light, throw my hands up, and say “well then, I guess I won’t do any more work today.” I’m not a workaholic. I’m someone who sometimes has days when I work until ten or eleven at night, as a way to pay for the days when I go see a movie in the afternoon, read a couple hundred pages of a book, and then work for a few hours on fiction I might or might not someday be paid for.
5: That time when I’m writing fiction, that’s work too. It’s the most flexible time on my schedule, and that makes it the most important, because it can be put off indefinitely, but if it is, everything goes to shit. My work-for-hire jobs exist only and wholly in order to build a lifestyle in which I can write for spec — or even, in the case of my novel The Sun Eater, write for a market I don’t know will ever exist.
6: The fact that I have time to check my email or the internet in general does not mean that I am lying about being busy. If I reply to your email, you have not tricked me into revealing that I’m not as busy as I say I am.
7: The fact that the television is on or I am listening to music does not mean that I am lying about being busy.
8: I don’t get sick days. I don’t get vacation days. I don’t get days where I can kind of phone it in and slack off or stretch three hours of work into eight, and still get the same paycheck. I get paid for effort, not time or the courtesy of showing up. I’m not saying it’s awesome, I’m not saying it’s impressive, I’m not saying I am some demigod of labor and grit, I’m just saying it is what it is.
9: Some careers are lifestyle choices — writing, or freelancing in general, is hardly the only one. Academics have little say in where they live, for instance, and can rarely (and even then, at great inconvenience) take time off other than the regularly scheduled academic breaks. Many people in medical and legal fields are on call, officially or in practice, at off-hours. Transportation workers have strange hours. My brother, among his many other duties, does commercial and home snow-removal in the winter — which can mean working all night with very little notice.
This is just how it is.
Going through movies and adjusting my Netflix queue, I realized — in that way that you internally articulate something you already knew and was obvious, but hadn’t been highlighted — that movies are as much an influence on my writing as music and other stories are, but I take something different from them. Not the plot, usually, though I’ve written a novel that owes a lot to Cool Hand Luke and Rio Bravo. What I take from movies is a tone … almost a color, or a sense of place … a place from which I can imagine writing the story.
They’re not always movies I love, though they often are. And they’re very often movies that don’t have anything to do with what I’m writing. The movies that play the most into what I write?
Carnal Knowledge (if more people watched this movie, Closer wouldn’t be so overrated)
They All Laughed (generally heralded as a disaster, but I love it for some reason)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Wicker Park
Cool Hand Luke
Badlands
Two-Lane Blacktop
Duel
My first fiction publication, a million years ago.
Y’all don’t know how hard it is to google reviews when you can’t spell my name. I have written a pome to help you.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the /e/
and the /p/
Falls the apostrophe
For Thine is the kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way my name ends
this is the way my name ends
this is the way my name ends
3.14159