Ceallaigh's Blog
Friday evening's Puffin Awards Benefit went really well. Bill Conall, Mona Anderson and I read from our various work, Kate Oland and Bill Conall performed two of Kate's songs, and Gary Walsh was our emcee. The picture is from our improv story circle, which was hella fun (I love improv stuff). I wish the Puffin Awards every good thing and hope it continues to encourage young writers for a long time to come.
The meringue in this recipe is indistinguishable from non-vegan meringue and comes from an unexpected source! Sean has been experimenting with it in meringue cookies and other treats all week, and he has finally brought his prodigious skills to bear on an honest-to-goodness lemon meringue pie cobbled together from various recipes. Here's the aggregate:
Pie Crust
- 1 1⁄2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1⁄2 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons organic sugar
- 1⁄2 cup oil
- 2 tablespoons orange juice or non-dairy milk
Preheat oven to 425F.
In a large bowl, place all of the dry ingredients. Add the orange juice or non-dairy milk and oil. Mix with a fork. Pat into a 9-inch pie pan with fingertips. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
Source: Food.com: World's Easiest Pie Crust - Vegan
Meringue
I've been struggling with this blog entry for over a week now, but in the wake of Mary Robinette Kowal's excellent post, I decided it was finally time to collect my own thoughts and write about the controversy around this year's Hugo awards. I'm not terribly certain how all of those thoughts will come together here, so I hope you'll be patient with me as I muddle through.
As you know, I've been a contributing writer to Rhonda Parrish's ongoing anthology series based on the letters of the alphabet. To date, my short story "N is for Nanomachine" has appeared in A is for Apocalypse, and my novelette "C is for Change" is forthcoming in B is for Broken.
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be contributing to the next volume as well, entitled C is for Chimera! You can read Rhonda's announcement about the anthology here.
I continue to enjoy this work quite a bit, and I'm delighted Rhonda still welcomes my participation in it (even after the last time, with all the extra words). *grin*
Now that Grandmother Mælkevejen's Belly is listed for sale on Audible, Amazon and iTunes, ACX has sent me a number of codes for free downloads of the title. I'm offering fifteen of them to people with Audible.com accounts in exchange for honest reviews of the title on the Audible and/or Amazon web sites.
If you have an Audible account and would like to review the audiobook, please let me know by e-mailing me via the contact form on my web site to request a code.
You can find the title on Audible here.
On the evening of April 17th at the St. Michael's Parish Hall in Baddeck, I'll be participating in a benefit for The Puffin Awards for Literary Excellence, an annual short story contest for high school students in Victoria County. I'm excited about the award and pleased I have the opportunity to help raise money for it.
Please come, if you can! I'll be reading from my forthcoming story "C is for Change", which will appear in Rhonda Parrish's B is for Broken anthology. I'll also be participating in a panel discussion about writing and an interactive story circle.
I just made this up, and it's gorgeous.
Ingredients
2 Bananas (frozen, if possible)
1 C. Silk Coconut Milk
1 oz. Kraken Rum
1 oz. Trader Vic's Macadamia Nut Liqueur
Ice (if your bananas aren't frozen)
Directions
Blend until smooth.
It's been four weeks since I picked up the Zombies, Run! app and began 5K training. I've ordered my first pair of running shoes, and I've made good progress on all of my original goals, so I thought it was time to blog about my outer and inner processes so far.
Let me start with that list of original goals:
I need to write this entry for my wiki anyway, so I thought I'd make it a blog post as well in the hope it might help other people getting started with Audible ACX narration. That said, this post is technical in nature and only covers that portion of the process. I'll write another post once my sound studio is finished that discusses sound attenuation for audio recording. Suffice to say for now that you need a silent, sound-dampened environment to work in, since it's virtually impossible to scrub sound artifacts from a recording without sacrificing quality.
"Grandmother Mælkevejen's Belly: A Novelette of the Lodhuven" is presently available for Kindle pre-order, and I've just uploaded the audio version to Audible ACX for QA. Want to hear a free sample? Awesome! Here ya go: