{"id":10124,"date":"2011-12-04T06:30:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-03T17:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=10124"},"modified":"2011-12-03T21:51:08","modified_gmt":"2011-12-03T08:51:08","slug":"what-ive-been-doing-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/12\/04\/what-ive-been-doing-6\/","title":{"rendered":"What I’ve Been Doing …"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Fun With Thornspell Short Story: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Firstly, I’ve finally—finally<\/em>, dear readers—finished the Rue<\/strong> short story I promised to write as part of the “Fun With Thornspell<\/span>” series that ran in August through to early September (I’ll post all the links below for those who are interested.) But the upshot was that I invited readers to comment suggesting their favourite Thornspell<\/em> character, with the undertaking that I would write a short story around the character named in the winning comment. In the interests of transparency the contest was judged by Beth Miller, Peter Fitzpatrick and Sharon Stogner—and the character selected was Rue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I blithely thought that I could deliver the short story in 4-6 weeks and got off to a good start. But then life and ‘book business’ intervened so it is closer to 10 weeks later that I am delivering the story—but deliver it I shall, sometime later this coming week. The title is Nameless<\/strong><\/em>, it’s completely free fiction and I hope you’ll enjoy—because when I finally sat down and spent the focused time, I very much enjoyed writing it, not least because it was fun to be back in the Thornspell<\/em><\/strong> world again.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Another thing I’ve been working on putting together is an Interview with Brandon Sanderson<\/a><\/strong>—which is pretty much complete now and which I think<\/span> I’ll be running tomorrow. If not it will be Thursday, but the way things are shaping I’m pretty sure it will be tomorrow—and I have to say that I think Brandon has given some really interesting and in-depth answers to the questions, so I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I have.<\/p>\n

Oh yes—Hachette have given me two copies of The Alloy of Law<\/strong><\/em> to give away, so that will also be happening in conjunction with the interview.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

SF-Signal<\/a> Guest Post<\/strong>—you may recall that a few weeks ago I did a guest post on SF-Signal titled , “Looking at the Stars: Why Epic Fantasy Keeps ‘Speaking’ To Us<\/a>.” This last week I have completed another guest post which should be coming up soon.\u00a0 Titled , “Having Fun With Epic Fantasy: Making the Grand Tour<\/em>” it is intended as the first of a mini series looking at sone of the classic elements of epic fantasy—totally from the point of view of someone who loves the subgenre, but nonetheless in a light hearted way.\u00a0 Anyway, watch this space—or SF-Signal (always worth checking out)—and I’ll let you know when it runs.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Something else I’ve done this week is discover Dutch process cocoa<\/strong>. Well, not exactly discover, because I’ve had it recommended to me many times, so I suppose I should say, discovered the excellence<\/em> of Dutch process cocoa! You may recall that last year on October 2nd<\/a> I revealed my “foodie” leaning (or it may have been before that on August 22nd when I talked about a dinner with my friend, CP Lin, and wine and food matches, here<\/a>) and discussed the virtues of simple food (even more of a virtue when you’re going down to the wire on writing projects like books!) In the October 2nd post I included the recipe for a traditional, very simple chocolate sauce recipe, which has always been very good—but made with the Dutch process cocoa: divine!<\/p>\n

What’s so good about it? It’s dark (and unsweetened) but not bitter—apparently because its been treated with alkali (which also means that you can’t use it in recipes that rely on baking soda as they likely won’t work.)<\/p>\n

What else was interesting about it? Well, I kind of blinked at the ‘disclaimer’ (for want of a better word) on the container: “No forced labour of childen or adults in the production of this product.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“I should per-lurry well hope not!” I thought—and then: sobering that we live in a world where that sort of clarification needs to be printed on a label. In fact, more than sobering: shameful.<\/p>\n

And sure makes you hope that you can rely<\/em> on the disclaimer. As well as wondering about other products that don’t carry such disclaimers—which adds a whole new dimension to the food labelling debate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fun With Thornspell Short Story: Firstly, I’ve finally—finally, dear readers—finished the Rue short story I promised to write as part of the “Fun With Thornspell” series that ran in August through to early September (I’ll post all the links below for those who are interested.) But the upshot was that I invited readers to comment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-what-im-doing","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10124"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10155,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10124\/revisions\/10155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}