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It’s a blogging world, and Susan regularly blogs over at Riding with the top down, a group blog where Susan is one of nine contributors. She posts usually twice a month. Check back here regularly to catch up on her posts. We will generally post them here within a few days of Susan posting to the blog. Additionally we will post Susan’s blogs from when she guests at other sites. Click on the screenshot at right to get whisked off to Riding with the top down, with comments and all, or just scroll down. Enjoy!
Winners... Hmm, I swear I did this already, but it doesn't show up for me. Mary-Francis Makichen! Email me at susan@susankaylaw.com and we'll make arrangements for a little Christmas present to wend its way to you . . . Susie (BTW, our (real) Christmas tree fell over almost as soon as we put it up! My husband wanted to take it down immediately - we're not HAVING tree this year!!! (though what he actually said was more profane.) Took my sons and I several hours and some McGuyver-y engineering with wedges of cardboard and two 50 pounds dumbbells to get it stay up thus far . . . Susie
The Great Christmas Tree War I grew up in a Christmas House. You know the kind – my mother took down every single decorative item in the public areas of the house, including the bathrooms, and replaced them with something red, green, or sparkly. There were lights and animated reindeer outside, wreaths in the windows, cross-stitched cloths over every table. There were candles surrounded by plastic wreaths on the coffee table, snowglobes and crocheted angels on the end tables, and a light-up Christmas scene with rolls of cotton batting for fake snow that took up the entire pool table. And a tree, of course, as tall as the room could handle, with a motley collection of ornaments that had been gifted over the years, or that our teachers forced my brother and me – who are both hopelessly inartistic – to fashioned out of green-painted salt dough or popsicle sticks and glitter. It was, always, a real tree, so the moment I stepped in the door after school I smelled pine and remembered Christmas was coming. My husband, however . . . well, okay, I can give him some slack here. He grew up without Christmas, and as such doesn’t have proper appreciation for the importance of some things. He does really adore Christmas, mostly because he likes food and presents an almost embarrassing amount. And unlike me and the rest of my generation, he could be shamed into eating lutefisk with my grandfather on Christmas Eve, which earned him major Christmas points. But he doesn’t get the real tree thing. Messy, he says. Expensive, and simply too much work. Why not make it simple? I’m not interested in fake, I say. About anything, really. Real flowers, real chocolate, real butter, real diamonds . . . why would you ever settle for anything else? It came to a head when our older boys were, oh, maybe 5 and 8. He wasn’t putting one up, he said, unless it was fake. I’d rather have no tree at all than one that wasn’t real, I insisted. Days went by. Weeks. He was sure I’d cave, that I couldn’t survive a Christmas without a tree. I, otoh – well, if one starts simply giving into husbands, that way madness lies. So we had no tree that year. Not as terrible as it sounds, because we opened our presents at my parents’, where there was a lovely – and real – Christmas tree. We’ve had a tree every year since. A real one, of course. Though now the yearly conversation goes like this. DH: I’m getting a little one this year. A really little one. Me: Fine. Husband: I mean it. A SHORT tree. Me: Got it. No problem. But then he takes one of our children along, and, out in that empty baseball field turned Optimists’ Tree Lot, they all look so small and lonely in all that space, and he invariably hauls home one that’s sticking out from our van roof in both the front AND the back by a good three feet. Except this year. THIS year, he insists, we’re getting a small tree. Seems we’re giving away presents this month . . . my favorite thing! Win a couple of my other favorite things (food, and books!) by telling me your Christmas “musts,” and what you’re willing to give up in the name of sanity. (I’ve given up baking Christmas cookies, though I enjoy it very much. But no one I know really wants to EAT more than a few, which leaves far too many in my kitchen, tempting me all day). Susie
Terminal, the sequel You know the Tom Hanks movie? I've been trapped in my own version. My son and I were on a trip. We left our hotel at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning to head home. We touched down in Minneapolis at 8:30 MONDAY night, 46 hours late. And not one second of those delays was due to weather. Suffice it to say a certain airline is at the top of my @#$% list at the moment. So I'm very sorry I missed my post on Monday. You all have no idea how sorry. Susie
Food. food, food... Hmm . . . recipes. First off, I love to cook. Love it. But it's VERY tricky during the week, to fit it around football practice and Tae Kwon Do and swimming lessons and homework and . . . well, you get the picture. I'm sure the details of your list is different, but it's every bit as long. So the following recipe is perfect for me. First off, it's fast, just over half an hour, most of the time unattended. It's pretty good for you, it's relatively cheap, it dirties just one pot, and it's made with stuff I almost always have around in the house, at least in the fall. Plus it's not quite the same old-same old. While I'm not a big fan of sweet potatoes, the rest of the crew is, and I don't mind them at all in this: WEST AFRICAN SWEET POTATO AND PEANUT SOUP. You'll need: 2 tbsp. butter (I use less without any ill effects) 1: melt the butter in a pot over med-high heat. Cook the onion, brown sugar, and 1 tsp salt until onion is softened, 5-7 minutes. Add garlic, coriander, and cayenne and cook 30 seconds. 2) Add the broth, water, sweet potatoes, and peanut butter. Bring to a boil over high heat, turn heat to low and cook, partially covered, until the sweet potatoes are very soft, 25-30 minutes. Puree the whole darn thing. You can do it in batches in a blender, but for me this is the perfect time to pull out that immersion blender that you bought when you were doing Body for Life and were going to live on protein shakes but haven't used in years. Finally, the perfect use for it! So whir away. Season with S & P. Here's where you should stir in the cilantro, but if you have heathen children like mine who do not properly appreciate the wonders of cilantro, serve as is and pile the green stuff on your bowl. This is from Cook's Illustrated THE BEST INTERNATIONAL RECIPE cookbook, btw. And if you don't know the whole Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen/Cooks Country group, you should. I have by far the most "wow, Mom, this is the best thing you've made in ages" hits in cooking from those books/magazines/website than any other. Enjoy! Susie
Dealbreakers So last week I'm reading a book. It's by a writer I enjoy very much. Well-written, interesting story, that I would say falls in the thriller/mystery genre. I'm thoroughly happy with it. Until, near the end, a character that is certainly one of the two largest characters in the book, if not THE central character, that we've spent much of the book hoping is going to get through the danger, bites it. I have to say, I was not a happy reader. Even more so since the author is so good, so I was enjoying the book so much and so invested in that character. I know I'm promised nothing; the mystery WAS solved, the bad murderer caught, so it does fulfill the requirements of its genre. And yet . . . I'll be thinking twice before I spring for the next book by this author. And I'll certainly be peeking at the end first. So what are absolute dealbreakers for you? Any books you just loved except for ONE unforgivable thing? Susie
Don't hate me because it was fast... I didn't grow up thinking I would be a writer. Too big a dream, really; where I come from, you might as well say you were going to go to Hollywood and be a movie star. Same reaction. But I was always a reader, non-stop. I wrote a little, now and then - a mystery story when I was in third grade or so, that my grandmother kept; when I was a junior, my first attempt at a romance (Her name was Fawn. Can you imagine? And she was soooo beautiful.) I didn't get too far. Thank goodness. And I didn't write again, nothing that wasn't an assignment, for at least ten years. But when I was 29, my then-youngest son was going to preschool, and my husband was making noises about me getting a real job, and I realized I might never have that much free time again. I didn't want to be at the end of my life and wonder if I could have done it. So I started a book. I didn't tell ANYONE. I wrote on this old Apple (the kind with the screen in the tower) that Matt had brought home from work, and he discovered what I was doing when he stumbled across a file named "Tony" when I was about halfway done. I still didn't tell anybody I knew. Didn't want to answer all those "sell a book yet?" questions. But I found the local chapter of Romance Writer's of America when I was about halfway done. We started a critique group (Hi, Helen! Connie Brockway was in it too. Can you believe how lucky I was?) and I entered the Golden Heart because I knew it would make me finish it - I'm far too Minnesotan to PAY to enter a contest and then not do it. Our chapter had a conference that spring. On Friday, an editor from Berkley ripped apart my idea, and I was devastated. And then I got a phone call that I made the GH finals on Saturday! An agent who was there told me to send it; I thought she told everybody that, which was pretty much true. That's when I told my mother. I overnighted it to the agent on Tuesday. On Thursday, she called me and said she wanted to represent me, and if it was okay with me she was delivering the ms. to Carolyn Marino from Harper at Grand Central station that evening, because she knew she was looking. On Monday, she called me and wanted to know if I was sitting down. Yeah, I know. Little did I know at the time that they were the only fast editor and agent in New York. And I've been turned down since then, believe me. But that book was JOURNEY HOME. Like Michele, I wish I could tweak the writing here and there. But I still really do love the story, and I'm not sure it's been quite as much fun to write since then. Too many critics whispering in my brain, now that I've learned a few things about writing. Being clueless and starry-eyed has some advantages. Susie
The first time is the . . . . time . . . It's September, and we'll be telling you the answer to the above question. Off and on this month, we'll all be telling our "first sale/first book" tales. You knew that's what I was talking about, right? Susie
ZZZZzzzzz... So I'm tired. Really tired. Because I keep staying up to watch the Olympics. All the really good stuff happens after my bedtime. (As my mother would tell you, I used to be good at sleeping it. Gold-medal class, you might say. But somewhere, along with the last twenty-some years of getting up every morning to get the kiddos off, I've lost the gift.) I keep swearing to turn it off. By 10:30, but then there's just a BIT more that I want to see. And then 11, and so on, and I'm feeling the drag. But I love it. Not entirely sure why . . . it's the ultimate reality tv, I suppose, the one that the producers really can't manipulate. People have the competition of their lives, do way better than anybody predicts. Or they drop batons, or get disqualified. And there's no way of telling which it's going to be. Do you have a favorite? Mine is, and forever has been, since I was a kid and Olga Korbut flipped over the top of an uneven bar in a way nobody had ever done before, gymnastics. I just can't believe anybody can do that stuff. Tonight, however, I'm going to bed. I swear. Have you all been watching? Susie
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