Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

05/09/2009 - Saturday, no work
* Read WritersDigest newsletter.
* Submitted "Diplomatic Relations" to M-Brane SF Queer Anthology.
* Fought a lot with OpenOffice 3.x's crashiness and problems saving in RTF format. By "fought a lot," I mean that Phil was on another floor of the house and I traumatized him.

05/08/2009 - Friday, full work, some downtime
* Dealt with the hazards of multiple versions of a working draft: merged the updated first three chapters from my home version with the more-recently-edited-elsewhere thumb drive version, and changed the paragraph I'd saved in my email. Then synced that version on home computer and thumb drive.
* Decided to be patient a little longer and not query about the status of "Salvaging Scottwell" (they've been holding the RTF version for 3 months, but molasses moves a lot faster than the publishing industry).
* Joined http://www.mnartists.org and submitted "Dining on a Dead Girl's Dime" to the MNArtists' miniStories Flash Fiction Contest (thanks for the idea, inktea!).
* Began formatting "Diplomatic Relations" for a reprint submission. Stumbled up against AbiWord problems with headers.
* Read Writing-World, FundsforWriters, and FFWMarkets newsletters.
* Writing-World feature article, "Music to Write By" (http://www.writing-world.com/newsletter/2009/WW09-09.shtml). I use music to set the writing mood, but the idea of "anchoring" is a new and interesting one. Now I just need to figure out what my starting song should be.
* Posted writing log.
* penthius freewriting about Death's need for a gardener.
* Worked on making editing changes to Vicesteed ch. 17

I baked a large quantity of vegan cookies for gunn's birthday party. As Phil kept commenting while I made them, I may have gone a bit insane. In case of future need for vegan cookies, I'm making my own notes here. Oh, and the best part about vegan cookies? Being able to eat the dough without fear.

Vegan Chocolate Spice Cookies - I thought these were the best of the lot. I doubled the amount of cocoa powder called for. Might make these again just using regular butter. (Note that making small chilled balls of the dough, perhaps with oatmeal added, might work well as a delicious no-bake cookie.)

Spiced Vegan Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies - I might not have tasted these. Can't recall. Think they were pretty good. I swapped in 1/4 c. of pomegranate molasses + 1/4 c. of soy milk for the called-for 1/2 c. of soy milk.

Vegan Peanut Butter, Oatmeal, and Banana Cookies - I didn't like the sugar-free part, so I added 1/4 c. of brown sugar. These were remarkably dense wedges. They didn't change shape at all during baking.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Recipe - I omitted the optional walnuts. These were tasty and chewy and crisp at the edges. Might make again as a regular cookie. However, they spread out insanely much during baking and became really thin. Still tasty, though.