Michelle McGinnis

I’ve just discovered a wonderful thing, a lifesaving, marvelous, adorable thing: Leechblock.

This gem of a Firefox plugin allows me to block myself from viewing certain sites at certain times of the day. (Leeching away my valuable writing time.)

It’s simple: when I sit down to write, I enable Leechblock by selecting “Lockdown” for a certain amount of time. I can still get to Wikipedia to look up that all-important street name I need for a scene, but I can’t get to Gmail or News of the Weird or IMDB YouTube or any of the blogs I follow.

Voila! The best thing about this plugin is that it’s smart. It has options to disable its own options while a block is active (! get your head around that!) so that my very tech-savvy inner procrastinator doesn’t do a system runaround and turn the internet back on when I’m jonesing for a fix.

Check out the plugin author’s site to get a full list of the many terrific options.

Are you getting sick of pictures of leeks? Then you can imagine how I felt when I awoke this morning to yet another cup of hot leek tea. (The “soup” concept? Pshaw. It might psychologically help those who just loooove spooning up soup, but I’m a tea drinker. Put that broth in a mug and I’m happy.)

Lessons learned from yesterday, day one of my all-leek diet:

1. Pepper is the spice of leeks. Put some fresh-ground pepper on mashed leeks or even into a mug of hot leek tea and you’ve done yourself a favor.
2. Dried tarragon doesn’t develop its flavor fully enough when added to the leeks; don’t bother with it.
3. Celery seeds ditto. They add crunch, but not worth it.
4. Lemon + olive oil = yum. So to recap: the suggestions Mireille Guiliano makes in her book are the best ways to eat leeks. I haven’t been able to top her. <sheepish grin>
5. I’m a fan of variety, but I’ve also been known to eat nothing but Mexican food for days on end, or to content myself week after week with corn tortillas and slices of cheese every day for lunch. The key to successful repeat-mealdom? You have to like the meal the first time. A lot.

So based on lesson #5, here’s my advice. Before trying this diet, try having leeks as part of a meal. Experiment with the various ways you can make them delicious. Enjoy them. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to look forward to two days of nothing but leeks. I didn’t have that attitude, and though the leeks aren’t tasting horrible or making me ill, I’m not tap dancing on the walls.

Will I ever do this again? Maybe. I’m not going to shout Never! and stomp my feet, but it’s a bit tortuous. Day two is better than day 1, probably because the “oh my GAWD I’m hungry” stage has passed. And on day 2 I got to wake up having lost 4 pounds, which started the day off right.

I’m looking forward to a real meal this evening, though!

Yesterday I posted about leeking off some poundage. Today is day one of my leek-only diet. (Don’t worry, it’s only a two day diet, and tomorrow night I get to eat food again, so it ain’t going to take over this blog.)

This morning I woke to the smell of French Roast wafting through the house, teasing me into getting out of bed and into the shower before Termite Inspection Guy showed up. Alas, I am not allowed to drink coffee today—so I trotted downstairs to boil me some leeks.

I must admit it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything leek-inspired at home, and I don’t think I’ve ever handled a leek myself until this weekend. I learned things! Did you know, for instance, that over half the weight of a leek is in the green leafy part? Yep. This is a two-pounds-of-leeks recipe, but after I chopped off the dark green bits (leaving the recommended ‘suggestion of pale green‘) the little white stubs weighed less than a pound. Was this okay? No idea. I moved ahead and put them in a pot, covered them with water, and boiled.

The concoction then simmered for 25 minutes. The rich scent of brewing coffee disappeared into clouds of oniony-leeky steam that permeated every dusty nook of the house.

Drawn to the smell of my only allowed food, I plucked out the three stubs of leek and chopped them up, then dumped them and the leftover leek juice into separate Tupperware. I prepared my first half-cup of mushy leek, and seasoned with a tiny bit of salt and pepper.

(I have to apologize to Mme. Guiliano, as yesterday I raved about not being able to use any herbs or spices in this soup. Rereading her recipe and the surrounding instructions, she does allow a sparing use of salt and pepper when eating the mushed up leeks. Whew!)

I ate. And you know, it ain’t half bad? Boiled leeks taste like sweet, very mild onions. I also drank a small cup of the hot leek juice; not so good. Hot leek juice has a slightly oily consistency and tastes like—yep, you guessed it. Leeks.

We’ll see what types of herbal mischief I can inflict on my poor foodstuff later this afternoon.

I’ve begun having nightmares about the backs of my thighs. They wobble. They pucker. They pool in bucket seats, overspill the edges of wooden stools and squish through the mesh of my Mirra chair.

They’re not large, not compared to transatlantic jets or sperm whales, but the fat content outweighs the muscle and bone content by about two-to-one, and that’s not good.

Even before the nightmares I’d already been playing around with the idea of dieting, or rather, eating better. Hell, I’m going to Spain in a month for a wedding. When I’m there I’ll see people who last laid eyes on me when I was 25 and in the best shape of my life. Dieting isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

But it’s not one of my strengths, self-control. I’ve had success with, and actually enjoy, the Atkins approach; fewer carbs, lose weight fast. But I’ve done it so often it’s boring. So a week ago I bought French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guillano, which sounded like a diet I could enjoy. For one thing, we share the same attitude towards dieting. It’s far more successful if it’s not considered a diet. Think of it as living life well, as opposed to punishing yourself, and you’re more likely to continue the modified food intake. It is not a diet. It is a philosophy of life. Check.

So, I bought it. I read it. I buy into it. And the first step?

Leek soup.

Let me give you the short (and, coincidentally, the long) version of this recipe: Put leeks in pot. Add water. Boil. Simmer. Cool. Drain (reserve liquid). Drink.

Annnnnnd that’s it. You make this “soup” (c’mon, it’s leek water! LEEK WATER!) and ingest nothing else for two days. Just leek water every few hours and if you’re really jonesing for the hard stuff, you get half a cup of mushy leeks with some olive oil and lemon juice to tide you over.

I’m going to go for it—I have the leeks. I start tomorrow.

But here’s the question, the reason I turned to the world wide interweb just now for some fancy Google footwork: Why the hell can’t you season this soup?

Would a little thyme really kill the diet? Pepper? I get that salt’s going to do that water-retention thing you’re trying to avoid by drinking a whole mess of leek juice, but surely plain tarragon would zip right through.

I could not find the answer, so I’m going to experiment and see what I can learn on my own. I will begin with plain leek juice, then add herbs and spices on subsequent trips back to the leeky well. I’ll let you know how it goes.

But first I’m going to go scarf an avocado. With salt. And a chocolate chaser.

Ever wondered about urban fantasy - as in, what the heck is it? Here’s the most understandable definition I’ve ever seen. A big thank you to the editors at Ellora’s Cave!

Now - does anyone disagree with this definition? I’m not familiar enough with the subgenre to have an opinion, but I’m interested.

UPDATE: Just found another very interesting post on a similar topic from an editor at Juno Books called Notes on “Urban Fantasy” & Roots of Kickassitude.

My brother recently did some puppeteering work on this music video. Nothing to do with anything, but I think it’s cool so I’m sharing. Go bro!

(It’s the Grayboy Allstars “Still Waiting” video, btw.)

I just got word that the workshop I’m presenting with my good friend Emma Clair at the RWA national conference in San Francisco has been scheduled. Hooray! Our talk is on “Creating a Web Presence.” We’ll discuss how to set up a site of your own and what’s necessary at each stage of your writing career - when you’re first starting out, as you begin submitting to agents and editors, and of course post-publication. Both Emma and I are looking forward to answering everyone’s questions. We’ve given this talk twice now and the audience interaction is our favorite part.

So, drumroll…. our talk is currently scheduled for Friday, August 1, from 2-3pm. I hope to see you there!

I’ve only watched this once and I’m sure there are plenty of peeps out there dissecting it for its political import and savviness. What interested me was how watchable this speech feels in comparison to others I’ve seen in my lifetime.

I thought I was going to see a rebuttal: Obama proving he had nothing to do with his pastor’s inflammatory statements. But this isn’t a politician’s speech; it’s a statesman’s, a masterful piece of speechwriting worth watching for its elegant patterns and escalating progression of thought. If you haven’t taken the time to see it, grab yourself 35 minutes and do so now. You can read the full text here.

Check this out - you can help with proofreading the books that are being prepared for Project Gutenberg’s free archives. The site isn’t the most intuitive I’ve ever used, but the satisfaction that comes from helping this noble effort is well worth the trouble.

Distributed Proofreading site

Project Gutenberg

Who needs more than a pen and a wordprocessor, right?

Right.

When I started writing, I thought that Word would be enough. Then I read a book that recommended outlining your story using index cards. Once you had your notes down, you could easily move them all around on a big corkboard to rearrange your story. So much easier than printing out actual scenes and rearranging them!

But not so easy to take with you - on the corkboard - to a coffee shop. And guess what happens once you take those cards off the corkboard? Yeah. Order, schmorder. I ended up with piles of index cards laying around my office - index cards with post-its attached, no less. Colorful but sad.

Then I heard a rumor that FinalDraft, the popular software program for screenwriters, had a ‘cards’ feature which would virtualize - huzzah! - my card dilemma. Some dollar$ later, I had hacked my way to a standstill. FinalDraft is just dandy - if you use it as it’s meant to be used. One day I’ll be writing a screenplay with it.

I was back to Microsoft Word and cards until one magical day I wandered into the wonderful world of SuperNoteCard. A program that’s actually meant for novelists sick of using index cards! for only $29! It has a few flaws and isn’t entirely intuitive, but it’s pretty damned great and helped me enormously as I made my way through First Draft in 30 Days, outlining my little heart out.

Then today as I was reading Nathan Bransford’s blog - ahem, writing - I came across a comment that led me to yWriter.

(The above pic is a screenshot of a yWriter storyboard showing scene progression arranged by POV.)

From my initial forays, this is the program of programs. It combines the best of SuperNoteCard - easy shuffling of scene order, ability to cross-reference settings, characters and objects, and an encapsulated view of my entire humongous manuscript - with the other key elements I’d hoped SNC would provide: a built-in scene timeline, POV indicators and chart, and a way to both describe a scene and write a scene on one “card.” Plus, drag-and-drop! And it’s FREE!

One caveat - the person who initially recommended this program did have an issue where they lost a draft of their manuscript due to a crash. Taking that into account, I’m backing up frequently. But I don’t think I’m going to stop using this program anytime soon.

Unless, of course, there’s something better out there. Anyone?

*** UPDATE ***

Nope, nothing bad - I’m even more convinced of the loveliness of yWriter. I just corresponded with Simon Haynes, the writer and software developer who created this in his (spare!?) time, and he’s very nice. He’s even set up a Google Group where users can go to request features and chat with each other about how great the tool is - check it out here: http://groups.google.com/group/ywriter. I’ve also learned that the software has received a 4-star review at PCMag, a very prestigious computer magazine. Congrats, Simon!