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Guest Post: RecipeArium by Costi Gurgu

GOURMET RECIPE: VERMIH IN PLABOS SAUCE

There are three complementary sides that determine a phril personality: gastronomy, politics, and romance. The rest represents salads or pickles to fill the mundane.
I will start naturally, with food for the gourmet side of the phrilic spirit, presenting to you, my dear reader, an absolutely genuine Recipe.

INGREDIENTS:
Mature vermih ““a crawler from the land-worm family, having its vital organ””the sufleida””in the middle of its spindle-shaped body. This in turn is protected by a circular stomach layer, where the ingested food is stored, preparatory to being assimilated after fermentation.
Swamp Plabos Sauce““for plant and insect broths, in a suckitori base.
Sequ-tulapa flavoured oil ““ with hot spices, preferably from Blood-Moth’s wings.

PREPARATION:
The fragrant vermih should be left to rot alive only under the light of the Three Daughters of the Sky. The diffuse light drives it mad and the cool night air makes its stomach layer tremble. The trembling forces its membrane to enlarge to several times its usual size, preparing for future storage. If it doesn’t scream for mercy, it means it has not putrefied enough. However, while it is rotting, ensure it is protected from fright, to avoid wrinkling its flesh.

When it has reached the desired level of putrefaction, immediately place the gluttonous and shivering animal on the sweet maidenly leaf of the moamoam. The two beings will intertwine and the juice of pleasure will flow from the vermih, imbuing the fluffy layer of the maiden moamoam. The vermih, driven by overwhelming hunger, will then devour the leaf. Because its stomach membrane is enlarged, it will not be satisfied with only one leaf. Continue this process with another leaf, luring it by way of the gnawed stem to where the Swamp Plabos Sauce boils vigorously. I have specified that the sauce be flavoured with suckitori. The steam from the boiling sauce will penetrate the vermih’s stomach wall, moistening the ingested moamoam leaves before the vermih throws itself into the sauce, simultaneously ejecting one last fresh spurt of the bittersweet pleasure liquid.

The vermih will sink to the bottom of the pot of boiling sauce, allowing the Plabos liquor to penetrate it just short of its core. It is very important that the depth the crawler will sink and the thickness of the sauce be calculated exactly. Otherwise, the slightest contamination of its vital core with the liquor will cause a hideous death, which would thicken the vermih’s flesh.

As its stomach membrane tenderizes to a suitable degree of sponginess, and with its flesh flavoured by the Swamp Plabos Sauce, the crawler should fall free from the orifice in the pot’s bottom straight onto your plate, where it will spread into a well-blended and sparkling stew surrounding the sufleida, still pulsing within the protective layer of the bitter crystalline coating.

Combine the sequ-tulapa flavoured oil with hot spices, preferably brown butterfly wings, and heat it to boiling. Pour the hot oil over the crystalline coating of the sufleida. This will melt the covering and evaporate all trace of bitterness. Flavour to taste with a sprinkling of Night Daughters Flower pollen and serve with red wine for a truly gourmet meal.

(from The Gastronomic Teachingsof Master Recipear Plabos)

Costi’s scripts have been finalists and semifinalists in numerous competitions.

Costi’s fiction has appeared in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He has sold 3 books and over 50 stories for which he has won 24 awards. His latest sales include the anthologies Tesseracts 17, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, Dark Horizons, Street Magick, Water, and Alice Unbound. His story Cosmoboticawas a finalist for Aurora Awards.

His novel RecipeArium is out from White Cat Publications and a 2018 finalist for the Aurora Awards.

To find out more about Costi Gurgu visit www.costigurgu.com
Recently, Costi started Games for Aliens, a tabletop games enterprise. His first two games are Absolutism (a dystopian scenario) and Carami (based on RecipeArium).

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines

This was a guest blog post.
Interested in blogging here?

Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?

Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.

Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.

Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.

I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:

  • Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
  • Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
  • Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
  • A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
  • Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
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  • F&SF volunteer efforts you work with

Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.

When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)

Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Guest Post: Author Influences and Aha! Moments: The Evolution of Writing by S.G. Browne

Most writers can probably remember the moment when they realized that they wanted to become a writer. Maybe it was a story someone read to them when they were a child. Or a novel they read in junior high. Or the first time they wrote a poem or a short story for an English assignment in elementary school. Maybe they saw a play or a film and felt inspired to write their own script. Or wrote an article for their high school newspaper. Or took a writing class in college.

Everyone has their Aha! moment. An epiphany that sends them down a path of words and characters and plots, that takes them on a journey of creativity and self-doubt and soul-crushing rejection. Not to mention years of emotional therapy.

That moment for me happened in the late fall of 1985, during the first semester of my sophomore year in college. I’d been introduced to The Stand by Stephen King the previous summer and devoured the novel while on a family vacation. I didn’t read much as a kid. I was allergic to libraries and would rather play outside or watch TV. Books were an afterthought or a requirement for high school American and Western Lit classes. Although I did enjoy Vonnegut. And Lord of the Flies remains near the top of my list of Desert Island Books (irony noted). But after reading The Stand, I was hooked.

So I picked up a few more of King’s novels, along with novels by Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and John Saul, among others. All horror writers, all the time. I’d fallen in love with reading and I couldn’t imagine my life without books. But there came a moment when I was in the middle of The Talisman by King and Straub that I became so caught up in the adventure unfolding within the pages of the story that the world outside of the novel ceased to exist. It was something I’d never experienced before. Not with The Stand or any other of the books I’d read. And it was such an amazing and exhilarating moment that I thought: I want to make someone feel like this.

So I took some writing classes and I kept reading. When I graduated, I got a job to pay the bills and wrote short stories in my spare time, sending them out to magazines in the hopes of having them published. The stories were all of the supernatural horror variety, of course. And the influence of the books I’d read, especially the novels of King and Straub, loomed large on my writing. They were, after all, the impetus for my wanting to become a writer.

Over the next decade, I wrote dozens of short stories along with three novels. While I managed to get a dozen of the stories published, the pay didn’t amount to much. And although I received positive feedback on my novels, none of them found an agent or a home. Writing soon became a grind, the joy replaced by discouragement, and I started to question whether or not continuing along this path was something that I wanted to do. Cue the self-doubt.

Soon after, in October 2002, I was browsing the books at my local bookstore in preparation for another trip and came across the novel Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I’d seen the movie Fight Club and loved it, and Lullaby was a supernatural horror-satire with a premise that sounded fun. So I bought a copy and put it in my backpack for the flight.

Have you ever read the first few pages of a novel or a short story and had to go back and reread them immediately because they spoke to you in a way that no story has ever spoken to you before? Suddenly an idea forms in your head. Except it’s more than just an idea. It’s an awareness. A realization that you have this story inside of you but you never knew it was waiting to be told until that moment.

That’s what happened to me in the first five minutes of that airplane flight, reading the opening pages of Lullaby. I’d written previous supernatural horror stories with elements of dark comedy and social satire but had never considered expanding any of them into a novel-length form. The idea had never occurred to me. But the dark comedy and social satire in Lullaby spoke to me in a way that straight supernatural horror no longer did.

So I read more Palahniuk. Around that same time, I discovered the comedic fantasy books of Christopher Moore (Lamb and Bloodsucking Fiends). Together, the influence of their books had an enormous impact on my writing. Where King and Straub had made me realize that I wanted to become a writer, Palahniuk and Moore made me realize what I wanted to do as a writer.

When I finally sat down to flesh out my darkly comedic short story “A Zombie’s Lament” that I’d written a year earlier, I discovered the joy of writing again. More than that, I discovered my voice. And that voice helped me to write Breathers, my fourth novel and first published novel, which came out in 2009.

I wrote four more novels after that, all of them dark comedy and social satire with a supernatural, speculative, or fantastic element. In addition to Palahniuk and Moore, I continued to read King and Straub but added other writers to my diet, including Gaiman, Pratchett, and Hiaasen, who all helped my writing to evolve. But Palahniuk and Moore were the catalyst for the writer I had become.

Then around 2014-2015, I discovered the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, specifically St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Get in Trouble. This discovery created a third shift in my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before. Not only did the stories of Russell and Link inspire me to write a number of my own short stories, but they also helped me to bring more balance to my writing.

Although all of my novels and many of my previous short stories included female characters who featured prominently in the plot, none of the women played the role of the main protagonist. Half of the 14 stories in my new collection, Lost Creatures, are told from a female POV””including a ten-year-old Japanese girl, a college zombie, and a time-jumping alcoholic. And they are some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.

Over the course of my creative career, dozens of writers have had an impact on my writing, influencing and inspiring me. And while my writing wouldn’t be the same without the existence of every single one of those writers, the books and words written by these six authors found me at the right time and had the most significant impact on the formation and the evolution of my writing.


BIO: S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. His new short story collection, Lost Creatures, is a blend of fantasy, science fiction, dark comedy, and magical realism. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, and a cat enthusiast. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, check out his website at www.sgbrowne.com, or learn more about his new collection Lost Creatures.


If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

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Guest Post: Confessions of a Reluctant Writing Gamer by Janet K. Smith

Writing games. I avoided them for years because I was short on time, not ideas. Once I lifted my head from my page, I realized my focus was all wrong. This one-hour-a-week “game” held incredible lessons I couldn’t get anywhere else.

So why the reluctance? That’s the easy part. Take a first-born, type-A personality with a novel in its final draft, multiple short stories out on rejection””oops, I mean submission, numerous other half-written stories, and a second novel that’s itching for a conclusion, then disrupt that work with “games” full of nonsensical sentence prompts, and odd pictures, and you’ll find a non-believer who prefers to focus on “real” work.

I’d occasionally pop into the session, but more often than not, I’d log out as soon as I heard it was a writing game and not the story discussion or feral writing time I’d expected. If I had a deadline to meet, anything with the word “play” was dismissed automatically. Who had time for play? For five and a half years, fun writing seemed like an oxymoron.

I remember getting a rush of rejections, one after another, on stories I’d poured my soul into. I wasn’t hitting the right notes somewhere, and it was time to figure out where. Yet I joined writing games with a casual attitude, logging less than a hundred words per challenge. I had good ideas, but I’d edit my sentences as I went, placing structure and grammar above word count. Others did four or five times my number of words in the ten to fifteen minutes per prompt, and even though I knew the writing gems appeared in unfettered prose, I couldn’t stop fixing things. It wasn’t satisfying, and soon I was back to one or two sessions a month.

For the next few years, I’d join a session if I was bored or had spare time. I still considered writing games an extra, as if writing for fun was a waste of time. Professional writers repeatedly told me, “Don’t correct your work. Let it flow.” Sure, I told them, but I didn’t mean it. I hadn’t found that crucial key that added value to prompt writing. Then one session, a brave reader shared an emotionally beautiful piece of prose inspired by a prompt I’d done little with. Hearing someone else achieve so much using the same prompt in the same length of time was inspiring. I wanted that and realized I’d handicapped myself by focusing on my own writing when I should have been listening to others.

Once my focus shifted, writing games became more than “fun.” The following week I dug in and wrote 193 words, still correcting as I wrote, but less than before. I read to the group, and people waved in appreciation. Then a more seasoned writer read her work. Her character came alive in the first sentence, and she’d given her listeners a strong sense of place, so when the plot kicked in, and things got dark, I pictured the surroundings as if I were there. I instantly saw where my work fell short. I’d drafted a plot outline””a summation. I wanted those primordial elements of life on the page, and her example showed me the way. Her skills, added to all the other things I’d done to improve my craft, lit a spark of understanding, and my writing changed at that moment.

With my resistance gone, I attended each writing-games session with a “challenge accepted” attitude, and my interest leaped from a three-four to an eight-nine. The key wasn’t in the task or the prompt but in hearing what others did with it””how they started their piece, the word choices, phrasing, character description (an area where I truly suck), and other elements handled in a way I envied. I was playing, but in a way that made sense to me.

One of the regulars at writing games is so good at drilling down on a sentence. She doesn’t just write of things normally associated with the contents in the sentence; she lists the things it’s not, then builds support for what it is. For example, the prompt: “Desire is no light thing.” She wrote that a dead body is heavier than a living one, but it should be lighter since the dead no longer have desires, and desires keep people alive””grounded with a gravity that can’t be ignored. I mean, wow! Then there’s another regular who creates the best descriptions and another who launches into crazy, off-kilter prose that shoves my logical mind aside. Taking the creative leap with him is exhilarating.

The range and variety of works are fun, and not in a candy-crush time-sucking way, but fun the way reading is fun. Everyone constructs their stories differently, and whether they focus on setting, character, plot, or a beautiful meld of all three, the creativity and flex of craft are always impressive. There are still prompts that don’t tickle my muse. Take “what are we but ten minds? this is sent with love. this paper has gone far.” I was blank on this one with a capital “B,” but others in the group produced some great pieces, and listening to the “what and how” of their prose was as important to my growth as a writer as plying my own skills to the task.

Looking back, I realized I needed those first years to understand that I was creative and could pull a story from the air using a prompt. But when I wanted more, writing games offered that too.

Beauty lies in the impulsive writing, the understanding and skill brought by the other players, and the option to listen while others read their work. Of course, reading is always optional, but it’s a supportive, safe place to share when your muse strikes. No one gives critiques here, and getting those double-hand waves for a piece that delights you feels pretty nice after writing in isolation these last few years. It’s also a great place to try new techniques, viewpoints, or styles, like poetry or second person.

After six months, I can honestly say my writing has improved. It has miles to go, but that’s the fun of it. I don’t want a skill-level ceiling. Last week, I wrote 247 words in twelve minutes””my new record. I had a character with a personality twist, a plot arc, a strong antagonist, and a good ending. I drafted a story. In twelve minutes. It needs fleshing out, and there’s no setting, but I saw people gasp when the story took an unexpected turn, so I know the bones are there.

The coolest part? I didn’t get there on my own.

Join Cat Rambo and friends on Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time for Writing Games.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

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