Guest Post: The Belfast Bar's Beer-Battered Cod from The Big Cinch by Kathy L. Brown

In the prohibition-era, supernatural noir novel,Â The Big Cinch,Â Sean Joye, a young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, has made his way to his brother’s place in the United States and into the employ of an ambitious judge. The courthouse charwoman, Mrs. MacSweeney, decides he’s just the person to rid the place of some troublesome haunts that only she can see. She shows up at Sean’s brother’s pub to convince him to do his duty.

Mrs. Mac’s Ghost Problem

Mrs. Mac’s whiskey seemed to take effect and she tucked into her dinner like a starving person. “I’m a God-fearing, Christian woman. I’ve never been a drinker. I marched with the temperance ladies. I’ve no truck with the devil or his wiles. But the new courts building is cursed. I’ve felt it since we moved in. And it’s getting worse. The vile things are bolder every day.”

“But why do you think I can help you with ghosts?”

She considered her words.

I waited, anointing my fish with malt vinegar. We batter the cod here, as Grandmother Joye did. No soggy breadcrumbs. Makes all the difference.

“I say “˜get thee behind me, Satan.’ But I was cursed with a bit of the Sight, I suppose,” she said at last. “”˜Twas worse when I was a girl. But when you came outta the lobby this morning, I could see their mark on you. They’ve claimed you as one of their own.”

One way or the other, the fae are responsible for humans with the Sight””a knack for seeing the unseen and knowing the unknown””and we recognize each other. Perhaps outright, or maybe just an attraction to a kindred spirit. But in those days, I refused to look at many things I could plainly see.

“Do you want pie? I want pie.” I half stood and waved at Maud. “Is there apple?”

Mrs. Mac sopped up the grease on her plate with a bit of bread and popped it into her mouth. “No one believes me. I’ve about been sacked for warning folks.”

“What can I do?” I had a thought. “Shall I find you a priest?”

She about choked on her Bevo. “The Church of Rome has no answer here, boy.” She looked pleased though, as Maud brought warm pie with cheddar cheese. “No offense. I know it’s the way you was raised and you don’t know no better.”

“None taken.” I agreed to coffee at Maud’s suggestion and the child poured it for the two of us. “So, not saying you are right or wrong about me and what I might see or feel or know”””

“I want them to leave me alone. To go back to Hell and leave me be. Seeing as you know them, I thought you could tell the haunts that.”

I couldn’t deny I’d run smack dab into the Veil before. But I didn’t need this bother right now. I didn’t want it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t see how I can help you.”

Her faded blue eyes turned bright with anger. She gripped her fork like a weapon. “”˜Tis a shame you’re marked for damnation.”

Grandmother Joye’s Beer-Battered Cod

Sometimes people use cornmeal or even breadcrumbs to prepare fried fish. But, according to Sean, that would be wrong.

2 pounds fresh or frozen Icelandic cod (If frozen, unthaw completely.)
Salt and pepper to season fish
1 Â½ cups flour, plus more for dredging the fish
2 teaspoons baking powder
Â½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried dill
1 egg, beaten
12 oz Smithwick’s Ale (Or any mild ale or lager. Grandmother doesn’t like the effect of high heat on stouts or IPA.)
Melted lard or shortening or vegetable oil
Malt vinegar, lemon wedges, and tartar sauce as desired

Beer and Fish: The batter makes all the difference. (Photo by ndemello from Pixabay.)

Pat fish fillets dry and cut into individual portions. Lightly salt and pepper them, then dredge in the flour.

Thoroughly mix 1 Â½ cups of flour, baking powder, salt, and dill together with a fork.

Stir in the beaten egg and enough beer to make a thin, pancake-like batter.

Submerge each piece of dredged fish in the batter briefly, then set aside for a few minutes while oil heats. (This is messy work. Take care the fish fillets don’t fall apart)

Using a heavy skillet, melt the cooking fat to a depth of Â¼ to Â½ inches. Heat at moderately high heat until shimmery. Test the oil temperature with a spoonful of the batter. If it cooks up to a golden-brown dollop in about 60 seconds, the oil is ready for the fish.

Avoid crowding the pieces in the pan. Cook on each side about 3-4 minutes (depending on thickness of fillet) until golden brown. Grandmother didn’t have an instant read thermometer, but the fish would have an internal temperature of 145 degrees F.

Serve hot with malt vinegar, lemon wedges, or tartar sauce. Fried potatoes (chips) are the traditional side dish.

Author Photo: Kathy L. Brown. (Photo by Jon Aikin.)

BIO: Kathy lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Her hometown and its history inspire her fiction. When she’s not thinking about how haunted everything is, she enjoys hiking, crafts, and cooking for her family. Her novel,Â The Big Cinch, published byÂ Montag Press, continues the supernatural noir Sean Joye investigations described in her novella,Â The Resurrectionist,Â and novelette,Â Water of Life.Â Â All stories are available as paperbacks and e-books fromÂ Amazon.comÂ and paperback from Barnes & Noble.Â Wolfhearted: A NovellaÂ is a secondary-world, YA fantasy. Follow her on Instagram atÂ kathylbrownwrites, Facebook atÂ kbKathylbrown, and Twitter atÂ KL_Brown. Kathy’s blog, Kathy L. Brown Writes the Storytelling Blog, lives atÂ kathylbrown.com.

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

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.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
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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Guest Post: Diane Morrison Discusses Crowdpublishing

October 2, 2018

Everyone says that indie publishing is the wave of the future. Avoiding gatekeepers, who are often prejudiced against particular ideas or demographics, and putting your work out there to see if it will sink or swim on its own, puts the power (and the money) back in the hands of the writers. I had an unusual idea and format that I realized would have difficulty finding a home because of its experimental nature, so I though I would give it a try.

Here’s the problem: It’s not free.

Amazon and others try to make you believe it’s free, but only if you want to give away a significant royalty chunk, and only if you don’t hire an editor (bad,) don’t hire a cover designer (worse,) don’t hire a formatter (fine if you have lots of time on your hands and are handy with computer programs; awful if not,) and don’t do any marketing or ever buy a copy to sell to your friends or at cons. If you do decide to go for it without any resources, people will dismiss your cover as tacky, your prose as terrible, and no one is ever going to see it in the sea of newly available titles anyway.

Not to mention there’s still the whiff of vanity publishing about it, so no matter how good you are, or how well you do, some people will never take you seriously.

If you want to succeed at indie publishing, you have to be seen in the vast herd of new titles appearing every day. It takes money. That’s fine if you can afford it, but I found it daunting. So I asked myself, “How can I publish a book without defeating the purpose? How can I find capital that doesn’t eliminate my bottom line?”

I launched a Kickstarter to bring my Wyrd West stories to print. I budgeted for cover design, formatting, editing, marketing and stock purchase. And I asked my readers to contribute.

The response was better than I could have hoped. The Kickstarter was successful. The end result was a beautiful, professional book I had every right to be proud of, many of which were going directly to the readers that funded them.

But can this said to be truly self-published? I don’t think it can. This is a new way of doing things, in which readers choose to fund what they want to read. It puts the power directly in their hands. As it should be.

Even the backing of the Big 5 doesn’t guarantee a book’s success. It has to find an audience. It has to have resonance with the people who read it. Readers aren’t going to fund bad ideas, and if you’re a bad writer, they’re not going to support you more than once. So rather than being vetted by small groups of people on the top of a big pyramid of status and business acumen, Crowdpublished projects are vetted directly by the public.

As a writer, here’s a look at the differences I’ve found between being traditionally, independently, or Crowdpublished:

	Traditional Publishing	Indie Publishing	Crowdpublishing
Getting the Book Published in the First Place	You may not be able to get a publisher interested. Chances are you will have a long wait. If you try something that’s too far outside of the mainstream in subject or presentation, don’t count on it. The publisher covers all publishing expenses and pays you a royalty.	You can get the book published whenever you want. You are entirely responsible for expenses & getting people to read it. On the other hand, you get to keep a larger share of the royalty.	If your audience will sustain your idea, you can publish the book whenever you want, and you know they, at least, will read it. Chances are they’ll get their friends to read it too, because they wouldn’t have invested if they didn’t think it was a good idea. If you’ve budgeted correctly, the expenses of printing some of your books, at any rate, will be covered. You receive indie royalties.
Editing	A professional editor who works for the publishing house will be provided to edit for you. Sometimes this leads to personality conflicts, but ultimately, it is the editor’s job to make your book into a marketable product, and that’s what they’re going to try to do.	There are good editors and bad editors out there in the indie world, and you have to pay one. Some charge very good rates, others higher ones. Unless you’re dealing with a professional service with multiple editors, rate doesn’t necessarily indicate quality. However, most writers have no idea what makes a good editor, and it’s not just whether they can copyedit your spelling mistakes. A good editor will also be trying to make your book into a marketable product. That means they have to know what that looks like, and in my experience, the vast majority of indie editors haven’t a clue.	You have all the innate disadvantages of indie editing, except that you can budget for that in your crowdfunder, so you can spring for the professional firm or someone you trust right away.
Cover Design	Your publisher decides on the cover, but will pay artists & designers to make it for you.	You have the final say over the cover, but either you have to figure out Cover Design 101 or pay someone to do it well.	You have the final say over the cover, but your readers cover the expense of creating it.
Creative Control	Your publisher has the final word on what will & will not go in the book.	You have complete creative control.	You have creative control ““ provided your readers will support your idea.
Marketing & Promotion	Your publisher expects you to do more of this than they used to, but they will still do a lot of it for you. They’ll market to bookstores and contact radio shows and podcasts. You will still be expected to use your own platform (especially online) to market, and you’ll probably still have to pay for your own book tour. They will decide much of how you and your book should be presented to the public.	You are entirely responsible for the way you market yourself and your book. You’re also entirely responsible for the expenses. You probably don’t know as much about doing it as a professional publicist does, so there will be a lot of trial and error. Often, some of the places you’d like to promote to won’t talk to you because you don’t have a publisher’s clout.	You still have many of the inherent problems of indie marketing. The exceptions are a) you are NOT entirely responsible for expenses (you can budget for that,) and b) a crowdfunding outlet is already a marketing platform. If you succeed at your goal, some shows who wouldn’t have talked to you as an indie will, because it’s a heartwarming success story and it’s apparent you do have an audience.

I realize that Crowdpublishing is a bit like being PBS instead of MSNBC. You know that you have an audience. Although it might not be as easy for you to reach them as it is for corporations, that audience is dedicated enough to supporting your work that they are willing to ante up, sight-unseen. It’s “Funded in part by readers like you.”

It’s a godsend for SFF story markets. Many respected pro- and semi-pro markets use the Crowdpublishing model, including Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, the entire EscapePod family, Third Flatiron, and more. And most SFF writers I know use the Crowdpublishing model, at least as far as setting up a Patreon, whether they’re just starting out or just shy of the New York Times bestseller list. I think this should be a point of pride.

I don’t believe that indie-publishing deserves its “lesser” reputation, because garbage gets published in all fields, and a big imprint is by no means a guarantee of quality. But I think when we’re asked if our project was self-published, we should smile and say, “No, it was Crowdpublished.” I think it’s a selling point.

I believe that any path a writer takes to success is a good one. Some people are really successful in the traditional or indie-publishing models, and regardless of which path they’ve taken, it’s hard. These are accomplishments worth taking pride in. But I think we should start thinking of Crowdpublishing as a third path within the literary market. There’s traditional publishing, and indie-publishing, and Crowdpublishing.

If you’re a writer who produces your own books, or a magazine editor, and you have a Kickstarter, GoFundMe or Patreon for the purpose, your work isn’t indie-published; it’s Crowdpublished. It’s not self-funded, or funded by shareholders; it’s funded by the public. And I think we should start talking about it that way.

Diane Morrison in an emerging neo-pro writer who just successfully ran a Kickstarter to publish her book, Once Upon a Time in the Wyrd West, available this month. She’s also appearing in Third Flatiron’s Terra! Tara! Terror!. This fall she will be offering a class through the Rambo Academy on finding time to write when you have none. Under her pen name Sable Aradia, she is a traditionally-published non-fiction author and blogger. She lives in Vernon, BC, Canada and she manages the SFWA YouTube channel. Right now, she’s doing a giveaway to support her Patreon membership drive. You can catch her on Twitter as @SableAradia, which means she’s not writing when she should be.

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.

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Guest Post from Kim Mainord: Mileage May Vary

March 2, 2015

Photograph of Author Kim Mainord — You can find more of Kim’s words at her website, ninjakeyboard.blogspot.com.

Note from Cat: March 2 kicks off two months of blog content dedicated to promoting my new (first!) novel, Beasts of Tabat. There’ll be guest blog posts, original fiction, essays about writing, feminism, and life in general, and even some giveaways and contests. Here’s our first guest blogger, Kim Mainord.

(Warning: there is a terrible pun below. If you are allergic to groaning please enjoy this cartoon instead. http://youtu.be/ykwqXuMPsoc)

When I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up I started collecting writing advice. Not tidbits from websites or manuals written by literati who wouldn’t touch a genre novel with a ten-foot pole. I went to my favorite authors, batted my puppy dog eyes, and said, “Please sir, I’d like some more.”

All right, I didn’t have to be that persuasive. Good thing too. I was so nervous I looked like Shaggy on espresso. Anyway”¦

One of the pieces of advice I received most often was “don’t give up” or some variation thereof. At that point in time I was still pretty naive. I had yet to complete my first story, I didn’t know about the caprices of the market, or the sting of rejection. What I did know what that this was the only career I truly wanted and there was no way I would ever consider quitting.

Oh, the schadenfreude when life proves me wrong.

What I failed to understand was that sooner or later we all have that moment. There’s no magical egg timer ticking away, warning us that it’s coming. No, like a regretful ex it rings when you least expect it and fills your life with woe.

Woe, man.

(Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Just like the timing, the cause is different too. It could be the daily grind, the solitude, the rejection, the one star reviews, publisher hijinks, internet trolls, etc. Whatever it may be it brings us so low that the easy 9 ““ 5 looks really appealing.

For some people it happens before the completion of that first trunk novel. For others it’s during a yearlong drought after a series of pro sales. Maybe it comes when that self-published book doesn’t do as well as you wanted. It may come in twenty years when arthritic hands insist that retirement is a good idea.

Whenever it happens the choice is the same. Tough it out or pack it in. It’s never an easy decision. But you know what? There are so many options now. Hands aren’t able to type anymore? Get voice recognition software. Self-published book not doing well? Time to try a different promotion tactic. Feeling lonely? Get some writer friends to join you in a G+ hangout or on face time. Rejection slips piling up? Use them to make lewd origami.

There are so many options, and resources for writers now there really isn’t a good reason to quit. Everything from support groups to indie publishing forums is a click away. It’s awesome!

Yes, being a writer can be hard. Publishing can twist your brain into knots faster than a Mensa puzzle. But it’s also one of the most fun, and exciting fields I know. What other occupation allows you research bomb construction techniques without fear of arrest? This is the best job around! It would be a shame to miss any of it.

If you want to know what Kim may be doing next, check out her blog: http://ninjakeyboard.blogspot.com.

Want to write your own guest post? Here’s the guidelines.
#sfwapro

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Guest Post: The Belfast Bar's Beer-Battered Cod from The Big Cinch by Kathy L. Brown

Grandmother Joye’s Beer-Battered Cod

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Guest Post: The Belfast Bar's Beer-Battered Cod from The Big Cinch by Kathy L. Brown

Grandmother Joye’s Beer-Battered Cod

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

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