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I have many thoughts on the GameStop stock/stonk play. Big movements in complex systems are difficult to write about, because many things that seem paradoxical can be correct at the same time. At different scales or frames, differing takes have validity. So forgive what may seem contradictory. For those not familiar with the topic, let’s start with this @Vox article as the baseline.
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Back when I was living in Japan, about 2003-2006, one of the foods that I fell in love with was nikuman 肉ã¾ã‚“, steamed pork buns. They could be found in any convenience store, and they made a great meal for someone who didn’t feel like cooking.
They come with various fillings: pork, beef, chicken, shrimp, veggie, even sweet custard. They are particularly comforting when the weather turns chilly and they’re all steamy and warm.
I was planning a vacation to Japan with the family in March 2020. We’d been planning it for years, and it would have been the first time I’d been back since returning to the States. I was excited to show my family, whom I didn’t have then, all the sights.
A secondary reason for going to Japan was professional, as I was in the midst of writing Tokyo Blood Magic, the first volume of my Shinjuku Shadows trilogy. I wanted to visit some important Tokyo locales, refresh my memory, gather some inspiration, but it was not to be.
As you might guess, COVID-19 derailed that, four days before wheels up for Tokyo. I was crushed, and nine months of isolation has not done much to help that state of mind.
Nevertheless, writing the book did assuage some of my disappointment, as I spent a lot of time in Google Street View, walking virtually around the streets of Tokyo. Writing the book was a fun way to reminisce, and also learn about places I didn’t get to visit while I was living there, such as Shizuoka, Ginza, and Roppongi.
There’s a scene in Tokyo Blood Magic where our hero, Django Wong, a ninja warlock, has his bacon saved from a very dangerous monster by a wisecracking alley cat, known only as Cat. Cat, however, is far from normal, and it’s not clear exactly what he is until Book 2, Tokyo Monster Mash.
Amid snarky repartee, Django and Cat venture into a convenience store for some post-fracas grub, where nikuman becomes a big part of their bonding. Cat becomes Django’s supernatural sidekick.
So in this Year of a Thousand Cuts, I wanted some comfort food for the Virtual Book Launch Party, which my wife and I put together over Zoom a couple of weeks after Tokyo Blood Magic was released. So I made some nikuman, and this video tells the tale so much better than text.
This recipe is adapted from Japanese measurements. Credit for the original goes to Namiko Chen.
Note: If you like big buns, and you cannot lie, you can cut your dough into larger sizes and use more filling for each one.
The result: they were delicious.
The texture of the bun was a little bit off, maybe because I missed a couple of steps with letting the dough rest. Another reason might be because I live in the Denver area, and altitude can certainly affect cooking and baking in unexpected ways, which I didn’t account for in my procedure.
Cooking is much like magic and writing. A little here, a little there, bits and pieces of accumulated experience and creative wisdom.
I hope you’ll give this recipe a try for yourself. If you do, let me know how it goes. Going into the Winter of COVID, maybe we’ll all need a little more comfort food.
Bio: Freelance writer, novelist, editor, and screenwriter, Travis Heermann is the author of nine novels, including Tokyo Blood Magic, The Hammer Falls, The Ronin Trilogy, and others, plus short fiction in Apex Magazine, Cemetery Dance, and many more. His freelance work includes contributions to the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Battletech, Legend of Five Rings, and EVE Online.
Find out more at travisheermann.com or follow him on Twitter @TravisHeermann.
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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“Oh, brilliant! What shall we bring?”
Verity and her husband Sacha””and any of their family friends””will never have a host cook all alone.
This is the dish they brought round to the Meiers’ for the first “˜do’ at theirs of that fateful new year: the year when she would twice travel to the USA””the “˜Evening Lands’. There she would risk her life for a simple letter written, as it turned out, during the head-splitting hangover after this particular soirée…
Arash and Farrukh had arrived in Britain, the day after New Year’s, without anywhere to stay. Within three days, they’d launched themselves into buying a house together.
Ruth said it might be fun for them all to meet up.
By nine in the evening noisy conversation criss-crossed the Meiers’ generous dining table. Dishes of gefiltefish, couscous salad and stuffed vine leaves passed from hand to hand, along with news and wine.
Verity sat next to the two new arrivals.
She picked up an open bottle of red to refill her glass, offering it to her neighbours first.
Each declined with a polite wave of the hand.
“Er”¦white, then?”
Neither said anything.
“Oh, right. Sorry. Of course.”
Sharia law.
Two blokes living together.
Sometimes people made even less sense than usual.
She poured herself a glass and took a swig.
“Ruth said you were house-hunting.”
She’d start with the easy question.
“Where’re you going to buy?”
“Bishopthorpe Road.”
“What, near the racecourse?”
Farrukh nodded.
“Would you go to the Races? Are you allowed to bet?”
“Gambling is haram. But for horses, one can make an arrangement with the organisers”””˜make a prediction’ and win, if one is correct. There are bureaux for this, in our country. We’ve not yet found a Predictions Bureau here, though.”
Arash smiled. “There’s a business opportunity for someone.”
He paused.
“My cousin would have been good at that.”
“Would have?” She picked up her glass. “Does he”¦do something else now?”
No! Her face burned””Heck, it must match the colour of the wine in her glass. Would have. That must mean he was dead, been killed somewhere.
“He disappeared.”
The whole table went quiet.
Everyone turned to her. Was she supposed to ask?
“Er”¦how?”
“He was arrested. In Rawalpindi, the night before he was due to fly to Europe. Terrorism. No one has heard from him since.”
“What’s”¦what’s his name?”
Perhaps Amnesty had taken up his case? Perhaps she’d see him in next month’s magazine when it arrived at the house. She should make sure to find it, and write. She’d already made that New Year’s resolution to write to the Director of the C.I.A. about those camps”¦
The formal name, elaborate and winding, soon left her consciousness. She didn’t dare ask, “˜what was that again?’
Ruth rescued her. “So, about the house?”
Arash explained the very thing she’d wanted to know to start with””how a Sharia mortgage worked. A mortgage without usury.
She hoped she hadn’t drunk too much to be able to remember the details in the morning.
***
Verity pressed the hot flannel against her forehead. If she pressed hard enough, perhaps the splinters of ice might melt””not dig into the joints in her skull. She tried not to groan. Sacha stirred. Damn, she’d not wanted to wake him.
“I made an idiot of myself at the Meiers’, love. Sorry”¦”
“I did tell you. I did pour some water out for you.”
“Sorry”¦”
“And you asked so many questions. I hope we haven’t upset the Meiers.”
He turned over, away from her, but the pain put her past the point of caring.
She had to write that letter in the morning.
It needn’t be a long one…
But to more practical matters. The dish, being Vegan, is (or at least, can be considered) also both kosher and halal. And you never know when that might come in useful.
The vegetables:Â
The rest:Â
Kit:Â
Method:Â
Seasonal variations:Â
Fiendish bean-dish can be adapted for summer by changing to summer vegetables. Celery rather than celeriac, and red peppers instead of parsnips, for example. It can even be served cold, if the weather merits it.
BIO: C L Spillard is a complex interplay of matter and energy in a wave-pattern whose probability cloud is densest in York, United Kingdom.
The moon landings influenced the young pattern’s self-awareness mechanisms, igniting lifelong interest in Physics, and in humanity’s plight on Earth.
C L Spillard’s wave-pattern enjoys proximity to a second pattern originating in St Petersburg (Russia), and these two have since generated two younger ones who are now diffusing over the planet stuffing themselves with knowledge as if it were going out of fashion.
She claims responsibility for a raft of published short stories, the fantasy “˜The Price of Time’, and its newly-released sequel “˜The Evening Lands’.
Her website lurks at www.cspillardwriter.co.uk and she can be stalked on Twitter @candispillard.
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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We are not defined by our mistakes, and we deserve to reach beyond our dreams until they become reality.
This is a pervading theme in everything I write, morphed into various forms through story and character but no less poignant from book to book. It’s an incredibly important message I strive to offer my readers in whatever different flavor each story brings, because it’s a message I have lived through personally. And I know I’m not the only one.
As a wife, a mother, and a queer female author navigating the literary world and supporting my family solely by writing fiction, I’ve struggled for some time to find the balance between meeting needs and fulfilling wishes. For years, I operated under the belief that what I needed, what I wanted, and what I deserved were three very different things within my personal life. Trying to visualize and actualize all three was a feat tossed even farther to the winds when I struggled through an active heroin addiction in my late teens and early twenties.
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There’s this common misconception that the world of editing (in the sense of submitting your story to a magazine or contest) is an absolute puzzle constantly being shifted around by angry and jaded editors. In classes, writing groups, and even among non-writers, I hear it repeated that you have to have this unknowable combination of luck and talent to land a spot in a magazine, and it isn’t worth trying or learning. You got it or you don’t.
But that type of thinking leaves most people without it.
I want to say that in my years as a reader, judge, and developmental editor none of that is true. Especially about editors. We’re not shadowed goblins lying in wait to crush every writers’ dream. The reason we got into this line of work is because we want to hear a good story, a new story. We want to be entertained.
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Things are tense these days. I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying that. There’s a lot of negative emotions going around, and people deal with them in different ways. One of the healthier ways is to engage with a good movie, game, book, or other form of media and get lost in a story. As a person empathizes with characters, they achieve catharsis as they experience their emotional journey together with the characters they empathize with. People enjoy dramas to release their sadness, they enjoy action to feel power over a world which often shows them to be powerless. Some enjoy horror for the endorphin rush, or to release pent up negative emotions in a more healthy way than going to the hardware store and looking for a chainsaw that’s light enough to chase someone with, yet not so light that it can’t get the job done.
Um, for example.
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Literature is the best medium for horror, and comics are the worst. Literature succeeds because of the power of words to suggest, to take you ninety percent there, and leave that final ten percent up to you. The horror we imagine in the darkness of our minds far exceeds anything that can be set down on paper in words or pictures. We love horror because it allows us to exorcise our fears in a safe and fun manner. It usually delivers a moral epiphany, as Mary Shelley intended.
There’s also existential horror with no good guys or bad guys, like The Devil’s Rejects. Without a moral epiphany no film can hope to reach a wider audience. Exorcist is not only the scariest movie ever made, it’s one of the most moral.
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Ask many writers what got them to the next level, what separates great writers from good writers, sparkling writing from the merely competent, and they’ll often give the same answer: voice. A voice that stands out, that grabs the reader and yanks them in. The thing that makes an author’s writing completely their own.
Of course, nobody can agree exactly on what “voice” means. I’ve collected a few quotes:
“Voice is the author’s style, the quality that makes his or her writing unique, and which conveys the author’s attitude, personality, and character; or. Voice is the characteristic speech and thought patterns of the narrator of a work of fiction.”
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I don’t know about other writers. For one thing, I’ve never been another writer. For another, although I’ve observed practically all the interviews, or as in this case requested from writers, are about how the writing is done, creative tricks, recipes and such. I can’t listen to, view, or read that stuff…not that it isn’t full of useful information, just that my attention wanders, or I fall asleep. So, the nice guy who works for the publisher and arranges this kind of thing told me it would be a good idea if I wrote something about writing. And I just told you that I really don’t know anything about how other writers do it.
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It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by”¦ everything right now.
Climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, the economy, systemic racism, a global pandemic. Social media (which arguably has never been a showcase for the best humanity has on offer) has become a doom scroll. The news headlines aren’t comforting either, obviously, as that’s not their job, but feel even less so this year.
Meanwhile, Life with a capital L keeps happening. We all still have to keep a roof over our heads, some of us have kids to feed and prepare for whatever the hell it is that lies ahead, or parents to support in their old age, or maybe even both. An appalling number of us have to fight daily just for the right to exist.
And worst of all, I think, is that it is the year 2020. There’s something extra galling about the fact that we’re nearly a quarter way through the 21st century and we literally have access to the sum total of the world’s knowledge in our pockets”¦ and yet we seem to be inundated with both egregious ignorance and aggressive gullibility. Never mind a jet pack, I’d be happy just to get everyone on the same damn page: Clean air good, pollution bad.
On my darker days, I tend to turn to accounts from other people who lived through uncertain or frightening times. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning comes to mind, or going further back, something like Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings. An obvious place to look for historical parallels right now is back to our most famous pandemic, even if our perception of those times isn’t entirely accurate. These books and essays don’t offer answers, per se, but they do provide that all important connection: other people have been in a crucible and survived, and maybe you can too.
But what can you do beyond just get by? These problems we’re facing seem so big and intractable. You’re just one person, right?
Listen: One person can make a difference.
Here’s how I know. On May 16th, 2020, more than 5000 volunteers in my community, following physical distancing protocols and wearing masks, collected at least 678,200 pounds””yes pounds, and no that amount is not a typo””of food, donated by residents who had been asked to leave a non-perishable item on their porch or front step for collection.
The goal was to restock local food banks, because donations had tailed off due to the pandemic lockdown. Organizers called it the May 16th Miracle, and the whole effort was put together in less than three weeks via social media and the now ubiquitous Zoom.
The Miracle”¦ was just one person’s idea.
It was not a government initiative, it wasn’t put together by a big non-profit organization, and it had no budget for publicity. One person saw that others were hurting, reached out to a few other people who would be able to recognize the same need, and this small group of people then put out the call to the community at large. And wow, did the community respond.
Even better, a neighbouring community was so inspired by the effort that they organized their own miracle and brought in even more donations for their food banks.
I took part in the May 16th Miracle as an area “˜captain,’ and the experience of collecting bag after bag of goods from my neighbours, and then joining the huge convoy en route to a makeshift warehouse has sustained me ever since. I’ve started noticing quiet success stories all over the place: the Facebook gardening group members giddily sharing pictures of the monarch caterpillars they’re now seeing in the gardens they’ve overhauled to include native species; the grassroots pressure that forced universities and other institutions to divest from oil and gas holdings; the proliferation of Pride rainbow crosswalks in even those most conservative of towns; colonial-era statues finally, finally coming down.
Yes, it’s 2020. No, we shouldn’t have to still be fighting these fights. But what you’re doing, however big or small your contribution, is working. Indeed, there wouldn’t be so much pushback if it weren’t.
Keep going. Double down if you can. It matters.
You matter.
BIO: Chandra Clarke (she/her) is the author of the Pundragon (available August 10), a cli-fi book disguised as a humorous fantasy. You can find her blog at www.chandrakclarke.com or say hi on Twitter at @chandraclarke.
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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"(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."
