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National Cherry Tart Day 2023
Okay, so this one’s a serious danger to my diet. National Cherry Tart Day is way too tempting for its own good.
Splitting Hairs
The differences between a tart, a pie and a quiche are a blur. ~Yotam Ottolenghi
Sometimes it’s not important to obsess about semantics. A tart is a variety of pie. A bundt is a variety of cake. Whatever, it’s all dessert.
I suppose it matters if you’re a baker or someone who’s obsessed with tarts as a favorite dessert. For most people, who cares?
Yes, it’s been a really long week in a series of particularly long-ass weeks. I’m tired and cranky. Thank God for weekends.
I need to crash and get some R&R. I imagine that’s a pretty universal feeling. The world is a lot these days.
All the better reason to savor the slow pace and relative calm of a weekend with few or no obligations like a sweet piece of Cherry Tart.
Mmm, Cherries
Cherry Tart – Bruno Albouze
I’m sure this thing would absolutely wreck my A1C, but so would a lot of even more innocuous dishes.
Fortunately, there are ways around the problem. Just eating the cherries raw or making the tart with sugar substitutes is an option.
Either way, the important thing is to simply enjoy something as a temporary escape from the daily grind.
What I really miss is the convenience of grabbing a teaberry milkshake. This is a pretty uncommon flavor, but it is a regional specialty where I live.
Fortunately, I got some teaberry extract that I can add to some sugar-free vanilla ice cream with a few drops of red food dye to get that distinctive teaberry shake experience.
Unfortunately, I haven’t worked out the right proportions yet. Getting too much extract in the mix is a bit jarring.
Another thing that I miss is a Red Bull. No, not the energy drink.
When I was growing up in Souderton, a local sandwich shop had a drink they called a Red Bull. It was essentially a red birch beer float. A scoop or two of vanilla ice cream in a big Styrofoam cup full of Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer.
It appears that this brand has a diet version. I’ll have to scare up a bottle and see if I can make a me-friendly Red Bull sometime.
Ripples And Reverberations
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. ~John Steinbeck
It’s true. Some things stay with you long after you’ve gone there and back again. Just ask Bilbo.
It’s also true of trips that don’t exactly count as vacations. There’s an iconic scene in one of my previous versions of The Sentinels: New Blood that I haven’t gotten back to in the current draft, but will be.
Actually, there are a handful of such scenes that I’ll need to get to as part of the story arc in the first book in the series. Since I decided to roll back to just before Tanda got her powers, it has changed the dynamic and pacing of the story.
After all, it’s a superhero story. That depends on action. It’s a given in the genre. Trying to pull off a primarily visual genre in prose is not impossible, but it requires more description than I’m used to providing. I tend to be dialogue heavy and comic books are generally more focused on the imagery.
Hey, I’m working on it.
My style of writing is based on transcribing the movie playing in my head. I know what it looks like because I can see it. That’s a mixed blessing. Since I can see it in my head, I seem to be taking it for granted that the reader will have the same idea.
The trick is knowing how much to provide.
I’ve heard some people say they want you to describe every flower and flourish in the design of the wallpaper in your imagined room.
I’ve heard some people who say it’s more or less up to the reader to paint those details in for themselves.
If I say the characters are in a cafe, a pizzeria, an office or a shabby apartment, I think most people have their own idea of what that looks like to them.
I don’t know if it’s that important that the pizzeria has a particular decor feature like brass rails, plastic grapevines or plastic lampshades that are made to look like stained glass.
I think it would only matter if it actually mattered specifically in the story.
Does the booth have wooden seats or stuffed vinyl cushions? Who actually cares? Unless the characters do, for some reason, I can’t believe that it actually matters.
A shoe store, a police station, a hospital room? To me, all of these are relatively self-explanatory. That’s all the description I feel the need to provide unless there is some detail that is specifically needed for a scene.
Did someone fall and clip their head on a nearby shelf? I’d better mention that there’s a shelf so people aren’t confused when somebody knocks their head on it.
Fortunately, I’ve got my groovy little PDF reader app on the phone. I can listen to the story as written and hear the gaps in detail.
I’m still biased toward minimalism and by the fact that I still have that mental movie image associated with the scene.
I can see it even though I did not describe it.
That’s a bit of a blind spot (despite the vivid visuals in my head) in my descriptive writing.
Another issue is that some AuthorTubers like to go on about ruthlessly reducing your word count. As King of the Run-On Sentences, I am averse to trimming certain phrases. This mostly because it’s how I believe I need to convey the idea.
Sure, I can use ProWritingAid to hammer my prose down to a 3rd Grade reading level. Some people think that’s desirable.
I think it’s a bridge too far.
There needs to be some middle ground between mass market ease of consumption and actual craft. I’m not convinced that playing to the least common denominator is the way to go.
Some day when I’m farther along with the book and I can afford a professional editor, it will be a topic of discussion.
That’s not now.
Right now, I just need to get the book done and see how that leads me to the rest of the series.
That’s my take on the end of a dreadfully long, exhausting week. Hopefully, there’s some relief on the horizon.