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National Chocolate Chip Day 2024
As a sweet Hump 🐪 Day diversion, today is National Chocolate Chip Day and I’m okay with that.
A Little Bit Of Sweet
Chocolate is not cheating! After a salty meal, you need a little bit of sweet. This is living, not cheating. ~Ali Landry
They’re like teeny-weeny little Hershey Kisses. You can put them in your cookies, your muffins, your cakes, your sundaes or you can just munch them like penny candy.
Who doesn’t like Chocolate Chips? Well, my blood sugar doesn’t like Chocolate Chips and a lot of other things I used to consume in mass quantities.
As with many other things, there are sugar-free chocolate chips. Even so, I maintain a more moderate consumption of even sugar-free items than I did when I was younger and more resilient.
That being said, chocolate simply makes life better, so I’m glad there’s a sugar-free version available.
My blood sugar was a bit too high at my procedure on Monday, so I’ll have to dial up the veggies and cut down on the sugar-free treats for the foreseeable future.
It’s hard enough to lose weight when you’re sitting around beating keys for a living, so I might as well not sabotage myself by eating like Augustus Gloop.
Chocolate Chips!!!
How to make Homemade chocolate Chips using cocoa powder
The funny thing about chocolate chips (or white chocolate chips or butterscotch chips, etc) is that we’re so used to buying them in little packages from the grocery store. They mysteriously appear from a factory somewhere, somehow in these funny little molten cone shapes.
Did you know you can make them yourself? Even the sugar-free kind…
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DIY is always an option, but you can’t beat the convenience of buying a package of these baking or snacking staples. If you ever wondered how the factory can crank out an infinite supply of these tiny treats, there is (of course) a machine for that.
How Chocolate Chips Are Made-Chocolate Factory-Chocolate Chips Depositing Machine
Things That Were Never Done Before
Whether it’s the experiments on ‘MythBusters’ or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I’ve regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate. ~Adam Savage
That’s a lot of what I do for my day job. As much as we don’t want to proliferate tons of unmanageable custom code, we do sometimes treat our customers to a little sugar coating.
As far as the writing goes, every writer would like to think we’re doing something that’s never been done before. To an extent, that’s absolutely true.
While there’s nothing new under the sun and you can say that every story is a version of some core narrative or even a discreet narrative, each version is always shaped by the teller.
In fact, it’s often said that a great way to pitch a book to a traditional publishing house is to indicate an identifiable mashup. It’s Harry Potter meets The Matrix. It’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears meets the Power Rangers. It’s Romeo & Juliet in WWII IndoChina.
Even so, the very fact that you’re pitching that kind of mashup makes it completely original. Even if you propose the exact same mashup as a dozen other writers, your version will have something that the others do not.
You are unique, therefore (unless you’re completely plagiarizing) your take on a story concept will be shaped by your unique perspective, life experience and skill in writing.
That’s as sweet as a wheelbarrow full of chocolate chips.
My ideas are as unique as can reasonably be expected. Are there common elements with other existing properties? How could there not be? This is how genres are determined.
By having certain plot points, character interactions, set pieces, theme, tone and whatever else, you can tell this is fantasy, that’s historical romance and the other thing is a classic Whodunit.
You can only be so unique. There are people and maybe cats or dogs in a lot of stories. Maybe the people fight each other or maybe they’re bound in common cause against some environmental circumstance like a hurricane, a forest fire, a plane crashed high in the mountains or a tidal wave. That’s all been done a zillion times.
And yet, people read or watch these things again and again and again.
The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic (y’all, there was room on that damn door) and Speed 2: Cruise Control are all just cruise ship disaster flicks, but they are completely different from each other.
At the surface level, they’re just cruise ship disaster flicks.
Skin deep, they’re completely different in time period, characters, locations, plot basics.
Deep dive, they’re so different that you could barely compare them.
So, don’t get hung up on whether or not your work is original. It simultaneously is and is not.
Sure, that sounds disheartening but it shouldn’t be. The important thing is that you do you.
Only you can write your story your way. Just do it.
That’s our sweet detour. I’ve got errands to run today, so I wish you a wonderful Wednesday and a sprinkling of chocolate chips.