How I spent the last three days. Layers: chocolate/brownie cake, chocolate mousse, raspberry mousse, chocolate ganache drip topping, raspberries and flake salt garnish. It took three days because the mousse layers have to chill overnight to set up before applying the next layer. As always, if there's interest I'll post the recipe later. Getting the ganache to drip down the sides was a little tricky. |
That's amazing, Max. You could do these cakes professionally! |
Nice Cake!! |
Are you a professional baker? This cake is a masterpiece. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ |
We're hosting my local writing group tonight, so I spent yesterday afternoon making four-layer brownies for the meeting. If there's interest, I'll post a recipe. |
My good friend Alex Morgan has let me collaborate with him on a mystery novel in his psionic corps series. It's due out soon, so here's a cover reveal. It was a blast working with him, and there's at least one more of these in the works. |
Dave Ryan - I think every collaboration is different. There are many prior books in this series which belongs to Alex, so he was the lead author and his opinions were determinative. I've been his beta-reader on several of the prior works, so I was at least familiar with the basics. We took turns writing chapters, with Alex more or less setting the "next steps" in the invesitgation with a little kibitizing from me along the way. I've tried collaborating before, without success, at least at fiction. (I collaborated a lot in my mathematics research.) Alex and I seemed to be perfectly synchronized, especially on characterizations. With earlier attempts, it was like the characters in my head were strangers to the characters in my co-author's head. That made it really hard to collaborate, but Alex and I seem to think alike and to conjure the same characters. |
It's been a while since I've posted a recipe, so here goes. This one is for a cilantro lime sauce and tuna sashimi. The "sauce" is more like what you'd get from a Japanese sushi chef who had only a verbal description of guacamole. In fact, Mr. Gene used it as a dip for corn chips and even he liked it! |
A picture of today's eclipse taken with my flip phone. It's blurry and doesns't do justice to the experience. There were a few high-altitude, hazy clouds, but we had a terrific view. We could even see Baily's beads--little beads of light at the rim of eclipse during totality that are due to sunlight shining through mountains on the moon. We had a great view from the backyard of the B&B my daughter rented in Dallas. Well worth the trip. My second total eclipse, and third overall. |
That's mind-boggling – an almost unreal shot! So glad you got to see that. The first and only (partial) eclipse I've seen so far was 1999 at home in Germany, short before my 16th birthday. We extra bought those weird UV plastic glasses. |
That's cool! I was in Southern New Jersey. We only had ~87% totality. Still with the protective lenses it was quite the sight. Thank you for sharing this picture! |
Updated my webpage this morning, attaching Amazon links to the covers of in-print titles back on the front page. Amazon used to provide a graphic link that included the book's cover, but they helpfully eliminated that feature last December. Now all they give you is a short link to the title's listing. Anyway, I uploaded the covers of my in-print books and used the now-text-only link to their listings on Amazon. The new page is here , in case anyone is interested. Clicking on the covers opens the full-graphics Amazon page for their listing in a new browser window. The difference is that the cover itself is now stored on my website instead of Amazon's. Most users won't notice the difference. More in the "in case anyone is interested" category: the old graphic link that Amazon used to provide used an HTML command (<iframe>) which lets web page designers embed and execute code from an external website. This opens a potential security hole which hackers could exploit, and so it gets flagged by most browsers. Thus, I guess the "new way" is better, or at least doesn't generate warnings when people try to view the page. |
Nixie - It's when you get toward the end of Act Two, and everything starts to look like crap and you're bored with the characters and plot. There are ways to push beyond it, but they're not always successful--at least for me. |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 -Oh, I understood the meaning of that phrase. I thought it was clever. Recognizing when it's time to abandon characters and plot saves inner turmoil. |
Believe it or not, short story writers fall victim to the middle muddle as well, LOL It just happens earlier in the grand scheme of things. I love your term for it and I will definitely be using it! |
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Dear Max,
Please join me as I tumble Down The Rabbit Hole. |
This is my final entry in response to the challenge posted in "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . While this may make you want to sing Hallejuh , I hope instead you "Get Happy" I hope you've enjoyed this sequence of blogs as much as I've enjoyhed writing them. In any case, I hope you all get happy!!! |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I wonder how many performers were in that reprisal of Hallelujah that you initially posted. Hundreds? |
Nixie - I'd say a couple hundred, at least. I actually heard a peformance of the Messiah in the Morman Tabernacle a week before Christmas. It was, I think, 1984 or 1985, and I'd given a mathematics talk at BYU that week. My host took me to the performance. It was awesome. |
One last song today for "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . This one is Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" |
A fourth, and final, song for today in "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . This one is "Over the Rainbow" . |