Lynn Strong

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  • Ranveer, The Next Book, and The Dagobah Swamp Ramen

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    I’m working on getting Haroun and the Study of Mischief ready for publication — that isn’t the book I thought was coming next! But it went from 0 to 60 in 8 madcap days over spring break for the Cozy Quill Pitchfest, and then I had a finished standalone book! And I’m still figuring out what to do with its existence now that I know more of what I should have done before Chai and Cat-tales.

    (Chai and Charmcraft is still coming! It’s just probably not coming first.)

    So I was chatting with my editor Dove this morning, and we got to talking about the implications of italicizing non-English words, what happens when different characters speak or don’t speak multiple languages, and Ranveer.

    The conversation about italicizing non-English words gets extra complicated when you have native speakers of at minimum three different languages as narrators! If you’ve noticed that I italicized court-sourced words like shahzada and phirni and habibti, but I didn’t italicize chai and dal and haldi and sahib? The reason for that is that the “common” language of Tel-Bastet considers those words native to itself. And on the other hand Rahat is speaking the court language when he calls Ashar ya majid, ya rafiq, ya hasan. From Ashar’s point of view, he doesn’t exactly know what those courtly poet-words mean either, but he knows chai, and he knows dal.

    And then we get to Ranveer, who speaks the common language, has frantically studied spellbooks written in the court language, has probably never heard it spoken, and didn’t actually realize that the court wizards didn’t write down the minor details like vowels in their spells or their records.

    Ranveer is the self-taught student of life who can’t afford a university, who’s trying out the word “visionary” for a job title on the business cards that don’t exist in Tel-Bastet. He already discarded “alchemist” when his landlady threatened to end his lease if his acid pots gnawed any more holes in her floors or ceilings or building foundations. And “inventor” has the unfortunate implication that people would expect the things he creates to actually, you know, work.

    Ranveer is as close to a teenaged self-insert as I’ve ever come in fiction. In this day-and-time he would absolutely be a queer theater kid who loves cats and books and magic of both the theatrical and the literal kind. He would have improvised his flight spells by running the magic-and-court-language lyrics of “Defying Gravity” through Google Translate and coming up with something that he knows can’t possibly have the right number of vowels in it, but he can’t translate the spellbook for himself and he doesn’t know any fancy court-trained magicians and he really desperately wants to know so many things he hasn’t got a teacher for.

    That’s how I started osmosing Japanese five years before I had access to lessons, and how I started cooking things I’d read the descriptions of before there was an Internet, let alone any English language authentic cookbooks (as opposed to the 1950s-housewife-with-extra-Jello don’t-worry-it’ll-be-fiiiiiine cookbooks) that would be available in my small rural area. The thing I invented that I thought was supposed to be something like yakisoba was actually more like lower-fish-sauced pad thai. I didn’t know that for several more years, until I finally got the chance to see and taste the real thing.

    But on the culinary front, my all time winner of the Honorary Ranveer Prize for Jumping Up And Down On The End of the Loveseat Hanging Out The Fifth Story Window and Figuring Out The Flight Spell On the Way Down? That wasn’t the burnt Kool-aid, because the burnt Kool-aid was never technically meant as food. The Honorary Ranveer Prize Winner was Dagobah Swamp Ramen.

    I feel like I can poke fun at Ranveer more than my other characters because I have been there and done that. Before there was commercial Internet, I wanted to know things from other places so badly, and there wasn’t a way to get there, and there wasn’t a way to find a teacher in the tiny rural nowheresville town I lived in. So I had books. Sometimes they were in languages I didn’t read. So I taught myself how to read languages I couldn’t speak in order to read more books, because the library usually had starting language-learning books for languages that we didn’t have teachers for — and remember, this was before the Internet, this was before YouTube.

    Now it is so much easier to learn languages from real people who speak that language! Now it is so much easier to meet people from around the world from wherever you are! Now it is just a few clicks to watch other languages’ media and have them translated and start osmosing the way the language works! But as a queer, neurodivergent, theater-kid outcast in the 1980s in the middle of uber-conservative rural nowhere? I didn’t know that queer and autistic (and even not-conservative) were things I could be. I just knew that I didn’t fit anywhere with anyone, and not even the teachers were safe.

    So I had books. On paper, without a search function!

    Throughout history, education has been hard to get. And for many people it’s still hard and expensive to get formal education, even if the informal education for the dangerously self-motivated like Ranveer and me has gotten easier.

    So, here and now with the resources I have, I am all about talking to real people who live different lives and have different experiences. And while I was physically able to do it, I was also all about experimental archaeology: learning what it was like to sleep in a tent made of cloth held up with sticks instead of super modern ultraengineered performance plastics, learning how long it took to weave your own clothes and cook your own food, learning the hard way how likely it was I would have died before I turned 5 thanks to the array of lung problems exacerbated by camping in canvas tents that were likely mold vectors. Learning By Experience “like you do,” right?

    I remember being Ranveer. I remember that if I had had a way to stick a loveseat out my bedroom window and escape, I would have done it even if I didn’t know whether the flight spell was going to work until gravity took hold and I was on the way down. I remember being that hungry for knowledge, that hungry for freedom.

    I only made it about 40 miles, but that was far enough to get to a university with a community and friends that have changed my life.

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen is the product of the first year in that university town, where they had six international grocery stores! And dozens of international restaurants! And eight libraries! And so many books I had a crisis of the soul knowing I could never manage to read them all in my life.

    I was free for the first time in my life. My life was my own for the first time ever. But I had never been the only person in charge of my life before, either. I had never lived alone in an apartment with no meal plan, bills in my own name, no savings, and no one to ask for help when the oven broke and your landlord refused to fix it.

    (The landlord refused to fix it for the next decade. I moved out before he fixed it.)

    I was a theater kid with more intellect than common sense, and admitting failure would mean I had to move back in with the family of magats and do the socially expected thing for the gender I was assigned at birth, and so failure was not an option.

    So I taught myself to rewire the broken electric stove to get one of the burners working. And it didn’t catch fire, which was a win!

    And I bought a rice cooker, because I knew Japanese food didn’t depend on ovens. I lived for ten years with one working burner and a rice cooker and all the ovenless Japanese recipes I could try to recreate.

    During part of that ten years I actually had a foray into semiprofessionally teaching cooking classes, as in people paid me to teach them how to make things you could eat. After all, if I could make things edible with one burner and one rice cooker, I could probably help university students feed themselves in similarly disreputable apartments (with possibly the same landlord).

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you go to an international grocery store where everything is labeled in the appropriate language for its country of origin, and you don’t read enough of that language yet, because a lot of it was Korean rather than Japanese. And you kind of guess based on what you can see through the packaging, and you buy things that you think you might know what they are, and you take it home to try to figure out how to make it edible because the restaurants were too expensive for everyday and the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. (This is also how I lived on lima bean not-quite-curry not-quite-salad for several weeks.)

    Oh, and the key part: Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you recognize that nori is seaweed from having seen it on sushi. But you do not recognize the difference between nori and konbu. And you did not know that more than one kind of seaweed was edible. But you had your bag of groceries and your rice cooker and one working stove burner, and a whole lot of determination to make it work somehow.

    I’m still really hella motivated to make it work somehow. If you need help figuring out how to make food suit what your dietary needs are and your physical capabilities are, I am what happens when you combine really wild ingenuity with really limited capacity, so let’s brainstorm.

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen*

    *Honestly, not recommended.

    But I guarantee Ranveer would have made this if he lived in an era with university students, grocery stores, ramen, and nori.

    • One package of some kind of noodles that you can’t read the label on, but which look like they’re about the right thickness and waviness?
    • One package nori — you can’t read the label on this either but it’s got a picture of being wrapped around rice, that’s gotta mean it’s seaweed, and seaweed is seaweed, right?
      • If this is a small rectangular package of nori in Korean, it might even have sesame oil already applied! Flavor bonus!
    • Some green onions or chives if you can find them, no worries if you can’t
      • If you have some dried or frozen small-cut vegetables, this is an opportunity for ~*~*~nutrition~*~*~ too
    • Flavor splurge: Some sesame seeds or a container of sesame oil that is actually labeled in a language you speak**
      • **and also does not have a picture of a chili pepper on it, speaking of Learned By Experience
    • An egg, if it’s not too expensive
    • Some soy sauce — this does come labeled in a language you can read, probably, and might be left over from a restaurant takeout
    • A sugar packet or two, possibly left over from having ordered tea with your takeout
    • A bouillon cube maybe?
      • Or maybe your noodle packet has something silver in it, and when you open it and sniff it it hasn’t burned out all your nose hairs?
    • One working burner
    • One pot
    • One bowl, spoon optional
    • ~*~*~Determination~*~*~

    Get some water boiling in your pot on your burner.

    Cook the noodles and any available vegetables until pulling a noodle out and blowing on it and tasting it suggests it’s cooked.

    If you’ve gotten hold of an egg, crack it in and stir it through so it will kind of cook and shred on the way. (It will not look attractive. There is a reason we have called this Dagobah Swamp Ramen.)

    Eyeball the difference between the size of your pot and the size of your intended bowl, and tip out some of the boiling water so it’s reasonably likely to fit.

    Add a spoonful or so of soy sauce, a sugar packet or two (otherwise known as 1-2 tsp), and whatever tastes right for any variety of sesame you may have acquired.

    Stir and taste.

    If it needs more flavor, cautiously sprinkle or crumble in your bouillon or ramen packet until you hit a good balance between flavor and oh-my-gods-salt-lick.

    Brace yourself.

    Open the package of nori.

    Crumble some of it into the soup pot, and watch in horror as it disintegrates into green slime.

    Apply contents of pot to bowl. Make sure the burner is turned off.

    Eat, and taste ~*~*~determination~*~*~.

    (It may taste better with your eyes closed.)

  • Paperbacks and Pickles

    So, uh, it’s been…

    yeah, it’s. Uh. Insert the thousand yard stare here.

    Setting aside the dumpster fire… I seem to have a finite capacity for word generation, much of which has been soaked by work, organizing efforts, required social media, and required newsletters. Oh, and also in April I lost my restraint and kinda wrote 50,000 words in 8 days. It doesn’t look like it was chosen for the pitchfest I was hoping for, but I have a first draft and hope that I can polish it enough to get it out this year? It’s not Chai and Charmcraft, that one seems to be requiring all three books to be written in unison in order to make the prophecies work. But it’s got familiar characters from Chai and Cat-tales, and I sincerely hope that I can get one or the other published by October?

    Anyhow, I am scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer more than usual. So here’s the current bookish news and the recipe!

    The paperback news:

    Chai and Cat-tales now has a paperback edition available from Amazon thanks to Joan Grey’s kind Seeing-Eye Human services of cover wrangling!

    I’m sorry it’s only Amazon, in the current situation, but Amazon continues to be 98% of my sales. I have not sorted out the complex interdependencies needed to get paperbacks available in other locations, but the ebooks cdo ontinue to be available everywhere. I’m doing as much as I can, I promise. But I figure more people would rather have a new book written than to have the rest of my spoons going into small business bureaucracy.

    (Celia Lake has a helpful explainer on the ins and outs of indie publishing in various venues. The short form: The more venues you add, the more micro-differences you have to manage, sometimes one at a time, sometimes via different stacking platforms’ dependencies. I added itch.io under pressure a month ago and still can’t get paid from there. And the time I spend on juggling infrastructure is time I’m not making or editing new words.)

    The Cozy the Day Away Sale May 16:

    Looking for more cozies, whether ebook, paperback, audiobook, or cuneiform tablets* ? The Cozy the Day Away sale is back! On May 16, check out https://cozyfantasysale.promisepress.org for at least 70 and possibly over 100 cozy fantasies on sale in as many formats as we can manage.

    (*Note: cuneiform tablets not yet dug up, but who knows, weirder stuff has happened this year already, I am not counting anything out at this point)

    The recipe: Quick pickles

    I have lost track of which of the historic cookbooks I first saw “oh wow, that looks like my mother’s pickle recipe” in, but when scratching my brain for something to quick-recipe for a blog post, quick pickles made the top of my list.

    There’s a fundamental difference between quick pickles (meant to be refrigerated and eaten within a week-ish) and preservation pickles (with sterilized jars and sealing and carefully calculated chemistry). I sure don’t have the spare wattage for carefully calculated chemistry and pressure canning right now, but quick pickles of many species are delicious, and they’re all over the world.

    I learned the basic version at home when I was about 8 and we were having summer picnics with the cousins, but every time I look around I find more variations on the same theme, ranging from Mediterranean areas like Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey to Vietnam to Japan, and bouncing back and forth in time.

    The general idea:

    • One part vinegar
      (white, apple cider, and red wine may benefit from dilution; rice vinegar probably wouldn’t need diluting)
    • Zero to one part water depending on how sharp you like the liquid
    • A pinch of salt
    • Sugar if you like a sweet note in your pickles
    • Additional spices to taste: Sumac, black pepper, lemon rind, mustard seeds, anything that sounds tasty

    The process:

    • Chop up a bunch of vegetables
      • Cucumber and onion are classic together
      • If you use a red onion, sumac, and/or a pre-pickled beet you can get a lovely pink color.
      • Carrots, radishes, daikon, and cabbage have all seen use in various places and times
      • If you’re feeling fancy, you can heat up the brine to pour it over and soften the vegetables, or you can blanch the vegetables and put them in the cooled brine
    • Throw them in your vinegar brine.
      • You want enough brine for your vegetables to be covered in a glass jar or to float in a bowl. Depending on how many veg and how big a bowl, your “one part” measuring unit could be one to three cups of vinegar and water.
    • Leave the vegetables in the brine for at least half an hour if your intended meal is that day, but overnight in the fridge lets them mellow together.
    • Eat within a few days. Refrigerate when not eating.
    • Bonus mini-recipe: A half cup to a cup of your brine with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of sugar makes a tasty pasta salad when you add cooked pasta and cherry tomatoes to any leftover quick pickles.

    Sorry for the delay, friends, this year has been A Lot. I’ll try not to let it go six months between posts next time…

  • Cozy the Day Away and Lassi Nog

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    So, wow, it’s been a year, hasn’t it. I’m still trying not to think about 2025.

    If anyone else out there is in need of an introvert break between big holiday events, I think Karryn was pretty brilliant with the timing of the last Cozy the Day Away sale this year, which is happening tomorrow when I’m writing this (aka Dec. 29)

    In the general lull between big events? Check.

    Introverts wanting recharge time before the next round of big energy events? Check.

    Some folks with gift cards they’d like to find joy with? Check.

    Some folks in need of respite for the soul after too many sharp edged family or other encounters? Hoo boy, check.

    So yeah, if you need a bit of escape time on the 29th, check out the sale.

    I also sold another story that’s coming out next July! And I’ve got about 42,000 of what I’m guessing will be about 60,000 to 80,000 words written on the first book of the trilogy, with some wild ambition to try to finish a first draft in January. Not sure if that’s going to happen, but knock wood?

    When putting together the playlist for Shai Madhur’s mouse party with Emily Goss on Bluesky, I encountered the notion that it’s possible I’m the first person to put together the idea of egg nog and lassi? I’ve found egg nog, eggless nog, and, uh, I wish I was kidding about celery nog.

    But egg nog was hard to find this year — it looks like electing an orange fascist actually does nothing to miraculously lower the price of eggs, increase the availability of egg products, or solve the avian flu pandemic spreading among agricultural birds and cattle, go figure.

    I can still find yogurt, though. And people who are less allergic to corn than I am could have easy mode eggless nog with Bird’s custard powder. I do miss Bird’s, it was delicious when I could still eat it.

    So for folks who can handle either egged or corn-starch-having eggless nog, Ranveer Brar has a video with both varieties.

    Here’s my egg-free and corn-free lassi nog for the rest of us.

    Lassi Nog

    For each cup:

    • 1/2 to 1 cup sweet vanilla yogurt (or regular yogurt plus 2-3 drops vanilla and simple syrup to taste)
    • 1/8 tsp cinnamon
    • 1/8 tsp nutmeg
    • A few threads of saffron
    • A few drops of rum extract or brandy extract if you want familiar flavor without the alcohol
    • 1 Tbsp water (plus extra water or milk to thin the texture… or a shot of brandy if you prefer)

    Start the saffron soaking in 1 Tbsp water while preparing the rest.

    Put some yogurt in a container with spare stirring room and stir until soft and blended.

    Add in your cinnamon, nutmeg, and chosen extracts or alcohol, then stir through.

    When the saffron water has turned golden, stir it in as well. (Usually I would recommend grinding saffron into sugar for hot chai, but I’m not confident the sugar would dissolve well in cold yogurt. If anyone tries it that way, let me know.)

    At this point, assess the drinkability of your beverage and decide if you’d like it thinner (more water/milk/alcohol) or thicker (more yogurt).

    If you’re patient, refrigerate it for a few hours to let the cinnamon and nutmeg meld in.

    When ready to serve, grate a bit more nutmeg on top of the glass.

    I am not patient and it smells delicious, so I drank mine straight away. (Clearly I will need to experiment with larger batches for leftovers.)

  • Book Launch and Mouse Party!

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    Whew.

    (If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the Big Parties this time of year, you’re not alone. Here’s a very Small Party for whatever level of ambition you feel like.)

    I’m both delighted by Chai and Cat-tales and also exhausted before the marathon even properly starts.

    I severely underestimated how much small business bureaucracy, research, form filling, and other administration would be involved in not just publishing a book but in fighting my way through at least a dozen sets of “yes this is actually me” autoresponse systems when trying to claim an author identity with a common name. I have not conquered all the paperwork, but I have gotten the essentials through.

    So, it’s available now!

    I am slowly assembling the trappings of a small business professional, also known as social media presence, a contact form, a newsletter, and a wide array of advertising venues that want me to pay them exponentially more money than I have taken in at this point, which, hahahaha oops.

    Someday I’m going to need to break the habit of feeling like I need to post a recipe with every blog post! But that day is apparently not today, because I would also like to squee about how much fun I had making the chapter art for Chai and Cat-tales.

    ETA, I also just found the chef Shai Madhur needs to hire for his tiny mouse festivals. Tiny katori and kadai and thali! Tiny charcoal cook stove! Tiniest fryer for papad and puri! Approximately one tablespoon of dal and a spice container the size of a pillbox.

    I am very weak to tiny adorable things…

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uZUiFadIWCI

    Since I can’t see well enough to use a pencil anymore, and since the thought of AI art or writing makes my soul break out in hives, my on best bet for art is what I can remember of Photoshop from about 25 years ago, plus a Depositphotos standard license for art that authors and creators are allowed to remix and use professionally. This particular image came from assembling about 5-6 pieces of licensed stock line art over several hours of squinting at previews and careful composite editing.

    A delighted mouse squeaks with enthusiasm for Shai Madhur's mouse-sized feast of rice and treats on a banana leaf with a little walnut shell diya lamp burning.

    In “The Potter’s Dream,” one of the three novellas in Chai and Cat-tales, Shai Madhur is tasked with trying to keep the mice out of the grain, and despite the fact that he lives in the Temple of Bastet, he’s just not good at un-welcoming anything, even the mice. So he prayed over a festival meal for the mice and made a little mandala of grain and pigments to see where they went afterwards.

    The mice, of course, very helpfully left brightly pigment-colored footprints all over the grain sacks once they’d finished receiving his blessings and his festival meal.

    In a different fantasy, the mice would have been obediently willing to go the other direction. But I’ve had a few too many difficulties convincing mice that no they really did not want to be in a house with both me and a cat who grew up wild and still had no qualms at all about mouse-hunting.

    (I had qualms about his mouse-hunting. For many years my cat seemed determined to repeatedly and not-very-patiently teach me, his clearly hunting-impaired provider of dry crunchy cat food, what was necessary to do to turn mice into juicy tasty food. The mice were persistently stupid enough to keep providing my mighty little hunter with educational materials for his hunt-reluctant human.)

    My mighty hunter has since crossed over to hunt the mice in kitty heaven. But I’m still as little inclined as Shai Madhur to hurt the mice myself. (And I adore that mouse in the art beyond all reason.)

    So I’m crossing a couple streams here with the intersection of Japanese furikake and onigiri and Middle Eastern za’atar, because I think the temple mice would approve.

    The Mouse’s Festival

    • Either 3/4 to 1 1/2 cups (1 or 2 rice cooker portions) of uncooked rice, or leftover rice from takeout
    • Shai Nanda’s lemon-rubbed cheese, if she will give you the recipe, or some feta sprinkled with olive oil and lemon juice
    • Any additional protein of your choice (beef, chicken, falafel…)
    • Your choice of any convenient and tasty mezze: hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouli, dal, olives, dates, dolma, whatever you enjoy
    • Your choice of za’atar, furikake, or mixed herbs
      • If you don’t have pre-made za’atar at hand, but you do have sumac, thyme, oregano, and sesame seeds: Mixing about 1 Tbsp of each of them together and toasting them for a couple minutes in a warm dry pan, then adding a sprinkle of salt, gets you za’atar. But Penzey’s za’atar is also tasty and I like supporting the Resistance.

    Rice:

    • If you want to shape your sushi rice, you’ll want to cook short grain sushi rice fresh. It will hold together in filled balls with ingredients tucked in the middle and/or sprinkles on the outside.
    • If you don’t care about shaping it, you can use long grain jasmine or basmati, or anything leftover from takeout.

    Other ingredients:

    • If you have finger bowls or katori from thali or other cute small containers, plate up your protein and mezze with them. If not, you could use lettuce leaves or nori squares or just dot them wherever you like.

    Time to eat:

    • If you have a banana leaf, set it out.
    • If you don’t, get a fancy plate or bamboo mat or something that makes you feel festive. Small bowls are fun and mouse-friendly too.
    • If you like rice balls filled with tasty stuff, take fresh-cooked sushi rice and tuck your protein in the middle and shape it. (If your hands are heat sensitive, you can get an assist from a quick swipe of olive oil in a teacup, then use the teacup as a mold. If you feel particularly festive, you could use silicone muffin molds or even flowers.)
    • If shaping rice balls is too much fuss, cook or reheat whatever rice you’ve got. You can entertain your inner mouse with teacups of rice covered with assorted nibbles and sprinkles with less hand scorching.
    • Sprinkle your za’atar or furikake on your rice and anything it looks tasty with, for a nod toward the mouse dance party.

    Other delicious stuff to do with za’atar:

    • Sprinkle on Greek yogurt for quick simple and tasty veggie or bread dips
    • Blend with olive oil and toast on pita or saj
    • Sprinkle on pizza (especially when there are olives and grilled onions involved)

  • Coming in December: The Childless Cat Lady’s Tale, and a new book

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    The night before the election, when I hadn’t slept for two days from pain from both the literal stormfront and the pressure of what was hanging over the world, I asked my friend Celia Lake for a sanity check on how crazy it might be to try to publish a book before the end of the year.

    I thought she’d say “settle down, that’s not realistic.”

    Instead, Celia thought about it for a minute, and said, “I think you could make that timeline if you have the text by Thanksgiving, and I could format it for you in about half an hour.”

    I really needed that. I still need that.

    (Celia, if you see this, thank you so much for giving me something to hold on to.)

    I knew when Biden dropped out in July that Kamala wasn’t going to win.

    I’d hoped for a few weeks that the country might surprise me. That the mad red hatters wouldn’t actually all crawl out from under the rocks to make sure the smart, joyful, competent brown woman lost to a doddering, demented old fascist because they were all going to put the uppity woman in her place.

    There have only been two other times in my life when I’ve wanted so desperately to be wrong about what I saw coming.

    Unfortunately, I was right all three times, no matter how badly I’d wanted to be wrong.

    (I really feel for Rahat, who is the type of prophet who foresees the dangers that other people don’t see, and who can’t always stop himself from knowing things he doesn’t want to know.)

    I did not have time to write an entire novella of cozily vindictive witches-vs-the-patriarchy wrath in a week where I was numb with grief and scrambling to keep it together and also organizing a whole conference.

    I didn’t have time or energy to spare but it came pouring out of my hands anyway.

    I didn’t want a brown woman’s victory over the forces of the patriarchy to be the most unrealistic part of a fantasy with cursed spellbooks and flying carpets and shapechanging cats. But here we are.

    And I love Najra. She’s the smart, scheming, ambitious, asexual, book-loving witch-archivist part of me has always wished I could be. (If it weren’t for the fact that I’m also much more like Rahat, soft and fat and anxious and not at all neurotypical and fretting over whether or not I’ve kept the required mask in place well enough for the necessary public performances. Not to mention the foreseeing things I really wish I didn’t. )

    So Najra is going into the book, and Priye is going into the book too, and so is Shai Madhur, the gentle priest who feeds even the granary mice, because everyone is welcome.

    I’m hoping to set up a pre-order for December 21 or 22, and then to be able to tie in to Karryn’s cozy sale on the 29th.

    I’m going to see if I can post about each of the novellas between now and then too. If nothing else, I’ve got to polish the blurbs. (And, since this is me, shorten them too.)

    Also since this is me, here’s a recipe.

    Najra’s Crimson Witch’s Brew

    • 2 cups hot water
    • 1 tsp dried hibiscus flowers
    • 1 tsp dried rose flowers
    • 2 green cardamom pods, cracked open and the black seeds pulverized
    • (Optional) A few drops of screwpine, which also sounds properly witchy, but if you don’t have it a few drops of Rooh Afza or rosewater will do
    • 1/4 tsp sumac (optional, but if you’re feeling exceptionally sour, go for it)
    • Simple syrup (half and half water and sugar)

    Steep the flowers and spices, covered, for about five to ten minutes, while muttering imprecations about the patriarchy.

    Taste the brew straight. Make a sour witch face as needed.

    Get determined to grab your own damn happy ending, at least for this cup.

    Add 1/2 tsp at a time of your simple syrup, stir, and taste again.

    When you’ve determined what level of sweetness brings you joy, note it down in your spellbook.

    Or if you hate everything in the universe (including sharp-edged tisanes) right now, go pour out the cup over a weed you’d like to kill. Then consider opening the nearest bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon instead.

  • Cozy Fantasy sale, birthday wishes, and a bouquet of beverages

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    I got a week mostly off this week, which is pretty astounding. I have been so burned out at work that it’s coming out in my writing– I’m currently writing about the priests of Upaja, one of whom is so ferociously devoted to his calling that it took, in the words of one of the junior priests, “both an actual conspiracy and an act of God to get him to take any time for himself.”

    (Yes, I do resemble that remark. In my case the act of God was a hurricane. I am not unaware of irony.)

    So I was absolutely delighted to discover Karryn Nagel’s next Cozy Fantasy sale is July 12 (tomorrow when I’m writing this), because it also happens to be my birthday.

    What are you going to do for your birthday? a lot of my co-workers asked.

    Many people do know I’m disabled, but not how much. Like Rahat, I do have years of experience in masking.

    So I borrowed Ashar’s skill in telling the truth through exquisitely angled language that doesn’t mention the words you can’t afford for some people to hear.

    I told them I was going to unplug from everything and curl up with a lot of really excellent ebooks.

    Which is also, conveniently, entirely true!

    And I know what they picture is nothing like what I live with. I tell my life stories that way intentionally. Like Ashar and Rahat, there are some things I just can’t afford to have spoken aloud in some people’s hearing.

    Karryn knows me better than many of my co-workers at this point. When I told her I was struggling with the PDF from the original sale in April, she asked how it could be more accessible.

    Hark, I hear my calling, I said.

    (Well, no. That’s what I wish I’d said. What I actually said was more along the lines of “so I am actually certified in accessible information design, I live and breathe WordPress 40 hours a week, and I’m 98% sure we can make you an author-managed accessible responsive category-filterable website for free in a subdomain?”)

    Karryn said, Awesome. Let’s do it.

    (Pretty sure she actually did say that.)

    So we did it!

    Tomorrow I am eagerly looking forward to putting my phone in airplane mode, uninstalling everything Microsoft ever made, shutting down all the notifications on my tablet, and, I hope, getting one blissful day of peace to browse alllllll the cozy fantasies.

    (One of my friends did the Great Unplugination for a week, and found the police breaking down his door on the third day because everyone he knew was so used to being able to ask his time and attention any hour of the day or night that they thought if he wasn’t immediately answering their every need he was either having a medical emergency or already dead. I learned from his experience to warn people before i turn off my own over-a-dozen always-on ping streams. The more you know! …did I mention how burned out I’ve been at work? Hahahahawhimper.)

    The Bouquet of Beverages

    My family knows I can’t read most print anymore and need dark mode with a lot of magnification, so they regularly give me Amazon gift certificates to help me convert my print library into ebooks I can read. And mostly I do get ebooks with them.

    But then I spotted the 14-flavor sampler of floral simple syrup concentrates were back in stock.

    When “this was out of stock for weeks before your birthday but just came back in stock” intersects with “no really I can officially use this for Research, I need to know all the flower flavors for rahat-al-hulqum recipe reasons, it is Research” intersects with “ooh pretty bottles” intersects with “birthday gift card” … yes, I am weak.

    My only regret is that it wasn’t back in stock in time to arrive by tomorrow for the Designated Day of Cozy.

    I am planning to try some of them in tea, some in seltzer, some in rahat al-hulqum, and some in microbatched sharbat that I will probably be acidifying with either an eye dropper or a 1/32 measure.

    Some of them do already have citric acid in them, though, so be careful not to use them in milk or lattes.

    I mean, not unless you want to experiment with homemade floral tea-cheese or coffee-cheese blends. I am an experimental cook but not quite that experimental!

  • Midsummer at the House of Jasmines

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    It’s Midsummer, the longest day of the year, and my jasmine plant is loving it. I, meanwhile, am looking for simple but cooling drinks when the lowest temperature for 3 weeks is 88 F and hot chai sounds much less appealing.

    I’d originally planned to write up a detailed history of sharbat and its descendants shrub and squash and switchel, with wanderings through syrup and sekanjabin and so on. But it’s been a crazy week at my paying job, with 8 of 10 people out at one time or another, and making up a proper sharbat takes more standing over the stove than I’ve been able to accomplish since before I became disabled. So I started looking for something that fit into today’s spoon drawer.

    Roughly speaking, sharbat involves making a thick flavored syrup with some acid and diluting it to taste. Sharbat e sekanjabin is one of the oldest, with mint and vinegar and sometimes cucumber, used either as the base of a beverage or as dipping sauce for lettuce in its thick form. Rose and pomegranate are both popular, saffron and sandalwood are both documented too, and once the notion made it to Europe you start getting into everything from basil to watermelon to carrots (no, really — they’re sweet!) If someone has made a trendy lemonade of it, there’s a good chance someone has made sharbat of it too.

    …well, maybe. I made shiso sharbat e sekanjabin the year the perilla tried to devour my whole garage. I don’t know if anyone has made shiso lemonade. But aside from that — sharbat, lemonade, and Kool-aid are all built on the same chassis: sugar, acid, flavorings, and no alcohol.

    This is me, and I named both Asharan bir Chameli and his House of Jasmines after my 20 year old Maid of Orleans jasmine plant. Which is currently vividly flowering! I picked a dozen flowers this morning while watering it.

    But when you’re going to make chameli ki sharbat / mogra ka sharbat / whichever jasmine varietal you have sharbat, you need a basket, not a cupped handful. One of the recipes I saw started with a unit of measure that was “about 3 gajra of mogre.” In other words, go buy three strands of freshly tied hair-ornament jasmine sambac (hopefully without preservatives or pesticides) and unweave them, and use that much to make your syrup. I’m estimating 250g of flowers is at least a hundred.

    So here’s my lower-spoons versions. These don’t start with “step 1, have hundreds of fresh jasmine blossoms all in bloom on the same day.”

    If your jasmine is blooming:

    • A dozen jasmine blossoms, picked when unfurled (often at night or the early morning)
    • Either 2 cups water or 3/4 cup water and some ice
    • 2 tsp white sugar (ish — more or less sweet depending on your preference)
    • Optional: A couple drops of lemon juice if you have a lemon open (but I didn’t, and it turned out quite nicely even without it)

    I have a little water heater which makes 2 cups of water hit 150 F in about 90 seconds. For this application, I didn’t want the water fully boiling; I trust my plant and my keeping of it and wasn’t terribly worried about needing to sterilize the flowers the way you would for jam or most sharbats. So get your water up to green tea temperature.

    With a heat safe teapot or large mug, put in the sugar and the jasmine blossoms.

    Pour the hot water over it, stir it until the sugar melts, cover it, and let it steep for at least 15 minutes. (In my case, that went ‘get pulled into a string of meetings for several hours,’ by which point it was both nicely cooled and very fragrant.)

    I mostly prefer room temperature drinks to cold ones, so the 2 cups hot water cooling to room temperature was fine for me to have a cooler-but-not-cold drink.

    If you prefer it colder, here’s the iced variation: Stir your sugar and flowers into 3/4 cup hot water, let steep for a few, and then pour the still probably warm liquid over ice. (You want to add the sugar while the liquid is hot even if you cool it later.)

    I’ve refilled my cup twice this morning and the flowers are still sweetly scenting the infusion and my room. I don’t mind gently sipping around floating flowers. If that’s a challenge for you, though, using a teapot and pouring through a strainer should take care of it.

    If you don’t have a blooming jasmine at hand:

    The recipe above isn’t technically a sharbat; it’s kind of a sharbat shortcut. Instead of making and then diluting syrup with acid, I just made it at the drinking concentration.

    But you can buy jasmine syrups, though not as many as there used to be.

    My former shortcut favorite, Monin, stopped making their cane syrup jasmine a few years ago and replaced it with honey. I have nothing at all against honey except that in this case it’s letting them shortcut on the flavor, which is now more like honey and less like jasmine itself. But if honeyed jasmine sounds great, or if Monin is what’s most accessible to you, have at it!

    I haven’t yet had a chance to try Floral Elixir or Amoretti’s jasmine syrups. From the prices, I suspect that’s why Monin shifted to honey.

    If you like sparkling water, using either a homemade sharbat or a syrup will get you to jasmine soda much more readily than my more dilute version too.

    I haven’t done the brand research to see if there are any jasmine essential oils that I would consider food safe, and they’re so concentrated they’re really not an easy substitute for cooking extracts like vanilla and almond.

    Let me know if you’d like the more detailed sharbat dive some time, or maybe a wander through the intersections of perfume and spice and cooking with flowers?

  • Neurodiverse fantasies and Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

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    Tomorrow (April 26), Karryn Nagel is organizing a big sale on cozy fantasy books at https://www.promisepress.org/. I don’t know what all the books are going to be, but Karryn says she’s got at least 45 authors on board and multiple books by several of them, so I’m eagerly waiting for when the sale page goes live!

    The Fantasy Romance February (FaRoFeb) team is also highlighting a collection of 8 books by and about neurodiverse folks in honor of Autism Awareness Month. Aside from being blown away that I’m on a recommendation list with some of my favorite authors (that supersonic squeal you hear might actually be coming from me), I’m honestly thrilled that folks are highlighting more varieties of neurodiversity than Rain Man and The Big Bang Theory.

    When I was growing up, “autism” was Rain Man. There was no other representation out there. So, obviously, I couldn’t be autistic, because I was literate and eloquent and not able to instantaneously count a pile of spilled nuts on the floor, even if I was painfully awkward and shy and I felt almost-physical scalding sensations if I had to make eye contact with someone who was angry with me. About thirty years later, a licensed psychotherapist said to me, “So, since you’re on the spectrum…” and after my brain got done making record-scratch noises, suddenly a whole lot of things about my life made a lot more sense.

    I knew Priye was autistic from the moment I started writing her. And I knew Rahat had a collection of neurodiverse thought patterns around anxiety and masking and social expectations and body shape expectations. But I didn’t realize he was also autistic until I was writing the sequel and he launched into a fluent analysis of the implications of different quality levels of frankincense resin and what that meant for what must have happened with natural disasters in the growing region (as opposed to piratical disasters, because natural disasters have implications for plant growth patterns) — and then he stopped himself short and said “at least I think it’s fascinating, I don’t know if anyone else would…”

    And I stopped and stared at the sentence that had just come out of my fingers, and I went, huh. Because that’s one of the language tics I’ve heard from so many autistic folks (including myself) who have been absolutely enraptured by something and started enthusing about it to a neurotypical person who stops pretending to be interested long before the autistic person stopped being excited by it, and sometimes the autistic person jerks their own reins short before the other person can. And I asked some friends on various spectrums, who took a look at some pieces, and they also went, yeah, we can see that too.

    From being autistic for a long time and talking to a lot of autistic folks over the years, I’ve noticed a common algorithm a lot of us learn for how to navigate society while trying hard to keep the Normal-Looking Mask on. It seems like the more training you’ve had in How to Act Normal, the better you get to be at learning when your own joy is an indicator that you need to stop yourself from feeling and expressing that joy because the person you’re talking to is going to be bored by it. And conversely, the more comfortable you are with the person you’re talking to, the more you feel able to let yourself relax into that joy a little longer than you would with an unfamiliar Other Person.

    As a prince, Rahat has had a lot of training in how to Act Normal. But around Asharan, he also lets himself relax into joy, until something in the back of his mind jerks on those reins and reminds him that he shouldn’t.

    A whole lot of the things I’m exploring with these two involve anti-tropes and flipping the script. I’m writing the anti-Cinderella story explicitly, but future installments involve the anti-makeover story and the coziest dungeon ever (full of cat toys and sunbeams!). And I want these stories to be cozy for people who’ve felt that it’s not safe to relax into their own joy, whether they’re autistic or queer or fat or disabled or whatever it is that makes other people frown down their noses at the way they are and live and think and feel and love.

    When the survey asked whether Rahat al-Hulqum was an “own voices” story, I honestly wasn’t sure how to respond. On the one hand, I am clearly neither a medieval prince with prophetic visions, nor a medieval bath-house courtesan with magical cat-summoning powers. But on the other hand, I am someone who understands a lot about social anxiety, role-switching, masking, and also the makings of delicious chai variants.

    I don’t know yet how many of the neurodiverse fantasies overlap with the cozy fantasy sale, but I am very much looking forward to finding out!

    And because I’m me, here, have another tea recipe. 😀

    Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

    Sahar is Rahat’s summoned cat-familiar; she is gray and soft and round and elegant, and also very opinionated, because she is of course still a cat. In one of the sequel bits, she casts a fog spell over the city. And the local coffeeshops call the less-masala cousin of this a London Fog.

    I don’t know how widespread that name is, but I liked the symbolism of a chai blended with fog-associations for both a magical gray cat who casts fog-illusions and neurospicy folks who have to spin very careful fog-illusions to shield the light of their special interests’ joys from sensitive neurotypical eyes that might wince from the blaze of our shining.

    For two one-cup servings (or one really big mug):

    • 1 1/2 cups hot water
    • Two teaspoons of Earl Grey
      • If you like bergamot, there are delicious double bergamot varieties out there too. If you don’t like bergamot but do like lemon, a nice Assam with a squeeze of lemon can get you in the neighborhood too.
    • Either half a teaspoon of dried rose petals or a quarter teaspoon of rosewater, whichever you prefer
    • A piece of crystallized ginger if you have it
    • A couple of cracked white peppercorns if you like floral heat
    • Around a tablespoon of lavender syrup depending on your preferred sweetness level
    • A couple tablespoons of your milk-like preference (skim milk froths very nicely; oat and almond milks don’t tend to froth but are still delicious)

    Helpful hardware:

    • A fill your own tea bag, fine-meshed tea ball, or cup-sieve to work your alchemy without a mouthful of tea leaves floating around the beverage
    • A handheld milk frother (I’ve used several over the years and I prefer the ones with flat bases rather than angled, so you don’t have to keep track of the stand separately)
    • If you want to lean extra hard into cozy cat-ness, consider your mug too…

    Once your water is hot, brew your tea in your preferred tea-leaf containment system before you add your milk. (Adding milk tends to slow or stop the brewing process.)

    Sweeten it while it’s still hot, then pull out the tea leaves before adding your milk or substitute.

    The frother will also make less mess if the tea containment system is not in the container where the frothing takes place.

    If you’re reading this from somewhere that’s hot, consider pouring it over ice into a blender (or getting out a stick blender, or even a kids’ snow-cone ice shaver) and making yourself a frozen latte.

    Happy sipping, and happy fog-cuddles from Sahar and me.

  • Happy Book Release Day (and Discount Chocolate Eve)!

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    The Wyngraf Valentines Edition is available now!

    I can’t say I’ve been working towards a day like today for 50 years, because I’m 50 right now. However, considering the first “book” I wrote (and illustrated) was when I was 3, I can say it’s been 47 years in progress.

    The character who became Ashar showed up in my head in 2018, and Rahat showed up in 2019, and I had 80% of the first draft done in 2020, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my scribbles because the notion of cozy fantasy as a publishable genre outside some corners of fanfic wasn’t really a glint in anyone’s eye, especially not back in 2018.

    And then between the global pandemic and billion dollar climate catastrophes and Trump, suddenly a lot of people decided they’d lived enough apocalyptic horror and would really not mind reading some fantasy that wasn’t grimdark anymore. But I still had no idea any of my scribbling might be publishable until I saw one of Nathaniel’s posts in the Cozy Fantasy Reddit last summer. I remember fighting with writing an ending around the 4th of July and being absolutely mortified that an autocorrect had autocorrected the last word of the last edit wrong!

    And Nathaniel very patiently did not laugh at me when I sent a frantic “what have I done, I know you wanted it to be well edited before I hit submit, I’m so sorry” email, assuring me that one typo would not make or break the acceptance of the story.

    Gmail gives preview of messages, and I knew writers got a lot of rejections, so when a few weeks later I got an email starting out like “we couldn’t fit your story into the summer edition,” I thought I knew the rest. And then I opened it, and if I hadn’t been sitting down I’d have fallen over when Nathaniel went on to say that he’d like to buy it for the Valentines Edition.

    He’s been absolutely fantastic to work with, kind and cheerful and infinitely patient with editing exchanges that occasionally went like:

    Nathaniel: “Rahat’s actual name can’t start with H for very good structural reasons.”

    Me: (12 hours of historical research on the lineages of both the Mughal and Safavid dynasties to come up with name and title patterns that were plausible followed by writing 15,000 words of sequel in order to find out how Kamil thinks of Rahat inside his own head and realizing the syllable he’d have started with that Ashar needed to interrupt was the first syllable of the title ‘shahzada’)

    Nathaniel (probably not used to someone writing 15,000 words of sequel to figure out how to change one letter of manuscript): “Sure, shahzada works!”

    I wish I was better at short story ideas as opposed to ridiculously long story ideas, because 15,000 words is way outside Wyngraf’s limit, but I’d absolutely love to write for Wyngraf again!

    In the meantime, in honor of Discount Chocolate Eve, here’s the Has Spoons edition of the hot chocolate recipe I mentioned in Priye’s preview. (True confession, today I did not have the spoons to make it. But tomorrow is Discount Chocolate Day, so maybe I can make it then.)

    Spoonful Hot Chocolate of Decadence

    (Occasionally called Secret Ninja Master Hot Chocolate by my friends, except no longer quite so secret.)

    Equipment:

    • 16 oz. microwave-safe mug
    • Small whisk or hand held milk frother

    Ingredients:

    • 12-14 oz. milk (or your preferred alternative)
    • 2-4 Tbsp semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips (depending on your preferred richness level)
    • Optional 1-2 Tbsp sugar or honey (if you have bittersweet or bakers chocolate)
    • Tiny pinch of salt (don’t forget this!)
    • 1/8 tsp-ish vanilla
    • Flavor twists as desired:
      • 1/8 tsp-ish rose water or orange blossom water and/or
      • 1/4 tsp-ish cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and/or chai masala
      • Optional shot of liqueur of your choice if it has been One of Those Days

    Step 1:

    Half-fill the mug with milk and add the chocolate chips, any desired sugar/honey, and the pinch of salt.

    If your additional flavor notes involve any dried spices like chai masala, add them here so they meld in with the hot liquid and aren’t raw at the end. (Liquid flavors are more volatile, so save vanilla or rosewater for the final step.)

    Step 2:

    Microwave for 30-45 seconds, then whisk or froth a little with the little frother. (Don’t worry if the chips are still hard.)

    Step 3:

    Microwave for another 30-45 seconds, then whisk or froth again. (At this point the chips should be melty enough to blend through nicely and turn the milk a lovely light chocolate color.)

    Step 4:

    At this point you’ll know about how much volume the frothed milk and hot chocolate are taking up.

    Add more milk to better fill the mug (but leave half an inch or so for final frothing).

    Microwave another 30-45 seconds to heat the new addition of milk, then froth. (Adjust time to suit your own tongue.)

    Step 5:

    Add any liquid flavor notes like vanilla/rosewater after the chocolate is warm enough to drink, so the vanilla flavor doesn’t evaporate during the heating and frothing. (Taste testing is handy.)

    Add any other liquid flavor notes desired at this point and stir through with the frother.

    Step 6:

    Drink. Purr. Repeat.

  • Pre-orders, previews, and Priye’s brindle chai

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    Wyngraf’s Valentine’s edition is available for pre-order!

    Here, have another cozy chai recipe, along with a preview of another character from a related story!

    I am both ridiculously excited and, at this particular moment, having a migraine. So I am doing some very low energy squee-ing. 😀

    Priye is a brindle catfolk-kitten who shows up in the sequel to Rahat’s story, in which we take a look at moments ranging from “what is the first thing an Imperial prince thinks upon awakening in the House of Jasmines with a cat walking on his face” to “what does a morning in the Catsprowl look (and smell) like” to “how exactly can a soft, round, middle-aged, and very un-parkour-suited accountant of a prince sneak back into his palace life without anything resembling a walk of shame, because it needs to be a walk of joy and discovery instead?”

    (Except that was about 15,000 words and counting, which is closing in on twice the short story threshold hahaha whimper. And if I want more stories to be submit-friendly, I need to be a lot closer to the 8,000 word limit!)

    So I thought, let’s try someone else’s point of view. And I adore Priye. She’s small and soft and gentle, and also has a lot of very quiet tortitude. She doesn’t like having to use human words because there are so many different human languages and sometimes the words aren’t allowed to go together and whichever set you choose is going to make people think things about you, and how you pronounce them makes people think other things about you, and it’s all Too Much To Cope With.

    Purrs are better than words, according to Priye. You know where you stand when someone is purring. You also know where you stand when someone is hissing. Cats are very clear about things like this — no complicated questions of whose words you use in which dialect with which accent. Purring means good, hissing means stop that, yowling air raid noises mean REALLY stop that, all nice and clear.

    So I asked her to get her slate from Elder Sister’s classroom and share a chai recipe for brindle kittens with us. She is chocolate brown and ginger orange, and she likes her coloring, so this is what she told me.

    Priye’s Brindle Kitten Chocolate Orange Ginger Chai

    • Milk
    • Chocolate (good)
    • Orange
    • Ginger
    • Chameli-sahib’s chai masala
      • Make warm and soft like kittens.
      • (Need spoons.)

    Lynn’s Low Spoons translation

    I have a Higher In Spoons edition I’m saving for the 14th, when I hope to be out of migraine land and having more energy for at least Secret Ninja Master Hot Chocolate, if not the entire half-hour production number of Asharan’s chai from the spices onward.

    But today the spoon drawer is empty. Food is complicated when you need to balance energy intake and migraine nausea and orthostatic intolerance and post-exertional malaise with a side order of weather-pain. So this is my Priye-approved 90-seconds edition.

    • 2 cups your choice of milk, water, or plant-milk, heated whichever way is easiest
    • Your favorite hot cocoa mix
      • (I used 4 tsp of Penzeys hot chocolate to make my big mug in a chai blend – if you’re making straight hot chocolate you might want double that again)
    • Your favorite chai masala powder
      • (usually my instant go-to is Blue Lotus’ regular, but I went with Blue Lotus’ mandarin – 1/2 tsp, to go with doubling the cocoa and getting orange already in the combo and minimizing the number of times I have to move)
    • A few drops of orange blossom water or shreds of orange zest
      • (if your chai masala doesn’t come with orange notes in it)
    • Half a meal shake
      • (this time chocolate, other times vanilla, usually Orgain’s vegan one because it’s the only one I’ve found without either artificial sweeteners or erythritol)
      • Use the other half to make another mug in a couple hours
    • A few bits of crystallized ginger either to chew or to put in the hot chocolate chai

    That lasted me the past 3 hours! About to go make “lunch” with the other half of the meal shake, and see whether Priye is up for more stories or just for more purring in the sunbeam.

    I hope you enjoy the low spoons variation, and that I’ll be up for the higher spoons variation on the 14th!