Author Archives: Maria Langer

Easy Cherry Cobbler for One

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When you have a limitless supply of cherries, you get creative.

Fresh-picked CherriesA few days ago, I asked my client if I could go into his orchard and pick some cherries. I’d finished off the 15+ pounds of Rainiers I’d picked in Quincy two weeks before and was fresh out of fruit. Across the street from my RV were 86 acres of ripening cherries. My client gave me the green light and I’ve had fresh-picked cherries in my fridge ever since.

If you have some kind of comment about the affect of cherries on my digestive system, save them. I seem to be immune to the usual effects. Indeed, I easily put away a pound of cherries a day with no significant side effects.

But I am bored with simply popping fresh cherries from a plastic container. Back in June, I began experimenting with cobbler. The results were so-so. I wanted an easier recipe so I turned to Bisquick.

Bisquick, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a Betty Crocker/General Mills product known primarily as a pancake batter mix. But what a lot of folks don’t realize is that it’s a good quickbread batter mix that you can also use to make biscuits and “shortcake.” (Shortcake is in quotes because it doesn’t make real shortcake.)

The trick is to mix Bisquick with milk and a small amount of sugar to make a batter. Then bake it for a little sweet breadlike cake. Add fruit to the batter and you have an easy cobbler.

Here’s my current recipe. It makes just one (because I’m by myself here) but I don’t see why you couldn’t multiply the recipe to make more. You might try making individual ones in large muffin tins.

Ingredients:

  • 1/4 cup Bisquick
  • 2 tablespoons milk
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 7 cherries, pitted and split in half

Instructions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
  2. Grease an ovensafe custard cup or other suitable baking vessel.
  3. In a small bowl, mix the first three ingredients until blended.
  4. Fold in the cherries.
  5. Place batter in custard cup.
  6. Bake 20 minutes or until batter is done.

This would probably be excellent with fresh whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. I have neither so I do without. It isn’t bad.

If you give this a try — with or without your own modifications — please do use the comments for this post to let us know what you think.

Ebook Review: The Pillars of the Earth

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Ebook FAIL.

Since this week’s blog theme seems to be FAIL, I figure I’d finish off the run of FAIL posts with the most epic failure of all: Penguin’s “ebook,” Pillars of the Earth. This attempt at ebook publishing is so full of FAIL that I almost don’t know where to begin.

When is an Ebook not an Ebook?

Home ScreenWhen it’s an app.

That’s the first problem. Announced almost the same day as Apple’s announcement that iBooks would support multimedia elements, I made the assumption that this new, “amplified” edition of Ken Follett’s novel would be an example of iBooks’ new capabilities.

I was wrong.

Not only is this a standalone iPad app, but it requires a whopping 1.54 GB of storage space on an iPad. “Updates” — and there has been one so far — are equally huge. In fact, Apple warns you:

Do not attempt to download this product wirelessly. Download in the App Store on your computer and transfer to your iPad by synching your apps.

The product itself is poorly designed, consisting of:

  • An ebook reader module. There’s nothing special about this at all. While it mimics the iBooks’ curling page flip, its implementation is sluggish and buggy; more than once, the page flip happened so slowly that it was impossible to turn the page. (It just wouldn’t move enough to “flip” over.) I had to quit the app and restart it to continue reading. The table of contents is broken down to the chapter level which wouldn’t be so bad if the chapters weren’t 50+ pages long. As a result, if you wanted to go back to a previous part of the book, it took forever to go to the page you wanted and then return to where you’d left off. Ebook settings do not include font size; you have to pinch to change that and more than once, it reset itself.
  • Character TreeA “Character Tree.” This feature is supposed to help you understand the relationship between characters. I found it nearly impossible to navigate and parts of it seemed to be locked out. It was more of a source of frustration than information. I still can’t figure out why some characters have flashing halos.
  • About the Author material. This includes text and video information about Ken Follett, author of mostly spy thrillers. This book is not spy thriller.
  • About TV Series material. This is the extras stuff that’ll likely turn up on the DVD. Starz marketing material, through and through. I figured I’d go through it when I was done with the book, but after the disappointment of being locked out of content, I figured it would be better to avoid additional frustration.
  • Links. I guess if they’ve got us, they may as well shoot marketing material at us with both barrels.

The settings screen is a joke. While it might have been a good place to put font settings, instead it offers just two options: Page Flip Sounds and Use Night Theme.

Annoying DialogI think the ultimate indicator that this is a poorly designed app is the dialog that appears every single time you open the app. Illustrated here, it includes a Don’t Show button. I tapped it every single time, but the damn dialog continued to appear.

Typos, Missing Breaks

The ebook text had its own problems:

  • There were typos. Real typos. I stopped counting after seven.
  • There was no indication of scene changes. For example, you’d be reading a scene where two characters are talking or doing something. Next line, another character who isn’t in the scene is talking or doing something. Huh? While the printed book may have used additional space to indicate a scene change, the ebook version doesn’t bother with such niceties. I guess they think the reader needs to be jarred to his senses once in a while.

Apparently, copyediting is not part of the ebook production process at Penguin.

The Movie Clips

Embedded in the book’s text are icons that, when clicked, may or may not display a movie clip from the Starz dramatization of the book. There were four problems with this feature.

  • Movie ClipThe clip usually did not match the text. The screenplay is apparently not a faithful adaptation, so dialog, characters, and scenes are different. Watching these clips while reading the book is like reading a book and watching a movie roughly based on it at the same time. Not a very rewarding experience.
  • The clips are teasers. There’s not enough content to make them valuable. They’re merely a tool to get you to watch or buy the Starz series.
  • The clip would not reliably play full screen width. You had to coax it to fill the screen by tapping a button in the upper right corner.
  • Unable to PlayThe clip would not display until it had aired on Starz! This zapped me early on. After reading a passage that described the cathedral under construction, I was pleased to see a video icon, hoping to be able to visualize the rather complex description. Instead, a dialog box (see image) told me that “speed-readers” had to wait until that clip aired more than a week later! My surprise quickly turned to anger when I realized I’d been sold a marketing tool for Starz.

The Book

Ken Follett writes spy thrillers. I’ve read a few of them. They’re good. Ken Follett should keep writing them and stop writing medieval historical fiction.

At first, the book was a pleasure to read. It introduced me to medieval times with an air of authenticity — other than dialog, of course — that was enjoyable to me. The dialog was not authentic at all and I think that’s okay. I don’t think I could have struggled through medieval dialects, spelling, and grammar.

But the book got very long very quickly. I’m a fast reader and can normally knock off a novel in two or three days, reading in the evening before bed. This one took more than a week. It seemed to go on and on and on. The story got boring. Even when it was supposed to be exciting it got boring.

About halfway through, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the book anymore. I’d passed the point of being able to watch video content — nothing was available to me — so all I could do was read. And what I read was disturbing.

Spoilers Ahead!

The book had several antagonists. One was a violent man named William who couldn’t seem to have sex with a woman unless beating her was part of the act. He raped one of the protagonists while her brother was forced to watch and then had his groom rape her, too. He basically went through the book, beating, raping, and killing. There was no stopping him. He literally got away with murder again and again.

It made me sick.

Another antagonist was a bishop who would forgive William for his sins. No matter how bad they were. He was evil in his own way and also seemed to get away with his acts over and over.

These two antagonists, and a few other minor ones who wound through the plot, had their way with just about anything. It was heartbreaking to read their latest dastardly deeds, page after page. After a while, I wondered why I was reading. There was no enjoyment in the plot, no real reward for the reader who needs to see good triumph over evil. It was simply a long, drawn out punishment for the good guys.

We’re not talking about a short book here. The mass market paperback — the version you’d buy in an airport bookstore, for example — is 983 pages. That’s a hell of a lot of evil to wade through.

Oh, every once in a while, the protagonists would win a small victory. They defended their town against William and his raiders, “only” losing 70 or so people in the process. Hooray. That was after William had burned their town to the ground on the previous raid, killing innocent men, women, and children, including one of the protagonists, and causing the financial ruin of the woman he’d raped while her brother watched. Talk about insult to injury, huh?

Throughout the whole book, I kept waiting for William to get his just desserts. He finally did, on the last pages of the book. Somehow he and the rest of the cast had managed to live — during medieval times, when Wikipedia reports average life expectancy to be only 30 years — to their 50s, 60s, and beyond. It was then that William was finally hanged. An astute reader will realize that the bad guy has lived a long and comfortable life, directly responsible for the rape, maiming, and murder of hundreds of people, and it is only in his old age that he’s finally punished. We’re supposed to be satisfied with that?

The interaction between the characters was unrealistic and contrived most of the time. I’d read a scene and wonder why they did (or didn’t do) what they did (or didn’t do). It doesn’t seem to make sense sometimes. It’s as if the author’s only purpose is to set them up for something in the future — something unpleasant. And there are only so many times you can get into a character’s head and read the same thoughts before you stop caring about what’s in there.

And sex? Not only is it prevalent throughout the book, but it’s often quite graphic, with various private parts being stroked, grabbed, fondled, squeezed, sucked — you get the idea. I don’t know how it got past the Apple censors with this rating:

Rated 12+ for the following:
• Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
• Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence

Mild? I don’t think so. The graphic descriptions of the rapes with their violence against women were disturbing enough to warrant a more protective rating than that.

And I don’t think I’ve read the words fuck and cunt so many times in a book in a long time — if ever. If this were a movie with that language, it would be rated R — that’s 17 and older, Apple.

But the most tasteless bit of narrative? One of the protagonists having sex with a stranger within hours of his wife dying while giving birth to their child. And we’re supposed to like these characters?

Finally, the book was supposed to be about the building of a medieval cathedral. In reality, it was a book about the brutality of the ruling class, the corruption of the Catholic church, and the rough life of peasants during medieval times.

Spoilers Done.

A Learning Experience

I thought this “ebook” would be a publishing breakthrough. That’s how it was heralded on USAToday and other news outlets.

After seeing the excellent Wired app — which I need to review here, too — I had very high expectations for ebook publishing. I thought that publishers finally “got it.” I didn’t expect them to take advantage of readers by selling them advertising material for a partner organization. I didn’t expect to be locked out of content I’d paid for. I didn’t expect an ebook to take up so much precious space on my iPad.

I’m not the only one disappointed by this mess. The iTunes store shows only 29 ratings averaging only 2 out of 5 stars. I wonder how many other buyers have demanded their money back, too.

My refund comes this week.

Weather Forecast FAIL

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You simply can’t trust any source.

My summer job as a cherry drying pilot depends on weather. When it rains, I fly. When it doesn’t rain, I don’t. If there’s absolutely no chance of rain, I can goof off.

Yesterday’s forecast called for haze with mostly sunny skies with a 0% chance of rain. I stayed in most of the morning, working on a book revision, and knocked off two chapters. By then, it was 1 PM and I was ready to head down into town to do some errands, have lunch out, and do some grocery shopping.

But it was overcast. It was overcast most of the day. In my mind, overcast ≠ mostly sunny.

The clouds were high and moving quickly. There were patches that looked thick. There were some straggling low clouds that moved along with the ones above.

There was no haze. In fact, yesterday the air was the clearest it had been in over a week. The wind was probably to thank for that. It wasn’t very windy, but it was windy enough to have to close the window beside my desk. It was downright chilly.

I looked at the weather forecast again. Still the same, no chance of rain.

Radar does not show clouds.
One of my clients thought that radar images showed cloud coverage. Although there are usually clouds where the radar echoes appear, radar is supposed to show precipitation. In dry climates, however, rainfall often evaporates before it hits the ground, so you can’t rely on radar echoes to indicate rain unless they’re very strong echoes. Color indicates strength. You learn to read radar very quickly when weather is a major part of your life.

Then I looked at the current radar. There were plenty of light green echoes moving southwest to northeast at a good clip. Sometimes those echoes were right over me, although it wasn’t raining. I did not feel comfortable driving into town when weather radar and cloud coverage indicated that rain was a possibility.

By 4 PM, I was tired of waiting. Despite the cloud cover and those light radar echoes, the forecast still said there was a 0% chance. It was obviously not going to rain.

I got in my truck and headed down to Wenatchee.

I hit a few stores to pick up a few things. Then I had an excellent meal at Smokeblossom on Wenatchee Avenue. Afterwards, I headed to East Wenatchee where there’s a Safeway supermarket I like.

I was filling up my truck with diesel at Safeway’s fuel pumps when my phone rang. It was my client.

“Hey, Maria. Is it raining up there?”

I’m living across the street from his orchard, so I should know the weather. I was embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t there, but I wasn’t about to lie. “I’m down in town,” I told him. And then I looked up. From my position, I could clearly see up the canyon toward the orchard. And it sure as hell looked as if it were raining. I reported what I saw and added, “I’m just getting gas in my truck now. I’ll head right back up there and give you a call.”

As I finished fueling, rain started falling on the truck. It was a light drizzle.

I sped back across the bridge, winding my way through traffic, and got on the road that would take me back to the orchard. It was raining on me the whole time. Just enough of a drizzle to put the wipers on their lowest setting. The road wasn’t wet, though.

I drove into the orchard and parked beside some trees. I got out of the truck and looked at the cherries. Some tiny drops were on them. I got back in the truck and drove over to another area. More tiny drops. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but I wasn’t a decision maker.

My client arrived a while later. He took one of the quads and toured the orchard. I went back to my trailer and closed it up. The rain pattered gently on the roof. The temperature dropped to 65°F.

I waited. It was getting late. I’d arrived at the orchard at about 6:30 PM. Sunset was around 8:20 PM. I’d have enough light to fly until 8:50 PM. I needed nearly 2 hours to dry the orchard. It was unlikely that they’d launch me while it was still raining. I kept checking the weather. The radar kept showing bands of possible rain coming our way. At 7 PM, the forecast updated to admit that there was a 20% chance of showers. While it was raining.

My client called at 7:30 and I walked across the street to the shed to talk to him. “False alarm,” he said. “Not wet enough to worry about.”

Of course, it was still raining. We discussed what we’d do if it started raining harder or rained in the middle of the night. Then we parted and I went in for the night.

I didn’t get a chance to do my grocery shopping.

It rained until 11 PM or later. I think it may have rained a bit in the middle of the night, too. In the morning, as soon as it got light to see, I walked across the street and checked out the cherries on the closest trees. Some were bone dry. Others were soaking wet.

I flew 1.8 hours this morning.

WeatherToday is a beautiful day, with thin high clouds and puffy thick ones floating out to the northeast at about 10,000 feet. The forecast says mostly sunny. Again.

I think I’ll head out and do my grocery shopping early, just in case.

Guest Blogger FAIL

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Another oddity from my inbox.

Here’s today’s message, with the subject “We would like to write an article for your site,” edited to remove identifying information:

Hey there,

We have been reading the articles on your website and are very impressed with the quality of your information.

We have a team of copywriters who specialize in writing articles on various topics and would like to write an original article for you to use on your website – this article will not be used anywhere else on the Internet.

In exchange all we ask is that we can have one or two links within the body of the article back to one of our sites. You can view a sample of the quality of our articles at [redacted].

If you are interested in having us write an article for your website please just let me know and we would be more than happy to have one written for you within two weeks.

Kind regards,
[redacted]

If they’re so impressed with the quality of my information, what makes them think I need a post written by someone else? Isn’t it clear that I can write my own blog posts?

And if it’s my personal blog, what makes them think I’d welcome posts from others? Did they find any posts by others on my blog?

And yes, I do realize that they likely never even looked at my blog. That this is just a form of spam that’s likely to sent out to every blogger they can find contact info for.

The question I take away from this is: Are bloggers so desperate for content that they’ll let strangers do guest posts in exchange for a couple of links?

Needless to say, I’m not interested so I don’t think a response is necessary. No need to put my e-mail address in their spam list. (They had to use a contact form to contact me.)

In a way, they did write a blog post for me. This one.

Is Writing a Book Like Riding a Bicycle?

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Is it possible to forget how?

Despite all my blogging about Flying and helicopters, I still earn the bulk of my income as a writer. I’ve been writing computer how-to books since 1991 (depending on which book you consider my first) and have authored or co-authored more than 70 titles since then.

You’d think that by now I could write a book in my sleep. In a way, I can. Or at least I thought I could.

This past week, I began discussions with a publisher I’d never worked with before about two new titles. I you might expect — I certainly did — I was asked to submit an outline for each proposed book. I sat down with Microsoft Word’s outline feature on one laptop and the software I was going to be writing about running on a laptop beside it. And, for longer than I’d like to admit, I felt overwhelmed.

Writing a Book ≠ Revising a Book

Creating Spreadsheets and ChartsYou see, although I’ve got 70+ books under my belt, the vast majority of those titles are revisions. Two of them have been revised at least 10 times. In fact, on consulting my list of books, I realized that the last time I wrote a book from scratch was in 2004 (Creating Spreadsheet and Charts with Microsoft Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide for Peachpit Press), although I did co-author one (with Miraz Jordan) from scratch in 2006 (WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press).

And revising a book is not like writing one from scratch.

When I revise a book, I start with the book and its text. There’s no need for a new outline. If the book will need major changes, I might take the existing book’s table of contents, bring it into Word’s outline feature, and modify it to fit the changes into appropriate places. But if the changes are minor — and believe me, quite a few revisions were like that — I didn’t even bother printing the table of contents. Either way, I go through each chapter and read the text, making changes as necessary. I re-shoot all the screen shots — even in books that have hundreds of them. I add sections and remove sections. Occasionally, I’ll move sections around or expand on sections to make them clearer. More and more often these days, I’m asked to remove sections simply to reduce page count. Then I’m done.

But when I write a book from scratch, I’m starting with nothing more than the subject — usually a software program or online service — and a blank outline page. I need to build the outline from scratch, knowing just a few things:

  • The audience. This is usually beginner to intermediate users; I don’t write for advanced users or programmers very often. Knowing the audience is important; it enables me to make assumptions about their experience and goals. My audience has changed in the 20 or so years I’ve been doing this. In the old days, I often had to begin with basics like how to point and click and close windows. Now I can assume my readers know all that and get on with topic-specific content.
  • The series. Most of my books are part of a book series. In the past, I’ve authored the first book in a series, but that’s not common. I like writing series books. They give me an idea of the style and format my editors want. I can visualize the final pages as I write. Heck, for some books — Peachpit’s Visual QuickStart Guide series, for example — I actually lay out the pages as I write.
  • The software or service. That’s my subject matter. I need to know the software or service very well to know what I’m going to write about. Often, I’m working with beta software that’s not quite ready for prime time or, worse yet, changes as I write. I have to explore menus and palettes and dialogs. I have to try things to see what happens. I have to learn so I can teach.
Don’t Torture Yourself
I always write with the software or service I’m writing about running on a second computer. Anyone who tries to write a book without being able to reference the subject matter while writing is putting himself through a lot of unnecessary torture.

The trick is to build an outline from the ground up, knowing where to start and where to end and how to get from one point to the next. Each chapter should have a logical flow, starting with the basics and moving on to more complex topics. I can’t explain how to perform one task until I’ve already explained how to perform the subtasks that are part of it. For example, I can’t write about formatting text until I’ve explained how to select the text to format and why selecting that text is important.

Have I Lost My Touch?

It’s this logical flow of things that had me stalled this week as I struggled with the two outlines. I seemed to have lost my touch. I couldn’t focus on the software and approach it as a new user might.

What made matters worse was that the editor I was working with gave me outlines to start with. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted me to follow those outlines or build my own. The outline for one of the books was very good. I wouldn’t have had any problem using it as a basis for my book. But I felt weird about using someone else’s outline — even if I had permission to do so. It was almost as if I were copying someone else’s work. I didn’t like that idea at all.

That meant I had to come up with an entirely different approach.

And that’s what stalled me. My mind went blank and I simply couldn’t think of another way to do it.

I’ve Still Got It

Putting the other outline aside and concentrating on the software is what saved me. I was eventually able to focus on the software. I started writing Part names, Chapter names, and A-Head names, following the style used in the series. I shuffled heads around. One thing led to another, just like it always had.

When I was halfway finished and clearly comfortable with my own approach, I consulted that other outline to make sure I covered all the applicable topics that it did. Since the other book was about the Windows version of the software (for the same publisher), only about 80% of the topics applied my Mac version book. My outline presented them in a completely different order, building skills along a different path.

Looking back on it, I realize that my outline is more like one of my outlines and wonder what I’d liked about the other outline in the first place.

Back on the Bicycle

I find it more difficult to write an outline than a book. That might sound strange, but it’s true. Getting the organization settled is the hardest part for me. Once I have that blueprint, I can start building pages.

With the initial period of uncertainty mostly behind me — at least on one of the two projects — I’m looking forward to writing a new book and working with new people. I’m hoping I get some good feedback from my editor on the outline and that we can work together to fine-tune it to meet the publisher’s needs. The contract comes next and then the writing. It’s all part of a workflow I’m quite familiar with.

Now if only I could knock out that second outline…