Vegetarian Taco Bell Burritos

1 Box Fantastic Taco Mix
1 pint Trader Joe’s Fresh Salsa
1 double-pack Trader Joe’s Avacado’s Number Guacamole
Three Cheese Blend (Mex blend)
Fresh Butterleaf Lettuce (rinsed and dried)
Trader Joe’s habanero lime tortillas

1. Take a tortilla, sprinkle a layer of cheese in the center.
2. Spread a tablespoon or two of the Taco Mix on top (this makes the cheese a little melty)
3. Spoon some salsa on top to taste
4. Add a heaping spoonful of guacamole
5. Arrange a few leaves of the butterleaf lettuce

Fold the tortilla and enjoy. So. Good.

Stupid Companies Doing Stupid Things

AT&T
This one is just charmingly funny. Someone made a serious booboo at AT&T recently which resulted in every customer getting an email announcing new store openings in the midwest. It’s nice and all that there’s a new store opening in Michigan, but I live in Philadelphia. Oh, okay, wait, there’s another store opening somewhere else I can’t easily get to? La de fuckin’ da. Twitter is abuzz about this snafu. Will AT&T send yet another email apologizing or come up with a more creative way of harassing their customers to apologize for harassing them?

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

This Sh*t is Bananas

As some of you may already know via the tweet feed, I’ve vastly exceeded the original plan of writing a book, and now the plan is to write seven books. This is not a joke. This is not an April Fool’s. This is really, seriously happening, and as each day passes, the rough ideas become more and more solid.

This is utterly terrifying and also exhilarating. I have never done something of this magnitude before, and instead of getting that scared feeling in the pit of my stomach, I’m instead coming at it, full force, night after night, jotting ideas down in meetings during the day, and writing pages and pages every night. keep reading »

Excerpt from the Prologue

Just for giggles:

They taught me things: how to make the rain come, how to make the snow fall. How to listen to the wind and how to be fearless. They taught me words of protection, how to recognize omens, how to talk to the crows, and how to see into a man’s soul. They taught me the seven types of magic, but they also taught me how to be myself. How to become the person I was destined to be.

Book Progress Update

There are two horribly common pitfalls in the fantasy/sci-fi genre. Two pitfalls I desperately want to avoid:

1. Plot vs. Characters
Too many potentially great (and many classic) stories and tv shows sacrifice plot for characters or vice versa. You can have a great idea for a story, and the plot may be brilliant, but without characters to move things along, it’s just someone going through the motions. It doesn’t work. Alternately, in cases like LOST, where the characters are fantastic, but the plot is a hot mess, the lack of fulfilling plot becomes that much more of a disappointment because the characters are left to flounder.

2. Details vs. Ideas
This isn’t to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but I find that there are two major types of genre writers. The writers that map out everything, to the tiniest detail, so meticulously that they can’t help but include too much information in their writing. Details that simply aren’t relevant or interesting to the overall story, or even to the most avid fan. There’s a place for detail, but there’s a limit to how much needs to be shared at once. On the flip side of this, there’s also a common “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” strategy to writing, where (especially in tv shows), we find strange and exciting ideas thrown out only to have only a few of them wind up “sticking” and getting carried through to a satisfactory resolution, leaving too many unanswered questions (and too many conflicting answers). A writer has a responsibility to do the homework and the research, to map out the duller minutae of the world they’re creating, but they should never reveal all of their secrets, and give away all the answers.

keep reading »