Pizza Gain, or Easter Pie

As a kid, I would look forward to Easter for one reason... A giant chocolate rabbit with my name on it. I could care less about resurrecting messiahs, rites of spring, or pagan fertility festivals. It was all about the candy. A good Easter basket, if properly managed, could last a sugar happy kid like myself all the way through the fourth of July.

Mine was of course, gone by Tuesday.

As an adult, my tastes and understanding of the holiday matured considerably, and along with freaking out my Catholic (with a capital 'C', you heathens) relatives by espousing my personal theory that Jesus was a Vampire, I started to look forward to a traditional Sicilian (with a capital 'S'!!!) dish known as Pizza Gain. I would later learn that the name of the dish was actually dialect-specific to the region of Sicily my ancestors came from. It's 'real' name is Pizza Rustica, or 'Italian Easter pie'.

When I moved to New Orleans, I was disappointed to find that my beloved Pizza Gain wasn't part of the Italian traditions here. Mind you, the Italian parades and St. Joseph's altars make up for this failing, so I let it slide for many years.

Fast forward twelve years. After hurricane Katrina, I flopped around a bit. I was unsure of myself or my identity. No longer confident about my role in the world after having much of my life stripped away. That following Easter, I felt homesick for the first time in years. I wanted and needed to have Pizza Gain on Easter Sunday.

First, I tried to find someone that produced it locally, with no luck. Then I called a bunch of Italian bakeries in NYC to see if they could ship some to me, but turned up nothing. Then I Googled it, and came across a recipe that seemed very similar to Grandpa Ferdinando's. I prepared it, tweaking it here and there to what I remembered my Grandpa doing to his, and it came out really close... but not quite there. Certainly it was close enough for my purposes. I have tried to prepare it every year since, and I really hope that my step kids will one day incorporate it into their holiday traditions.

Rob's Pizza Gain (Pizza Rustica, Italian Easter Pie)

Ingredients:
2 lbs of good ricotta cheese (dense, not watery, being the standard here)
1lb of deli ham, cubed (or capicolla if your local deli has it)
1lb of Genoa salami (any hard salami should work... but Genoa has just the right blend of garlic and fat)
9 large eggs
1lb cubed Mozzarella cheese
3 tbs of dried parsley
2 tbs of dried basil
2 deep dish ready-made pie crusts, or 3 regular depth**

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. in a large bowl, mix together the eggs and the ricotta. add all the deli meats and cheese, and the basil and parsley. Pour the mixture into the pie crusts and bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the edges turn golden brown. remove from oven and let stand until completely cool before serving. My Mom says that you need to let it age for at least a week... yeah, you just try waiting that long.

**Note- Grandpa Ferdinando's traditional Pizza Gain always had a top crust... I have never gotten the hang of making pie crust from scratch, So if you feel up to it, go for it. Don't forget to do an olive oil wash (not egg) and vent the top.

Once again into the Frenzy...

For those of you unaware of such things, (read: non-writers) April is an event known as Script Frenzy. Script Frenzy is the screenwriter's equivalent of NaNoWriMo, an online writer's challenge that throws down the gauntlet about that play, movie, or comic book script that has been yearning to bust out of you for years.

The challenge, simply put, is to write 100 pages of an original screenplay (or like script) in thirty days. I have participated in the screnzy for the past three years, but I have yet to complete one. Keep in mind that in the same three years, I won NaNo twice, and got three quarters through a third year before my kid developed a rare Italian disease I call "Dadanogettatowrita". The symptoms are prolonged absences from school, lots of mucus, and a constant need for attention...

But I digress...

The thing is that as a writer, it really frustrates me when I can't complete a writing challenge. I mean, it's kinda my thing, you know? And it's not like I've never completed a screenplay before... I've done at least three outside the screnzy that were completed with little trouble. I really don't know why it is that come April, my writing drive just tells the left side of my brain to take a flying leap.

So, this year, I'm trying something a little easier... I'm doing an adaptation of Dimensional Games. I've never tried adapting prose to a screenplay before, much less one of my own works, but I'm giving it the old college try anyway. Part of me is convinced I'm cheating, but the other part of me sees me at a solid twenty pages by day two, with at least four or five really good new jokes that weren't in the original.

So, I may be cheating on the definition of "original work" but at least there are parts of it that are indeed original. Wish me luck, and pray that fudging the Script Frenzy rules doesn't qualify me for a one way trip to writer hell. *

* WRITER HELL- Dante's seldom talked about fifteenth circle of hell where plagiarists go when they die, and are forced to write bad tween sitcoms for nickelodeon for all eternity (shudder)

This Month's Netflix Obsession... Stargate Atlantis

Every month or so as part of my geeky homework I run through a sci-fi or fantasy series on Netflix from beginning to end, tackling a few episodes a day. The reason I do this is because I ultimately want to be seen at a convention as an authority on such things. It gets under my skin a bit when a panel turns to something I haven't seen yet, like the finer points of Farscape or Babylon 5. (Many of my readers will see these as glaring omissions in my geek cred... you're right, and I'm working on it) I started a few months ago with Reaper, then went through the final three seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This month, I decided to run through the entire run of Stargate Atlantis.    

For those unfamiliar with the show, well, Wikepedia puts it really well in explaining the show's basic premise:

The story of Stargate Atlantis follows the events of Stargate SG-1's seventh season finale episode "Lost City", in which the cast of that series discovered an Antarctic outpost created by the alien race known as the Ancients. In the pilot episode "Rising", Stargate Command sends an international team to investigate the outpost, where Dr. Daniel Jackson discovers the location of Atlantis, the legendary city created by the Ancients.

 Of course, those wacky Tyree of Stargate command can't resist but send an expedition right away to find out what's the deally-o with the lost city of the ancients. The problem is that because of the amount of power required to get there, it's a one way trip. Most of the first season is spent bitching about this... but in a "look at this tremendous sacrifice we've made that no one will ever know about" way. (This is an old writer's trick to elicit unearned sympathy from the reader/viewer... you want someone to feel sorry for your protagonists, strand them far from home with no hope of return. Now you too see the man behind the curtain.) One can just imagine how that briefing went...

Daniel Jackson: So, we've figured out how to get there. It will take a lot of power, but we can do it...

O'Neill: Okay, that's great... how do we get back?

Daniel: Not real sure on that part.

O'Neill: You said the same thing the first time we stepped through the Stargate. You know, back when I looked like Jeff Bridges?

Daniel: Well, we did get back.

O'Neill: I ain't going. Why don't we send that annoying civilian observer they saddled us with last season?

Teal'c: Indeed.

Daniel: Good idea. No sense in risking our lives on my half-thought out theory again.

So our team, (led by former civilian observer to Stargate command Dr. Elizabeth Weir... seriously.) enters the Pegasus Galaxy and immediately finds out that the city has been abandoned, and that they don't have the power to return. The team is "Multi-cultural" in that it's supposed to be made up of people from exotic countries around the world like 'Canada', but it's really just a bunch of cookie cutter stereotypes. You've got the "strong yet feminine peacenik diplomat leader" (Dr. Weir), The "Tortured Military leader with the heart of gold" (Major John Sheppard), The "Bumbling and arrogant but brilliant scientist" (Dr. Rodney McKay.. a character whose most memorable trait was that he hit on Carter a few times back at the SGC) and the "alien chick who knows her way around the Galaxy so let's trust her now" (Tayla).

The rest of the expeditions is primarily made up of heavily accented actors playing nuanced parts like "soldier with guns", "medical doctor", and "second scientist in case the first one breaks".

Seriously... it's not till the second season that any of them really start to develop a personality.

So, the United Nations of Benetton ad that they've sent on this mission goes and wakes up an ancient enemy of the Ancients known as the Wraith. The Wraith are basically space vampires, only they don't sparkle or have that annoying weakness to sunlight. Seems that in the Pegasus galaxy the Wraith awaken every 1000 years or so, eat all the humans they can gorge themselves on, and then go back to sleep. Only the folks from Atlantis interrupted their nap (our bad), and now they're pissed.

I know I'm making it sound just awful, but the characters do come around to being likable by the end of the first season, and once contact is made with Earth again the series really finds it's legs. There is a lot of good in the series, and it was a really fun ride. By the time I got to the series finale, I was genuinely disappointed that it was over.

Notable episodes:
"Rising"- pilot
"The Seige"- The Wraith stage an all-out attack on Atlantis
"Runner"- introduces Ronin Dax, the teams token "alien dude that kicks ass"
"Progeny"- a race that appears to be the Ancients aren't quite what they seem
"First Strike"- a preemptive strike against an old foe has disastrous consequences
"Midway"- worth it if only to watch Ronin and Teal'c beating the piss out of each other while the Atlantis crew bets on them
"Enemy at the gate"- Atlantis is all that stand between the Wraith and Earth.

CoastCon 35

This past weekend was a very good weekend to be Rob. I was a guest at CoastCon 35, and while I have been involved with the organization for years, it was far different to be on the other side of the guest table.

I owe CoastCon a lot, when I think about it... The first time I realized that this whole "writer" thing was going to work out for me was at last year's convention when a fan I was unaware I had approached me and asked if I had any copies of Dimensional Games for sale. I had already learned that one of the best things you can do as an author is to carry a copy on you at all times, so of course I did... But just the one, because I was a staff member at that con, not a guest. Then a second person came up to me and asked me the same thing. I was flattered, but didn't have a second copy.

I now carry two copies at all times, either in the trunk of the car or in my bag.

Still, being a billed guest is a really humbling experience. I had people hanging on my every word at the panels I was on, looking for my "sage advice" about the craft of writing. Said sage advice consisted primarily of how much is too much to pay for an iced mocha, and how if you want to be a writer, don't assume that fame and fortune will immediately follow.

One of the strangest experiences I've had so far as a guest has more to do with my interactions with other guests... I sat on a panel with my publisher, Allan Gilbreath, my editor, Kim Richardson, and Hugo award winning, NYT best selling author, Timothy Zahn.

Read that again, and try to think of it from my perspective... Two of my bosses, one of my idols, and me, all talking about the craft of writing. What was really strange is that among these incredible writers and personalities, I totally held my own on that panel, very much giving the newcomer's perspective on my craft. In less than a year, i've gone from "goober in audience" to "respected colleague". When the heck did that happen?

Afterward, I got compliments from all three of them about how well I handled myself, and what good advice I gave about writing. Mr. Zahn was particularly gracious and encouraging, using terms like "after you're done with your next twenty books, you'll see how much your opinion of certain things will change" then he goes on to tell a story about him and George Lucas ("George" to him of course) like these are the types of stories we all have to tell. I told him I would check in with him in twenty years, and we would have the conversation again.

Before I get accused of having a swelled head, let me say that there are definitely some media guest types that still intimidate me. Ms. Lindsay Wagner was a guest at this con as well, and I spent a good part of the weekend trying to talk to her and not come off like a gibbering fanboy. It was not easy... I have had a crush on the bionic woman since I was six. For most of the weekend I totally avoided her, and got teased mercilessly by my wife and friends for the fact. It was finally the sage wisdom of Allan Gilbreath that made me buck up and go up to her, by reminding me where I stand on the "con food chain" at this point in my carreer.

"You're not just joe shmoe off the street, Rob" he said in all seriousness, "You're an award winning screenwriter and novelist with a story in an anthology that has itself been nominated for three prestigious awards! Years from now, she'll tell the story of the young fanboy that approached her blushing at a con, and turned out to be Rob fricking Cerio!!!"

"You're right!" I yelled, granting a few stares from the other people in the merchants room, "I AM A BAD ASSED NOVELIST!!" I screamed a primal scream, and ran from the room right to the end of the autograph line.

I still came off like a gibbering fanboy, mind you.... But I was a fanboy that had every right to be there and gibbering. Ms. Wagner was very gracious and sweet for her part... Although she did seem very slightly disturbed when I explained about the whole " crush since I was six" thing. It occurs to me now that she probably gets that all the time, and was probably just sizing me up to see if I was "harmless goober" or "psycho stalker". (Wrong on both counts... More likely "psycho goober".) I even got off an intelligent question as she signed her picture for me that she answered thoughtfully and at length. (Why did she pass on the role of Captain Janeway? The short answer- she didn't... Her agent passed without asking her)

The most interesting thing about her to me was that her voice still sounds just like it did when she played the Bionic Woman... She still very much has that " schoolteacher" air about her, and carries herself with an easygoing dignity that is rare among pop culture icons.

Speaking of pop culture icons, it was also a good weekend for Captain Chaos. He participated in a lively panel about super hero movies, and got to help judge the costume contest. He's well on his way to becoming a fan favorite in his own right, and I couldn't be any prouder. I doubt that they will ever allow the good Captain to be a judge again, because he kept inventing awards in the intrests of equality and justice. (and the award for best jumping jacks goes to...)

Fagehdaboutit

I was going to take some time out to write about how forgetful i've been lately, but I forgot to research the topic. Ow. I think I just hurt my brain.
I often wonder what it is about getting older that seems to destroy our capacity to keep thoughts on our mind's "to do" list for longer than a few hours. I also marvel at the paradox that if I take the time to write something down, I invariably find that I didn't need to.
Case in point: Each day, as I wake up, I have gotten in the habit of making a "To do" list of my day's errands. I do this because once I wake the boys, it becomes difficult to concentrate on anything not involving kids, dogs, school, cartoons, bathtime, diapers, medicines, schoolbags, breakfast, or some horrible combination of all of the above. Yesterday, I had the foresight to remind myself that I needed to go to the Hardware store. I spent all day thinking that I need to get to the hardware store, but never did because the bulk of my day was spent chauffering my mother in law around. Today, the first thing I said to myself was "I must get to the hardware store", and so I did.
Only to have absolutely no recolection of WHY it was so important for me to go there.
Early onset alzheimers, perhaps? One too many contact highs from hanging out with stoners? Or just running into the fact that my eight pounds of grey matter is becoming more limited in its capacity?

A few random thoughts before bedtime...

Last month, the number of medications on my nightstand was zero. Today it is four. This troubles me greatly as a harbinger of things to come.

I love both my kids, but lord my life is easier when they're in school.

I like where we live, but thin walls and noisy ass neighbors do not make for a good nights sleep.

I would love to make a coffee table book about my thoughts when I watch my wife sleep. Problem is, she would kill me for taking the companion photos.

Rewriting your novel...

Welcome to 2012. Every year, I come back to this blog, with every intention of updating it on a regular basis... here I am again, in what has become a January 2nd tradition. This year has been really good to me, and I'm hoping I will be able to carry some of that through to this blog. As far as my writing goes, it has truly been a banner year. I self published my first novel, which made it to the semi-finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, co-wrote an award winning script for the local 48hr film competition, had a short story published in a steampunk anthology, and was for the first time a guest at a local sci-fi convention.

Currently I'm working on pitching a few articles to Cracked.com, Finishing this years NaNoWriMo novel (The November gods really had it in for me this year), and most importantly rewriting and editing my second novel.

Recently my NaNoWriMo compatriots Shannon and Suzie started blogs about the process of the rewrite. Both of them have been there for me through the good and bad of my NaNo attempts, and are looking to make the leap to pro. When they looked for some advice on the internet about how to go about turning their rough drafts into literary gold, they found that there was little to no info about the process of rewriting. Well, I decided that for the next few weeks I will share my process as I work to bring my second novel to press.

Part 1) Looking over the rough draft

The most important thing for anyone to do with their freshly minted rough draft (such as the smoldering pile of 50,000 words that comes out the other end of NaNoWriMo) is to put it away for a while. That's right... lock your baby in a closet for at least a month, preferably two. Don't look at it, don't think about it, don't so much as smell it until you've done something else to pull you away from it. When you're no longer looking at several pounds of blood, and tears placed upon a divine anvil and hammered by the gods themselves into 'your greatest work made manifest' anymore, but instead a story that was written by a mere mortal on way too much caffine and with the kids screaming in the next room, you're ready to begin again. You start by reading it with a notepad next to you.

I warn you, it will be ugly. There will be huge tracts of it that are nothing but literary vomit. But on the flip side there will be parts that are absolutely brilliant, making you wonder if magic elves came and added to your word count in the middle of the night. It's important to remember at this point that you're not here to judge yet.

As you read over the manuscript, here is what to ask yourself, and make notes on your notepad where applicable, but RESIST THE URGE TO REWRITE UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT AT LEAST ONCE!!!:

1) Are there any gaping holes in the plot?
2) Are there any unintentional loose ends?
3) Are there any scenes that simply don't move the plot forward?
4) Does the story have the tone I want it to, and does it say what I wanted it to say?

Now go back and address these issues one at a time.

For the manuscript I'm working on (the sequel to Dimensional Games), I noticed a few things during this initial reading... There a was a device I introduced to the story that could have allowed the hero to easily dispatch the bad guys by pushing a button. I fixed this by making the thing impractical, with a huge amount of time between usages for recharge. I also had two "what the hell was I thinking here?" scenes that while funny, introduced characters and plot points that went absolutely nowhere. It broke my heart to lose the jokes, but I eliminated them completely. The last thing I found that I had to work on was much harder to fix... the tone of the book was all wrong.

Dimensional Games and its sequel take place in a science fiction multiverse that at its heart, is supposed to be absurdly funny. It took me a while to figure out why the next book wasn't really as funny to me, but eventually I realized that it all came down to the opening chapter... To demonstrate what I'm talking about, close your eyes and think of the opening of your favorite movie... what do you see?

One of my favorite movies is the Cannonball Run. The first minute of the movie is filled with two hot girls in a European sports car making cops look stupid as they try in vein to catch them. This pretty much continues throughout the entire film. Any James Bond movie will open with oo7 in some exotic locale flirting with a beautiful woman, while foiling a villainous plan to take over the world before returning to MI6 for his next assignment, which will involve beautiful women, action, and a plot to take over the world.

Your opening chapter is like the first minutes of a movie. It will tell your reader (and if you have aspirations of publication, the editors reading your manuscript) what to expect from your book for the next three hundred or more pages.

The problem with the original opening to the manuscript I'm working on is that the tone was all wrong... It had my hero in a very dark place (nearly getting killed in action), and was simply too serious for the tone I wanted my book to have. I dumped it and wrote a new opening from scratch, trying to make it lighthearted, while still revealing the important plot points that the original opening made. It completely turned the story around.

If you want to, you can go back now and edit for grammar, spelling, etc... in preparation for the next step. Letting others (shudder) read it.

The not-so fresh beats

I have kids below the age of ten, and unfortunately that means I am subjected to an inordinate amount of childrens programming every day. While this can be awesome (my 9 year old just discovered the wonder of Rocky and Bullwinkle) it is more often terrible.

Case in point, should your preschooler ever want to watch these yahoos:
My advice is simply this... Run. The Fresh Beat band is simply put the most repetitive, inane piece of pablum that has ever come out of the minds at Nickelodeon. Keep in mind, that this is from a guy that has no problem with the Teletubbies or Yo-Gabba-Gabba.

The worst part is that the show wouldn't actually be that bad to share with your kids (they promote discussions about creativity, friendship and responsibility) if it wasn't for the fact that they know exactly five songs, which they repeat over and over again every episode. I promise you that after three or four of them, you'll want to fill up the bathtub and throw in a live toaster. To make it worse, the bright primary colors and happy tones make this like kiddie crack. They will insist on a daily (sometimes twice daily) hit of this crap.

Do yourself a favor and make them watch the Backyardigans instead.

Facing the book...

This post originally appeared yesterday as a facebook note... DOA management

I think I've worked out this new Facebook... Apparently, the idea is to be able to break your friends up into more manageable groups, like Google + and their 'circles'. when you don't pick categories for all your friends and loved ones, It auto-defaults to the people that you comment on the most. I suppose for the Facebook user that has several thousand friends that they don't actually know, this would be a pretty neat thing... pull out all the folks that you met through farmville and apps like it, and concentrate on the people that really matter to you.

Which is great if you have primarily casual acquaintances on your Facebook, but not so much if you actually care about all the people on your Facebook. Me, I have maybe 200 or so Facebook friends, and I'm pretty picky about who gets added. My hard and fast rule is that I either have to have had a flesh and blood conversation with you at some point in my life, or you have to be someone that I desperately want to have a conversation with (which is why there are a few of my author/heroes on my feed).

I have always felt that one of Facebook's genuine strengths was that I could loosely keep tabs on folks that I had long lost contact with. Updates about friends from high school and college whose lives I genuinely miss being a part of now have their lives played out in front of me on a daily basis. Pictures of spouses and offspring float past, invariably bringing a smile to my face whether I hit the "like" button or not . It was a great way for me to reconnect with people through the flood of child care and writing that is now my life. I like to think that my updates do the same for them.

But then a few days ago, Facebook decided that I obviously couldn't possibly care about all of these people, so it cut back my feed to the top ten that I comment on on a regular basis. They have confused my passivity for apathy. Among the people that wound up filtered out were my wife and three of my closest friends. This made no sense to me until I tried to set up a Google + account, and saw the paradigm that Facebook is scrambling to emulate.

I think that Facebook has really turned a corner. Rather than being the trendsetter, they are now playing catch-up, much as MySpace wound up doing with them a few years ago. I would think that it would benefit them to just make their own product as useful as possible (Where's my damn dislike button?) and to stop copying others.

From the Short Stuff Journal series- Why I wish I was better at math.

Short stuff is now doing journaling assignments in class, and I told him that I would write too. After all, it's difficult to tell the boy to do an assignment when he sees his writer step-dad doing nothing... So, I told him I would write on my blog about anything he was told to write about in class. I may make it a weekly thing.

I wish I was better at math for a number of reasons. Math would help me manage my finances better, that's for sure. I mean, money isn't really that much of a problem for us these days, in that our bills are paid on a fairly regular basis, but things have been tight of late. If I was better at math I would be better at budgeting what little money we do have.

Another reason I wish that I was better at math is that I probably would have wound up in a much different career... I wanted to be a scientist or engineer when I was young, and then later a computer programmer... but I found out at an early age that I have no brain for either languages or math. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I do so well at English, all thing considered or I would be screwed.

Dr Strangebook, (Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Blog)

A lot of my thoughts are strictly one liners. I make no apologies about this, but sadly it means that they are far better suited for the "status update" or "tweet" than the "blog".

Coming up with Blog entries is hard. It can be discouraging, educational, and maddening at times to come up with just a few paragraphs that are all at once inspirational, interesting and entertaining all at the same time. I shouldn't be so self conscious about it I suppose, but let's face it, all of us write on some level to be read.

Blogging, I think is one of the more primal exercises in writing. It's not that I don't have a tremendous amount of respect for those that make a popular blog, but the act of blogging is a little like spitting out the best and worst of yourself out on a page, unedited for the world to see. At least with sites like Facebook, you always have a measure of control over who actually reads your words... but blogs are usually very public places.

I have recently come to the conclusion that if you're really worried about who reads what you write and how they will react to it you probably shouldn't be a writer. I have had reason to be worried in the past, too... I have had at least two of my jobs placed in jeopardy, and watched a fellow promising writers career go down in flames due to the raging beast that is the internet. But that was then, and this is now. I no longer work for anyone, save my wife, kids, and personal sense of duty.

I need to be out there on the web sticking it to the man, you know? Or at the very least poking him with a rubber chicken or two.