Pie!

This entry should be on my memoir blog, but that’s on hiatus at the moment, so I’ll put it here for now…

When I was probably around ten-years-old, right around Christmas, I was walking by the Bonnet’s house up the street from us. They lived on the corner of Maxwell Avenue and 19^th street. They were a numerous clan, I can’t remember how many kids there were, and they were a lot of fun, parents and children. Mr. Bonnet was in the back yard digging in a snow bank. As I watched, he dug up a large cooking pot, brushed the snow off and went up on the porch. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he had made a pork pie last night and had buried it in the snow overnight to solidify. Did I want a piece?

Pork pie! I had never heard of such a thing and couldn’t even conceive of it. Pies were sweet and they certainly didn’t contain meat. No thanks.

Several years later I took him up on his offer of the Christmas Pork Pie. Of course it was fabulous. I recently found Mrs. Bonnet’s recipe in an old cookbook she wrote for her family. Here it is, in her words, a Christmas gift from Thriller Guy, Allen Appel, and all the other Appels. It is not necessary to bury the pie in a snow bank and let it sit overnight, but it’s a nice touch.

Dick Bonnet’s Pork Pie

“This recipe should be in a book by itself. It’s not a meat recipe, or a pie recipe; at least not the usual meat or pie recipes. But it definitely belongs in this book. It’s not something you can “whip up” in a hurry, and certainly no way to impress guests, unless they are British.

It has always been dad’s late evening winter snack. Also, Grandma has made it for all your Uncles and Aunts and has actually mailed it on occasion. Absolutely indestructible!

The first time I ever went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Bonnet, way back in 1947, we arrived in the late evening in a snow storm and Grandma had made a pork pie for Dad. Maybe she wanted to discourage me! Anyway, I ate it “to be polite” and have eaten it “to be polite” ever since. One suggestion, don’t try to make it yourself until you have watched the master (Dad) make at least one.

This is not an ordinary recipe – This is ANOTHER BONNET CHALLENGE.

6 cups flour

1 ¼ cup lard

1 ½ tsp. salt

¾ c water

Boil lard and water until lard is melted. Add flour and salt. Knead until smooth and elastic – about 10 – 15 minutes or when it no longer falls apart and has the consistency of putty. Shape dough on a cookie sheet, building sides about ¼” thick and about 3” high. So it will hold meat. Save ¼ of dough for cover.

Get a very lean piece of pork, about three pounds. I usually get a fresh ham and use what is left for a small roast. A “picnic” shoulder is cheaper, but has a lot more fat to cut off. Cut meat in ¼” cubes, cutting off all fat. Meat cuts easier if it has been left in the freezer about an hour. Put in a bowl and salt and pepper generously. Put pork in molded, unbaked crust. Roll out top crust with rolling pin. Cover pie, pinching edges together so it is tight. Cut an X in the center of top so steam can escape. Bake in oven for 2 hours. The last 20 minutes of baking brush top and sides with egg white or milk to make it shiny. Raise temp to 400 degrees for last 20 minutes.

While pie is cooling, boil 1 cup water with 2 bouillon cubes, one pk. Gelatin and an onion. Boil about 15 minutes. When pie is completely cool, add this mixture to X in top of pie, a little bit at a time. Refrigerate several hours before serving.”

Or, as noted above, bury in snow overnight.

Merry Christmas everyone. Don’t forget to go to audible.com and order your audio copy of the Christmas classic, The Christmas Chicken. You can listen to it while you cook up your Pork Pie. 

Elf

Thriller Guy is going to pass along some holiday cheer, but first he’d like to discuss the elf

on the fucking shelf phenomena. Who comes up with this crap? And why do so many perfectly reasonable parents fall for it? Thriller Guy readily admits that he has come late to this phenomena, alerted to it only by certain Facebook friends complaining that they have to get up in the middle of the night to move the damn elf because they forgot to do it before going to bed. Who is this elf, TG wondered, who was as pushy and demanding as TG himself? For those of you who aren’t aware of the gimmick, TG will give you the short version. For those who want a more detailed explanation, Wikipedia,as always, has an interesting article about it. 

Short version: You buy a little stuffed elf toy, put it somewhere around the house (a shelf is a good place) tell your kid that the elf is going to watch him/her and every night he flies back to Santa and reports if the kid has been naughty or nice. Every night after the kid goes to bed the parent moves the elf to a new place to prove to the child that the elf has gone to tattle to Santa and is now back, ready to spy on the kid for another day. The main rule is that the kid can’t touch or play with the elf in any way. (WTF?)

It may surprise some of you out there that TG is an actual parent of three children, now all grown, and who was and is an active participant in many Christmas traditions. Every year he puts the Goddamned Christmas Lights on the bushes in front of the house, goes to the nursery to buy the Goddamned Christmas Tree with the wife and kids, struggles to put it in the Goddamned Christmas Tree Holder while Mrs. Thriller Guy endlessly moves it a half an inch this way and that while TG lays on the floor cursing while screwing those goddamned holder things into the trunk. Later on TG sits on the couch and drinks (heavily) as Mrs. TG puts the lights on the tree and berates TG for not helping to hang the millions of ornaments that have accrued over a lifetime of summer vacations to locations who all seem to have one common element, a Goddamn Christmas Store somewhere nearby.  So who says TG doesn’t have beloved Christmas traditions?

But the elf on the goddamned shelf? Are you kidding TG? Not in TG’s house. Ever.

Wikipedia says the whole thing was dreamed up by a couple of writers, Carol Aebersold and her daughter Chanda Bell, back in 2005 when they self-published a book telling the tale of the elf. You got a small elf doll when you bought the book. TG is always happy when a writer, any writer, makes some money, and it appears that these two have done very well. Maybe not as well as the lady who wrote the Fifty Shades of Grey books, but… wait a

minute!…TG ‘s fertile brain is banging on the front door of some sort of a mashup between an evil elf and a bit of light bondage, the phrase “naughty but nice” springs to mind; TG will reluctantly put this million dollar idea away for the time being so he can finish this blog entry. At any rate, kudos to the writers who came up with this scheme and snookered deluded parents into paying them money and going through an absurd ritual simply for the sake of the kids who probably understand what bullshit it all is, but are going along with it anyway figuring is it makes their parents happy then that’s all to the good, especially at gift giving time.

So where’s that holiday cheer TG promised at the beginning of this rant?

Looking at his stats, Thriller Guy sees he’s been writing this blog for several months more than five years, turning in 220 entries in that time. In the blogosphere, where most blogs have the life span of the proverbial mayfly, that’s an eternity. TG would hope that over those years, amidst all the bullshit he’s slung around, that he’s passed along some useful advice about good books to read, how to go about being creative, writing in general, and how to survive the Writer’s Life. During this time TG has made some friends and pissed off a lot of people; TG would have it no other way. Also in those years, Allen Appel has sold some books, and he and TG would like to thank those of you who have bought them. TG says every time you buy one of Appel’s books, an angel gets his wings, so we can only encourage you to continue this tradition. In fact, heading over to The Appel Store right now is a good idea if you have any last minute purchases for holiday presents or would just like to unwind with a pretty good book.

In the past five years Appel has read and reviewed almost 800 books. One surprising finding is that books, thrillers in particular, are getting better every year. When Appel started out, there were many terrible books, unoriginal, poorly written and just plain bad. And many of them went on to become giant bestsellers. It is very rare these days when a truly terrible book comes across his desk. Of course this gives TG less to rant about, but rest assured, in the coming year (years) he’ll find plenty of vineyards to trample, buffoons to stick pins in and books to ridicule. So from all of us here at appelworks, TG would like to wish his readers a Merry Goddamn Christmas and Happy Goddamn Holidays. And if you have one of those stupid elves, throw it in the trash after Christmas and never mention it again, your children will never miss it, trust me. If you want to start a tradition, buy a copy of Appel’s The Christmas Chicken and read it to your kid or get the audio version and listento the great Brad Wills act it out. And who says Christmas is too commercial. Not me.

Art Camp and A Christmas Message

On the grounds of art camp

Allen here. I recently did 19 days at an art camp down in Virginia. That makes it sound kind 

My writing studio

of like a short jail sentence, which in a way it is. You get three hots and a cot and all that is expected of you is that you use that time to work on your art. In my case I was working on my Kickstarter novel, the latest in my Pastmaster series. The fact that the art camp is in a magnificent setting and there are plenty of other prisoners there, most of them interesting, is an added bonus. There are, as I have slowly learned, many of these facilities around the world. They’re called by different names -- artist’s colonies, artists residencies, fellowship programs, etc. -- but art camp is how I think of it. Thriller Guy wasn’t invited because as regular readers of this blog know, he can be an obnoxious asshole, and well, let’s be honest, a real prick when it comes to interacting with others, particularly artists, especially writers. So if he ever went to art camp, there would be fights. Particularly dangerous, at least for TG, would be the Lady Poets. (LPs) TG has faced down a lot of bad hombres over the years, but none of his enemies -- Viet Cong, Taliban, ISIS, Columbian drug lords -- have ever equaled the ferocity of the riled up LP. This is particularly true when they band together and roam the night, looking for hapless prey to eviscerate with their creative knives. You know who you are, the two Barbaras, and your other poetical gangsta sisters.

Scary.

Art camp is full of a variety of artists: painters, photographers, writers – fiction and non-fiction, poets – and composers. I’m particularly interested in the composers because their art seems the most different from mine, and perhaps the most difficult. I know a little about music (I have for years been planning to write an opera, The Last Castrato) but the idea of stringing notes together into some sort of coherence completely baffles me, so it has been fascinating to lurk around the composer’s studios at art camp and listen to them work their way through the same sorts of problems that writers have to work through only using a piano instead of a word processor. This last stint at art camp, I met a wonderful composer, 

Andrew Rudin

Andrew Rudin. He’s about my age, so we share a relatively similar worldview, and because he’s a composer/teacher he has a huge fund of fascinating -- at least to me -- stories that I’ve never read or heard before. At dinner, and breakfast, he would regale us with anecdotes of the “And then Hindemeth said to Schoenberg…” variety, which left us in stitches. Andrew is a musician of some note (see what I did there?) who is well known for his early, pioneering work with Robert Moog. His continuing composition work has resulted

Andrew at the Moog synthesizer back in the day

in new and old pieces being performed all over the world.

Now, many of you are probably by now asking yourselves what is all this in aid of? as the Brits say, and what does it have to do in a writing/book blog? I’m getting to it.

Andrew is a “modern music” composer. That’s probably the wrong term, but most of you will understand what I mean by it. Rather than abide by the rules laid down by mostly old white classical composers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, his spirit roams over newer explorations of 20^th and 21^st century music. Meaning it can be difficult to listen to one of his pieces if you’re looking for a catchy tune to whistle, but putting in some effort will offer any number of interesting rewards. For those of you, my more avant-garde brethren, here’s a website where you can listen to some of his music.  

Be advised that Thriller Guy, the cranky, opinionated troublemaker who usually roams these pages, probably wouldn’t be a fan, but I have found much beauty in this sometimes fierce, intellectual music, even when I have to work at it a bit.

While talking one evening, Andrew said something I thought has as much to do with writing books as it does with writing music. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, (sorry Andrew) that after some years as a young musician working in electronic music and other advanced forms, he came to the realization that people just naturally “liked to hear a tune.” And so he decided to incorporate tunes – melodies – into his work. “But rather than being one of those guys who rummage through Bach’s wastebasket to come up with tunes, I decided to do it my own way.”

That’s when the nickel dropped. Rummage through Bach’s wastebasket. Brilliant.

As Thriller Guy has said, many times, humans seem to have a natural affinity, a need, for stories. From the days when early humans gathered around the proverbial fire eating their meal of roast mastodon, there was (probably) always a guy who recounted the story of the hunt, who told the stories of hunts past and the hunters and warriors who performed their glorious deeds. These were the proto-writers, the entertainers, the storytellers. When writing was figured out and printing presses invented, the need for stories could be fulfilled for everyone, once they learned to read. It seems to me that this need for stories is the same as the desire for melodies, tunes.

I am aware that this is not a particularly new or original thought, but we need to remind ourselves of it from time to time. Andrew’s next comment, about rummaging through Bach’s wastebasket, struck me particularly because, as a professional reviewer, I have read many, many novels that sound as if the author has spent his time, rather than coming up with a new and original premise/plot, rummaging around Dan Brown’s wastebasket, or Brad Thor’s or Larry Bond’s or Clive Cussler’s, instead of doing the hard work of thinking up and hammering out something ingenious, imaginative and remarkable in its own originality. Yes, it’s very difficult to do. TG has many times talked about strategies for coming up with new ideas – most of them involving gin – and there are many blogs and books out there that have their own methods, none of which are particularly easy or foolproof.

Or even necessary. Originality, that is, if your goal is simply making money. Consider the hundreds, thousands, of Da Vinci Code knock-offs, many of which have done extremely well in the marketplace, if not critically. And let me assure you, critics eventually become tired and dispirited writing reviews that sound mean-spirited and carping about how a book lacks originality when such books regularly climb the best seller lists and fly into the hands of readers, usually genre readers, who want more of the same stories, the kinds of stories that they love so much they’ll read various versions of it over and over and be perfectly happy. Maybe not as happy as if they had a book that gave a truly original spin on what they love, but they won’t know what they haven’t got unless they get it. Now there’s a convoluted sentence for you, but I think you understand my point.

Thriller Guy is always raving about certain writers, people who come from a life or career where they have some expertise that appears would lend itself to novelizing, who then pick a genre (usually mystery or thriller) and write a book (how hard could it be? they ask themselves) that ends up on my desk to review. This is seriously annoying for a number of reasons, but primarily because they haven’t read deeply in the canon and thus don’t know what’s already been done, and how not to break the rules that have been established by those who have gone before. The result is unoriginal stories littered with genre clichés. If they have a big enough platform – if they were “famous” for some reason -- they can usually get away with fooling publishers and convincing readers to read their books. But this doesn’t mean their work is any good, and I remain unmoved by their howls of pain when they read my lacerating reviews.

So, writers. Take my friend Andrew Rudin’s advice: get your heads out of someone else’s wastebasket. Think. Be original. Work harder. We want tunes and stories that are new. Always remember Thriller Guy’s mantra: Sit down, shut up, get to work.

Note to Dan Brown: please, put a lock on your dumpster.

A Christmas message from Thriller Guy: For those of you looking for a present for that special someone, or looking for something that will be much better than the usual crap you’re probably going to get, you could do far worse than journeying over to The Appel Store and picking up a novel, novella or an audio recording of one of Allen Appel’s books. Of special note is a download of the classic holiday tale,The Christmas Chicken. If this doesn’t move you to tears, of both laughter and emotion, Thriller Guy will send you your money back. Word, bro.

Have a Thrilling Christmas

Those of you who missed last weeks advertisement for Allen Appel’s classic novella, The Christmas Chicken, both in recorded version and as a Kindle, can scroll down to the previous entry or go here for the recorded and here for the Kindle version. And while you’re at the Kindle store, why not stock up on Appel’s other books so you’ll have plenty in the queue for the upcoming year. The Pastmaster series, featuring history professor/time traveler Alex Balfour has been a fan favorite for many years. If you’re waiting around for George R.R. Martin to finish up his next Game of Thrones, you could simply start Appel’s series with Time After Time and work your way through the following four books, Twice Upon a Time, Till the End of Time, Sea of Time, and In Time of War. And while you’re at it, give yourself a pat on the back for supporting this dedicated, hard-working writer. Now on to our regularly scheduled blog…

Actually, there is no regular blog this week. Consider this a placeholder. Thriller Guy is heading off in a few minutes to get eye surgery to remove a cataract. A simple operation these days, far simpler than the scores of times over the years that TG has had to go under the knife to remove various slugs from his many firefights and to be sewn up after being blown up.  So TG would like to stop and thank all his readers and wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Hopefully TG will be seeing you again in a few days. Stay tuned for updates.