The recipe! Courtesy of The Smitten Kitchen. This will make two pie crusts. I’m making a half batch in all the pictures I took.

2 1/2 c. flour
1 T sugar
1 t. salt
8 oz (2 sticks) unsalted butter

(We never have unsalted butter in the house, so I used regular and omitted the teaspoon of salt and it worked out fine)

Chill everything. Or at least the butter. Make sure it’s COLD. The refrigerator is your friend.

Cut the butter into cubes. I cut the stick of butter in quarters lengthwise, then cut those sticks into cubes. Dump everything into a really big mixing bowl. Significantly bigger than you’d think you’d need. Making pie crust is messy, and you don’t want to fling your flour all over your kitchen, or yourself. Like so:

See how that bowl looks way too big for such a small pile of ingredients? I was glad to have it. And I still ended up with flour on my pants.

Get one of these:

I guess you could cut the butter into your dough using two knives, but that sounds like an awful lot of work to me. This makes it much faster, and much easier.

Speaking of which: Cut the butter into your dough.

I used to be under the impression that the goal of cutting the butter in was to get a homogenous butter/flour mixture. Apparently, I was completely wrong. I have this irresistible urge to get Everything Completely And Thoroughly Combined, but I have to resist it when making pie, because apparently, you want chunks of butter. That’s what creates flakiness. D’oh!

This is good news, though, because it means you get to stop much sooner than you’re inclined to.

The general guideline I read is to cut the butter into your dough until it’s in “pea-sized chunks”. They really mean this. So when you’re cutting it in, stop every so often, squint at your butter chunks, and really ask yourself if peas are that size. Resist the inner voice that says, “No! Make them smaller!” Really look.

For reference’s sake, this is what my butter looked like when I decided it was done:

Look how chunky and uneven that is! It makes my poor baker’s heart weep with its lack of homogeneity. But it’s going to be delicious.

Now, get a glass of ice water and a rubber (or silicone) spatula. Give the ice water a minute to really get chilled. Remember: cold. Cold cold cold.

Now dribble ice water onto your dough a little bit at a time, and mix it up with the spatula in between. You don’t want this to be too wet, or it’ll be sticky and unmanageable. Just add water until comes together and you don’t have any dry flour left in the bottom of the bowl. With this half batch, I dribbled water in two tablespoons at a time, and ended up putting in about 5 tablespoons of water total. It’ll look like this:

Now reach in there and mash it together. Just a little bit! I probably squeezed it four times total. You don’t want to work this much because that’ll form gluten, and gluten will make it chewy, not flaky. You definitely don’t want to knead it.

Form it into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and flatten it into a disc. (If you’re making a full batch, divide it in half, and form it into two separate discs.)

See how it looks kina blotchy there? With darker-yellow spots in the middle of lighter-yellow bits? The darker yellow there is your chunks of butter. This makes my baker’s heart cry a little, too. But your tastebuds will thank you. Just remind yourself that it’s good for it to be uneven.

Then stick it in the fridge and go write for a while. It needs time to cool off after all that handling.

Reina turned, holding a coffee mug inscribed with overwrought sentimentalism and a floral palette. “What do you think?”

Fate stared at it, at a loss. “It’s kind of awful, sweetie.”

“Kynan’s got a birthday coming up, I want to get him a gag gift.”

“You’re going to inflict that on Kynan? What did that poor man ever do to you?”

“Do you think he’d hate it? I’m going for funny-awful, not awful-awful.”

“I don’t think he’d ever tell you how dreadful it is. He’d drink out of it every day for the rest of eternity just so you’d know he appreciated it.” Fate took the mug out of her hands and put it back on the shelf. “Friends don’t let friends buy kitsch.

If you’re tackling a structural revision, this is the way I did my last one. It’s a little labor intensive, but it’s got structure out the wazoo, which I find incredibly helpful for keeping me from flying into a panic.

First: Go watch Dan Wells’ talk on story structure, if you haven’t. The video is here, and you can download his powerpoint to follow along here.

Then, what I did for my novel, which was “finished” but had some serious structural issues I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to solve, was I wrote down every plot thread that I could think of in the book.

Next, I used Dan Wells’ method to build a 7-point system for each plot thread. Many of them, I didn’t all seven points — those were places where I had structural problems, so I worked on making sure that I had the complete chart filled out for every single thread, making sure that each had a solid arc, progression, and conclusion. Being able to work with just one thread at a time really helped keep the panic down because I could focus on just that one, instead of getting overwhelmed by the book as a whole.

You can see in the image above how I color coded the threads. Then I printed them out on 3×5 cards, one point per card, and spent a while crawling around on my living room floor, arranging everything into chronological order. When I was done with that, I’d turned my half-a-dozen threads into one long plot.

The places where there are multiple cards next to each other are where the same plot point spread across multiple threads. When I was satisfied with my layout, I typed the cards up into an outline. With that in hand, I went through the book, using the outline to identify scenes that were superfluous to the plot and needed to be gotten rid of, as well as places where new scenes had to be written to fill in the holes of my first draft.

Although this does take a fair bit of work beforehand, I’ve found it so incredibly helpful, because it eliminates away the panic of “oh my god, I don’t know how to fix this”. Using Dan Wells’ structure helps me to identify exactly where the problems are and how to fix them, and having the whole thing outlined beforehand means that once I’m actually working on the book, I only have to focus on the scene in front of me, instead of getting pulled a million different directions by a hundred different scenes that all need to be fixed.

It also works great for outlining the book before you start writing the first draft, but I like pantsing well enough that I usually only do that if I’m feeling really intimidated by a book.

Does anyone else use Dan Wells’ system? What other methods do you use for structuring your books? Please share! I’m always on the look out for more tools.

Aten, immortal pharaoh of the Two Kingdoms, keeps his eternal good looks by sucking the blood of innocents. Everyone knows it. His very existence is a blasphemy against the gods. So when Seth, a priest of Ra, is told to assassinate this tyrant at the masquerade celebration during the Festival of Opet, he accepts the task without questioning it. He seduces Aten and waits until they’re in the privacy of the pharaoh’s bedchamber before he strikes, driving a stake into Aten’s chest. But Aten doesn’t die. The stake shatters without even leaving a scratch, and Aten laughs at him for the attempt.

Seth expects to be executed for treason, but neither man can deny their attraction and Aten’s intrigued by Seth’s misguided desire to see him dead. He challenges Seth to stay, to see if he can find a way to kill him — and maybe to see that he’s not the man people say he is.

The longer he remains, the more Seth struggles with his convictions. Is it possible that all the rumors are wrong? Can a man who survives on the blood of others possibly be good and just? When the time comes to choose sides, will he honor his gods, or his heart?

And how about an excerpt? Oh, I think so!

He still didn’t stir. I kissed his chest once more, then positioned the point of the stake between my fingers.

Aten stiffened and I felt opportunity slipping away from me. I poised the tip of the stake in the space between two ribs, grasped the shaft in both hands, and leaned all my weight against it.

There was a moment’s resistance, then it gave beneath me and I fell forward. He grunted in surprise — only that, nothing more.

I scrambled up, shaking with the knowledge of what I’d done. But the sight before me made me shake even harder. The stake hadn’t driven into him, it had shattered, and Aten’s chest wasn’t even scratched.

No, I thought, dizzy. It’s impossible.

Aten picked a splinter up from his chest. His brow quirked. “That’s what this was all about?”

I could only stare at him, unable to speak.

His lips curved, a wry smile. “All this. I supposed there was some point behind it, but…” He rolled the splinter between his fingers, then flicked it away. “I admit, I didn’t expect that.”

I slid backwards to the foot of the bed, watching him, waiting for his retaliation.

He sat up and brushed the splinters from his chest and the bed. “Well? If you are intent upon killing me, the least you could do is tell me why.”

Want more? Check out a teaser here, or an extended excerpt here. You can also follow that last link to buy the book and read the whole thing.

It helped to strip off these trappings and reveal the man underneath, even if he was not a true man at all. I drew the mantle over his head, then took his hands between mine and pulled at the fingers of his gloves until they came off.

With hands and face and throat revealed, he looked more like any other man standing before me. I could face this with better equanimity than I could when he had been covered and featureless, as remote as the god he deemed himself.

But a man I could kiss, and coax into bed, and betray. I could do this, if I could think of him as only that, and nothing more.

Want to read more? Follow this link to read more about the book, including a longer excerpt, or click here to buy it.

Want to play along? It’s fun and easy!
1. pick a project – a current WIP, contracted work or even something readers can buy if you’re published
2. pick six sentences
3. post ‘em on Sunday

When I was a kid, I used to love going to the dentist. They had a fish tank with tons of awesome, exotic fish that I got to stare at while we waited, Dr. Lamb was awesome and funny, and at the end of every visit, we got to pick a toy out of this treasure chest to take home with us. I knew that there was this prevalent trope about people being afraid of the dentist, but I really didn’t understand why.

Sometime between then and now, I contracted the disease, and now I understand it all too well. I had an appointment with the dentist this morning, and I spent much of the past 24 hours trying to think up plausible excuses to miss it. The thing is, for me, the reluctance doesn’t actually have anything to do with the dental work. My dread is focused on the actual dentist, and how at my last appointment, I was made to feel like a horrible excuse for a human being because I had the temerity to need a root canal. Needles and drills I can handle, but shaming? Oh hell no. That’s the quickest way to get me to avoid coming in for a cleaning. Which then leads to needing root canals. You see the problem…

In any case, I may have been praying for a Hail Mary save or a spontaneously dead car battery up until the very last minute, but in the end, I put on my big girl panties and went to the dentist. Turns out, they were much more respectful this time. The worst (and longest) part were the x-rays. My geeky heart thinks that the fact that they can do digital x-rays now is completely kick-ass, but my gag reflex begs to differ.

Raleigh squinted his eyes against the glare of the reflected sunlight, gazing out over the seemingly endless expanse of forest, snow, and rock. A man could get lost in this wilderness and never find his way out again, and only the beasts of the mountain would bear witness.

“What do you see in it?” Raleigh wondered.

Fletch’s brows shot up. He looked out over the landscape as Raleigh had, but whatever it was he saw, it made his eyes brighten and a smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “Freedom,” he said.

Want to play along? It’s fun and easy!
1. pick a project – a current WIP, contracted work or even something readers can buy if you’re published
2. pick six sentences
3. post ‘em on Sunday

Raleigh stood in the snow with the tent unpacked before him, laying deflated and sad on the ground.

“Haven’t you got that up yet?”

“Fletch,” he said mournfully, “I fear someone has played a terrible prank on you. They’ve taken your tent and replaced it with a heap of wool and sticks.”

Fletch laughed beneath his breath, but schooled his expression by the time he reached Raleigh’s side. “It’s not going to assemble itself, you know.”

Want to play along? It’s fun and easy!
1. pick a project – a current WIP, contracted work or even something readers can buy if you’re published
2. pick six sentences
3. post ‘em on Sunday

Seriously, people. Don’t be That Guy. Bad reviews suck, but the internet is forever, and acting like a big enough ass that everyone and their brother is talking about it and people are even selling CafePress items commemorating your idiocy sucks even worse.

I read an article recently about a man who runs an online shop and is horrifically nasty to his customers. Why? Because even negative chatter boosts his site’s Google ranking, which gives him greater visibility and therefore more sales. Personally, I think maintaining that level of vitriol sounds exhausting, and I don’t think the take-away from that piece should be that acting like an ass on the internet can increase your sales. It may be true in the short run, but it’s not going to get you many long-term fans.

I think the more important thing to take from that article is that even negative publicity can boost your sales. So the next time you get a review that hurts, take a deep breath and please, walk away. I’ve been known to buy a book based on a negative review, because even while it was clearly not the reviewer’s cup of tea, it sounded like mine. But I will not give my money to authors who behave badly on the internet, and even just a cursory look at the comments on that article shows that I’m not alone.

He landed against Fletch with a force that drove the air from his lungs. Fletch shrugged his weight off with a muttered obscenity and Raleigh rolled, landed hard against the sharp edge of the console.

I am going to die, he thought, and watched the ground rush toward them. I am going to die here in this iron box in the snow with a complete ass for my companion.

He didn’t shut his eyes. He braced a hand against the windscreen and watched the ground rush toward them.

Want to play along? It’s fun and easy!
1. pick a project – a current WIP, contracted work or even something readers can buy if you’re published
2. pick six sentences
3. post ‘em on Sunday