Livia Llewellyn

I’m going to start posting family recipes every now and then. I have no problem with sharing them, and I’d rather send them out in the world to be used and reused and rewritten and passed along, than just have them sit in my files and then forgotten about after I’m long dead and poltergeisting it up in various museum dioramas and libraries – which is pretty much what I want to do post-life, but it would seriously cut down on my kitchen time. So here you go.

Grandma Chittenden’s Oatmeal Cookies

This is a recipe from my great-grandma on my father’s side. It’s changed a bit over the decades, but is largely intact from when she made them (about a century ago!). They can be chewy or crispy, depending on raisin amount and baking time.

Ingredients

• 1 cup shortening (I use Crisco)
• 1 cup brown sugar (I like dark brown but use light brown if that’s what you have)
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs, unbeaten
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1-½ cups flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp soda
• 3 cups oatmeal (regular Quaker Oats is what I use)
• ½ to 1 cup raisins (depending on how pro-raisin you are)
• ½ cup chopped walnuts (I use a bit more)
• I also add a small dash of cinnamon, a very small dash of nutmeg and a very small dash of allspice.

Instructions:

Mix the shortening and the brown and white sugar together. (I do all of this by hand, fyi)

Add the eggs and vanilla to the shortening/sugar mix.

Add all of the dry ingredients (flour, salt, soda, oatmeal) together, and then add to the mix.

Last, add raisins and nuts. When the dough is evenly mixed, drop large spoonfuls on ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake cookies in 350-degree oven for 10-12 minutes.

When you take them out of the oven, cram one into your mouth. Swoon. You’ll want to follow with an ice-cold glass of milk.

Yes, I’m still alive. I was going to post something at the end of the year, but I’ve fallen so far out of the habit of blogging, I just didn’t feel like it. Even now, I’m pretty meh about starting up again. I’m just not feeling the whole new year, new resolutions, new me crap. I still live in a garbage can. I’m still covered in ants. New year, same old same old.

I’m still working on FrankenNovel (yes, I know, SHUT UP), but there is a definite end in sight. That end may of course involve putting the finished manuscript in a shoebox and shoving it under the bed next to the dust bunnies (and, I’m pretty sure a small devil), but at least it will be an end! Oh, of course, it probably won’t be as bad as all that, but I’m all about being as dramatic a bitch as possible. Is that really a surprise to anyone? I thought not.

Anyway! After FrankenNovel is finished, and a couple stories sent off to various anthologies, I’m going to spend the rest of the year on two projects. One will be my next collection: four short (around 20-25k) novellas, all contemporary horror (i.e., nothing as lavishly fantastical as “Her Deepness”, but more in the style of “At the Edge of Ellensburg”). I don’t have a market or publisher for these – these are all just novellas I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. The second project will be starting my next novel. I have no idea what it will be – FrankenNovel is part of a series, but if it isn’t picked up by an agent, then it doesn’t make sense to write the next novel right away (although, yes, I will write out a synopsis, just to hedge my bets). There are a couple of stand-alone novels I can start on instead.

Yes, there are other things I plan to do this year besides writing and cavorting with insects, but I’ll save those for another post.

It’s a very good review. And I what I love in particular is that the reviewer has interpreted a number of the stories in ways I never saw before. You think you know everything about the stories you write, and then someone proves you wrong, in the best possible way.

I was putting books into boxes, which will go into storage, and I came across this. Italics are original, bolding is mine. Copy and pass it along, if you want. Make of it what you will.

“When the barbarians appear on the frontiers of a civilization it is a sign of a crisis in that civilization. If the barbarians come, not with weapons of war but with songs and ikons of peace, it is a sign that the crisis is one of a spiritual nature. In either case the crisis is never welcomed by the entrenched beneficiaries of the status quo. In the case of the holy barbarians it is not an enemy invasion threatening the gates, it is “a change felt in the rhythm of events” that signals one of those “cyclic turns” which the poet Robinson Jeffers has written about.

“To the ancient Greeks the barbarian was the bearded foreigner who spoke an unintelligible gibberish. Our barbarians come bearded and sandaled, and they speak and write in a language that is not the “Geneva language” of conventional usage. That their advent is not just another bohemianism is evident from the fact that their ranks are not confined to the young. Moreover, the not-so-young amongst the holy barbarians are not “settling down”, as the nonconformists of the past have done. Some of them are already bringing up families and they are still “beat”. This is not, as it was at the turn of the century, the expatriates in flight from New England gentility and bluenose censorship. It is not the anti-Babbitt caper of the twenties. Nor the politically oriented alienation of the thirties. The present generation has taken note of all these and passed on beyond them to a total rejection of the whole society, and that, in present-day America, means the business civilization.”

preface to The Holy Barbarians, written by Lawrence Lipton in 1959.

The post I’d intended to write will come tomorrow. Today, we get to talk about plagiarism – specifically the plagiarism of me! I found out yesterday that David Boyer, aka David Byron, aka about twenty other pseudonyms, has plagiarized portions of my story Jetsam (much thanks to “B”, for their constant and unfortunately never-ending work in exposing Boyer’s theft). Mr. Boyer/yron has been getting away with this shit for about five years now, to (at last count) over sixty authors. And not just horror writers, mind you – anyone is fair game. For those of you not familiar with his history, I suggest you take a look at this post by Brian Keene, which has links to a number of other blogs and websites that have been tracking down all of this fuckstick’s activities over the past couple of years.

In the meantime, I’ve been directed to this post, which has helpful instructions on how to go about reporting him. Since it appears that the book he wrote (ha ha, I mean “stolen, hacked up, and stitched together like some horrific fictional version of the Human Centipede”) that contained the rewritten portions of “Jetsam” has been pulled from online stores, I don’t know if there’s much I can do about it now beyond reporting it. However, it’s been pointed out to me that when Boyer finds an author he likes to “borrow” from, he tends to go back to the well a number of times. So, chances are pretty good that everything of mine that’s been published online has been looked over by him, and at some point may show up in his future, ahem, projects.

So! I guess I can count this as a milestone in my journey toward becoming a pro writer, right? Blerg. Well, anyway, onward.