Sunburst Award!

September 19, 2013 / rachelhartman / 4 Comments

As some of you may have heard already, Seraphina has been awarded the 2013 YA Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. A big thank-you to this year’s jury, and congratulations to Martine Desjardins, winner of the adult award, to all the runners-up, and to Lesley Livingston, who won the Sunburst Society’s Copper Cylinder Award. I got to meet Lesley this past weekend, and she is a fabulous human being.

In fact, I have an amusing tale to tell you. This past weekend I gave a reading at the Eden Mills Writer’s Festival — a wonderful festival in Ontario, and you should all GO if you ever have the chance! Anyway, I gave a reading in a picturesque, bucolic garden, and was now signing books at the signing tent. When my merry fans finally dissipated, I turned around to see two stern older gentlemen behind me.

“Rachel Hartman?” they said. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

I followed them to the village hall, wondering what on earth they wanted to ask. Waiting for us in the hall were five or six other people. That’s when I started to worry. The difficulty with being a writer, you see, is that my brain immediately leapt to many ridiculous and false conclusions about what was going on. I had upset the Literary Mafia and would soon be swimming with the fishes in the millpond. I was being abducted by aliens or inducted into a secret society.

It took a few minutes to understand that, no, they were giving me an award. I’m told I handled myself with aplomb. I mostly just remember feeling tickled. And relieved.

Leon Rooke, Peter Halasz, and a peculiar woman with a fabulous medal. Photo by Peter Grimaldi

The award, of course, wasn’t to be announced until the 18th, but since the jury members were there, and I was there, and they really wanted to see the look on my face, they’d decided to present the prize early. I was sworn to silence for a few days. Anyone who happened to see me later that afternoon, looking like I had a cramp in my face, that’s why. I was struggling not to grin. I have the kind of grin that inevitably inspires people to ask, “What’re YOU grinnin’ for, ya rascal?”

Peter then enlisted me to present Lesley Livingston with her Copper Cylinder Award. I tried to be as ominous as possible, but I almost certainly failed. I’m just not the ominous type. I feel certain I giggled. Anyway, it was awesome because then Leslie and I got to hang out, and that’s half the fun of these things, making new author friends. It’s like going to camp. We all weep and promise to write when it’s over, although sometimes “promise to write” means writing the next book. That’s fair.

I strongly encourage you all to check out past Sunburst winners as well as this year’s shortlists. There’s a lot of good speculative fiction coming out of Canada; I would have been honoured to lose to anyone on that list.

Happy Turkish book birthday!

September 5, 2013 / rachelhartman / 3 Comments

If any of you read Turkish, you’re in luck! Seraphina is now in Turkish too.

I’ve been to Turkey, so this was an international sale I was particularly tickled about. Someday I can regale you with tales of how the Basilica Cistern gave me the massive heebie-jeebies, or how we got unbelievably lost and dehydrated in Izmir. Or how I ate olives wrapped in anchovies and was thirsty for the next three days, or how the music-store clerks scoffed at our super old-fashioned taste in baglama music.

Good times! Happy memories! My funniest stories make it sound like everything went wrong, but it was one of our most fun, memorable trips and I’d love to go back someday.

Dragon Con!

August 27, 2013August 27, 2013 / rachelhartman / 3 Comments

This coming weekend I will be a guest at Dragon Con in Atlanta. I’m very excited, not least because the con has such an apropos name. Back in my comic book days, I went to a lot of conventions, but I never made it down to Dragon Con. Nice to be able to rectify that omission years later.

For those interested in seeing me there, I’ll be participating in six panels:

YA at Its Finest
Description: YA authors discuss the how-tos and wherefores of writing for the YA market.
Time: Sat 10:00 am Location: Embassy D-F – Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)

Advice for Young Writers
Description: So you’re a teenager or young person who has a story to tell. Come hear some advice from seasoned writers about how to get your start.
Time: Sat 11:30 am Location: A707 – Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)

Okay, You Sold It. Now What?
Description: For writers who’ve sold their first novels and/or short stories. What should you expect next?
Time: Sun 01:00 pm Location: Embassy D-F – Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)

A Diversity of Dragons
Description: Murderous flying lizards? Hardly. Dragons can be cunning, compassionate, graceful, wise, brash, bestial — and sometimes all of the above.
Time: Sun 02:30 pm Location: Embassy C – Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)

Sidekicks in YA
Description: All of our heroes have someone by their side. Harry has Ron and Hermione. Katniss, Peta and Gale. How do these characters help shape the story?
Time: Mon 11:30 am Location: A707 – Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)

Stuck in the Middle
Description: SF and Fantasy for the middle grades and younger fan.
Time: Mon 01:00 pm Location: A707 – Marriott (Length: 1 Hour)

Lots of informative writing and publishing panels, sounds like. Should be fun. I don’t know whether I have any kind of formal signing time, but I’m always happy to sign freelance if you catch me after a panel.

Going through my head today

August 16, 2013 / rachelhartman / 2 Comments

Steve Howe’s merry guitar tune, “Clap”

I had understood the title of this song to be “The Clap”, as in the STD, but according to Wikipedia, that’s wrong. I just checked our antique tape of The Yes Album, and there it is, wrong. How annoying would that be, to write a jolly little song in honour of your son’s birth and then some album-cover designer renames it after gonorrhea. I’d be a little upset, I have to admit.

But what a happy song, and what an interesting video of it. I’m so used to the cello and violin model of of string instruments, where you’d be moving the left hand fingers for each individual note, but you can see really clearly here that the left hand holds set chord positions and most of the work and challenge is in the right hand. Pretty neat.

A nautical feast!

August 4, 2013August 4, 2013 / rachelhartman / 1 Comment

I would like to give credit where credit’s due: this was all my husband’s idea. He planned it, he researched it, he (and my son) did most of the cooking. And although I won’t say this was the most delicious meal I’ve ever eaten, it was one of the most fun.

They started out yesterday making hardtack, not just for us to eat straight, but because figgy dowdy is made mostly of hardtack. Hardtack itself is made of flour, water, and a little salt, then baked at a low temperature until it is hard as a rock.

We carved “ER” in a few of them, so we could symbolically bite the queen later on.

We baked a second batch with a different recipe that used a little butter, and indeed, those were a lot easier to chew. Below is a plate full of the authentic hardtack, illustrating how much a sailor would receive as his ration every day:

A pound of tooth-chipping goodness!

The next day, my husband and son took the designated amount of hardtack out on the balcony and beat it to death with a bat:

It’s cowering in that bag.

Figgy dowdy requires hardtack crumbs, which are in fact quite hard to make. Hardtack is – I may have mentioned – pretty hard. Anyway, they finally crushed it sufficiently (or decided it would do), and then they mixed in the other ingredients: raisins and currants (which had been soaking in rum overnight), chopped figs, a little flour, a little sugar, a little nutmeg and ginger, more rum, water, three eggs, and a LOT of suet. Here’s my son kneading the mixture together. All those little white pellet-shaped things? SUET.

There were a lot of rum fumes, which he didn’t appreciate.

We then wrapped the mixture in flour-dusted cheesecloth, tied it shut, and set it in a pot of boiling water for three hours.

A tidy, attractive package! My hand is close to the camera, which is making the dowdy look smaller than it is.

Enjoy your bath, dowdy!

At one point, all four burners on our stove were going: boiling the figgy dowdy, heating up water to add to the figgy dowdy if it boiled down too low, cooking up the pease porridge, and boiling the salt pork. Hot work on a hot day! The pease porridge was basically yellow split peas and onions, boiled down to mush, and then some egg and seasoning added in. THEN, it too was wrapped in cheesecloth and put in to boil with the salt pork.

Boilin’ boilin’ boilin! Keep that dinner boilin’!

So ok, the salt pork and pease porridge (hot!) were done before the dowdy, so we had our dinner all together tidily like so:

Clockwise from top: Pease porridge; salt pork; more salt pork; hardtack (one with butter and one without – you can’t tell by looking, but your teeth will know)

What’s that in the mug, you ask? Why that, darling, is grog — rum, water, lime juice, a little brown sugar. I found it drinkable, just. I liked the peas best. The hardtack was very cracker-like, honestly; nothing to fault but the texture. Salt pork, however, is nasty, at least the way we prepared it. To be fair, I don’t know that any meat is at its best, particularly, when boiled. Still, I found this unpleasantly salty, and the half-inch fat rind was kinda tasty, but it really sits in your stomach like a lump.

British sailors were rationed a pound of salt pork. PER DAY. I can’t even imagine.

So ok, you’re wondering how the figgy dowdy turned out. I can read your mind, clearly. Well, it turned out like THIS:

That’s right, bebeh. Slimy and delicious.

It held together reasonably well. It looked a little like a loaf of soda bread, or a brain. We were able to slice and eat it for dessert.

Mmm! The white lumps this time are chunks of still-hard hardtack. The suet all melted.

I would imagine that if you’ve been stuck at sea for months, eating a pound of hardtack and a pound of salt pork every day, this probably tasted sweet and delicate and heavenly. It was a bit like bread pudding, I guess, but damper and greasier and not very sweet at all. I liked it, but it was a lot of work to make. My husband was thoughtful enough to run the figgy dowdy ingredients through a nutrition website and make us this:

Look at that iron content! That’s got to be good for something!

Apparently their rations came to about 5000 calories per day. I imagine trimming the sails and heaving the capstan and dancing the hornpipe took a lot of energy, but ye gods, I can’t even imagine. My stomach still kinda feels like I swallowed a rock.

Our continuing culinary adventures

August 3, 2013 / rachelhartman / 2 Comments

You may remember that we steamed a haggis ’round these parts on Bobby Burns Day back in January. Well, we’re up to no good again, this time in the form of 19th century nautical cuisine. My husband has been reading Patrick O’Brian’s novels – basis for the movie Master and Commander, if that’s more familiar – and he’s grown increasingly intrigued by what the sailors eat.

And who wouldn’t want to try figgy dowdy? I maintain he’s got a point.

And so, yes, we’re diving in. Today he and our son will be making hardtack (two kinds! No weevils, though), and then tomorrow we’re making salt pork, pease porridge (hot? cold? nine days old?), figgy dowdy, and grog.

REAL grog, not Ikea grog. Made from rum, lime juice, and bilge water. Bilge-tastic!

Anyway, my lads have largely taken charge of this whole operation, which is nice. I’m to take pictures and make sure Nancy Dawson is playing while we drink our grog. No, really, there was a specific fife tune for grog-drinking time. Here it is.

Hello, old friends

August 2, 2013 / rachelhartman / 3 Comments

Why yes, it has been forever — or maybe half of forever, which is close enough. I hope you weren’t worried. I needed to step away from this space for a while. I may do it again at some point, with or without warning. Well, THIS is your warning, I guess.

I think it’s fair to blame the sequel for pretty much everything. The way it ate my brain, the way it had me so stressed out in April that I would freeze up when I sat down to write. This sequel has, on occasion, been very very mean to me.

Or I’ve been very mean to myself. Or a lot of both.

I’m afraid I had to spend some time untangling myself and figuring out how to love writing again. The weird thing is that in the course of doing that, I found answers to a few problems in the sequel. That’s right: without all the suffering, I couldn’t have written those things. I’d spent months prior to that, trying to write a book I couldn’t write because I hadn’t been through April (the cruellest month! ™) yet.

Clearly, what we have here is some kind of timeline issue that could be solved quite easily if I had a time machine. I could go forward in time to my Future Self and say, “So, Future Self, what hard-won wisdom have you gleaned, so I can put it in this here book I’m writing. Don’t worry, I’ll mention you in the acknowledgements.”

At which point my Future Self would probably steal my time machine and blast herself back to ancient Greece. For all I know, she’s already done this. Time machines are tricky that way.

In any case, this is a terribly tedious and roundabout way of saying I’m feeling better. I’m writing better. I’ve taught myself overtone singing. We’re all gonna be OK.

A pair of book birthdays

May 6, 2013 / rachelhartman / 8 Comments

I’m early for one and late for the other, but let’s just pretend it’s Presidents’ Day and celebrate both together! Here’s the cover for the Brazilian edition of Seraphina, which came out in April:

Hurray! I hope Brazilian readers are enjoying the book!

And then, coming out at the end of May, we’ve got the Indonesian Seraphina!

My Indonesian translator informs me that this is original art by Martin Dima. I love how it’s reminiscent of the North American cover – sepia tones, Medieval city – while still being entirely its own thing.

Happy (late and early!) birthdays, international editions! It is humbling to realize how many places people are (and will be!) reading my book.

Two weekends, two events

May 5, 2013May 5, 2013 / rachelhartman / 4 Comments

Last weekend I did a reading at McGill Library in Burnaby, where my madrigal choir (plus an extra musical guest) very kindly agreed to sing, and where my friend Els very kindly agreed to take some pictures.

I started off reading excerpts from Seraphina and fielding questions from the crowd. And it was one of the biggest crowds I’ve had:

I talked a lot. It’s a well-known fact that I can go on and on:

“Well, now, let me tell you a little story about THAT…”

The second half was devoted to our musical performances. The choir sang two Renaissance songs: “Belle Qui Tiens,” which is a pavane (like the pavano Seraphina dances with Kiggs); and “Mille Regretz” by Josquin Desprez, a goosebump-inducing piece of music which was an inspiration for the book itself.

Too bad you can’t hear us, because we were AWESOME.

Then we had some special instrumental demonstrations. Here’s Lise – my librarian friend who set this all up – demonstrating the wooden transverse Renaissance flute, just like Seraphina plays:

Lise plays Jouissance Vous Donneray

An intrepid recorder trio then played Praetorius’s “Bransle de la Torche”, which is one of my favourite Medieval dance tunes.

Did you know recorders came in so many sizes?

I even demonstrated the bransle, or bits of it. It’s really more of a line dance, but I’ve never been embarrassed about dancing with myself.

My idiosyncratic bransle includes moves from the Charleston. This isn’t one of them.

For the grand finale, Lise’s cousin Nathan gave us a demonstration on his amazing bass sackbut! That’s right, friends, the sackbut is a real thing. I didn’t make it up.

No, it’s not a trombone. It’s a proto-trombone.

At the end of my visit, I received some tulips, a special bookmark, and this, a lovely piece of art from a talented young lady named Caitlin.

It’s on my mantle now, between Apollo and Poseidon.

So that was last weekend. THIS weekend, I got to go to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, and attend the BC Book Awards Gala Dinner. No point keeping you in suspense: I didn’t win the award I was nominated for, alas. But I had a cultural experience most Canadians never get to have, a reception and dinner with my province’s Lieutenant Governor. The Lieutenant Governor is, at a provincial level, what the Governor General is at the national: the official representative of the British Crown. I have never been anyplace so officially fancy in my life.

BC literary lights – I knew five people in the entire room, and two were my husband and son.

That’s the VIP reception, pictured above. My son was SO EXCITED to be part of it. He’s totally planning to brag to his friends that he was a VIP. I’m pretty sure this is not what his friends are going to imagine he means.

Then there was the award presentation and banquet, in the ballroom:

We sat at table five. (Oh, oh, oh, oh, table five! Table five!)

After the awards ceremony, we had a fancy dinner involving things like “White Asparagus Panna Cotta” (it was white! And gelatinous! ), and “Stinging Nettles & Fresh Goat Cheese Custard” (which didn’t sting, even a little). My son was far and away the youngest person present, and he got quite a bit of attention for being patient, well-behaved, and a good eater (even of the unusual foods, above). I may not have won the prize, but I did get a weekend that my whole family is going to remember for a very long time, and that is worth a lot.

And who knows, maybe I’ll be back someday.

Edited to add: Geez! I should tell you who DID win! It was Caroline Adderson, for her book Middle of Nowhere! I haven’t read it, but I’d better correct that. All the winners and nominees are listed here. What a writing culture we have here in BC!

I am sitting in a room

May 3, 2013May 2, 2013 / rachelhartman / 2 Comments

My friend John told me about this recently, but it took me a while to work up the nerve to listen to it. It’s an interesting bit of experimental music. It’s also 45 minutes long, so don’t feel you have to sit through the whole thing. You get a pretty good idea of where it’s going just a few minutes in. I was astonished how distorted it was by about seven minutes, utterly unintelligible at twelve.

I’ve got it running in the background. Right now, it sounds like blurry chords.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about human voices, though. Even while speaking, our voices are made up of different frequencies. The room echoes back some frequencies more readily than others, and by the end of this piece that’s what you’re hearing, notes that were always present in his voice, selected by the properties of the room.

The notes are all there, even when we don’t perceive them.

It’s getting more and more drone-like. It reminds me of this harmonica I had as a kid that would make eerie mooing noises if one didn’t blow into it with enough force. I suspect we’re headed toward even the rhythm of speech disappearing.

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