Patricia Stoltey

Author

Mix and Match

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What I’m Reading This Week:

I finished The Neighbor by Lisa Gardner. It was hard to put down, but I was just a tiny bit disappointed by the ending. While I would have thought early on that I would rank it 5 out of 5, I’d have to drop that to something like 4.25 out of 5. That’s still pretty darned good, right?

Now I’m reading the all-conference chosen book for Bouchercon, Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout (a Nero Wolfe mystery).

What I’m Thinking About:

Mostly thinking about the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference this weekend. And I’m thinking I’m not even close to being ready. I still have a lot of tasks to do, including my packing. I received my bookmarks and postcards yesterday, thank goodness. I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to post any conference happenings over the weekend. I’m usually so exhausted by 9:00 that I head for my room and collapse. I’m one wild and crazy woman when I’m away from home.

My Quote of the Week:

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
———-Ernest Hemingway, Interview in Paris Review, 1958

This Week’s Recommended Blog:

The Blood-Red Pencil (of course): See this week’s posts on self-critiquing and self-editing.

The Best Thing I Had To Eat This Week:

I threw together a meal with random ingredients and it came out like shrimp creole made with chicken instead of shrimp. Served it over rice and it was darned good. I added a little ground rosemary and yellow curry powder with my chili powder (and an extra dash of cayenne).

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Comments

  1. Just realized I answered Linda directly so my comment didn’t show up here. I too make a version of the refrigerator soup. Never the same soup twice, but always good.

    As for Archie, he’s a much more sympathetic character than Nero Wolfe, and he was well played in the series. I only saw two or three episodes (a pretty long time ago), but I remember the characters well.

  2. I, of course, am going to remark on your food comment. My husband and I were evacuated from home because of a nearby wildfire during the summer of 2007. We stayed with friends and the wife is a gourmet cook, who prepared dinner for us each of the 10 evenings of our visit.

    What was my favorite meal? Her “refrigerator soup.” She prepared it about a week into our stay and, as I’m sure you guessed, she took the refrigerated leftovers from that week’s meal and tossed them into a soup pot.

    BTW, any of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is a good choice. (I actually own an aged paperback of SOME BURIED CAESAR.) Do you remember the Nero Wolfe TV series with William Contrad and Lee Horsley? I absolutely LOVED Lee Horsley’s Archie.

  4. Keeping with the shit theme. (Grin) I used to work for a guy in Korea who had an aerosol can labeled, “Bullshit Repellant.” Every time you went in his office and gave him information he thought was incomplete, poorly researched, incorrect, or…I came to believe…he just didn’t wanna hear, out came the can and he commenced to spraying the room. Anticipating the question, I’ll respond that inside the can was simple room deodorizer. Thank Goodness.

    Best Regards, Galen
    Imagineering Fiction Blog

    P.S. Oh, there was a picture of a very robust bull on the outside. Not sure why that’s important, it just popped (as opposed to pooped) into my head. Though, I think the bull was doing more than just standing there…if you catch my, uh…drift.

  8. Thanks, Elizabeth and Karen, I’m going to do my best. It’s a good conference with great folks, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

    Karen, there sure is, and the list could get mighty long. For instance, I can’t play even one musical instrument well although I can read music for the piano, and I still haven’t mastered Photoshop. I could go on and on and on.