What's Cooking Wednesday - Tomato-Spinach Soup

What I'm reading: Contest entry #3 of 8

Thanks to Mike for his great post yesterday. Remember, there's still plenty of time to comment on both my Monday post and his Tuesday's post to enter to win books. And another reminder about my POV workshop at Savvy Authors. I'll be giving books away there, too. If you know someone who might benefit from a basic craft workshop, point them that way. I'm blogging about it today at their site. Please pop over.

And, I'm still open to more easy gluten-free desserts for our neighbors. I live in the boonies, so fancy ingredients, like gluten-free flours, are hard to come by.  Likewise, baking at 9100 feet presents its own challenges, so I try to steer away from cakes.

My books always include food. Sometimes, however, the scene doesn't end up on the page of the final product, as is the case with Sadie's Tomato-Spinach Soup. In my Pine Hills series, Sarah often eats at Sadie's. One of her favorite things for lunch is their Tomato-Spinach Soup. I'll be making this one for our monthly dinner pot luck on Friday. (In truth, the original recipe, which I've varied, came not from "Sadie" but from Sandra McDonald, my first writing mentor.)

"Sadie's" Tomato-Spinach Soup

Ingredients
Vegetable cooking spray
1 ½ teaspoons olive oil
¾ c chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
1 ½ cups salsa
1 c fresh tomato, chopped
2 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes
1 10-3/4 oz can condensed tomato soup, undiluted
1 10 oz package frozen chopped spinach, thawed

Directions
Coat a Dutch oven with cooking spray; add olive oil, and place over medium-high heat until hot.
Add the onion and garlic, saute for 2 minutes.
Add remaining ingredients; bring to a boil.
Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes or until thoroughly heated. Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 1 cup)

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Dialogue: Who’s Talking Now?

What I’m reading: Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith; Thrilled to Death, by L.J. Sellers.

First: Thanks to all who bought copies of WHATS IN A NAME? I’ve made my donation to my daughter’s fund-raising efforts for Team in Training.

Next: Check the “Deals and Steals” tab – Smashwords has a big sale featuring members of the Backlist eBooks group, and I’m pleased to be among them. Some of these authors are multi-award winners, and best selling authors, so even if you’re not looking for one of my books, there are some fantastic books out there.

And thanks to Mason Canyon at Thoughts in Progress for her review of WHERE DANGER HIDES.

As I write this, last Thursday still doesn’t exist according to Blogger. Maybe they’ll find my post, or maybe I’ll repost it another day.


I’m going to be leading a workshop—I hesitate to say “teaching” since I’d like it to include input from the participants—on dialogue basics for Savvy Authors. It starts on May 30th and will run through June 27th. There’s a sign up link in the sidebar.

Here's a secret – handling dialogue almost stopped me from becoming a writer. But wait, you're saying. Didn't you just say dialogue came easy?

Hearing dialogue was easy. Thinking dialogue was easy. But when I sat down to try to write a story that had been rolling around in my head, I found that typing dialogue was a royal pain. There were rules. Where did the punctuation go? I got so bogged down in remembering that you needed a comma and quote marks before the tag (not that I knew it was called a tag then), that I couldn't write the story. All that "shift" key stuff made writing a chore. The stories could stay in my head, where there wasn't anything complicated to remember.

DigiCon, E-publishing, and more

What I'm reading: Unforgivable, by Laura Griffin

First, before I forget – contest winners are announced on the weekends, so if you don't leave your emails in comments, you'll have to check back. This means there's still time to scroll through posts and add a comment for a chance to win. This week's special was posted on Monday, in case you missed it.

Thanks to Margaret Fieland for reminding us why it's so important to back up our work, and with suggestions for ways to do it. I happen to use a program called Dropbox (or is it a service? – terminology eludes me). With our new digs, living on 2 stories, it's so nice to be able to bounce downstairs (only did that literally once) and work on the laptop for a change of scenery, and have all my backed up files follow me down instead of dealing with flash drives.

Note: if anyone's interested, I can send you an 'official' invitation, and you'll get some extra storage space when you sign up. Just email me.

Since most of yesterday was spent down in The Springs while the Hubster underwent some oral surgery, I'm going to point you to the blog I did yesterday at Savvy Authors about e-publishing. The publishing industry is changing – nobody knows exactly where it's going, but to quote Bob Mayer, it's going very fast.

I made comparisons between the traditional print-first model, the e-book first, and the indie publisher models. The topics I covered included Speed of Publication, Support, Gatekeepers, and Payment for those three models, with some examples of my own experience.

I think the blog is up for public viewing as part of the Savvy Authors DigiCon that runs all this week. You should be able to find it here.

And because we wrote a ginormous check to the dentist, I would like to remind you of my e-books from the Kindle Store,(click the Kindle Books tab) Smashwords, and All Romance e-Books.

I should be back with a meatier blog tomorrow.

What Is Romance?

What I'm reading: Edge of Sight by Roxanne St. Claire.

Don't forget my new contest where everyone wins. Click the Contest tab above. And there's another contest in today's blog--details at the end of this post.

It's Valentine's Day, a holiday devoted to romance. I thought I'd ask what others find romantic, but before I did that, I went to Dictionary.com to see what the 'official' definition was. I was surprised when I found this at the top of the page:

1. a novel or other prose narrative depicting heroic or marvelous deeds, pageantry, romantic exploits, etc., usually in a historical or imaginary setting.
2. the colorful world, life, or conditions depicted in such tales.
3. a medieval narrative, originally one in verse and in some Romance dialect, treating of heroic, fantastic, or supernatural events, often in the form of allegory.
4. a baseless, made-up story, usually full of exaggeration or fanciful invention.
5. a romantic spirit, sentiment, emotion, or desire.
6. romantic character or quality.
7. a romantic affair or experience; a love affair.
8. ( initial capital letter ) Also, Romanic. Also called Romance languages. the group of Italic Indo-European languages descended since a.d. 800 from Latin, as french, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Provençal, Catalan, Rhaeto-Romanic, Sardinian, and Ladino. Abbreviation: Rom.

Scrolling down, I found the entries for the World English Dictionary to be the following: