Sunday Quote beat Final Fantasy II 24 years ago today
Read More“If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.”
~Paul Fussell
25000 words
I started Call of Fire on January 1st. In one week, I have written 25,000 words. This is a good thing… and a bad thing. I am enormously stressed. I am actually making myself slow down at this point, as I need to get other things done and actually leave the house sometimes.
This gif is an accurate depiction of my mental state.
How Dinosaurs Can Fix Your Time Machine: Guest Post from Daniel M. Bensen
I’m happy to welcome author Daniel M. Bensen to the blog today! He has a new book you can really sink your teeth into… uh… sorry. We’re talking about a dinosaur book, so I can’t resist a few jokes. His new release is Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, a time-travel romance with adventure and dinosaurs. Let’s get to the meat of the post… here’s Daniel!
How dinosaurs can fix your time machine
You know what I hate about time travel? Time travel tropes. Oh no, the future is the past and the past is the future! It turns out that by trying to prevent the thing, you caused the thing! The 1983 you went to doesn’t exist anymore! Now you have to seduce your own grandmother and kill your grandfather, clearly.
I didn’t want to write a book about time machines any more than George Miller wanted to write about cars. I wanted to write a book about bad-asses riding dinosaurs. So here’s how I worked it. And the science might even make sense.
What Douglas Adams called “the Whole Sort of General Mishmash” has a real name coined by real theoretical physicists: phase space. A phase space is a way to represent a system, in which each possible state of the system is a given an “address.” Imagine every particle was given a set of coordinates depending on where it is, where it was, and where it could be. Move from one set of coordinates to another set, and you’ve moved through the history of a particle — you’ve traveled through time.
You get into your time machine and select your destination — say 65 million years in the past. Your time machine then traces back the causal chain that ends with you until it arrives where you want it to be…more or less.
For one thing, the time machine is only accurate to the closest ten thousand years, which makes it pretty useless for studying human history.
The other, bigger problem is there is some “sideways” slippage as well. You may come out in a past, but it isn’t necessarily your past. You might find yourself in an alternate past where the Earth never formed, or where intelligent squids built a civilization before fish ever crawled out of the water.
But don’t worry. The time machine in my story is much more accurate than that. It sends our heroes to a prehistoric past that is very nearly indistinguishable from the real Age of Dinosaurs. Except for the stone-age humans riding those dinosaurs around. Oops.
So that’s where the actual story begins. There’s no worrying about changing the past, no possibility of fixing mistakes once you’ve made them. You just get in a machine and pilot it to a place where hairy men ride triceratopses and hurl spears at you. And take away your time machine. And your cybernetic enhancements. And marry you?
Then things get strange. We don’t need messing around with the time stream to make them any stranger.
Daniel M. Bensen is the author of Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, a time-travel romance with adventure and dinosaurs. You can see more of his work on his webpage.
Read MoreBready or Not: Healthy No-Bake Maple Breakfast Cookies
Happy New Year! Let’s make a healthy start. It’s no secret I love maple. This particular recipe has been a huge breakfast favorite of mine for the past six months, along with my other Healthy Breakfast Cookies.
These have another advantage, too… other than stronger maple flavor. They are fast to prepare. Even with my slow stovetop, I can whip these up and have them cooling in about 20 minutes.
Plus, these are fantastic to make and freeze! Since I eat three for breakfast, that means I can have a week’s worth of breakfast stashed away for now or later.
These are similar to the Maple Nut Butter No-Bakes I posted a while back, but this breakfast version is a heck of a lot healthier. No sugar. No butter. I like the taste more, too. It has a great, mild maple and nut butter flavor to it, and the oats soak just enough so that the cookies are perfectly chewy.
Customize these all kinds of ways, too. Use apple butter, pumpkin butter, etc. I’ve made them with cashew butter and almond butter, and combinations thereof. You could certainly use other kinds of milk, too, but I stick with unsweetened vanilla almond milk.
Greatly modified from Cookin’ Canuck.
Bready or Not: Healthy No-Bake Maple Breakfast Cookies
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 - 1 tsp maple flavor to preference
- 1/2 cup apple butter or other fruit butter
- 1/2 cup + 2 Tb almond milk
- 1/2 cup almond butter or other nut butter
- 1/4 cup + 2 Tb pure maple syrup
- sprinkle salt
- 1/2 cup pepitas or other seeds/nuts, optional
Instructions
- Measure out the oats and the two extracts, keeping them separate, and have ready near the stove. Prepare a large baking sheet with full coverage of wax paper.
- In a medium saucepan, mix together the apple butter, almond milk, maple syrup, and salt. Heat on medium, stirring often.
- After about ten minutes, the mixture will thicken; cook it at that level for another minute or two. If you have a candy thermometer, this thickening starts at about 180-degrees; that few minutes will take it to 200-degrees, and make sure it gets no hotter than that. Remove the pot from heat.
- Stir in the oats followed by the two extracts. Add pepitas or nuts, if desired. Stir until everything is covered.
- Use a tablespoon scoop to dole out cookies onto the prepared wax paper. This will be about 20 cookies or about 29 if seeds/nuts are added. Once they are all scooped, use your fingers to gently press in stray oats.
- Let cool for about 30 minutes. They can be kept sealed at room temperature but taste even better from the fridge; store between layers of wax paper. They can also be frozen.
- OM NOM NOM!
Sunday Quote welcomes 2016
Read More“For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.”
~Garth Nix
