Dredge Boat Coffee -- recipe

Thought it might be fun to use one of my own, today.

It's almost Oyster season, and though dredge boats are now for tourists only, their world lives on in fiction.

Stories of the culture of the working oystermen abound, including the daily miracles performed in cramped after-cabins by their legendary cooks.

Barfer Robinson’s Dredge Boat Coffee

In a percolator pot, fill basket with about as much ground coffee as it will hold – add a dash of salt and throw an empty egg shell in the bottom of the pot. Fill the coffee pot up with water, level with the basket.

Percolate on high heat until liquid in the bubble top is good and dark. Remove from fire and when it has stopped perking, remove the percolator basket. Fill up the rest of the pot with white lightning, if there’s no white lighting, bourbon or dark rum will do.

Serve black to six hungry crewmen along with heaps of bacon, fried eggs, and pancakes smothered in butter and molasses and it will help keep them warm, even when they're sailing against the wind, on a frosty morning.

Arline Chase's character, Barfer Robinson, is ship’s cook aboard the bugeye Hope V. Rogers. “Barfer”, so called by his shipmates because he is often seasick, made his first appearance in The Drowned Land... That novella won The Governor's Award in Maryland, in 1984, and the short story collection was an Eppie Finalist in 1999. He, along with his shipmates and many of the other characters appear in the later novel Killraven.

What are Swifties? -- writing tip

Question: Whoever read my submission (the rejection just said "The Editors"), scrawled a note, "too many Swifties." Any idea what that means?

Answer: I have heard editors use the term. It refers to the dialogue writing style in the popular Tom Swift kids' series. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive, or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails, was one, always featuring the newest of scientific gadgets in the 1910s to 20s. These books are now in the public domain and are free for the most part to e-reading devices. The books were famous for their use of "said, followed by an adverb" combinations as speechtags. Later, sometime in the 1950s I think, there was a Tom Swift, Jr. series, followed by a rash of Swiftie jokes:

For Instance: "That's the spark!" Tom said, electrically.

Okay, the jokes weren't very funny. But I often have heard modern day editors refer to the use of a "said followed by an adverb" combination as a Swiftie, and while it was the ultimate of style from 1910 on, it is now considered "lazy writing." Literary trends have fashion and will continue to do so. Using images is in style since Hemingway, and using adverbs is OUT. Any adverbs, and especially, Swifties are out of style, too, and can lead to unintentionally funny combinations if stretched too far.

Back in the day, the best of writers used them. Swifties abound in Agatha Christie, and other best selling writers who started in the WWI era and wrote through the 50s and 60s. But editors who are buying today will not respond well to them. Now I grew up on Tom Swift, Brenda Starr, and Nancy Drew and have read any number of Swifties in my time. Used to write a lot of them too, until I heard the editors comparing notes and telling jokes about them at a conference.

Corn Fritters - recipe

Corn Fritters

1 can of corn
1 dash salt
2 tbsp. milk
2 tbsp. flour
2 egg whites
1/4 inch cooking oil heated in a deep frying pan
1 tablespoon honey for each fritter
strawberry (or any favorite) jelly

Drain the can of corn and dump into a mixing bowl. Combine the with the salt, flour and milk, and then set aside. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form then fold into the other prepared ingredients. When a drip of the batter sizzles and browns quickly, the oil is ready. Drop by the ladle into the hot oil and watch for browning on the edges. When edge is brown and bubbles stop forming in the batter, flip the fritter and cook until edge browns to match the top. Remove and drain on a piece of paper towel. The fritter will deflate like a fallen souffle. This is normal.

Serve and top with a mixture of the jelly and honey. Serves 5 to 8 depending on how large you make the fritters.

Catching UP!

Files that went to press, or back to press, this week:

FACEPAINTER MURDERS, by Virginia Winters

TAPE, by C.M. Albrecht

POCKETFUL OF HOPE, by Anna Dynowski

MY DEAREST FRIEND, by Hazel Statham

MINDER'S OATH, by Nina M. Osier


Galleys that went out, or went out again, this week:

MINDER'S OATH, by Nina M. Osier

TOBY MARTIN: PARK PATROL, by Barbara Grengs

GHOST AT STALLION'S GATE, by Elizabeth Eagan-Cox


Work continued on:

DREW GETS IT RIGHT, by Ludima Gus Burton

OCCUPATIONAL HAZZARDS, by Michael E. Field

TOO DANGEROUS, by Geoff Geauterre



Galleys still out and not yet returned on the following:

A GRANDFATHER'S GIFT, by Hugh Carter Vinson

ROUGH WATERS, by Gianni Hayes

You still didn't answer -- writing tip

Question: You still didn't answer my question. Why won't bookstores stock and sell my book on their shelves, even if it is published by a small company. Yes, it has an ISBN. Yes people can go in and order it at a store or on line. But it's never "in stock."

Answer: No bookstore will ever routinely stock books unless they are published by a mass-market publisher. Mass-market publishers print masses of books. Let stores order any amount of them on CREDIT, and if they don't sell them, the store owner rips the covers off, throws the books away, and pays nothing!  The book goes out of print within 364 days to avoid inventory taxes which accrue each and every year. The unsold books end up in a landfill someplace. Neither the author, nor the publisher makes a dime on any of them, despite the large numbers printed.

This is the way the publishing industry had worked for the past 50 years, but I don't believe it will last much longer. E-books are becoming much more  popular and are outselling hardcover and paperback books put together on amazon.com.  On our own home site, they outsell paper books 10 to one.

Most small publishers use Print on Demand technology. With that, no book is printed, until it is ordered. This kind of printing is expensive -- usually $5 or more per copy rather than the 50 cents a copy paid for printing a high number of copies of mass market books. 

Small publishers like POD technology since no copies exist in a warehouse to generate inventory taxes. But small publishers must also pay the HIGH printing costs on every copy printed. At $5 or more a copy, you can readily see that NO ONE could afford to have the cover stripped and the book sent to the landfill by the hundreds. There are no thousands of copies waiting in a warehouse. There are NO full page ads in Publisher's Weekly. No one could stay in business that way.

But on the other hand the title will not go out of print in 364 days. It will stay available as long as the author  and the publisher agree. With the Internet, and social networking, promoting your own work on line can certainly help to sell and to keep on selling.

Hope this holds the answer for you.

Okay, how come my book isn't in bookstores.... writing tip

Question: Okay, my book is published, so how come it's not on the shelves at my local bookstore? I had a nice offer from another publisher who promised me I'd get into the big chain book stores....

Answer: If the other offer came from a mass market publisher, then they may have been telling the truth. But this sounds more like the kind of promise made by vanity publishers (the kind you have to pay big bucks to, who advertise everywhere from Writer's Digest to the classified section of your local newspapers, asking, "Have you written a book?" They will make a lot of promises and charge each time you agree to an option. Anyone can promise anything.

Here's my best advice on Vanity Publishers -- you pay them, they don't pay you:

1. If bookstores are your main market don't use any vanity publisher.

2. No matter how you choose to publish, unless you are with a large NY publisher, marketing is your job.

If you publish with us, or almost any other small publisher who follows the rules, your book is listed in Books in Print, is registered with Bowker, and has an International Standard Book Number, as all legally marketed books need to do. With an ISBN, any customer can go to any bookstore and order your book. You will see the number at the top of the bar code on the back cover and again on the copyright page.

ISBNs are publisher-specific. They are registered to the publisher who has paid for them. Anyone checking the number, through the Bowker Books in Print website, will be told the price and how to contact the publisher for purchase.

That means, if your friend buys some ISBNs, and gives you one that was left over so you can self-publish your book, when anyone goes to a bookstore looking for your book, they will be told to contact your friend to buy it. Same thing, if your former publisher had an ISBN on it, you can't still use the same number, if you publish this yourself. With the cancellation of the contract, the former publisher can NO LONGER SELL the title. But the number, itself, still belongs to them. And any customer who goes to a book store with that number in hand, will be sent to them to buy, although the publisher can no longer legally sell any copies.

Details - writing tip

Question from my e-mail:  Arline, I'm back writing again, but things are going much more slowly  than I had hoped. It can take me an hour, or more, to create the fictional setting and get a real enough picture of it in my mind, and that's before I put a single word on paper.

Answer:  Good to hear from you, Julie.  Congratulations on writing again.  This solution may sound over-simplified, but use what you have. TYou would have thought I would know that from the beginning, but I didn't. I thought if I wrote a story about a wedding, I had to make up the church, spend a lot of time picturing what it was like inside, creating every detail in my mind before I wrote. Then I'd go on to do the same with the wedding dress, and then the next imaginary detail. Now I just describe my church, or a church I have been in, a bell skirted wedding dress I saw advertised in a magazine, the lace-encrusted shirt my son received as part of the rented tux when he acted as his friend's best man. The secret is the reader will take the few details I include and imagine a church of his or her own. It won't look like MY church, but it will be a real and valid creation. Then as long as the characters are real, everything else will be, too.