Amanda Helms

Category: Miscellany Monday

  • Miscellany Monday Presents How to Not Make Pumpkin Gnocchi

    …in several rambling steps. 1 Foster a deep love of winter squash, pumpkin in particular, that leads to compulsive purchase of the gourds at grocery stores and farmers market, even though you receive more than enough vegetables through your CSA and will supposedly receive winter squash from the CSA in the near future. Develop collection…

  • Writerly soul searching

    What with my near-continuous lack of writing, both in terms of my blog and with fiction, I’ve been doing some writerly soul searching. Mind, the soul searching has been sporadic, a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and the ones I’ve got not matching up with each other. On the surface, it feels like…

  • Why, as I live and breathe!

    … if it isn’t Amanda! (coughs) Hey, website. How are you? Seems like it’s been ages since you’ve graced my pages. I’d give you the exact number of months, but having to say it may cause me to have a brain aneurysm. More likely me than you, seeing as I’m the one with an actual…

  • Smells like spam (but with a certain je ne sais quoi)

    I should probably apologize for not blogging in so long, but it’s my blog, so I don’t have to. Makes me feel all mighty and powerful in a world where my control is small and finite. Or something. Anyway, I moderate all my comments so as to prevent the vast body of spammers from infiltrating…

  • Titles are overrated

    Post titles, that is. Were authors to stop titling their books, leaving blank spine after blank spine on the shelves of my local Borders, there would be havoc. Geeky, bibliophiliac havoc, which I suppose isn’t as havoc-like as what one might find at an anarchist meeting, but still. Havoc of a sort. So titles are…

  • Sourdough snobbery

    A confession: My inner bread baker is a sourdough snob. I hesitate to use the term “inner bread baker,” since that implies the baker aspect of my persona is somehow cut off from the rest of me, or that it’s like a rarely worn shirt hanging in the back of my closet, that, when I…

  • NaNoWriMo: Fin

    Thousands of novelists are, as I write this post, frantically typing away at their novel, hoping their heads don’t explode or their fingers catch fire from the friction of speedy keyboarding. Or at least that their heads kindly delay their explosions and fingers their igniting until after midnight, local time, so that they may verify…

  • Thanksgiving

    I thought about calling this “The Obligatory Thanksgiving Post,” but decided that had too negative a connotation, like it’s just something I need to check off my list: “Oh, it’s Thanksgiving; time to be thankful,” since of course we ought to always be mindful of the blessings we’ve received. Still, thankfulness is the core of…

  • NaNoisms

    So one of my favorite threads over at the NaNoWriMo site is the NaNoisms thread. “NaNoisms” are the humorous mistakes that come about as a result of sleep deprivation and constant pummelings of one’s Inner Editor and Inner Critic, beings who are banished during the course of NaNo since the idea is to get the…

  • Two things that make me happy

    1. Getting in over 9000 words (and not even including the 843 I lost when my computer crashed during a Write or Die session) during the weekend means I’m caught up on NaNoWriMo after switching ideas on Day 3 last week. And if I get in approximately 2650 each day, I’ll hit 75k by the…