It's Easter! (go look for eggs!)

What?! But it was LAST week!

For you, maybe. But for millions of Eastern Christians, Easter is only THIS Sunday.

Easter is the only Christian holiday that has no fixed date, and because its timing depends on calculations (full moon, first day of spring, and other calendar considerations), a few other holidays have a variable schedule. But but not on their own! Lent begins 40 days before Easter. Pentecost happens 50 days after.

And those facts are the same whether you're in the Eastern Church or in a Western denomination, that is, Catholic or Protestant.

Traditionally, Russian Christians are for the vast majority Eastern Orthodox, like the Greeks, the Bulgarians, the Armenians, the Serbs.

How do we celebrate Easter? Pretty much like everyone: Church, food, and family.

Having been raised in an educated family, I know more than my share about the formal aspects of the religious rites, but I will refer you to the real experts in the subject if you want to learn more. The Orthodox Church of America maintains a great number of sites with a variety of articles, links, and images. Most individual parishes have their schedules on the web today, and you can catch up with folks at home if you're traveling to the ends of the universe.

The family aspect of holidays, well, it's universal. There's the grandmother, the kids, the mother and father, the relatives who make phone calls (or forget to). There's cheer and strife.

The food, well, that's something else.

I don't take the time to cook ethnic dishes very often anymore. Modern life doesn't give you the leisure to spend a whole day preparing a one-pot dish and baking bread, nor will your family agree to eat the same meal several times in a row, even if you disguise it with interesting sides and desserts.

So ethnic dishes are relegated to special occasions.

Like Easter.

Kulich, or Easter Bread, a rich, yeast bread, full of good stuff like butter and sugar, vanilla, almonds, raisins, cardamom, takes three risings and a lot of kneading. It doesn't lend itself to modernization. Forget transposing the recipe to bread machines. Oh yes, I've tried. It's too rich, too dense for the poor appliances to handle it.

No, you have to mix it and knead it by hand. You have to get your hands messy. You have to sprinkle flour all over your kitchen.

Three risings, with mixing in ingredients after each one, that takes hours. And baking this kind of bread, that takes another hour and a half. So you see why I don't do it more than once a year.

But when they come out... Ah, the pride.

The other dish in demand is Paskha, or Syrnaya Paskha, Cheese Paskha, is made from fresh farmer's cheese and, you guessed, more butter, eggs, and sugar. It's like cheesecake, but smoother and meltier. Oh, and I found a recipe here, with pictures, that will give you an idea of what I was doing yesterday. One comment though: I'd rather skip making Paskha than using cottage cheese. It's much too watery, and too bland. It has to be farmer's cheese.

Guess what breakfast was this morning? Tea or coffee, and Kulich with Paskha.

Decadent? For sure! But you have to remember, if you really follow the tradition, then you haven't been eating any meat or dairy products for 40 days. None. At all. No milk, cheese, yoghurt, butter, no beef, chicken, pork. Vegetables and fish and oil. But if you think it makes for a boring diet, you're wrong! Don't forget that lobster and shrimp are "fish," too! And caviar, and wine is made from grapes, and sauces don't have to be cream-based, and spices are most often seeds or flowers.

Umm... I'm getting hungry...

But I confess, I'm not so hard-core. Not like my Mom used to be. I haven't forgotten, though, and I'm still capable of baking all the traditional dishes.

It has to count for something.

I haven't forgotten that you came here for the Big Contest! So go look for the Contest Egg on my site for a chance at the basket, and post a comment on this blog to be entered in a drawing (at the end of the month) to win a $5 gift certificate to The Wild Rose Press -- and remember that the Rosettes are on sale until the end of April!

And the next stop in the blog hunt will be: http://www.ashleyladd.blogspot.com. Ashley Ladd will post her contribution tomorrow!

Happy Reading!

A Sale at The Wild Rose Press!

All the Rosettes (short stories) are on sale! 99c. until the end of April!

And that means The Joining is too!

Take advantage of the offer to find out what makes Erik crash on a planet on the far reaches of the known universe. Discover alien places, for sure!

Memories

Don't you love showers? They're not just convenient means of waking up and getting oneself clean. They're also the source of endless inspiration, the place where your thoughts come into focus and your plots take form.

Many a story has been hatched in the shower.

Can you believe that once upon a time I hated showers?

More than that. I dreaded them. I shook in panic at the mere thought of taking one, and baths were not an alternative at that time. We only had a small half-bath in our efficiency, my mother and I, and that was it.

Obviously, I got over it. How? I don't know. It was a long time ago. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the pleasure and luxury of showers. The delight provided by the sensory isolation of the sound of running water, the soothing effect of hot steam, and the knowledge that no one expects you to hear anything for at least ten minutes.

When you're a mother, that's a lot.

And so I forgot the absolute fear and loathing of showers I once had.

What brought it back to mind is the realization that my elderly mother detests being cold, and the constant noise and irritation of running water, and therefore she will not take a shower. It's her old-age fussiness that brought back memories of my own childhood aversions.

What else have I forgotten?

I read several sci-fi novels recently where memory, either too-acute, or lost, is a central element of the plot. Whether regained, impossible to erase, or forever gone, memory is such an essential part of what makes us, that we don't even give it a thought.

Let's not even ponder memory as personal history: that's merely the simplest aspect of it.

Memory makes and remakes us constantly. Memory and recall. Recall and memory. Our ability to recall long-term memories and short-term memories: events that happened a long time ago, or just moments past. Our ability to arrange the memories into sequences, and more than that: into meaningful sequences, related to other memories and events, that are also arranged into meaningful sequences, themselves easily related...

That's how our mind works. A spiderweb of connections: ideas, deductions, recalls, memories, connections. All of these are made up of words, images, sensory information, emotions, rational thought processes.

Eliminate one, and you have a big gap that nothing can bridge. Forever and ever, you will go around it, but never over or across. That place is simply lost.

Whether you're considering the actual human mind, or a fictional story-world, this web is there: an infinite network of connections that you can never know fully, but you're aware it's there. And when you need it, you can dip into it. The same gaps that loss of memory cause in your mind can be created by lack of foresight in a fictional story-world, with the same result: an empty space, devoid of information.

Even if you have no gaps, in the case of a fictional story-world, you mustn't tell it all, or put every detail of it into your story, any more that you would recall every memory at every moment of your actual life. But as the writer, you must be aware of all the possible details of your story-world, as you are aware of your own self. You must know your story-world down to the molecular level, down to every sensory input. Know the colors and the scents, and the flavors of your imaginary places, and the way the people think there. So that the logic of your story is always that of your story, even if it's not necessarily quite realistic.

Because, hey, some days, we just don't want reality. We want the reality of the story, not the one outside our door.

Don't Forget to Read!

I mean, we're all readers, or else you wouldn't be stopping by.

I like books. You like books. We all like books. We forgive our favorite authors their lapses in characterization, their little plot holes, the things they forget to tell us, and we fill the blanks in our own minds, recreating a story-world that becomes all ours.

As long as the story is compelling, we'll forgive. Pile up too many errors, and we get mad.

Whether we read or watch a movie, we tend to argue with the characters. "You idiot, how could you believe this, he never said..." (fill in the blank). Or: "well, of course, I don't know what you heard, but that's not what she said."

We want the characters to pay attention. And a skilled writer will play on the fact that a reader will be more aware of the story-world than even its own people.

Why then don't we read everything with the same care and attention?

Contracts. Announcements. Ads. Newspaper articles.

What's there is obviously there, but we never seem to stop and consider what isn't there. What hasn't been said. We become both the characters (but not the smart detectives) and the fiction readers of our real world.

We fill in the blanks of our reality the way we fill in the blanks of our story-worlds. With what we'd like to be there.

Whereas we should be the detectives of our reality. Eve Dallas. Columbo. Patrick Jane. Sherlock Holmes.

We should be observing, noting the missing pieces, the things unsaid, the details avoided, and drawing conclusions as much from the missing evidence as from the facts staring us in the face.

And like the CSI heroes, we shouldn't just leap to conclusions. We should look for that evidence.

All that in a text.

Paranoid? Who, me?

Nah. Just a reader.

I've been interviewed!

Check it out. I had a very nice chat with the most gracious hostess Emma Lai:

Emma Lai Writes: Author Interview - Masha Holl on The Brightest Heaven

Thank you Emma for inviting me!

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Research

You never know what you'll find when you open a book.

I'm reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (Harper Collins, 2008), and even though it should be a dry treatise on the psychological causes of our insistence on repeating the same mistakes, I find it a most enjoyable experience.

Maybe it's because Dan Ariely shows that our instinctual understanding (or at least my instinctual understanding, as writer) of human motivations and urges, is not as flawed as we might fear. And that the extreme reactions we like to showcase in our stories, at the point of crisis, are not as far-fetched as a cool, rational mind would like to make them.

And maybe it's because the author of Predictably Irrational is himself an excellent writer, a rare gem in the world of academic prose. He doesn't just provide information, and the names of the researchers involved in the experiments he describes, he entertains his public with the work he obviously loves and performs with a passion.

What have I learned so far in this book? That expectations do trump reality -- your senses will be betrayed by your mind. That ownership gives things more value than they're worth -- value is not a static, objective concept, but a scale that depends on variables as intangible as the moment when you decide how much you care for the thing you're considering selling or buying.

I can't help but wonder, as I read this book, how a Zen master would walk through life. Would he be as predictably irrational, or would his rational self govern him at each step? Could a human attain enough self-control to stop and consider every decision with a quiet, if not cool mind, before launching himself into reckless action?

Some days, I wish I was that Zen master. Other days... I just don't know. Whenever you gain something, you also lose something. And the grass is always greener...

Book Lists

I came across another one.

You know them. The lists of "classics" you "should have read" if you're a "book nerd."

Considering that I'm just a few pages and a stand-up performance short of a PhD in literature, you'd think I'd cross off every book on every such list.

Nuh-uh.

My lists of books read, unread, to-be-read, and never-to-look-at are just too odd.

Sure, I do have War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo on my lists.

I also have a French collection: Zola, Balzac, Sartre, Camus. I'll have to put it into some order... some day.

The fact is, I've done my "serious" reading in graduate school. And before. When I had classes. And papers due. You know, grades.

What do I mean by serious reading? My good author friends, do no make faces! It does not mean "good" reading. It means obligatory, not-by-choice reading.

I read War and Peace for fun, but Anna Karenina as obligatory reading (although it ended up being fun). I read Crime and Punishment for fun, but Chekhov as obligatory reading. Some of the authors and titles shifted from one category to the other. Some didn't. Some I revisited. Some I ignored pointedly after I closed the book once I was done with the assignment. Some I could almost burn (if I could ever bring myself to destroy a single book). Some I'd take with me to a deserted island.

Now lest these authors and titles start impressing you, I will admit that I also enjoy graphic novels, comic books, and manga. I am an old-time fan of science-fiction and fantasy. I couldn't survive without my regular dose of genre novels. I read all of the Harry Potter books, but none of the Stephenie Mayer ones (timing, I guess). And yes, I am a big fan of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

The point is, there is no bad reading.

There is such a thing as not pushing yourself, as limiting your curiosity. When my first child was little and I felt my reading was going by the wayside, I joined a book club -- just a few friends who got together for coffee and chatting. We decided on a book and talked about it. Nothing formal, but I read some authors I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. And I enjoyed the books.

I pushed myself out of my comfort zone.

We should always do that. We should push ourselves. Be curious. Opening a book is a great way to take a risk without risking danger. And a library is a wonderful place to open a book without opening your wallet.