This festival’s theme was Halloween and I was making a very scary film with a very familiar monster but my film editor, Josh, became busy at work and apparently felt that a paid job took precedence over my hobbies. So. You will get my scary film, albeit tweaked and without the Halloween imagery, at a later date.

I am entering an older film, Uterninus’s Law for the IIFF this month. Let me stretch it so it fits the theme. It is scary. I mean, facing the fact that life is out of your control is scary. And it’s a bumpy walk. That could be because there are acorns all over the sidewalks outside. And coffee is an excellent offering for Halloween. In fact, next year, we’re giving espresso beans to all the trick-or-treaters. So, see, not so far from the theme.

Uterninus’s Law, like Murphy’s Law, is the promise that every effort you make, conception-wise, will be thwarted. It works in direct correlation to how badly you need the cycle to work. Any attempt to circumvent Uterninus’s Law by pretending to “not care” about a cycle is detected and squashed in turn (see, scary!).

Interview with Lolly Winston below this post. Occasional author participation is one of the cool things about the Barren Bitches…

It’s back and better than ever with a brand-new icon. The Barren Bitches (and Man-Pie) Book Brigade has started spinning; meaning, we’re now going to switch off between books that contain IF/adoption/pg loss and books that are a complete distraction–from chicklit to mysteries to good old-fashioned literature.

Here is the master list for the eighth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. What is the Barren Bitches Book Brigade? It’s a book club from the comfort of your own living room. The book club is conducted entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way. We read both fiction and non-fiction.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: The Handmaid’s Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Start Date: October 31
Question Due: December 6
Question List Sent Out: December 7
Post Dates: December 10-12th (perhaps also the 13th)
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours.)

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (click on any of the links below on December 10th to take you to a stop on this book tour. Jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on The Handmaid’s Tale. I will keep adding to this list until 11 p.m. on December 6th. The list is currently open)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters (Mel)
The Annex (Josh)
Twisted Ovaries (Vanessa/Helen)
Sticky Bean (Kristen)
Road Blocks and Rollercoasters (R & R)
Weebles Wobblog (Lori)
Conceiving is Believing (Conceiving is Believing)
Beaten But Not Bowed (Drowned Girl)
The Open Door (Deanna)
The Dunn Family (Erica)
Southern Infertility (Samantha)
We Are What We Repeatedly Do (Yodasmistress)
Mommy Someday? (Michelle)
That Was the Plan (Ms. Planner)
Our Box of Rain (K)
Clumsy Kisses (Rebecca)
Wonderful Thing (Anne)
Our Own Creation (AMS)
Desperate to Multiply (Portia P)
Slaying, Blogging, Whatever… (Delenn)
I Won’t Fear Love (Julia)
No Swimmers in the Tubes (Noswimmers)
Infertile Fantasies (Bea)
My Journey to Motherhood (Courtney)
Tired of Waiting (Holly)
The Infertile Long and Winding Road (Ms. Infertile)
One Year (Amanda)
Coming2Terms (Pamela Jeanne)
Wannabe RE (Rachel)
Infertility Sucks (S)
Confessions of a Paranoid Parent (Paranoid)
Egg Drop Post (Egg Drop)
The Road Less Travelled (Loribeth)
The Duchess (Duchess)

Not on the list and want to join? Drop me an email at thetowncriers@gmail.com. You can add yourself up until 11 p.m. on December 6th.

How the book tour works:

(1) leave a comment or send me an email (thetowncriers@gmail.com) saying that you’re interested in participating. I need your blog name, blog url, and email address.

(2) read The Handmaid’s Tale by December 6th (or at least enough of it in order to ask a question to the group).

(3) create a single question that would kick off a discussion (in other words, any question that leads to more than a “yes” or “no” answer where someone can express their opinion) and mail it to me on December 6th (or any time beforehand). I will send you a reminder email close to the date. Click here to see sample questions from tour #4.

(5) on December 7th, I will send you a list of possible questions. Everyone will choose 3 questions off the list and answer them in a blog entry. You will find out if you are posting on December 10th, 11th or 12th (you can choose).

(6) on December 10th, people will begin to post their entry. Each day, I will post a list of all the people putting up their entry that day so people can go around and read the entries and comment (start a discussion back and forth in the comments section). Reading the entries and commenting on the posts is the best part of the tour–by the end of the week, you should have a comment from every participant (and maybe even a few new permanent blog readers).

After an early email exchange with Lolly Winston, I used the term “lovely” to describe her to Josh. Hence why I laughed so hard when I got to page 171 and read this paragraph:

“You’re lovely,” Noah whispers, lifting his head to kiss her on the mouth. This kiss is deeper and warmer and saltier. But the word lovely spins in Elinor’s head. Isn’t lovely just short of pretty? Three rungs below beautiful? Grandmothers are lovely. She should just relax and ulp–“

When Noah said it to Elinor, he meant it as the highest compliment, that amalgamation of delightful and enjoyable and beautiful. While I can’t speak to Lolly’s physical beauty via email, I can tell you that she is just as warm and delightful and fun as her writing. She is, in a nutshell, lovely. Which is to say that even emailing with her a few times you realize that she could be a heroine in one of her own stories–kind to the bone and thoughtful and smart.

Lolly excels at writing female characters who are likable, intelligent, and always find the right words at the right time. While they find themselves in unenviable situations–the loss of a husband or infertility–they are the best friends every woman needs to have. The ones who would show up at your doorstep with ice cream and know how to walk that fine line between unconditional support and tough love.

For the seventh tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade, we read her latest novel, Happiness Sold Separately. Elinor, immobilized by infertility and failed treatments, discovers that her husband is having an affair with a personal trainer. Ted loves his wife, but infertility has driven a wedge between them and he doesn’t know how to connect with her anymore. Throw in a 10-year-old boy, an alcoholic ex-lover, your friendly neighbourhood cleaning man, and a tree doctor and you have the colliding of universes and the aftermath of those connections.

Participants in the book tours can ask the author their questions as they read. A very public thank you to Lolly for delving deeper into the world of Elinor and Ted. Here’s what she had to say about her book, writing, and infertility in general:

I was both captivated and unnerved by the character of Ted and wondered how you came up with his story, emotions, behaviors and motivations. How did you research him? Is he based on a single personality or is he an amalgamation of several male personalities and how they might of reacted to personal crisis?

I just wanted to redeem Ted. I wanted him to be lovable, despite being flawed and making big mistakes. The men in my writer’s group made suggestions whenever his thinking or dialogue didn’t ring true to them. Also, I have a friend whose husband is a podiatrist. He’s very funny and warm and smart and I asked him questions about his job for Ted (a podiatrist).

Did you set out to write a novel with infertility as a theme or did it evolve that way? Did you mean to “educate” your mainstream readership in any way through your deft weaving of the pervasiveness of infertility and the lasting impact it has on couples?

I just wanted to write about a couple struggling, and infertility happened to be something that I was familiar with. I do think it was under-covered in the media until the last five years or so, perhaps. I was glad when infertility became more talked about in magazines and on TV shows, because I think my age group was led to believe we could easily have babies in our forties and that’s not statistically the case.

What is/was your personal experience with infertility or pregnancy loss? If you had no personal experience, what tools did you use to craft an accurate portrayal of the effects of infertility on a woman and her marriage?

Like Elinor, I’m unable to have children and did a number of infertility treatments. I started trying to get pregnant on my own at 37. At 38, my OB sent me to the in vitro clinic. I did three IUIs with shots and two IVFs, with no luck. The first IUI worked, but I lost the pregnancy at 12 weeks—after seeing the heartbeat twice. Bah! I think it was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, after my dad dying when I was in my twenties. Fortunately, my OB ordered a pathology report and we learned that the pregnancy had been a trisomie that never would have made it to term. This is the case with almost all miscarriages. But you don’t know that. I started to drink a little tea once I was nearly in the second trimester, and I honestly thought I’d killed my poor baby with Earl Grey. After the pathology report, I had another test and learned that I have this rare chromosomal anomaly called a “balanced translocation.” The doctors said this diminished my chances even more, but nobody seemed to know by how much. So I eventually called it quits.

I actually went through my own dang medical files to make sure the chronology of events were accurate for the book. I had already done so much research while going through the treatments that I didn’t have to do any more, really. (I’m sure you guys have bought all the books too.) I just had to dip back into that dark personal experience. But I do know about a dozen women for whom in vitro has worked. So I’m very optimistic for others. Sometimes, like anything in life, it can just be a matter of persistence.

Also, I enjoyed the steady pacing of the novel. What is your strategy for maintaining a good pace in your novel?

I think structure helps maintain the pace of a novel. I had a great writing teacher who said that good stories begin when the characters are on the cusp of change. I like to structure things so that they begin with the characters right in the thick of things, with action at the opening. Then of course we need some back story to establish the status quo, and then conflict, with the story moving forward, followed by climax and a resolution, although without a too-tidy bow. This sort of structure is as old as Aristotle. This book was a bit of a challenge for me because I wanted to tell it from multiple points of view, yet not have events overlap, and keep things moving forward. At one point I pages spread across my office floor because the big picture was making my head hurt.

Can you explain the meaning behind the title? I know what it means to me, but I’d like to know what it meant to you.

Happiness Sold Separately is a play on “batteries sold separately.” To me the title just means that love and marriage don’t necessarily guarantee happiness. Couples get married at the end of many stories—such as at the end of Jane Austen’s novels. You imagine that they live happily ever after. But of course we know there are all sorts of sad, difficult events in life that make us unhappy, even after people are married.

I’m assuming you went through treatments yourself—do you think being a writer and having that flexible schedule (not having to go to an office, for example) was helpful when undergoing treatments or did work still get in the way of treatments (okay—or treatments get in the way of work?)?

Working at home when you’re having any sort of health issue is a welcome luxury, I think. It gives you flexibility and you can work in your sweats and lie down for a while if you’re not feeling well. I was doing rounds of in vitro while I was writing my first novel, Good Grief. In vitro was such a d
rag that it made me look forward to my work—the book felt like a refuge. Also, the novel was something I could control, while the outcome of the in vitro, and the roller coaster of news we’d get at the 8 zillion doctor’s appointments, was completely out of my control, and thus driving me crazy. Because I was writing a book with the theme of grief, I think I just poured the grief that goes along with failed treatments and lost pregnancies into the story.

Six times in the past two months I have received emails from people mentioning that I was in their dream and I was teaching them how to bake bread (Maybe I’m doing other things in other people’s dreams, but I only seem to receive notes about the bread baking). I must talk about bagels and whole wheat honey loaves a lot if I am showing up still speaking about these things in someone else’s unconscious mind.

I have a cake decorating degree (thank you, infertility, for providing me with many potentially-useful hobbies). Whenever this comes up in conversation, it invariably leads to others saying they’d love to learn how to make icing flowers or sugar pomegranates. If we were face-to-face, I could teach you in a couple of hours. But on paper? It’s really hard to explain consistency or texture. Which means that things like bread baking or cake decorating don’t translate well on a flat page. Plus, black and white recipes aren’t a lot of fun.

I asked Josh if he would film me baking bagels so I could upload it to Youtube, but he pointed out that this was (1) time consuming on his end since I don’t know how to use video editing software, (2) not very easily usable since people would need to keep pausing the movie and coming back into the kitchen to do the next step and (3) did I really need one more project?

Um…the answer to the last one is yes.

It came to me a few hours later that it would be more useful to provide still-pictures that could be printed out and brought into the kitchen along with the recipe. And then, it would be as if you were standing next to me in the kitchen with the aid of visuals and words and we could bake together, albeit sometimes thousands of miles apart. The Internet is good for many things. Think of it as the same thing as My First Picture Dictionary–the visuals explain the words.

I’m calling them phrecipes (pronounced “fres-i-pees”): photo-supported recipes. Get it? So you’ll see how each dough should look at every step of the way.

So, if you were looking for a new distraction, as the next installment on my quest to make myself happier this year, I am inviting you along to do some baking and cake decorating projects. I’ll teach you how I make my pie crusts and pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving as well as how I make nut brittles around Christmas. We can bake muffins and breads together. Create sugar flowers and icing roses. Everyone can do it at home, whenever it’s convenient rather than at a preset class time. And if you do end up trying the recipe, I would love you to blog about it and send me a link so I can go back into the recipe and add other people’s experiences onto the main post so others can find your post and read it in the future.

I have some breads I’d like to show first because, as I said during my book club post, there is something about bread that touches the same place in my heart that needs to nurture a child. Bread dough is warm and light and smells good. And it is something I sometimes cry making, but it always makes me feel better in the end. But I would like to take any requests (I can make hundreds of baked goods and candies) for future lessons. Email me your requests at thetowncriers@gmail.com.

If you think this is a good idea, let me know so I’m not shouting bagel recipes into the ether for no reason (if I’m the only person who wants to make bagels, let me know). If you don’t want to bake or read along, I’ll clearly mark the posts so you can skip over them whenever I post them. But you don’t have to let me know that this idea is lame. Just click away–bakers have sensitive feelings…

Hey, sweeties, roll up your sleeves and let’s begin. You can either print out this recipe or bring the laptop into the kitchen. This recipe is linked under the icon on the sidebar so you will always be able to find it in the future if you want to wait a few weeks to try this lesson. If you do end up making bagels–regardless of whether they turn out perfectly or end up a burned, twisted heap of dough–blog about it and send me the link at thetowncriers@gmail.com. I will add all links (regardless of when they come in–still send it if you’re reading this in 2010) to the bagel posts so future bakers can read along with other people’s experiences too. I would appreciate it if you blog about it if you’ll link back to this post so your readers can find these other blogs too.

Pour in 1 1/4 cup of water. I keep my water in a brita in the refrigerator. I know that the exact temperature you’ll need can be produced by placing the water for 50 seconds in the microwave. Since I can’t give you an exact temperature, I’d suggest leaving a cup of water in the refrigerator overnight and then placing it in the microwave for 50 seconds. The result looks like this:

Place the Kitchenaid bowl in the mixer and use the dough hook. Now step away for a minute or two and just observe. The dough will start out dry and shreddy-looking. It will then start to pick up and come together into a smooth ball of dough, leaving no flour on the sides of the bowl. If in 5 minutes, it isn’t beginning to look like this…

…a
dd a dash of water. And I really mean a dash. Under a tsp. A little water goes a long way in this recipe. Once it looks like the picture above, let it go for a bit until the dough is smooth and satiny. It will look something like this:

Note the super clean sides of the Kitchenaid bowl. Take the dough over to your silpat (you could also probably use a sheet of parchment paper, but silpats are such a great workspace and they’re reusable so…worth the investment). Divide it in half. Then divide each half in half. Then divide each of those half in half. You should have 8 chunks of dough. Cup your hands and roll them into tight balls like so:

Place a damp paper towel over them (you can use a damp cloth towel, but make sure you launder it afterwards. I once left the towels to wash a day or two later and I had to throw them out because they were covered in mold. Not nice. I now use disposable paper towels).

Rest the little balls of dough. Set the timer for 10 minutes. You can use this time to start on a second batch of dough.

The timer goes off and now it’s time to shape them. Take a baking sheet and cover it in foil and sprinkle cornmeal across the surface. The picture should show you how much cornmeal you need:

You’ve probably read a bunch of recipes where they tell you to make a long rope and loop the ends together–forget it. Those bagels always pull apart. Instead, pop your thumb through the center of the ball of dough.

Then working from the center out, open up the hole and turn the bagel as you work so its of equal thickness all the way around the bagel (check out that pomegranate thread!).

Place these bagels on the prepared baking sheets, making sure that the dough has a little space to rise (it won’t change shape a lot, but leave an inch between bagels). Cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator. Now walk away for 12–18 hours. And then continue on with Part Two: Baking Bagels…

*Wait! What if you want cinnamon raisin bagels? All other bagel flavours will be dealt with during the baking process, but cinnamon raisin bagels require a few extra ingredients. Mix into your dough (prior to pouring in the water), 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tbsp cinnamon, and 2 handfuls of raisins. Pour in the water and proceed as usual.