This is my crazy-looking urn thing that I bought at a yard sale for like a dollar.

This is my crazy-looking urn thing, filled with pretty much every fortune-cookie fortune I ever got.

At the $5 pledge level, I draw a fortune from my crazy-looking urn thing and I take a photograph and I tweet you the photograph. This fortune is now YOUR fortune. I can’t promise it won’t be just a platitude (SO DISAPPOINTING***) or that there won’t be any stains from years-old General Tso’s. I also can’t say where, or in the presence of what, the fortune will be photographed. It’s a strange world. Anything could happen.

I DEFINITELY can’t predict whether or not it will come true in a horrifying way, so if it does, please let me know! We are all about customer service here at Chez Davis.

This is meant to be a tight-budget, support-it-but-don’t-need-to-read-it pledge level, but if you want the book as well, you can boost your pledge and add on a book, in electronic or print-and-electronic formats. Details in the FAQ. I’ll be sending these in the month before the book release date. If you don’t have Twitter but desperately want a photographed fortune out of a crazy-looking urn thing, we’ll work out a way to email you. No duplicates, guaranteed. Second chances to reverse a terrible fortune not included.

You can find out more or become a backer, right here.

*My story is called The Scry Mirror. It begins: The day Tom Bright got wed, I ran home and got a poker from the hearth and smashed the scry mirror until it was a thunderstorm of glass all falling at my feet. Then I ran out back to the fish pond and sat there on a log wishing I was dead.

**Last night I made dinner using hot sauce sent to me by a stranger from the Internet. That’s cool, right?

***Suggested appendages for improving your fortune:
“…in bed.”
“…or else.”
“…with an axe.”
“…but at what cost?”

John Boden tagged me for this A MILLION YEARS AGO and now, at last, I actually have something to talk about.

1. What is the working title of your next book?

Wolves and Witches

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

megengelhardt and I looked at each other and said, “Geez, we’ve sold a lot of fairy tale retellings. Let’s put ‘em together and see how many. Hey! That’s, like, enough for a book.”

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy, I guess? I feel like darkish fairy-tale retellings are their own subgenre.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Cast of dozens!

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I think the official line is: “In Wolves and Witches, sisters Amanda C. Davis and Megan Engelhardt weave sixteen stories and poems out of familiar fairy tales, letting them show their teeth.”

I have been describing it as: “We did a thing!”

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Neither; it was placed at World Weaver Press without an agent.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The stories in this book were written between 2009 and 2012. We tinkered for quite a few months adding new things as we made new sales and got the rights released. I think we started talking about it in the middle of 2010 and finalized it toward the end of 2012. The release date is February 19.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Any of the darkish fairytale retellings. Several of these pieces started out in Enchanted Conversation.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

We love fairy tales and dark stories, and it sure didn’t hurt to see calls for submission for that kind of thing time and again.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you buy a copy, our grandma says she’ll sign it for you.

TAGS:
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engelhardtlm1
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Wilma Davis’s Recipe for Gobs

Cream together

2 cups sugar
1/2 cup Crisco
2 eggs

Then add

4 cups flour
2 teaspoons soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cocoa
1 cup sour milk
1 cup boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat well. Drop one on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 450 for 7-8 minutes.

FILLING:

2 teaspoons water
4 1/2 teaspoons granulated sugar
2 1/2 cup sifted confectionary sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup Crisco
1/2 cup Oleo
1 teaspoon vanilla

Boil water and G. sugar together for 1 minute
Cool
Beat Conf. sugar with egg
Combine the two mixture, add shortening, beat until creams

Notes:

I used unsalted butter instead of Oleo and then added salt, like a boss. I did make a second batch without the raw egg, but man, it’s not the same.

In my house, we always replicate sour milk by adding a tablespoon of vinegar to actual milk and letting it sit a little while.

Putting down a teaspoon at a time, the recipe made a literal hundred complete cookies. My mom always made them bigger, but I like the mini ones. At that size, I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to eat four at a time. I do not think the little ones took the full seven minutes to bake. I didn’t actually time them.

Don’t let the boiled sugar water cool down very long, because it’ll turn into candy.

And for archival purposes, here’s the Twitter stream that went along with it.

* I’m doing it, guys; I’m baking one million chocolate sandwich cookies, local name “gobs”. #1milliongobs

* The recipe is my grandmother’s, which she got in Johnstown, more than likely from a recent Polish immigrant. #1milliongobs

* Here’s a baking tip: rinse the back of your cookie sheet in cool water between batches. Warm sheets make your cookies spread. #1milliongobs

* Gram quit 8th grade to raise her baby brother. She eloped with Pap before WWII & did factory work until he got back. #1milliongobs

* That’s all the cookies. Now for the hard part. #1milliongobs pic.twitter.com/qc1Tbkwh

* Gram was a farm wife who rarely bothered with recipes, and got inventive: she once made jelly out of the violets in her yard. #1milliongobs

* According to my dad, the violet jelly was a beautiful shade of lavender and pretty much tasted like sugar. #1milliongobs

* Assembled gobs. #1milliongobs pic.twitter.com/bCK1kcd2

* Gram died when I was 12, after years of poor health. Anything I know about her cooking came through my parents. #1milliongobs

* And the final gob count is…EXACTLY ONE MILLION! Haha, no it’s not, it’s ninety-five. #1milliongobs

- Triangulation: Morning After debuted at Confluence last weekend, and is now available on Amazon in paperback. Kindle version should be forthcoming. This might be my favorite story I’ve written this year.

- The table of contents was announced for World Weaver Press’s ghost-story collection, Specter Spectacular. Somewhere in there will be a reprint of My Rest a Stone, if you’d like a preview of the editor’s tastes.

- The table of contents for The Beast Within 3: Oceans Unleashed by Graveside Press, ed. Jennifer Brozek, is up: http://jennifer-brozek.livejournal.com/172035.html Some wonderful names on that list, and I’m weirdly proud to have the longest title.

- FISH has been successfully funded through Kickstarter, but you can still pre-order it through that mechanism for the next three weeks if you want a signed copy or cover-art swag. megengelhardt is in this! *sister fistbump*

All three of those last three stories are ocean-related. It’s a thing. And I got a poetry sale (not ocean-related) to a market I’ve been wanting to crack, but I’m waiting on the contract to announce it.

Vacation is so disconcerting. It’s like a pocket universe: you can work like a dog the whole time and still have nothing to show when you get back. Well, adorable footage of your father teaching your baby nephew to quack like a duck. But not much else.

GLORK

I told my teacher, the great and terrible Mrs. Glork, who once brought sulfured frogs for lunch and liked to tell us how the steam-vents on her home world perfumed the air with gentle poisons and who had taken the title “Mrs.” although none of us were sure she was married or even female, about the chemical spill at the lab table in the back–but she (great and terrible) sniffed her wide nostrils at us, and said we ought to be old enough to handle it ourselves, so when the vapors rose and began knocking us down a row at a time, she squatted at the front of the room, breathing fumes through her great and terrible nose, and watched us fall (despicable teenagers!), and watched us writhe (human scum!), and as we fought each other to get into the hallway, she opened her cavernous mouth–and she laughed.