Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but the novel just didn’t have the same charm as its movie adaptation.

First, a little background: Howl’s Moving Castle is better known as an anime film by veteran filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, that guy who manages to produce hit after hit after hit like Pixar.  (He’s also responsible for Princess Mononoke and Ponyo).  Howl’s Moving Castle the movie is a richly layered fairy tale with a Beauty and the Beast love story at its core.  The characters are complex and original.  The visuals are stunning.

So, the novel that Miyazaki got his idea from must be great, right?  Well … all of the characters have the same names.  That’s about as far as the resemblance carries.

Diana Wynne Jones was not trying to write a fairy tale when she wrote Howl’s Moving Castle the book.  Her aim was more of a madcap comedy.  And a mystery.   …and a romance … and a parody.  The final product ends up being none of these, not quite.  On top of much of the material found in the film, Howl’s Moving Castle the book contains an entire extra dimension, a shapeshifting dog-man, a John Donne poem, several cases of mistaken identity, and an evil plot by the Witch of the Waste that’s introduced in the last chapter and makes absolutely no sense.  There’s so much clutter in here that the poor characters are shunted to the sidelines, mere shadows of themselves.  Diana Wynne Jones writes like she’s trying to cover ground.

Miyazaki was right to pare the story down to what really matters: Howl’s heart and who it belongs to.  By doing so, the movie has a living heart, too.  The novel has a heart in there, but it’s hard to see under all those layers of stuff.

To sum up, rather blah.  One of the redeeming features of the novel was its send-up of traditional fairy tale elements, but if you’re in the mood for that, go read Terry Pratchett.  Go read Terry Pratchett right now.

Stuffed Zucchini

“Oh, no, I have too many zucchini!  Whatever shall I do?”

Answer: stuff ’em!

To stuff two large zucchini, start by simmering one heaping cup of barley until soft.

While that’s going, slice your zucchini in half the long way and scoop out the insides with a spoon.

Throw all the zucchini guts into a large bowl.  Add diced bell peppers, spinach, sausage (walnuts instead would also work well), and the barley.  Toss with salt, Italian seasoning, and olive oil.  Now you’re ready to moosh all that back into your hollowed-out zucchini.

Put onto a foil-lined baking pan and top with Parmesan.  Bake at 375º for about half an hour, and voilá, stuffed zucchini!

Lesson learned: taking photos of what you’re cooking while you’re trying to cook is really hard.  Perhaps I’ll leave this to the experts.

Confederacy Teaser Excerpt

And remember, everybody, The Confederacy of Heaven is due to come out on Smashwords and Podiobooks on September 15.

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Nasan approached Shadowings like he was a horse who’d been allowed to run free all summer and gone half-feral.  She ran the back of her hand down his neck to calm him.  He just turned his head and looked at her.  It was hard to read any expression in those glittering insect eyes of his, but she didn’t think there was any hostility.  At least, he hadn’t bitten her fingers off yet.

She decided to risk it.  Halfway up Shadowings’s back she ran into a problem she hadn’t even thought of before.  This wasn’t like being on her mare Belladonna at all – there were wings to contend with.  Did she sit above or below them?  Then all at once it was the most natural thing in the world.  There was a place right in front of his shoulder blades, a sort of depression between two of his vertebrae, almost like a natural saddle.  She settled herself right in.

Shadowings didn’t buck or turn his head or anything.  He simply took off.

At the first explosion of air from his wings, she closed her eyes and pressed herself close to his back.  Muscles tensed under leathery skin.  His body lurched, then lifted, and her ears popped.

Come on, you can’t ride a horse with your eyes closed. After about a minute she finally talked herself into opening her eyes.

Oh, good Stars in Heaven.

They were high in the air! Higher than treetops – possibly they were higher than the towers of Calgary itself.  The air tasted sweet and cold as it rushed past them like a windstorm.  The barren trees, no bigger than new-sprouted grasses.  And the mountains, from here they looked like wrinkles in a sheet.  And Mother Sol rising in the east – she’d never seen so much horizon all at once.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye behind her.  Oscar was flapping madly to keep up with them.  With each downstroke of Shadowings’s powerful wings, he lagged a little further behind.  He shouted something to her, but the wind whipped his words away.

“What?” she yelled.

This time she caught a snippet over the wind.

“…fast!…”

“Hitch a ride!”  She pointed to her shoulder.  She didn’t know whether he’d heard her or not, but he understood the gesture.  He put on a burst of speed and dove for her jacket.  His talons dug deep to keep him holding on, pricking her skin.  He folded his wings and hunkered down into the wind.

Confederacy Teaser Excerpt

“I brought your pack,” came Oscar’s voice.

Nasan reached out and found it in the dark.  It was torn all down one side, but all its contents were still there.  Her hand ran into the broken halves of the spear on the ground next to it.

“You carried that?  You’re a quarter my size!”

His silence was a yes.

She realized she ought to be grateful to the bird, but she wasn’t sure what to say.  Instead of answering she got the firesticks out of the sack.  She grudgingly opened up a fire khipu, just a little bit, enough to let out a spark.  The firestick kindled and caught fire.

It didn’t provide much light, not nearly as good as the light khipu, but the dried and compressed horse dung of the firestick would burn slower.  This one should last her for about an hour.

She wrapped herself up in the square of tent canvas and huddled next to it.  The flames licked at the brick-shaped chunk without giving much heat.

“Would you like some–”  She caught herself.  “Do you eat?”

“A little, yes.”

“Would you like some barley paste?” she said, by way of an apology.

The bird hopped over to her, and she fished around in the pack for the paste.  Her hand ran into the glider’s egg.  For a moment, she paused.  No, she’d save that for eating later.  Barley this time.

She peeled back the cloth wrapping and broke a chunk off for the bird.  It – he – held it under a claw and pecked at it politely.  She ate, too.

“Dunno what I’m going to do when it runs out,” she said.  “I never thought this would happen to me.  Running out of food before I do water.”

And she had her arm to worry about.  It still throbbed, and it still wouldn’t move.  And where the heck was she?

“You don’t know my name, do you?” she said suddenly.

The bird blustered.

“I can tell, you keep calling me girl-child.”  She kicked the sack away.  “For another thing, what’s all this about my destiny?”

And then something very peculiar happened to Oscar.  He seemed to be fighting with something invisible.  He wriggled his head, as if to shake it free of a net, and squinted – was that supposed to be a grimace?

“I can’t tell you,” he said finally, panting.

She raised an eyebrow.

“It’s against the rules,” he said.  “I’m under these rules for … reasons that I can’t talk about, either.  I can give hints, though.”

“Oh, isn’t that lovely?”  She rolled her eyes over the barley paste.

“You’re going to be doing something very important.  It has to do with the fate of this world.”  The best part was that Oscar looked utterly serious as he said it.

“Keep on telling me that, witch-spirit.  Maybe once I figure out what you are, I’ll get some more answers.”  She pulled the canvas around her and gingerly lowered herself down.  “Until then, good night.”

Then, on second thought, she levered herself up a little.  “One other thing, bird.  My name’s Nasan.  It means ‘life.’  I don’t have a clan name anymore.”

It was satisfying just to see the bird look at her with its beak half open.  She rolled over and closed her eyes.

Sweet Baked Tofu Stir Fry

Argh, I keep forgetting to take photos for these recipes.  I was all set to take photos for this one, and then kittens happened.

  • 2 tbsp. honey
  • 3 tbsp. soy sauce
  • dash of sesame oil
  • 1 package extra-firm tofu
  • 2 bell peppers
  • snow peas
  • 1/3 cabbage
  • 1 12-oz package soba noodles
  • 1/2 jar of salad olives

Baking tofu is a new technique to me.  The interesting thing about it is that it turns the tofu into an entirely different dish.  It gets chewy, a texture kind of reminiscent of oysters.  Anyway, the trick to baking tofu is to remove as much moisture from the tofu as possible.  Drain the tofu and cut it into long, thin strips with a knife (see?  Here’s where a photo would have been helpful.)  Block the heck out of them with a towel.  You might want to wrap them up in the towel, put a plate with a weight on it on top, and leave them there for a while.

Put the thoroughly blotted tofu strips onto a foil-lined baking pan.  Mixed together the soy sauce, honey, and oil, and sprinkle it on top.  Stir them around a bit to make sure they’re coated.  Or coat them with whatever sauce floats your boat – tofu will take on the flavor of whatever is around it.  Bake in the oven at 350º for 15 minutes, stir, then bake another 15 minutes.  Once the soy sauce becomes a gooey, chewy coating like road tar, you’ll see why you foil-lined the pan.

The rest of the recipe goes together like a regular stir fry.  Chop the peppers into long, thin strips and sauté on high heat along with the snow peas.  Chop the cabbage into long strips.  Once the peppers and peas are softened up a bit, throw in the cabbage.  Then throw in the soba noodles, olives, and baked tofu strips.  Fry that all up until it’s as brown as you like it.

Sweet and salty – great combination!

Kittens!

I’ve got a bunch of things to do right now: read about interspecific incompatibility for grad school, apartment hunt, put together a publicity plan for The Confederacy of Heaven, keep up with a certain blog of mine.  But a bucket full of kittens somehow manages to trump all that, doesn’t it?

These guys are little attention sponges.  They don’t want you to leave them alone for an instant – forget about what you had been planning to do today.  We found them out on a curb in our neighborhood, and we’ll be keeping them until they’re old enough to go to the shelter.

One of the tykes has the most remarkable markings.  He’s halfway between being a black cat and a tabby.  The white bits remind me of swirls of galaxy in the night sky.

(That's my goofball brother in the background.)

If I had my way I’d name him Ëarendil and keep him, but alas.  I doubt the apartment building would accept cats.

ETA of The Confederacy of Heaven is September 15

This is contingent on whether Podiobooks has problems with the formatting of my podcast audio files, but at the moment, the forecast is good.

For the rest of the summer, I’m going to be teasing you mercilessly with excerpts from the text and illustrations.  I’m going to be telling everybody I know and their uncle about this book.  I don’t think I marketed Grizelda effectively enough, and I want to do better the second time around.

I’ve decided I’m going to make The Confederacy of Heaven available for free.  While it would be nice making a living from writing, it would also be a lot less fun.  What I really love getting out of my e-noveling hobby is feedback.  Please, feed back!  Tell me what you thought of the book (and this blog, too).  Tell me if you hated it.  And then go tell all your friends about it.