Board Games, a Dinner Recipe, a Movie Recommendation

Would You Like to Join a Secret Society of Kopp Sisters Fans?

Did you know that about fifty Kopp Sisters superfans get free books, real mail, little presents, and other good things from me throughout the year? Some of us have even met up in person, or at least we did in the Before Times. It could happen again!

I have persuaded my publisher to supply this small group with advance copies of every Kopp novel. In exchange, (yes, there's a catch) they post reviews and share their opinions with friends and family, both online and in real life.

With bookstores and libraries mostly shut down, and the media distracted by...well, everything, an extra boost from my readers means more than you can possibly imagine. Recommendations from friends is the number one reason why people decide to read a book.

We have a few spaces open this year and I'd love to add some of you to our little society. The only requirement is that you be a passionate reader who knows how to make some noise about the books you love. Maybe you write Goodreads reviews, post silly pictures of books and cats on Instagram, or stand on a street corner, shouting and sharing about your favorite books (with a mask on!)

I'm doing an art auction to honor a great woman and save democracy.

This will almost certainly ("almost" because 2020 is impossible to predict) be my last charity auction of 2020. For this one I chose the ACLU Foundation, for two reasons: First, to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who co-founded their Women's Rights Project in 1972 and handled many of their gender discrimination cases, and second, because the ACLU is and always has been on the scene with smart lawyers and a well-argued case when we needed them to safeguard voting rights, protect our privacy, and defend every marginalized group you can imagine, from women to gay couples to immigrants to prisoners. Emphasis on the voting rights this fall--the ACLU is all over the country, rushing to court anywhere the right to vote is threatened. None of that comes cheap.

We should not have to hold a bake sale to defend our civil liberties, but here we are. To that end, I've posted 24 small paintings on eBay, all starting at $9.99, including some new paintings that I made just for this auction: three small oil paintings of wicked plants in bloom, a little flower bouquet, and some more cocktails.

You have first crack at these! Here's the link. Go take a look. The holidays are coming. Maybe you'll see something small and handmade that a loved one (and a fan of RBG) would appreciate. All proceeds will go directly to the ACLU through eBay's charity program. eBay even donates the processing fees.

If for some reason the link doesn't work, try this one and be sure to pick "See All Items."

Here's my latest "assemble it from Trader Joe's ingredients" dinner.

I am an indifferent cook and so is my husband. Out of desparation and boredom, I have started attempting some of the "At Home" recipes published in the Sunday New York Times each week. I figured out how to hack this one with Trader Joe's ingredients and it was a winner. Here's a link to the recipe, and here are my Trader Joe's hacks: 

• Buy 2 bags of pre-cut butternut squash. All you do is open the bag and roast them in a pan with some olive oil.

• Buy the pre-cooked lentils they have in the produce section. Again, just open the bag and heat them up (with some garlic and cinnamon as the recipe calls for)

• Buy pumpkin seeds, either pre-roasted or raw and roast them yoursef.

• Buy the already-crumbled feta (yes I'm just that lazy)

• If you don't have pomegranate molasses, just throw something in. I happened to have some pomegranate balsamic, and I also had a jar of savory tomato jam from Trader Joe's. Weird combination, I know, but it worked.

Really, all I did was make the dressing and chop the green onions. Everything else was just open and heat. We both loved it.

Shutdown Board & Card Games, Ranked

(my husband made the above picture for you--he would like you to know that the horizontal words are good and the vertical words are bad in our game-playing world)

I generally hate board games and card games, but I'm so BORED after six months of shutdown that I announced to my husband that we had to find some games we could play in the evenings. (He likes games and is generally good at everything and in every way is a nicer person than I am, so he was agreeable to all this and even willing to try many games in order to find one I would actually like.)

So we went down to this wonderful new game shop in the neighborhood with my list of criteria: 

• No math. No card games involving doing small sums in your head constantly.

• Nothing that requires computers or technology in any way.

• No long, complicated lists of rules. Something you can learn quickly and play over and over.

• Games that encourage some amount of talking (unlike, say, chess, where one person sits and thinks while the other person sits and waits) or, even better, collaboration.

• My husband says that I will not play a game that involves a lot of strategy, such as keeping track of how many queens your opponent has. It is true that I don't care enough about winning or losing to want to game things out in my head.

Here's how we did:

Detective: FAIL. The rules were insanely complicated and it involved setting up an online account and in some way interacting with a computer.

Fugitive: FAIL. Sold to us as a fun chase between a fugitive and a marshall, but actually it's one long math problem on a set of numbered cards. Ugh.

Hardback: Another FAIL. Sold to us as a literary word game, but it's actually what I've learned is called a "deck-building" game, which is code for "a million cards that all do different things no one can keep track of unless you're a 12 year-old boy." The rules were so absurdly complicated that we both just laughed and put it all back in the box. 

By this time, we learned that you can go on YouTube and watch a demonstration/review of any game. So we started doing this before we went to the game store and eliminated quite a few that way. I thought Azul looked beautiful, but watching a video convinced us both that it would drive me crazy.

Timeline: WIN! Super easy to play, and generates lots of discussion. All you do is try to lay out cards according to when different events happened in history. There are many themed decks that you can combine because you will, eventually, remember the date the ballpoint pen was invented and at some point you'll need new historical facts. 

Bananagrams: WIN! We play this one just about every night. We invented our own house rule, which is that anyone who spells an 8-letter word gets a kiss. Add your own rules from there. (why not Scrabble, you ask? I hate the whole triple-point scorekeeping thing, and also trying to block your opponent from doing something. Who cares what he's over there doing with his letters? Plus there's too much waiting around while the other person sits and stares at tiles. This is why Bananagrams is perfect.)

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective: WIN! You're looking through old newspapers, a London directory, a map, and a book of clues to solve a Sherlock-style mystery. It's collaborative and takes several nights to work through one case. There are 10 cases per game, and four editions of the game (according to the many reviews I read, the newest one, Baker Street Irregulars, is also the best one to start with.) Some nights I am too mentally fried to dig into this one, but it is fun and involves lots of discussion and debate and reading aloud to each other.

Why not card games, you ask? Spite and Malice was recommended to us and we did play one night, but my darling husband kept pointing out that I was not employing any strategy as related to what cards he had on his side of the table. Again, why is that any of my concern? But we might try again, I didn't hate it.

Still on my list is Codenames Duet, but Scott is very skeptical that I will actually like it.

What are you playing? Let me know.

Bookstores would really like you to order holiday gifts right now.

You all know that the holiday season is the busiest time for retailers. But for bookstores, it's everything. December sales are often greater than the slowest 2-3 months of the year combined.

In a normal year, the way you handle that increase in sales is by bringing in a lot of extra holiday help and working a lot of overtime. But bookstores can't bring in extra people, due to safety precautions. Also, shipping delays are going to make it harder to get books in stock and to then ship them out to your gift recipients. (and believe it or not, Obama's massive 768 page biography--part one of two!--is using up all the paper at printing presses, making it harder to get other books to press.)

There has never been a more important year to shop local. Pandemic assistance has run out. There is no rescue package coming. Please buy books now from your local bookstore, or from any small local business you would like to see survive into 2021.

As long as we're talking about books, DEAR MISS KOPP will be out in January, but it can certainly be ordered now everywhere books are sold. It's being released simultaneously in all formats--hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audio. 

Asked and Answered...

Ask me a question, and if I answer it here, I'll send you the book of your choice! This month's winner is Kathleen, who asks:

You seem to be both right-brained and left-brained!  I would think someone with artistic skills wouldn’t be good at writing/research. But you do both so well.  Maybe both skills fit together perfectly.  What do you think?  

I think you're absolutely right to use the word "skills" here, because skills are taught, you just have to want to learn them and put in the time...and it's perfectly OK for anyone to decide they don't want to learn a particular skill. (I'm not sure I believe in the idea of left-brained or right-brained. Science backs me up on this. This is off-topic, but while I'm at it, there's also no evidence that some people are visual, audio, or kinesthetic learners. For that matter, I don't believe in the idea of talent at all.)

Obviously we're all a little different from birth. I have not raised children, but I have raised chickens, and it was astonishing for me to see that their personalities on the day they emerged from the egg remained their personalities for their entire lives. We had a shy chicken, an extremely friendly chicken, a mischievous chicken, a bossy chicken...it was all right there, when they were little fuzzballs that took naps in the palms of our hands. 

So I think I would say that we all have PREFERENCES. Proclivities, you might call them. Whether we're born with them or whether we develop them over time doesn't really matter, because we have them. I will never enjoy playing a card game that involves constantly doing small math sums in my head over and over. I don't like to do anything that requires a great deal of precision and accuracy. My paintings look the way they do because I can't bear to fuss over them any longer. I write a book in a year because it would bore me to tears to labor over the same book for five years.

I think ANY of us can do ANYTHING, but we might have to adapt it to best suit our proclivities. That's what makes our work specific to us, which is what makes it interesting. 

Having said all that, there are some interesting similarities and differences between writing and painting. Both are all about revision. It's easy for me to wipe off a canvas and start over, because I've thrown away not just chapters, but entire books and started again with a blank page. Both involve some technical skills that anyone can learn: color, composition, and brushwork are not terribly different from plot structure, character development, and dialogue.

But there are some satisfying differences: I can finish a painting in an afternoon, and you can't do that with a book. I can stand back and look at a painting and decide in an instant if it's working, but it's very hard to tell how a book is going.

So I would say...ideally we find a way to do what's interesting to us, and what we enjoy, and what suits our personality and our lifestyle and our schedule. If we continue to pursue our interests and our curiosity, those things will change and evolve over the years. Who knows where you might end up?

Ask a Question, Win a Book

Most of you know the drill by now. Ask me a question and tell me which book you'd like to win. If I pick your question to answer in the next newsletter, I'll send you the book you chose.  Please head over here to enter, and if you've entered before, ask the same question or a different one! I love all your questions and hope to get to all of them eventually. Only 20 people entered last month. Your chances are good!

Autumn Leaves are Works of Art

Just gathering them up and bringing them home to look at is an act of art-making. But if you feel moved to paint them, I teach a class on painting leaves and flowers. This link gets you 2 months free to check out everything Skillshare has to offer, including all my art and writing classes.

New Art in My Shop

I've been doing lots of little 5x7 and 6x6 oil paintings with very thick, juicy paint lately. Feel free to stop by my little art shop anytime and have a poke around. You can always see new stuff on Instagram, too.

I'm doing lots of virtual events these days

Would you like to come to one of my events, but you also don't want to get out of your pajamas or leave the house? I got you.

Oct 10 Wicked Plants Zoom event

Oct 17 Science & Nature Writing Workshop

Oct 18 Drunken Botanist Zoom event

Oct 21 Wicked Plants Zoom event

Please tell your friends! It makes a difference if people actually turn up to these virtual events.

I'm always happy to do an online chat with a book club, but now I'm also doing actual presentations, like the sort of thing I used to do on the road in the Before Times. So if you run a lecture series or any sort of event series and you need a virtual speaker, you can go here to see four types of virtual events I'm doing now. Feel free to pass this on if you know someone who's putting on these types of events right now.

Here's a wonderful documentary about a painting..and so much more.

It's only an hour long, you can watch it for free on YouTube, and it relates to the book I'm recommending below. Check it out.

What Are You Reading?

What a wonderful biography! Usually I hate biographies because they insist on starting with the person's childhood and trudging through every last event in their life in mind-numbing detail, but not Francine Prose! She's a novelist and she knows how to tell a story. If you love 20th century modern art, read this.