- I am high on ACHIEVEMENT TODAY! What have I achieved, you might ask? I have FINALLY found a gluten free dough recipe that I can use to make hot pockets that doesn’t TEAR all over the place. It’s sort of a cross between a pastry dough and a pizza dough. It was super easy to make, no rise time (like there is on pizza dough). Between that and my silicone mat (which allowed me to FOLD the dough easily instead of trying to scrape and lift (which is where all the tearage happens), I got 4 ham and cheese hot pockets for hubby that look like proper little calzones and DIDN’T LEAK FILLING EVERYWHERE! I’ve been trying to do this for four or five years now.
- My next grand experiment for the week is a gluten free, dairy free mac and cheese with Daiya. I’ve been hard core wanting mac and cheese, so…we’ll see. Fingers crossed that it’s as successful as my last batch of hot pockets.
- My other grand achievement for the week is that I started a new Meet Cute on Wednesday and I’ve only got one scene left, which I hope to knock out today. Five days for one of these is about what I WANTED to be able to spend on a first draft. It’ll be back to TY tomorrow. This particular MC is actually set in Wishful. I hope to write a series of little crossovers like this with side characters to do a little cross pollination between audiences. Either way, I scored a whopping 10k+ this week–all actual prose. Booyah!
- I’ve been mulling a bit again about Wattpad today. A few years ago, I uploaded Forsaken and Blindsight since both of those can be read for free in various places anyway. But I never did anything to promote them. I’ve had something like 1000 reads (which over that period of time is NOTHING on this site) and a handful of votes, and I definitely have no idea whether I ever actually had sales result because of them. But the secret, apparently, is getting featured, which involves submitting your story/book/whatever to Wattpad staff for consideration. And they (understandably) prefer to feature the work of people who are active on the site. Either way I was considering trying it with some of my Meet Cutes to see if I couldn’t tap another segment of audience. The downfall, I think, is that probably to be very successful on the site, you need to be very ENGAGED on the site–which means reading and commenting on other people’s stuff. Not something I have much time to DO…plus, these kinds of sites tend to be the land of rank amateurs (yes, I’m a snob, I admit it), and trolling through the chaff to find the what I might actually like is ALSO something I don’t have a lot of time to do. So…eh, we’ll see. Probably nothing will come of it because I just spent twenty minutes trying to find something that I wanted to read on there and…couldn’t. It’s VERY much a hangout for teens, so probably folks who are writing YA and NA would be more successful there.
- My new gi should come in this week. As it is red and I’m being allowed to step in with the green belt I earned back in college, I’ll look like Christmas for, like…a year until I’m ready to test up to blue belt again. My knees haven’t quite adjusted yet to the new activity, but I’m really glad I decided to go back. My flexibility is coming back surprisingly fast, and the muscle memory is in there…somewhere. The balance…is going to take longer. But that’s okay. I’m really enjoying myself.
5 thoughts on “Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Update”
Thanks… I’m always looking for new “gluten free” ideas….
I’ve got gobs over at my cooking blog,.
Have you tried pao de queijo? (I can’t remember if you can have dairy or not; sorry.) That does not rip easily at ALL. Produces a fairly chewy bread; the fluffiness depends on the type of tapioca starch used (sour or sweet—and I don’t remember how to tell the difference or which one does what, because texture doesn’t matter much to me). I make it with chia seed egg replacer; my mother uses flax.
Quinoa pasta makes the BEST GF mac & cheese, in my experience, for taste and texture. I’ve used Ancient Harvest brand. 🙂
I count as successful on Wattpad (@carradee; I got 500k reads in about a year, on my first book) without really reading and commenting on others’ work. I just got featured early in and interact with all (or almost all) my commenters. If someone comments or PMs me, I answer. Sometimes I check out their stuff, when I have time, but I do that very rarely.
*grin* Now I’m off to check on the recipe…
I’ve got gluten free mac and cheese down pat because of hubby. It’s the dairy free I’m trying to sort out for myself now.
Oh! Yikes. Yes, that would be tough. 🙁 Hope you can figure that out.