Not that kind of book.

 I have had the incredible privilege to beta read a spectacularly wonderful book.  The beta version was good; then the author offered eARCs to the beta readers (and paid subscribers to her substack).  And the eARC I've read was better.  I can't wait to see the final version.

The book is huge, so she has split it into thirds.  It'll be volume 1, then two weeks later volume 2, then volume three two weeks after that.  

I've read the first volume in eArc--the second one's not out yet.  

So, what is this book?  Who is this author?  It's Sarah Hoyt's No Man's Land.  First book in a series that has lived in her head for most of her life, the Chronicles of Lost Elly.  

The setup is...weird, but great sci-fi normally is.  The first colony ships would...teleport, basically, from one planet to where they were going to colonize.  Only problem was that half of them didn't arrive as expected.  They just...vanished.*  Later, it was discovered that the teleporting ships did not take time into account.  And that is important.

 Those ships ended up creating colonies, all right.  In that world, the various space polities would run across a lost colony every so often.  Most of which had forgotten their origins.  

One of the main point-of-view characters is from the Star Empire of Brittania.  Which was founded by a bunch of people who believed in what England was once like...or at least its public relations image.  He's a diplomat, and sent to another planet--a semi-barbarian one--to bring them into the empire.  

Things go drastically wrong, and he ends up jumping out of a window ahead of a murder attempt, and falling through a portal into another world.   

This brings him into contact with the other main, point-of-view character: the Archmage of the world of Elly.  

I can hear you thinking, "Sounds like a faerie tale.  Or Alice in Wonderland."  

Nope.  It isn't.  It's still sci-fi, not fantasy or a drug trip (regardless of what that particular point of view character thinks).  It's a lost colony.  A colony where the founders deliberatly lost themselves, all so they could play with a My Little Genetics kit, and perfect humanity.  By making them hermaphrodites.  Yes, it mostly breeds true.  And by using nanotechnology to give them abilities that most of the rest of humanity uses machines to achieve.

NO, this book is not about gender issues or sex, or even sexual preferences, proclivities, and alignments. Not at all.  The book is about family: both found family (really weird found family), and about realizations that any kid makes about their parents as they reach adulthood (that none of us know what we're doing when raising kids, we just love them and do our best).  This book is about children.  Babies.  About what it takes to have a baby, and to be able to keep one alive in a society with no formula.  This book is about what the fuck did the founders do with their My Little Genetics Kit to make these people able to teleport, and make and use portals?  And about realizing that, in spite of all the weirdness, humans are still human, and valuable for that more than what they can do.  

I will be buying this book.  It will be going not just in my re-read pile, but my comfort re-reads pile.  I don't want to live in Elly, but it's absolutely wonderful as an escape.  

*I, personally, given the chance, would absolutely board a ship with like-minded colonists.  A fifty-fifty chance of getting where we were going is better than no chance of improvement under oppressive political systems.  But I am a special kind of crazy, and I fully acknowledge that not everyone is.  

Bread

I used the bread machine to make a loaf to go with pasta bake, Tuesday night.  The whole house smelled good.  Like my childhood.  

When I was little, buying flour and oil and other ingredients was...well, more expensive than a loaf of bread, but cheaper in the longer run than buying that many loaves of bread.  And flour also made biscuits, cookies, cornbread, and wacky cake.  Grandma bought flour in 25 lb bags, and went through an entire bag of flour every month. 

(I go through a 25 lb bag of bread flour every six weeks or so, making pizza.  It takes...a lot of dough to go through that much flour.)  

Once a week, Grandma made a four-loaf batch of bread.  Sometimes, in the winter, she'd do that in the wood cookstove that sat back in the utility room--which, really, doubled as a second kitchen, when she had that thing fired up.  There was a double-chambered sink and cabinets and counters back there, too.  But, like I said, in the winter, she actually built a fire in that stove and used it.  For bread.  And homemade, from scratch cocoa.  

The smell of bread baking is the smell of home.  One of the few, unmarred, good memories of childhood.  

Basic, white bread

1 c warm water
2.5 tbsp oil
2-3 tbsp sugar 
1/2 tbsp yeast
3.5 c all purpose or bread flour
1 tsp salt

This basic recipe works in a bread machine OR mixed and baked.  If you're using a bread machine, use all purpose flour,* follow your machine's order of operations (i.e., which ingredients go in what order), then push the button and forget.

If you're mixing then baking...I strongly recommend a stand mixer.  Start with the paddle, then use the dough hook for kneading.  

Normally, I add things in the order I've listed them.  And I run the stand mixer on speed 2.  When the dough balls up in the paddle, grab a rubber scraper, clean it out, and switch to the dough hook.  Then  keep it going until the dough's no longer shaggy looking, but smooth and elastic.  Turn the mixer off, and cover it with a towel.  Give it an hour or so to rise, then check.  If it's doubled, it's ready for a second knead.  If not, then cover it back up and check in about another fifteen minutes.  It's okay if it rises too much at this point.  You're just going to punch it down again.  

When it's doubled, turn the mixer back on to knead it a bit more.  While you're doing that, use cooking spray in a bread pan, and turn on your oven light (it'll make sense in a minute).  Turn off your mixer, and squash your dough ball into the pan, and spray the top with cooking spray or spread melted butter over the top to keep it from drying out.  Then, cover it, and put the pan in the oven with the light on to give it some warmth for the yeast to work.  Give it half an hour to rise, then check.  It should be doubled, peeking up over the top of the pan.  

Turn the oven on.  I bake the loaves I make at 375.  It'll only take about thirty minutes or so--start checking on it when you really start smelling bread.  When it looks done, tap it.  If it sounds hollow, it's ready.  

And boom!  Hot, homemade bread!  All the experts will tell you to wait for it to cool before slicing into it, but I call bullshit: slice into it as soon as you can hang onto it, then butter it generously.  There's absolutely nothing so wonderful as fresh bread with a lot of butter melted into it.  Add cinnamon-sugar if you want, or just chow down without it.  

Your whole house will smell wonderful for hours.  

*Do not, for the love of all that's holy, use bread flour in a bread machine with that much yeast.  Reduce it to a teaspoon. Or do like I do, and just use all purpose flour.  If you use bread flour and that much yeast, the result is...well.  I'm not sure how what caliber you'd use for mutant bread dough trying to push open the bread machine to escape into the wild.  

Programmers.

They're so smart they're stupid.  

A year and a bit ago, I bought this laptop.  I mostly use it for writing, but I also use it to read online, and to play some solitaire, and some match-three games.  I had my music on it, and downloaded a separate music player because I hate the one that comes with microsoft products.  

 End of November, Microsoft started pushing their AI "assistant" into everything.  

Including Word.  

I let my subscription lapse, and bought Atticus.  

Fast forward a bit to last month.  When the Microsoft updates went to do their thing.  

"You don't have enough room on your C drive for this update.  Use our smart tool to free up space for the update."  

Say what, now?  I do not have a lot of data, and this laptop was supposed to have an enormous amount of space.  

Well.  Come to find out, it does...but on a separate partition.  

All of my data has to live elsewhere, and most of my play-programs had to be uninstalled.  

Because somebody had the BRILLIANT idea to make the DATA partition more than 2/3 of the total space.  

And now I can't figure out how to get my music player to find the music files on my jump drive.  

I seriously want to head-desk the bright boy that decided that ALL laptops MUST have a partition because of COURSE everybody has to restore to factory settings sometimes.  Because the internet is for porn.  Right?   

Huh. Imagine that.

I'm not sure it isn't a dubious honor (I've seen my own sales reports), but I guess I get to claim the honor of Amazon bestselling author.*
 

*I probably won't.