Wait a sec, this freeway is full of kicked cans

and a salty cake

Pull up a chair, crack open a bubbly water, time for:

☠️ “How’s the book going?”

The best thing about writing a rough draft is throwing around a reporter’s favorite abbreviation: TK.

TK stands for “to come” in newsroom-speak, and it acts as your all-purpose filler for holes in your draft where you don’t have the details quite yet, e.g., “detritus from the exploding whale, filmed in TKYEAR, smashed cars as far as TK miles away from the blubbery epicenter.” Stuck? TKTK, move on with the draft, fill it in later.

Why is this relevant? Good news first: When I started book leave in August, my goal was to get most of a rough draft finished during my time off. Book leave ended a week ago, and I finished about 85% of the rough draft. Huzzah!

The less-huzzah part is that I am starting to revise some of my rough drafts and I can no longer ignore how much I came to rely on My Good Friend TK. TKTKTK WILL FILL THIS IN LATER, I wrote to Future Ellen. TKQUOTE HERE. I even finished one chapter with CLIFFHANGERTK.

So, yeah, here’s a live shot of the next stretch of the road!!

this is actually the 405, from here

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✅ Review it with Huet: good cake and bad pie

The good cake is this black sesame mochi cake. I made it a week-ish ago for a friend’s birthday and I liked it so much that I scrapped my existing plans for my Thanksgiving dessert and made it again. This is a twice-in-a-week cake!!

The recipe very accurately calls this good cake “moody-glam.” She is salty and mysterious. (And gluten free.) The last time I tried making a mochi cake, it had a matcha glaze that somehow turned out dark green and liquidy and made the whole cake look like a muddy bog; my roommates affectionately called it “swamp cake.” This sesame cake, on the other hand, has a caramel-based glaze, which remains soft but not drippy and also tastes damn great. If you’re thinking of making a cake and you like sesame and chewy things…….make this cake.*

The bad pie, on the other hand, is pumpkin pie. I have lived a life full of many good pies and I am an open-hearted person, but I cannot open my heart to pumpkin pie. It has no features, nothing for the teeth to hold onto, just soft moist pumpkin puree all the way down into the echoing void.

* Honorable mention “also a good cake” award goes to this raspberry cake. Its virtues are simplicity and delicious raspberries.

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☎️ Let me know if you

have a defense of pumpkin pie

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🌞 Thanks for reading; see you in a few weeks; in the meantime, don’t forget to hold your head up straight when using your phone to ease the strain on your neck!!

supinatra

A post shared by Maria Luneva (@supinatra)