Here, There, and Everywhere!

The title pretty much sums up the state of my brain.  I've had a lot going on in the past couple of weeks but not much of it shows on the surface, so I thought I'd make a note here about a couple of the more interesting things.

At Gen Con I talked with Shane Moore, author of the Abyss Walker books, and because of that I'm now working on a cookbook ... of sorts.  It's going to be an Orcish cookbook - a sort of fantasy thing filled with recipes for roast Elf and such.  The goal is to have all the recipes be workable (assuming some ingredient substitutions) and have the cuisine have its own distinct flavor.  We'll see how this goes.  If nothing else, it should be a fun project.

Yosinori Satoh of Kobe, Japan has just completed a Japanese translation of the 14th century French cookbook "Enseignements" (Bibl. Nationale Ms. Lat. 7131), based upon my English translation.  I've been corresponding with Yosi for a couple weeks now, clarifying and revising parts of my translation - which probably means my translation will need to be updated in the next month or so.

I'm starting up a writing circle with a couple of friends.  Hopefully this will encourage all of us to get more written, and help work out plot issues, etc.  The zombie story I'm currently working on is currently around 8000 words and starting to move.

I've got a small bunch of things by other researchers that I need to format properly and put up on the website - a couple of articles and recipes and the like.  I should also take some time to make sure I've got links to all of Kristen's recipes.

Recently I have been taking more of an interest in medieval European charms, amulets, and magical "cures".  I don't know how far I'll be going with it, but it's neat stuff.

Yesterday I received an email from Dr. Thomas Gloning.  He'd been contacted by Helmut Kluge who is working on a database of plants and their uses in German manuscripts.  Dr. Gloning thought I might be of some help for this project.  It took a bit for me to work out what the emails were about because my understanding of German is very limited (I can read medieval German recipes and comments in German database code with reasonable accuracy, but beyond that I'm lost).  It turns out that Helmut is well aware of my website (Hi Helmut!), and while there isn't much I can currently help him with, there is some potential for future collaboration.

There's more, of course, but a lot of it is silly stuff that I do for fun and is probably a waste of time.