Beyond Brat for Breakfast

8 Nov 2019 ~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I bought some Beyond Meat products at the grocery store.

They’re not cheap, and the whole debate about them being healthy is, to me, rather beside the point. I wanted to see how good Beyond could get pea protein to taste.

Four links of Beyond Meat’s Beyond Sausage Brat Original (100 grams each, uncooked) ran me $9. That’s $2.25 per link retail. Each link has 16 grams of protein to 12 grams of fat. (No trans fat, no cholesterol, 500 mg sodium, 5g carbs). 5 grams of that 12 are saturated fats, which is, according to the packaging, 38% less saturated fat than a pork link of the same size.

I grilled up one link, which, as promised, sizzled while it cooked. When it was done, I cut it in half and placed each half on a small Stonefire Nan round and added mustard and half a pickle spear to each round. I ate the finished product like two small nan-wrapped brats.

They were very, very good. I grilled the brat on a Foreman grill, so I could go about my morning while it cooked. It took less than a minute to assemble my nan-brat wraps. It was an efficient, delicious experience.

To try this at home, you’ll need:

Beyond Meat Sausage Brat Original (one link)
Stonefire Nan Rounds (2)
Pickle (1 spear)
Mustard

(And, for supreme convenience, a George Foreman grill).

If I were making this for lunch or dinner, a side of slaw or kimchi would have been a perfect compliment. At the moment, I’m still hungry, but that’s my fault for being too lazy to fry an egg or two. And yes, I have fried eggs on a Foreman. Once you account for the tilt, it’s a pretty straightforward process.

The bottom line on Beyond brats: If you’re looking for something that tastes like meat but isn’t, this is a pretty great option. Again, I can’t speak to the health side of it, because everyone has different nutritional needs and restrictions. I’ll be finishing my four pack (just not all in one day).

Literary pairing: Animal Farm (because The Jungle is too obvious and pigs really are smart).

Where to Submit Short Fiction?

5 Nov 2019 ~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

About a year ago, I sat down in the chair and got back to writing short fiction.

It is hard work.

People who think writing is about sitting and waiting for a muse or for some inspiration aren’t really thinking about writing. They’re thinking about some idealized notion of something.

Like anything else, inspiration comes from hard work.

Yes, the creative process can be unwieldy. Creative flow is a thing, and you find yourself in the middle of it at inopportune times. You have to work to get it back. Again, that word work. Creativity may be mystical, but it needn’t be mystifying.

Because this is hard work, breaks must be taken. And that’s when I tend to start submitting finished pieces around. Or write a blog post. Or, in this case, both.

When I’m as sure as I can be that something is ready go out and find a home, I submit to the biggest journals first. You know the ones. They’re the ones everyone knows. They get tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of submissions a year. The process is long and your chances are slim. I hit them first, and I wait. A few weeks later, I might start submitting the same work to the next tier. This is all very subjective, of course. On and on it goes until a piece is accepted or until I have run out of journals that I’d like to see myself in. Between rounds, I keep reading and writing.

As for the lesser-known journals, there are many very good ones. Because it’s impossible to read them all on anything approaching a regular basis, everyone has some innate process for screening which ones might be good fits. Sometimes the name of a journal stands out, or sometimes a journal has the kind of aesthetic that probably means they put hard work into the entire process. Again, it comes back to hard work.

Good luck placing your pieces!

The Writing on Page 21

29 Oct 2019 ~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Metzger flashed her a big wry couple rows of teeth. “Looks don’t mean anything anymore,” he said. “I live inside my looks, and I’m never sure. The possibility haunts me.”

“And how often,” Oedipa inquired, now aware it was all words, “has that line of approach worked for you, Baby Igor?”

(from The Crying of Lot 49, page 21, by Thomas Pynchon.)

The Long, Complex Sentences of Ernest Hemingway

22 Oct 2019 ~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

So they sat there in the shade where the camp was pitched under some
wide-topped acacia trees with a boulder-strewn cliff behind them, and a
stretch of grass that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream in front
with forest beyond it, and drank their just-cool lime drinks and avoided
one another’s eyes while the boys all knew about it now and when he
saw Macomber’s personal boy looking curiously at his master while he
was putting dishes on the table he snapped at him in Swahili. The boy
turned away with his face blank.

People who say Hemingway only wrote in terse, simple sentences forget passages like this one. That whole graph is just two sentences, and the first sentence has three hyphen-words spaced in such a way that they balance and even out like lines of parallel Hebrew.

In May, Another Easter

16 May 2019 ~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Somehow, it is May 16, 2019.

May 16 already.

Ten days ago, my cousin would have turned 38. His beagle, who is now my beagle, is whining in his crate. Beagles, if you don’t know, are beautiful and complicated and a little bit of mess. Beagles are like people when it all comes right down to it.

Last week I had a dream about my cousin. We were driving and catching up. We both knew that he had died. “Yeah,” I said, “but tell me. What’s it like?” I was pointing to the sky. I felt bad for asking, like I was violating some secret. It’s not that I needed certainty, but here I was, staring at it. Here I was, staring at Easter.

“Yeah,” I said, “but tell me. What’s it like?”

“You can’t even begin to imagine,” he said.

“Good,” I can picture myself saying. “Good,” I said. “I thought so.”