Have Faith In The Bake

One of the advantages (in fact, surely the only advantage) to being woken up at ungodly hours by excitable offspring (ages four and one) is that I can get cracking at baking some bread and have it ready to eat at a civilised hour. This morning it was this rather splendid basil, rosemary and mozzarella focaccia.

Focaccia does very well at absorbing other flavours and textures. The aforementioned herbs and cheese do the business, as do sun-dried tomatoes, olives, artichokes, peppers, even anchovies and potatoes if you’re feeling adventurous. One of the results of adding these wet ingredients – as well as the copious amounts of olive oil already in the mix – is that you’re left with rather a sticky, wet dough. When I started doing focaccias I did wonder about whether I’d be left with rather a soggy middle, so I added some flour until I thought it was right. And I ended up with stodgy focaccia, and my Italian grandmother probably spinning in her grave. What did I learn? You gotta have faith in the bake!

I’m going through a rather sticky patch in Hole In The Sky, inasmuch as I’m juggling several different plot strands at once, running the risk of a soggy middle. My protagonist, Grub the psychitect, is undergoing a psychic deep dive. Sand, the last of the slave/creators, is being taught the true reservoirs of his powers of creation by a wise teacher character of ambiguous virtue, and these two plot threads have a huge impact on the worlds of my other main characters such as the cyber hacker Gretchen, and the career woman on the up, Ura.

One of the problems with SF – and perhaps to a lesser extent, fantasy – is that one is forced into a certain amount of handwavium and explanation in order to make the on-page events make sense, or at least remain consistent. Grub’s “deep diving” and “psychitecture” abilities require a lot of explanation, and it’s by loading ingredients of exposition into the book that I’m currently in fear of the soggy middle. But, after some soul searching last night, I’ve decided to plough on with the narrative and try to let the explanations rise from the text organically, rather than force it by adding more and more infodumpy flour. I’m having faith in the bake, and I'm hoping my Amalfi-born nan would approve.

And here is the focaccia itself (I was too slow in getting a picture of it while it was still whole, which I suppose is a good sign…)