July Newsletter: Shamarandura

I kicked harder, sweeping another armful of water back and away, and gaining another body length toward the paddle board. With my next stroke, I pushed my shoulders up and bent back my head to see my daughter dig in her paddle and propel herself into the distant Aegean.
The Bulgarian word shamandura means “a buoy,” and not, as it seems to me it should, a mystical lamasery that only appears once every ten thousand years. Likewise, shamar, is not a diamond market on the Silk Road, but a slap across the face.
Last summer, I combined the words and invented the game of Shamarandura, in which you swim out to a buoy and give it a slap. We generally use the smaller, nearby buoys for our slapping purposes. The bottom there is only seven or eight feet down, and you can dive to see the sand bags that anchor the buoys, sheltering hand-length, curled gobies.
The gobies are black, with large chipmonk-cheeks and fat, powerful tails. On the Black Sea coast, you can buy gobies fried and eat those cheeks, but on the Aegean, it’s the cuttlefish and squid that are in danger. These are facts that should reassure me as to my place at the top of the marine food chain, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t like swimming past the little buoys.
There’s a bigger one out there, encrusted with barnacles, its line trailing into murk. I swim over depths like those and I can’t help but imagine movement. Long, langorous swirls, as of a tail. A tentacle.
But you gotta work off that calamari somehow. What better way to conquer my fear and maintain my beach bod than this offer to my wife: “They can paddle out to the far-away buoy, and I’ll swim with them.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but one stroke of my little niece’s oar was the equivalent to four of my most powerful, avuncular strokes. Going all out, I could just barely catch up with the board, and when I stopped to rest, the girls powered steadily away.
I kicked, I breathed, I flipped over and let the burn drain out of my arms. I treaded water and gave my legs a rest while the girls gave the buoy a thorough spanking. My chest and arms hurt too much to worry about sea monsters.
“Now let’s go back.”
And the paddle dug in again.
***
I have quite a lot of news. Expect a post with more details next week, but for now I’ll keep things simple: Wealthgiver will end in two weeks. Paid subscribers will read the end of the whole novel on August 14th. Free subscribers will have to wait until October. So come on:
After Wealthgiver, paid subscribers will get a little vacation treat: two short stories from my friend and colleague Emil Minchev. Get ready for some yummy Balkan horror.
Finally, Wealthgiver I: Darkness, is now available for pre-order. For those of you who prefer all the chapters together, or who want a physical book, click here.
***
And I read some things:
In Xanadu: A Quest* by William Dalrymple - Another excellent recommendation from  Jane Psmith. This is an interestingly recent travelogue, from a near three decades ago, when men were more daring and the net of managerial technocracy clung less tightly, and any feckless couple of British twenty-somethings could sneak, bluff, and bumble their way across a hostile frontier. It’s rather funny, more than a little terrifying, and very human. How to give people an excuse not to kill you through body language alone.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - I’d been putting of trying this book because I don’t like video games and I think LitRPGs are dumb. But, like Invading the System, Carl makes it clear that it’s bad when a vast, unstoppable system destroys your life and forces you to kill your neighbors to gain points. The demon was an especially nice touch.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman - Not as good as book one. It wasn’t so much the shift from pop-culture humor to fantasy adventure. Doomsday was just rushed. Fewer ideas, less heart. I home Dinniman hits his stride for book 3.
Captain Trader Helmsman Spy by Karl K. Gallagher - I was a bit leery of this book, because it switches from the story of Marcus, to that of his father Niko, whose ship has been dragooned into spy duty. I enjoyed the exploration of the Censorate, both physical and sociological, and the human side of the story was good enough to make me care. What I like most about this series is how personal it is. Characters don’t solve problems by submitting the proper form to the correct department before the deadline. They talk to each other man to man. Or sometimes fight to the death. It’s a trade-off.
Outlaw of the Outer Stars by John C. Wright - Another great beach read from Wright’s pulpy homage to Star Wars. In this, the 4th book,the overarching plot is well on its way, with Lyra, Athos, and Flint getting themselves in ever deeper trouble. Most of the book we spend with Athos, himself, who is in very deep, indeed. Frogs everywhere.
The Paladin by David Ignatius - It would have been a decent book if it hadn’t been so heavily censored. In this political thriller set in 2016. The main character refers to Trump as “the president,” for whom he voted, but now regrets it. There’s a plot about deepfake videos and Kompromat and spies betraying each other, but every now and then the author feels the need to assure us that he’s not a bad Republican.
Epic The Musical by Jorge Rivera-Herrans - I got this recommendation from Author Update, which I also recommend, as an example of the next wave of story fashion in the 2020s: ruthless and bloodthirsty. Umstattd says it’s a retelling of the Odyssea that doesn’t try to “fix” the story, but it does. It’s just that instead of shoehorning in a lesson about diversity, the message is “kill whoever might become a problem later.” Hoo boy.
Pandemonia: A Novel Plague Plague Novel by Johnson Riggs - Full Disclosure: the author is a friend. Fuller disclosure, I had to push at the beginning. I was glad I did, though. Everything straightens out once the poison is in the water supply and our hero has been sent on his epic quest. From then on it's just big, dumb epic fun. There's a wizard whose magic is based on bodily secretions ("My prostatism is nothing compared to your pro-statism!"), a ramen-loving pilot from "South Direa," and of course our hero, Pickle, who waterboards prisoners the fun way ("Hope you like shredding gnar, bro!"). Imagine if Xanth had less weird eighties sex stuff and Cracked dot com didn't signal its twenty-teens virtue. Pandemonia is a novel of the twenty-twenties: offensively virtuous, and with only normal sex stuff.
Macedonian baked giant beans from the Syntrofia restaurant in Psarades on Lake Prespa - From our third trip to Lake Prespa, an annual vacation that we undertake not only because this place makes the best baked beans from Tirana to Sofia. Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients: Fasolia gigantes or other giant white beans, dried Florina peppers, olive onion, oil, dried spearmint, paprika, salt.
Directions: Soak the beans overnight. Cut up the onion and peppers and fry them in “a lot” of olive oil. I think this is really a lot, like a third of the volume of the beans. Put the oil, onions, peppers, and oil into a clay pot or Dutch oven. Season with spearmint, paprika, and salt. Bake until the beans are soft.
That’s the recipe I got from the chef, but I think there’s another “ingredient” she didn’t mention. I tasted a fishy, meaty flavor, which I think comes from the fact that she soaked the beans in lake water. To mimic this, I’ll try soaking my beans in dashi. Not until the weather has cooled down, though.

See you next month
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