Right Down The Line: Soundtrack, story notes & thanks
Masterpost
Right Down The Line
Conceived:
Late January 2011.
Begun:
3 February 2011.
[abandoned by mid-February 2011; restarted early February 2012]
Completed:
21 April 2012.
Written for:
kizuna_exchange
for tia_junan.
If you've come this far, I want to both thank you and congratulate you. :D It takes me hours, so I understand the tremendous investment of time required to read this story.
"Right Down The Line" is the story I originally began for K_X 2011. After a couple weeks of writing and about eleven thousand words, I realized the story was too big and too time-consuming to finish for 2011 so I put it aside to work on later.
Later became K_X 2012.
To be honest, it would be impossible for me to actually cite to everything that went into the writing of this story. I have an enormous folder of articles I've been collecting, and I have shelves of cookbooks and food memoirs and many boxes of food magazines. When David Chang and Peter Meehan began publishing Lucky Peach last year, it was like they dreamed up that magazine for me.
It's pretty safe to say I'm a food geek. The "Food" tag in my Google Reader is loaded up with more than I could ever possibly read in a day. There are all the chefs I follow either in my Reader or via Twitter, plus the food writers and bloggers and the food journalism of everything from the New York Times, Washington Post & LA Times to chow.com, Saveur and Lucky Peach. It's not just about recipes, restaurants and chefs. It's about the ingredients. Farms and farmers. Sustainability. Food safety. Nutrition. Global food and water issues. Basically, I'm interested in all of it.
So writing "Right Down The Line" was just about THE most self-indulgent story I've ever written, because the research I did for it was all stuff I'd normally read even if I didn't have this mammoth ever-spawning story in my head. A lot of what I brought to the story is the stuff I already knew going in - things that I care about, like sustainability and local food and ethical eating. So, yeah, annoying food geek here. The research was the awesome part of writing this story: getting to take all this food geekery and turn it into a story.
The difficult part was the actual writing. RDTL is probably the hardest project I've ever worked on, if for no other reason than that it turned out to be so long. In my head I thought it would be 20K words less than the final version. To make matters worse, there's so much more that I'd planned to write for this story. My story notes are immense. The story that ended up on the page is the result of what I could do with the time I had - coupled with endless anxiety that what I'd written didn't do justice to the topic or the characters. Writing this was a long, tough, painful slog. Each story is a journey and a learning process. Hopefully this one, for all its shortcomings, will make the next one better.
Inspiration came from everywhere. I drew a ton of inspiration from the memoirs and writings of people like Anthony Bourdain and chefs Gabrielle Hamilton (chef/owner of NYC restaurant Prune) and David Chang (chef/owner of Momofuku restaurant group which operates restaurants in New York City, Sidney, & Toronto). A lot of the Kayakuya business model and company set-up is a very stripped-down version of how Momofuku is run. I dropped a lot of real-people names into the first half of the story, particularly Thomas Keller, Gabrielle Hamilton, Andrew Carmellini, David Chang, Jose Andrés, Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz and Peter Serpico. These are all chefs with excellent reputations in the "fine dining" world right now. Eleven Madison Park (where the character Runa is the executive pastry chef) is currently a Michelin-starred New York City restaurant of great repute. Momofuku Ko is the Michelin-starred experimental dining venue of the Momofuku group (a spiritual ancestor of Sesamo). Momofuku's Noodle Bar is an ancestor of Zenzero (which, in my canon, started out as a dumpling shop the same way Noodle Bar started out as a ramen noodle shop). minibar from Jose Andres is an ancestor of Outlandish. I've eaten at minibar, and it was amazing.
When I say "ancestor," I only mean that the real chefs and their restaurants provided the inspiration, but that my invented restaurants are not intended to be carbon copies. Rather, my restaurants are next generation versions of the kinds of concepts these existing restaurants execute right now.
However, in the case of inboccalupo, I just could not top the real thing. I always knew that Jin was going to be involved with an underground restaurant/supper club type of thing, but when I discovered wolvesmouth, I knew I had the model for Jin's inboccalupo. Chef Craig Thornton is the long-haired twenty-something creative driver behind what has become a supper club phenomenon. inboccalupo is a poor imitation of the real thing. Someday maybe I'll be lucky enough to eat one of Thornton's dinners. If you google "wolvesmouth" you'll find more blog posts and articles than you can shake a stick at, many with gorgeous photographs and descriptions of what a Wolvesmouth dinner is like.
Most of the food is real - many of the described dishes are from one of the Momofuku restaurants or from Craig Thornton's Wolvesmouth dinners. My fic's recipient, tia_junan asked for recipes. Sadly, for most of the dishes there are no recipes, there are only descriptions floating around the internet which I hoarded greedily. I invented a few things, but I'm sure some chef out there has already thought of them.
I would like to include a few recipes, however, so here are a couple food blogs that provide the recipe & photos for Momofuku's "spicy pork sausage & rice cakes," one of the dishes included in the inboccalupo dinner Jin prepares for Kame and other guests in part 6: blog 1 | blog 2.
And here are Momofuku's "48-hour short ribs" (sous vide preparation) which Kame considers in part 2: blog 1 | blog 2
If you google "momofuku recipes" there are plenty of food blogs out there who have cooked out of the Momofuku cookbook. You can also find plenty of bloggers who have written about their meals at Momofuku restaurants as well as people who have blogged their Wolvesmouth dinners. The Wolvesmouth site also has a link to the Wolvesmouth Flickr photostream which is an amazing source of gorgeous food pr0n. :D
Finally, Haruka and Runa's wedding and cake was directly inspired by the wedding of married chefs Karen Urie and John Shields, formerly of Town House restaurant in Chilhowie, Virginia.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention this, but the charity! Many of the best chefs in New York City and other cities and towns all over the U.S. (and likely elsewhere, also) do tons of charity work. Many of the NYC chefs I 'follow' are big supporters of City Harvest. It's a fantastic organization that redistributes usable food waste from restaurant kitchens to prepare meals for people who otherwise might not get to eat. It's a terrific way to prevent food waste and help communities as the same time.
ETA2: I also forgot to link to the amazing Yale Sustainable Food Project. They do really vital, good work and they are a real force for affecting positive change in sustainable food today and for the future. Check them out! There are real chefs (some of those I mentioned above and many others) who work with this project right now.
So these are the broad strokes for this story's roots. Any questions? I'll do my best to answer.
Now, onto the music:
[download]
note: download both parts of the winrar archive into one folder;
extract part 1 with winrar and both parts will automatically extract to create a single folder;
password: lupo
If you've read RDTL, you know that music is liberally mentioned, and in some cases, holds considerable emotional significance to the characters. Music is always integral to my writing process, so the soundtrack reflects both some of the music I listened to while writing the story as well as all the music actually described in the story. It's a long soundtrack to accompany a long story. I hope it provides some enjoyment.
--
Huge thanks to N for being my faithful companion, supporter and partner and to acchikocchi for being my first reader and dear friend who tolerated an egregious amount of desperate worrying. ♥
And to you, dear reader, thank YOU. Writers cloister themselves to write and then send their words out into the world to find someone willing to take a chance. So I thank you for coming with me on this journey. ♥♥
Right Down The Line
Conceived:
Late January 2011.
Begun:
3 February 2011.
[abandoned by mid-February 2011; restarted early February 2012]
Completed:
21 April 2012.
Written for:
kizuna_exchange
for tia_junan.
If you've come this far, I want to both thank you and congratulate you. :D It takes me hours, so I understand the tremendous investment of time required to read this story.
"Right Down The Line" is the story I originally began for K_X 2011. After a couple weeks of writing and about eleven thousand words, I realized the story was too big and too time-consuming to finish for 2011 so I put it aside to work on later.
Later became K_X 2012.
To be honest, it would be impossible for me to actually cite to everything that went into the writing of this story. I have an enormous folder of articles I've been collecting, and I have shelves of cookbooks and food memoirs and many boxes of food magazines. When David Chang and Peter Meehan began publishing Lucky Peach last year, it was like they dreamed up that magazine for me.
It's pretty safe to say I'm a food geek. The "Food" tag in my Google Reader is loaded up with more than I could ever possibly read in a day. There are all the chefs I follow either in my Reader or via Twitter, plus the food writers and bloggers and the food journalism of everything from the New York Times, Washington Post & LA Times to chow.com, Saveur and Lucky Peach. It's not just about recipes, restaurants and chefs. It's about the ingredients. Farms and farmers. Sustainability. Food safety. Nutrition. Global food and water issues. Basically, I'm interested in all of it.
So writing "Right Down The Line" was just about THE most self-indulgent story I've ever written, because the research I did for it was all stuff I'd normally read even if I didn't have this mammoth ever-spawning story in my head. A lot of what I brought to the story is the stuff I already knew going in - things that I care about, like sustainability and local food and ethical eating. So, yeah, annoying food geek here. The research was the awesome part of writing this story: getting to take all this food geekery and turn it into a story.
The difficult part was the actual writing. RDTL is probably the hardest project I've ever worked on, if for no other reason than that it turned out to be so long. In my head I thought it would be 20K words less than the final version. To make matters worse, there's so much more that I'd planned to write for this story. My story notes are immense. The story that ended up on the page is the result of what I could do with the time I had - coupled with endless anxiety that what I'd written didn't do justice to the topic or the characters. Writing this was a long, tough, painful slog. Each story is a journey and a learning process. Hopefully this one, for all its shortcomings, will make the next one better.
Inspiration came from everywhere. I drew a ton of inspiration from the memoirs and writings of people like Anthony Bourdain and chefs Gabrielle Hamilton (chef/owner of NYC restaurant Prune) and David Chang (chef/owner of Momofuku restaurant group which operates restaurants in New York City, Sidney, & Toronto). A lot of the Kayakuya business model and company set-up is a very stripped-down version of how Momofuku is run. I dropped a lot of real-people names into the first half of the story, particularly Thomas Keller, Gabrielle Hamilton, Andrew Carmellini, David Chang, Jose Andrés, Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz and Peter Serpico. These are all chefs with excellent reputations in the "fine dining" world right now. Eleven Madison Park (where the character Runa is the executive pastry chef) is currently a Michelin-starred New York City restaurant of great repute. Momofuku Ko is the Michelin-starred experimental dining venue of the Momofuku group (a spiritual ancestor of Sesamo). Momofuku's Noodle Bar is an ancestor of Zenzero (which, in my canon, started out as a dumpling shop the same way Noodle Bar started out as a ramen noodle shop). minibar from Jose Andres is an ancestor of Outlandish. I've eaten at minibar, and it was amazing.
When I say "ancestor," I only mean that the real chefs and their restaurants provided the inspiration, but that my invented restaurants are not intended to be carbon copies. Rather, my restaurants are next generation versions of the kinds of concepts these existing restaurants execute right now.
However, in the case of inboccalupo, I just could not top the real thing. I always knew that Jin was going to be involved with an underground restaurant/supper club type of thing, but when I discovered wolvesmouth, I knew I had the model for Jin's inboccalupo. Chef Craig Thornton is the long-haired twenty-something creative driver behind what has become a supper club phenomenon. inboccalupo is a poor imitation of the real thing. Someday maybe I'll be lucky enough to eat one of Thornton's dinners. If you google "wolvesmouth" you'll find more blog posts and articles than you can shake a stick at, many with gorgeous photographs and descriptions of what a Wolvesmouth dinner is like.
Most of the food is real - many of the described dishes are from one of the Momofuku restaurants or from Craig Thornton's Wolvesmouth dinners. My fic's recipient, tia_junan asked for recipes. Sadly, for most of the dishes there are no recipes, there are only descriptions floating around the internet which I hoarded greedily. I invented a few things, but I'm sure some chef out there has already thought of them.
I would like to include a few recipes, however, so here are a couple food blogs that provide the recipe & photos for Momofuku's "spicy pork sausage & rice cakes," one of the dishes included in the inboccalupo dinner Jin prepares for Kame and other guests in part 6: blog 1 | blog 2.
And here are Momofuku's "48-hour short ribs" (sous vide preparation) which Kame considers in part 2: blog 1 | blog 2
If you google "momofuku recipes" there are plenty of food blogs out there who have cooked out of the Momofuku cookbook. You can also find plenty of bloggers who have written about their meals at Momofuku restaurants as well as people who have blogged their Wolvesmouth dinners. The Wolvesmouth site also has a link to the Wolvesmouth Flickr photostream which is an amazing source of gorgeous food pr0n. :D
Finally, Haruka and Runa's wedding and cake was directly inspired by the wedding of married chefs Karen Urie and John Shields, formerly of Town House restaurant in Chilhowie, Virginia.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention this, but the charity! Many of the best chefs in New York City and other cities and towns all over the U.S. (and likely elsewhere, also) do tons of charity work. Many of the NYC chefs I 'follow' are big supporters of City Harvest. It's a fantastic organization that redistributes usable food waste from restaurant kitchens to prepare meals for people who otherwise might not get to eat. It's a terrific way to prevent food waste and help communities as the same time.
ETA2: I also forgot to link to the amazing Yale Sustainable Food Project. They do really vital, good work and they are a real force for affecting positive change in sustainable food today and for the future. Check them out! There are real chefs (some of those I mentioned above and many others) who work with this project right now.
So these are the broad strokes for this story's roots. Any questions? I'll do my best to answer.
Now, onto the music:
[download]
note: download both parts of the winrar archive into one folder;
extract part 1 with winrar and both parts will automatically extract to create a single folder;
password: lupo
If you've read RDTL, you know that music is liberally mentioned, and in some cases, holds considerable emotional significance to the characters. Music is always integral to my writing process, so the soundtrack reflects both some of the music I listened to while writing the story as well as all the music actually described in the story. It's a long soundtrack to accompany a long story. I hope it provides some enjoyment.
--
Huge thanks to N for being my faithful companion, supporter and partner and to acchikocchi for being my first reader and dear friend who tolerated an egregious amount of desperate worrying. ♥
And to you, dear reader, thank YOU. Writers cloister themselves to write and then send their words out into the world to find someone willing to take a chance. So I thank you for coming with me on this journey. ♥♥