Category: Writing

Posts in which we talk about the writing craft and process

Considering Culinary History

Updated on April 18, 2013 by susanna

Susanna here, rejoicing that it’s Friday at last. I’m hard-pressed to think when I’ve been more eager to see a week come to its end.

I’m currently reading Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. It’s a fascinating look at the history not of food, but of the implements we use to cook and eat it. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I’ve already learned so much. For example, 19th century vegetables weren’t anywhere near as overcooked as you’d expect based on the long cooking times advised in early cookbooks, because cooks were advised to simmer vegetables rather than cook them at a fast boil, and also because they’d pack a lot of vegetables into a small saucepan rather than a smaller amount in a larger pot like we do today.

Consider the Fork

And here’s another fact that surprised me tremendously: You know how most people have a natural overbite, and if you don’t, your orthodontist will work to give you one? Apparently that’s a recent development in human history, and isn’t the result of a genetic change–it’s developmental, based on how we eat. When you look at older skeletons, you generally see incisors that meet edge-to-edge. The overbite starts to emerge 200-250 years ago in Europe, but 800 to 1000 years earlier in China. In both cases, the change happened first among the upper classes.

The probable explanation? Forks and chopsticks. Once people started carrying food to their mouths already bite-sized rather than tearing it apart with their teeth, their incisors started to grow in differently.

I’ve long been fascinated by culinary history, and I’m starting to incorporate it in my writing. In my July release, A Dream Defiant, my heroine is a naturally gifted cook. She’s a commoner, an ordinary English village girl following the drum in Spain with her soldier husband, and her dream for after the war ends is to take over the inn in her home village, which has a reputation for dreadful food, and turn it into a place all the travelers on the Great North Road will stop to linger over their dinners. And I have an unfinished manuscript I’m thinking of dusting off where one of the characters is a French chef I created to contrast with every fussy, melodramatic French chef ever written. The manuscript in question is a paranormal, so if you picture Anthony Bourdain, Vampire Hunter, armed with garlic and cleaver, you wouldn’t be far off.

What delicious things are you hoping to taste this weekend? I’m planning to bake cookies for the first time in ages.

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged food, research, Susanna Fraser | 8 Replies

Horn Tooting and Evolution of a Sale

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I blogged a few months ago on a post called Where do you get your ideas? about how a story starts for me, and I’m very happy to announce that that book, now called Chained, has sold–details were thrashed out by the agent and editor while I traveled to Atlanta–a great way to start the RWA National Conference! Or rather, an almost completely different version of that book has sold.

Then, the story was called, tentatively, The Story of Miss O. I renamed it Chained as I realized the story was about the English abolitionist movement. Here are the pics I found of the hero and heroine (courtesy of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of Russian aristocrats), although being my characters, they do not look nearly as cleaned-up and glamorous:

Now the editor liked the idea, she particularly liked the naughty goings-on that occurred in a carriage in chapter three, but she glommed onto something I was hoping to avoid because it involved real research, and gasp, I have a deadline of the end of the year. This year. My original story started off in England and after a while and many more naughty goings-on in a variety of locations, the action moved to a Caribbean sugar-producing island, where, um, more of the same took place, and then they sailed for home, by which time the hero/heroine are not speaking to each other. This is a two-month voyage. That’s a long, long sulk. This is not terrific plotting. It bothered me. I was afraid I’d write a book that contained something like this–Two months later, as they stepped onto English soil again… And I wasn’t really sure how it would end.

My local RWA chapter, bless their hearts, had a plotting session at one of our meetings. To a woman, they said I should have a raging mob with pitchforks and the hero performing heroic deeds to win the heroine. Um, yes, I said, but the English abolitionist movement wasn’t like that. It was housewives boycotting sugar, and earnest Quakers distributing pamplets and getting names for petitions–the Georgian equivalent of envelope-stuffing for a political campaign.

The editor–who of course zoomed in, eagle-eyed, on the terrible weakness of the original plot– told me she wanted it set on the Caribbean island, with the story beginning on the voyage out, and could I send her a couple of paragraphs on how I would rewrite it. Later that day, if possible, certainly before the weekend (this was the Wednesday of the week before National). I produced a cold sweat instead, went home, and thought about more sin in the sun and less about earnest Quakers in appalling weather. I thought about raging mobs. Raging mobs with machetes…a slave revolt. I sent an email to the editor the next day, she liked it, and she and my agent began thrashing out the stuff we writers are too timid to attempt. Less than a week later, the day before the conference started, we had a deal.

So now all I have to do is rewrite and write and go to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” because I can write it off as a legitimate business expense! Chained will be released in (probably) Sept. 2007 under the name of Jane Lockwood for NAL’s Heat line.

And now I really must write!

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged Abolitionists, Jane Lockwood | 5 Replies

An excerpt with obligatory flashback

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

Here’s an excerpt from something that may or may not ever be written. (Warning: there is a flashback that may injure the tenderhearted)

Time passing.

Ben spent a lot of his life watching time pass, looking interested or uninterested as they talked on about their concerns or business. He’d learned long ago that they didn’t necessarily expect an answer and sometimes not even a response, but a look of quiet concern and interest would do the trick.

And when an upward inflection indicated an agreement was necessary, the words came automatically. “Very true, my lord. Exactly so, sir. Indeed.”

And meanwhile his mind would wander where it would as his hands dealt with buttons and folds and all the niceties of milord’s dress.

Time passed. He waited for the time when his life, his real life would begin, a life that had started some twenty years ago, when first he met Marie.

He, wasting time (they’d say) or exploring (he’d say) his lordship’s library, with the buzz of a bee against the mullioned windows, the comforting rich smell of leather and beeswax, shafts of light with dust dancing like he was in church. But this was better than church, and with the added excitement of getting caught. Running his hands over the spines of leather books, daring to take one down and open it to pictures of strange lands and creatures, and row upon row of words. Or this, spinning the great globe, watching continents and seas blur into brown and blue and green, the surface smooth beneath his fingers, sunlight dancing off the golden bonds that held it in place..

Another hand, small and clean, reddened by daily immersion in soap and water, stilled the globe.

“That’s where you come from, Ben.” Pointing to a great brown mass like a pear upside down.

“No, t’aint. I come from here. I always been here.”

“No you don’t. Here. Africa. That’s what they says in the kitchen.”

He looked at their hands together on the globe, hers so pale and his dark, dark as the ink that named the continents and countries and cities and that he couldn’t read.

“I always been here,” he repeated. “I was born in this house, I was.”

“Silly,” she said and she touched his hand with one of her delicate fingers. The globe shifted at the movement.

The globe revolved again at her touch, and she moved it just a little more, and more again, halfway round the world.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s London. That’s where I was born.”

He looked at the familiar triangle of Britain. Yes, London. He could read that. You watched it on the milestones when milord and milady traveled to town with the servants and where he saw all sorts of people, strangers and foreigners and some even like himself.

“I’ll go back to London.” She tossed her head and removed her hand from the globe to take some of the weight of the folded linens she carried. “When I’m a grown woman, I shall be maid to a great lady and dress as fine as she, and eat meat three times a day.”

He darted in and kissed her rosy cheek. “And I’ll marry you.”

She shrieked and giggled and ran off, shoes slapping on the wooden floor, her fair hair tumbling out from under her linen cap. Her shoes were a little too big for her, just as her gown was a little too faded and short.

Posted in Writing | 2 Replies

At The Movies

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. … I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out. Roger Ebert, 1942—2013

“The more Roger became a prisoner of his body, the more he seemed to escape into his rich and sophisticated mind. By the agreement of almost everyone I know, his writing in these last years was among the best he’d ever done, more personal and expansive, marked by a still-astonishing rate of productivity. He wrote a wonderful memoir, close in its deceptively profound, plainspoken way to two of the writers Roger most admired: Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson. And indeed, Roger was nothing if not an Anglophile: Among the least known books he authored is a slender volume called ‘The Perfect London Walk,’ an instructional travel book that, having taken the journey it maps, I can assure you is a rare case of truth in titling.” (Scott Foundas, Variety)

Last week, a great person passed away when Roger Ebert died at age 70. Since he seemed above all to appreciate great storytelling (and to be a great storyteller himself!) I wanted to talk a little about him here.

I love movies for the same reason I love books and writing—I love stories and characters, I love how they can show us deep truths about ourselves and the world around us in a way nothing else can. In Roger Ebert’s reviews and blog essays, I found this same passion, and was always inspired by what he had to say. Every week I ran to his blog to see what new movies were coming out, because he always told us not only what to see but how to think about what we had seen. How to find the truth of every story, good and bad, in our own hearts. (In fact, the number one best piece of writing advice I ever read came from him–”It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” This is true for books as well as something like, say, Tree of Life or La Dolce Vita)

“He saw, and felt, and described the movies more effectively, more cinematically, and more warmly than just about anyone writing about anything. Even his pans had a warmth to them. Even when you disagreed with Roger you found yourself imagining the movie he saw, and loved (or hated) more than you did.” (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune)

His reviews were always witty and intelligent, clearly written and evocative. Never snobby (he loved a great popcorn movie as much as French indie) or faux-populist. Just clear, beautiful writing evoking what makes a story great, or even what makes it, well, suck. He always just seemed like a super-smart guy who wanted to talk to us all about movies, who wanted to hear what we thought as much as he wanted to tell us his own opinions. (his very active Twitter account can testify to how much he seemed to love that connection!). And his writing on politics and social causes was just as evocative and amazing as his movie reviews. He loved movies, people, and life, and it always came through in his writing.

“The irony is that it all feels so personally sad. It feels so personally, profoundly awful and unfair, and I feel it with the grief nerves, not just the admiration nerves, because people whose books you destroy from overuse as a 16-year-old, you will grieve when they die as if you knew them, whether they are novelists or critics. But still, after all that, I was doing all right until I remembered that he’s not going to write about any more movies. And I’m still not ready for that.” (Linda Holmes, NPR)

He was an inspiration in real life as well. His great love for his wife and family, his kindness and humanity, the way he forged ahead with life in the face of immense health problems that would have made most of us give up, the way he always found wonder and connection no matter what, is an example for everyone in the best way to live our lives and make the most of our precious time and talents.

“‘Start writing. Short sentences. Describe it. Just describe it.”

“Roger said, when I asked him about writer’s block. Then he quoted the first three paragraphs of his ‘Persona’ review and told me that it had completely baffled him in 1967 but this strategy worked brilliantly. Tonight, as I sit here numbly staring at the screen with the hardest writer’s block I’ve ever known, I place my fingers on the keyboard to follow the advice of the greatest man I know, and just describe it.” (Grace Wang)

(You can read his last review, and many tributes, at his website…)

It’s hard when we lose our heroes. It’s hard to know I will never see what he thinks about a new movie again. But I can enjoy re-reading his words, and can be inspired by them all over again. Who are some of your heroes this week?? What inspiration have you found at the movies?

Posted in TV and Film, Writing | Tagged Roger Ebert | 5 Replies

Spring Fever

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Happy Tuesday, everyone! What are you doing this week?? I got my latest Harlequin Regency romance turned in (yay!!) and am getting caught up on a few things before diving into the next Elizabethan mystery. Things like grocery shopping and running the vacuum cleaner, which always fall by the wayside when a deadline looms. Among my projects–a fun round-robin story my local RWA chapter is doing with a St. Patrick’s Day theme! Stay tuned for more info on that….

I am also announcing a winner! The winner of a copy of A Stranger at Castonbury is…Emily! Congrats! Email me your info at amccabe7551 AT yahoo.com….

In between taking a few naps and watching some DVDs that have piled up while I was working on the book (including all of season one of Girls, I have also been dreaming of spring. Like many places, winter has been dismal here, with more gray skies and snow and freezing rain than usual. (I also just read The Lady and Her Monsters, about Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein, which included some depressing details of 1816’s Year Without a Summer. It hasn’t been that bad here, but still…). So I’ve been perusing garden catalogs and spring fashion websites (already bought some shorts at J Crew!).