Shelley Workinger's Blog, page 7

Please Welcome Lynne Kelly, Author of Song For a Whale

My character Iris, a Deaf twelve-year-old tech whiz, is about to embark on a grand journey to track down the world’s loneliest whale. But first, she’ll need to fuel up. On her way to the assisted living center to pick up her sidekick grandma, Iris stops at the gas station. Since she lives in Houston, there are plenty of good Mexican restaurants around, but Carlos’s Gas ‘Em Up has the best breakfast tacos. This isn’t the kind of place that has all the food pre-wrapped in plastic. One side is like the ordinary convenience store you’ll find at most gas stations, but there’s also a family-run café that serves excellent Mexican food. If you’re unfamiliar with breakfast tacos, think of a regular taco on a flour tortilla, but fill it with breakfast food: scrambled eggs, cheese, maybe some bacon or sausage, and salsa. This morning, Iris orders her taco with eggs, potatoes, and cheese. She also orders a coffee. She’s never had coffee before, but it seems like an appropriately grown-up drink for a trip like this. After one bitter sip...

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/07...

Please Welcome Mary Kincaid, Creator of Hawk McCoy

My character Hawk McCoy is a seeking personality who has many adventures. Confronted with the eating habits of my grandchildren who will not try anything new I was prompted to write this story. I want to encourage children to try things and make up their own minds.

In Hawk McCoy: The Mutant Onion, Hawk explores the tastes of various superfoods, vegetables, that his mentor Nyssa Pentas developed with his father, a plant genetist. He joins Nyssa as a Junior Botanist. The first requirement of being a junior botanist with his father’s lab are expressing his opinions about recipes after the daily taste test. His father and Nyssa work on increasing the nutrient value of four types of vegetables: artichokes, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and onions. While he tastes, Lima Bean Curry, Artichoke sauces, and peanut fritters, he develops a three-part scale to rate vegetables on the blog.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/06...

Please Welcome Timothy S. Johnston, Author of Fatal Depth

The characters in my newest thriller, Fatal Depth, live in an underwater city. They commute to work in scuba gear or in submersibles. They work in submarines or serve in the submarine fleet, piloting massive warsubs through the world’s oceans. They live, love, fight, and do everything else underwater. All. The. Time.

It’s their life, it’s their existence, and it’s their very reason for waking up each morning.

But what are they eating???

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/06...

Please Welcome Bowen Greenwood, Author of Death of Secrets

What we like to eat reveals something about us. If a character orders nothing but salad every time he eats, the natural conclusion is to wonder whether he’s concerned about weight, or cholesterol, or some such. If a dainty, petite woman calls for a sixteen-ounce sirloin and tells the waitress, “I want to hear it mooing,” a picture of her rural upbringing comes readily to mind.

That makes food and drink useful tools for writing. In my first novel, Death of Secrets, Kathy Kelver, the female protagonist, witnesses a murder and then gets accused of making a false report by the police. In response, she and her college roommate open a bottle of wine together at the end of the day. It brings them into focus; it makes them relatable. It helps the reader understand better who they are.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/05...

Please Welcome Susan Keene, Author of the Wedding Cake Murder

Arizona Summers is the fifth generation to own Moonstone Lake’s most popular eating spot. At one time or another, everyone in the area has eaten there. She has nightly specials geared to the area seniors and folks who can’t afford to eat healthy without help.. She sends her leftovers to the homeless camp nightly.

Food is a universal symbol of fellowship. It’s our common ground.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/05...

Please Welcome Connie Jasperson, Contributor to Swords, Sorcery, and Self-Rescuing Damsels

First of all, thank you, Shelley, for giving me this opportunity to talk about food and how it fits into the fantasy universe. After all, even fantasy characters must eat to live. But what are the foods available to them? I usually try to keep it simple so that food becomes a component of world-building.

In 2018, Lee French asked me to write a story for an anthology called Swords, Sorcery, & Self-Rescuing Damsels. In my heart, I knew it had to be set in the Tower of Bones world of Neveyah, and I wanted my heroine to be as complex and inventive as women are in reality. I had wanted to do a story featuring the minotaur soldiers of the Bull God, and this provided an opportunity to show them as human.

My protagonist is a slave, a woman whose tongue was cut out in her childhood. She uses a hand language to speak to the other slaves. In the Bull God’s world of Serende, all boys are taken to the priests at age fifteen and remade into minotaurs. Many don’t survive the remaking. Many minotaurs are left mute in the process, so all people of Serende are bi-lingual and use the hand language to communicate.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/05...

Please Welcome Carole Bumpus, Author of A September to Remember

Drawing from an excerpt from my newest book, A September to Remember: Searching for Culinary Pleasures at the Italian Table, I’ve decided to share one of the unique culinary experiences we had the pleasure to enjoy:

A FORAY THROUGH A QUAY IN GALLIPOLI...

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/04...

Please Welcome John Ironmonger, Author of The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild

I was in a car in Paris, with my wife and some friends, when we stopped at traffic lights to let pedestrians cross. It was one of those deliciously rare moments when everyone spots the same hilarious thing at the same moment, and you laugh so hard it hurts to breathe. In this case it was a baguette. A man crossing in front of us was carrying an enormously long, slightly bendy, baguette in a carrier bag on the side that was hidden from us. All we could see was the top half of this baguette emerging from just below his waist, pointing skywards, wobbling as he walked.

OK. You probably had to be there. But here’s the thing. The French are easy to stereotype aren’t they? They eat baguettes. And snails. In The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild, around a third of the novel is set in France during the revolution. The heroine of this story, Marianne, is a pauper and she does indeed eat baguettes and snails; when she can get them. Heloise, a wealthy aristocrat (Marianne’s mother) eats better. One passage reveals, ‘maids bearing silver trays with oysters and raspberries and soft cheeses and cold meats. The house would smell of warm baked bread.’ She drinks a lot of wine.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/04...

Please Welcome Nicki Chen, Author of When in Vanuatu

No matter where you travel, you’re bound to return with memories of what you ate. Some of those memories will stay with you for years and years. You’ll tell friends about the pizza in Naples or the Spotted Dick in Canterbury or the generous bowl of lime wedges that came with your rum-and-Cokes in Puerto Vallarta.

I used to smile at the obsession my late husband and his colleagues seemed to have with food. While we were living in Asia, we attended many wine dinners—festive meals served around large round tables with a Lazy Susan in the middle. While we ate, the conversation would touch on politics and shop talk. But the main topic was always food.

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Please Welcome Susanne Gervay, Author of Heroes of the Underground

Food is a delicious way to draw readers into the nurture, love and hospitality of relationships, culture and tradition in Heroes of the Secret Underground.

Even without context, the paragraph extracted from the Heroes of the Secret Underground reveals how the abundance of food equates to love and protection. This is the early part of the book:


There’s too much food like always. Cabbage and dumplings. Cabbage in sweet and sour vinegar. Cabbage and mince-meat pancakes. Hungarians love their cabbage. Poppy-seed rolls, sour cherries in sweet juice, melt-in-your-mouth angel wing biscuits, strudel with the flakiest pastry, and Louie’s favourite, kuglof, which looks like a rocky mountain with drippy chocolate, twirled between twists of dry-sweet vanilla cake.

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https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2021/04...