Amanda Usen's Blog, page 17

SCRUMPTIOUS Is Available Now!

I was buying pajamas for my nieces when I received a text from a friend in Canada, saying that she was standing in Barnes and Noble looking at my book. Scrumptious had been delivered early and was on the new romance display in the excellent company of Allison Brennan! I begged for a photo. My friend's cell phone camera was broken, so she asked a total stranger to snap this for me:

A dream come true. My book is on display with the romance writers who inspired me to write in the first place. So far the reviews of SCRUMPTIOUS have been fantastic, another dream come true…

"In the small but expanding niche of foodie romance, Usen's debut rules the kitchen with lip-smacking prose and rowdy protagonists who put Iron Chef to shame…the pacing, emotion, and erotic exuberance all sparkle."

- Publishers Weekly

"In her superbly crafted debut, Usen blends together two realistically complicated protagonists, a well-realized culinary setting (complete with mouthwatering descriptions of food), and plenty of incendiary love scenes. The resulting literary dish is a smart, sexy, simply irresistible contemporary romance."

- Booklist

"The title perfectly summarizes the feel of this book. Both the main characters and the culinary dishes are described in such a way that readers can practically taste, see and feel every word. Usen has a way with words and it translates to a solid storyline with great sex scenes."

- RT Book Reviews, 4 Stars

There is some serious hootin' and hollerin' going on at the Usen house. I'm trying to simply enjoy the moment (without obsessing over non-glowing reviews, without watching the numbers go up and down) because to sell a book is a grand thing. And to see it on the shelf is astonishing! *Happy dance*

SCRUMPTIOUS!

I love cupcakes and man candy!

My culinary romance SCRUMPTIOUS will hit the shelves in January, and things have been heating up! I am thrilled to have my recipe for Thai Pot Stickers featured in December's issue of Romantic Times Book Reviews Magazine and delighted that the accompanying Sweet and Sour Peanut Sauce recipe was on the RT Blog, too. That is sweet!

I have loved Thai dumplings ever since Corey Griffith, my first chef boss at the now closed Cakewalk restaurant in Nashville, TN, introduced them to me. It boggles the mind that I didn't have Asian food until I went to college, but it's true. I've made up for lost time since then, and I make dumplings a lot. I can never decide on just one way to cook them, either. Steamed, fried or potstickered – my family loves them all. I stand at the stove cooking, and they sit at the table eating. No one keeps count of how many I make or how many they eat, dipped in ginger-soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, hot mustard and, of course, sweet and sour peanut sauce.

In SCRUMPTIOUS, Marlene and Joe make dumplings twice – once for each other and once for a food critic paying a surprise visit to the restaurant. Ever since my creative writing classes in college, I've been told "write what you know." In SCRUMPTIOUS, I write what I cook. All of Marlene's desserts were featured on the menu when I was Susan Spicer's pastry chef at Bayona in New Orleans circa 1998. The cheesecake in Chapter Two? Best thing I make. I won a trip to Toronto with that recipe!

The dishes Joe and Marlene cook, I've cooked or watched my husband cook, while offering helpful advice *giggle*. I hope you'll be inspired to try a few of my recipes. If I post them, they are tried-and-true keepers. However, if you have any trouble with them, I'm happy to give you cooking advice, too. As my culinary students know, I believe the measure of a good chef is the ability to learn from mistakes, fix them, and if you are in the biz…sell them!

Reclaiming The Kitchen

Reclaiming is not the perfect word for what I am doing. Reclaiming implies someone took the kitchen from me. That someone would be my husband, and it is simply not the case. I gave it up. Willingly. Gratefully. Necessarily.

You see, ten years ago, I had my first child. She was perfect and beautiful and I nearly died. I lost a lot of blood. A lot. Of blood. Babies two and three didn't go much better. I won't go into details because this is not a blog about postpartum hemorrhage and complete placenta previa! Feel free to send an e-mail if you want to chat about those unappetizing topics.

Because it took all of my energy to nurse my babies and come back to life, I stopped cooking dinner. I pretty much stopped cooking dinner for ten years. Oh, I  made guest appearances – dumplings, spring rolls, vegetarian dishes and desserts. I made some intense birthday cakes, but my husband cooked our dinners. And did the grocery shopping. And enjoyed it. In the decade I spent at home with the kiddies during the day and working part-time at night decorating cakes, he worked as a chef. The man can cook. Fast. Clean. And to the tastes of both adults and children. And he looks like this when he's doing it. Why on earth would I want to disturb the balance of what seems like a very cushy arrangement?

*Shrug* I like to cook. However, I am not as well-behaved as my husband. He's a crowd pleaser. The kids always eat what he makes. I like to cook spicy and piquant foods. Give me sriracha, vinegar and preserved lemons (maybe even all together). If I cook, sometimes I have to make two meals – one for us and one for the kids. (Yes, we do that. We are short order cooks. Judge us.) If I start doing the grocery shopping, it will cut into my writing time. If I start cooking dinners again, it will also cut into my writing time. My husband is a kick-ass chef. (Yes, fine, I admit it. Joe in SCRUMPTIOUS was modeled on my husband. Hot chef in the house!) Why on earth do I want to rock the boat?

*Shrug* I like to cook. I want glass noodles and peanut butter on my chicken occasionally, okay? And I want to make it myself. Our last birth disaster is five now, and he just started kindergarten. There is room for two in this kitchen, and I have more writing time while all the kids are at school. Surrendering the kitchen made me feel incapable, even though I juggled five part-time jobs and my uber-husband was happy to run our kitchen. Cooking is part of who I am and it is giving me great satisfaction to get back to the stove. Expect the recipes section of my blog to grow. Come into the kitchen with me. Own it. Work it. Cook it. Claim it!

RWA 2011

After the IASPR conference I hopped on the subway and headed uptown to the Times Square Marriott for the Romance Writers of America conference. My mind was only halfway blown, so I figured why not make a proper job of it with a slew of workshops and appointments with my editor, agent and publicist? Yes, publicist! I'm really excited to work with someone who actually knows how to do this whole marketing thing.

The kick-off event was a literacy signing, five hundred authors signing books donated by their publishers with all proceeds going to literacy charities. My first squee stop was at Louisa Edwards table so I could thank her properly for the exquisite blurb she wrote for Scrumptious. I gave her a cupcake cookie and one of the Scrumptious bookmarks Sourcebooks made for me to give away at the conference. She was lovely and gracious and she said I was her first cover quote. The honor is all mine, believe me!

I asked Megan Mulry to take a pic of me getting into the limo and text it to my kids.

Since Sourcebooks was one of the conference sponsors, they had lunch tables reserved at the front of the room. This was great for two reasons. I had a front row seat for the speeches given by Madeline Hunter and Sherrilyn Kenyon, and I was able to talk with seasoned Sourcebooks author Carolyn Brown as well as compare notes with fellow debut authors Megan Mulry and Tes Hilaire. By the time Sourcebooks took us out to dinner at O'Mai on Thursday night, I had made friends. It's good to be among friends when making a pig out of yourself on Vietnamese food while using chopsticks! I wore a groove in my finger that night because I didn't stop eating for three hours. The food was unbelievable. Fresh spring rolls with rice wine dipping sauce, shrimp spring rolls with peanut sauce, shrimp ravioli, papaya salad, fried spring rolls… and then they brought the entrees. Amazing chicken, a shrimp something with snow peas, red snapper, beef with sweet potatoes. Um, not so sure I remember the entrees correctly because they started pouring champagne the minute we sat down and every time I turned my head, they topped up my glass. Any meal that begins with a blood orange martini, ends with a cupcake from the Magnolia Bakery and has foodie heaven and great conversation in the middle gets a spot on my top ten list forever. Sourcebooks certainly knows how to treat their authors!

I had been looking forward to RWA11 for so long I thought I would be sad when it was over, but I'm not. I'm excited to finish Luscious and send it to my editor. I'm even more excited to begin new projects and focus on the ever-most-important business of getting the next book out there. #1k1hr, anyone?

Why Am I At An Academic Conference…

when one of my greatest fears has always been that the world (or the person to whom I am speaking) will suddenly realize I do NOT know what the hell I'm talking about? I'm spending three days at the Third Annual International Conference on Popular Romance Studies, but I am not an academic. I'm not even a wanna-be academic. I do like the way their minds work though.

Back in college I teamed up with a fellow English major and wrote a paper. It had something to do with feminist literary criticism and creative power. She was the literary critic. Since I majored in poetry-writing, I was the creative power. I think she hoped to somehow deconstruct how I did what I did when I wrote a poem. I'm sure she was disappointed because the answer then and now is I have no idea.

So there I was, listening to An Goris speak eloquently about "Rape as a Trope in the Work of Nora Roberts," sitting in a room full of wicked smart people who are using words like patriarchy, telos and trope and I'm thinking Ah, patriarchy, I'm supposed to know what that means. All of the sudden, a question from the back of the room. I turn around. Eloisa James, NYT best-selling historical romance author, would like to know how, specifically, the author of the paper is using the word patriarchy. I love smart people. And I would die if I were giving a paper and Eloisa James asked me a question like that. Which I what I wrote in the note I was going to pass to the person sitting beside me, but alas, she was engrossed and not the note-passing type. The question was answered with grace and a simple Yes, that is one of the limitations of my paper and I'm still thinking about that.

That was one of my favorite moments yesterday. There there were some great papers and discussions – a round table chat with Raelene Gorlinsky, Cecilia Tan and Megan Hart, Catherine Roach discussing "I Love You," He Said: The Money Shot in Romance Fiction as Feminist Porn, Jonathan A. Allan discoursing on Too Much and Too Little: On Flirting and Kissing – but that simple moment of I don't know; I'm still working on that put it all in perspective for me. I joined the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance because I wanted to learn from people who think about romance a little differently than I do, people with a broader perspective who might, just might, be able to help me write better fiction by explaining how other authors write. I'm out of my comfort zone, but it's interesting to realize I might not be the only one.

We are here in NYC to learn and to share what we know. Ten minutes into the first discussion, I was already all fired up to go home and write. Why? Who knows? Maybe someone will tell me today because I can't wait to get back to the discussion.

Celebratory Pig Roast

Okay, so I know it was a coincidence that I finished the second revision of Luscious the night before our neighborhood pig roast, but the timing was exquisite! The monkey on my back, the albatross around my neck, my nine-month labor was over! (Okay, writers, I know it's not really over. I know.)

I haven't done tooooo much public complaining on the off-chance my editor might come across my bellyaching on the internet and decide I'm not as brilliant as I have been trying to make her believe. However, I was terrified. It took me five years to write Scrumptious, partly because I stopped in the middle to have two kids and write four novellas… and Sourcebooks asked if I could write the sequel to Scrumptious in nine months.

I said yes.

Of course I said yes. With a two-book deal on the table, I would have said yes to anything that sounded remotely possible. Look to the right and you can read all about the sticky middle months, but now I'm done. Luscious is done! And this is what I did to celebrate:

I made five different BBQ sauces for the pig! From top left: Eastern NC, Memphis Wet, Carolina Gold, Bourbon and KY Dip.

It was another happy coincidence that the Saveur Magazine barbeque issue arrived last week. Check it out if you want the recipes for the sauces I made and many others. I've loved Saveur (nope, don't work for them) for years. The photography is amazing, the recipes generally work out (there was one brown

My husband in pig heaven.

sugar meatloaf catastrophe a few years ago, but I should have known better), and the articles make me feel like I'm in an exotic location enjoying great food with friends. My husband and I have roasted many pigs, and I think I went looking for a back issue of Saveur for the first one. Anyway, I digress.

It was the best pig yet and the sauces were a hit. I'm a mixer, so I think my favorite combination was the Eastern NC and the Memphis Wet. Piquant enough to cut the fat, with a good bit of kick on the back end. Crowd favorite was the Bourbon, which is why there is slightly less in the cup in the picture – there wasn't much left! One neighbor almost started crying because he used to live in Eastern NC and WNY has never pretty much never heard of a BBQ sauce that is almost pure vinegar. He'll be coming by for the recipe, for sure. Carolina Gold was good, but it made me want to go looking for a chicken finger. The KY Dip is Worcestershire-based and very spicy. I like that in a sauce, but I wish I'd made the Dr. Pepper sauce instead. I guess there's always next year.

Holy cow, I almost forgot that there's a pig roast in Scrumptious! Joe and Marly drive to a little town in Kentucky to roast a pig for Joe's entire family. Marly makes blackberry cobbler, falls in love and things get hot in the hayloft… Scrumptious, coming January 2012! I know of what I write – when it comes to pigs.

Plan B

First, although I stand behind my aforementioned faith and optimism, March, April and half of May rattled the heck out of me. I was teaching community college pastry arts classes full-time, SAT prep classes on the weekends and trying to achieve grand daily word count goals so I could finish my book on time. I almost lost my faith, my optimism and my marbles too.

I always think if I can just make the perfect list, the perfect schedule, if I'm a good girl and I do everything perfectly -  then I can get everything done. You know what? When in doubt, examine your premise. Some plans aren't reasonable.

I dearly love my projects. All of them. I know for a fact I seek a certain level of crazy-busy because when I finish one thing, I start something else, even though I'm still in the middle of four or five other things. I planned to do a little bit of work on each project every day until everything was done. It was a shock to discover that creating a five-week, four-team, thirteen-person production schedule for my first class required my full attention. I began to panic. If I couldn't multi-task, I couldn't succeed. What about my second class, a higher level pastry class than I had ever taught? What about the edits on Scrumptious that I was expecting any day? What about finishing my book? My wheels began to spin. My gears ground to a halt and then… the mother of all head colds turned my brain to fudge.

Absolute, total meltdown.

My daughter made me cookies.

My husband got down on the floor with me, where I lay gibbering and snotting, and said these magic words: just do one thing at a time.

Not my usual MO, but I didn't have a choice. My plan wasn't working.

I focused on the project with the closest deadline, and ignored everything else. Bit by bit, class by class, I made progress. As time passed and I got more done, the panic dissipated. The anxiety that had paralyzed me eased up considerably. I wish I could say it went away, but I haven't finished the book yet. And when I do finish the (damn) book, there will be another one, soooooo… I'll have to remember what I've learned.

Anybody other than me shaking their head and thinking Yeah, like that's gonna happen? Because I think that's what I learned. Apparently, I run full-tilt until I hit a wall, fall down and watch the birdies sing. This spring, my husband suggested I get up and jog parallel to the wall instead. Changing my approach was the difference between success and what felt like certain failure, but it doesn't come easily to me. I'll probably hit the wall again. There will likely be gibbering and snot. I'll find myself on the floor, eye to eye with my husband, who will again say: just do one thing at a time.

The really beautiful thing I learned this spring? I can do it! One thing at a time works, too. Hello, Plan B!

Believe

To the plotters, the pantsers and the puzzlers – I say yes. Trust your process.

Easy, right? We are writers, of course we will write! We are published, our stories will be good. Hmm. It doesn't always feel so simple in the middle of the creative process, does it?

Believe. In yourself. I give you permission.

It's there. You've got it all going on. Your charts, graphs, collages, legal pads, spread sheets, blank computer screen – you don't have to explain them or justify them to anyone. You just have to have faith that whatever you are doing will get the job done because you are talented and experienced.

It's a little like being a chef. Unless I'm baking, I don't use too many recipes anymore. When I do use a recipe, it's a jumping off point. Or perhaps I'll look at three recipes for the same dish and create a hybrid. I can do that because I've done a lot of cooking over the last twenty years, and I can sense how the food is going to turn out. I couldn't have done it in culinary school, maybe not even five years after graduation… but I can do it now.

I've decided it's the same with writing. This isn't my first manuscript. It's my sixth. I'm winging it with confidence, counting on all the things I've learned to make this my best story yet. I'm not allowing the Oh God, you suck demons to plague me when I don't meet my word count. I'm not worried that I have a half-empty four-act sketch tacked up on the wall. I'm not freaking out because I wrote the beginning, then the end, and now I'm writing the middle. I'm allowing it to emerge in sprints and halts, music, notecards and photographs. The story is there. I can sense. I will write it.

And you'll write yours too. If you are good at what you do, if you care, if you put in the time and effort to learn more about your craft, then you should trust your abilities. Let your confidence carry you through the convolutions of the creative process. Let everything else fall away. You know what you are doing.

You know you do.

Believe.

Scary World of Publishing

Pessimistic writer-life books and blogs are stalking me lately. A friend gave me The Accidental Bestseller by Wendy Wax, a book about four friends at different stages in their romance writing careers. Go ahead, romance writers, read it. I dare you. Nothing against the book. It is well-written, engrossing and strikes many familiar chords. But it isn't cheerful, at least not yet. Another pal posted this link on a writers loop You Don't Want To Be A Writer. I pulled into a Barnes and Noble when my car began to overheat because I thought B&N would be a nifty place to wait for a tow truck. I started reading Teresa Medeiros' Goodnight, Tweetheart. It's about a writer whose career feels like it is… spiraling downward. I was really getting into it, too.

This is not good. I'm about to hop on the publishing carousel. I'm excited! I'm not expecting a brass ring, but I am hopeful. I have had a book in my hand, backpack or purse ever since I learned to read. I have always admired the people who created imaginary worlds for me to visit. I have "keeper" books with characters that are truly real to me. I'm thrilled that my daughter just read The Black Stallion and a thirty-three year old copy of Julie Edwards' Mandy. I'm grateful to the authors who enriched my childhood, made my teen years bearable and my adulthood fun and interesting. I'm going to be one of those people to someone. I hope. Maybe. And my children need those people too.

So stop it already, okay? Have a little publishing shake-down, a little backlash, a little faith, a freak-out, a pity-party – whatever. Get used to e-readers. Buy books. And writers – write! The world needs books.