Why are our characters always eating?

Come to our house, you won’t get a feast like this. Sadly.

Is it just me, or are purple book covers a thing right now?

I think it’s only because I haven’t noticed them before, but
ever since Stars Beyond came out, all I see are books with predominantly
purple covers. I can remember when talking cover colours for Linesman,
we said we’d like it to have some blue in it, for every science fiction novel
at the time seemed to have red or orange covers.

Looking at the covers coming up, I’m predicting brown will
be the new purple.

It’s all about food

We’re currently editing a scene in our new novel where the
protagonist’s uncle serves hard-to-eat food to embarrass one of his guests.

Food is a constant in our novels (along with drinking). From
Ean’s dinners with rulers and the military, to Rossi’s less-social dinner with
Janni Naidan, all the way down to Sale’s sandwiches in the linesman’s survival
pack. From Jacque’s spicy flatbread to garfungi soup. So much so that you’d
sometimes think that food—and drink—is all we think about.

You might also think that based on our novels we lovingly
prepare gastronomic masterpieces every night for dinner. Not so. Once, before
some close friends retired and moved to the country, they used to come around
for dinner every month and we’d scour the magazines to find something new and
experimental (but that looked good) to cook. But that was then, and we haven’t
brought out the good dinner service since they moved away.

Those dinners were legendary, by the way. We experimented,
and while most meals were successful, some went down in history as monumental
flops. We all still joke about the infamous Mars Bar dessert, which was so hard
we couldn’t even cut it with a knife. I don’t recall if any of us ate it. I
think we would have broken our teeth.

But experiments notwithstanding, most of our dinners are of
the “what’s for dinner” variety five minutes before we have to prepare it. It often
turns out to be salad and a meat, or meat and potatoes and peas (important
standby in anyone’s pantry). Or pasta. Tuna and noodles (tuna in oil and
whatever pasta is in the cupboard) is a favourite. Tuna is another cupboard
staple.

As for going out to dine, how to get home afterwards is always
more important than how good the food is. The restaurant needs to be close.

So although we write a lot about food, but we don’t always
think about it.