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Author Jennifer Quail

Fantasy, Steampunk, Science Fiction, and More

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Jeopardy

Food and Fiction

Hopefully the folks who frequent this passes-for-a-blog and my author Facebook page have read some of my work. (If not, you can visit my Amazon Author page and see what strikes your fancy. Strange Roads is hovering at that 19 reviews threshold…) And especially if you’ve checked out A Kiss and a Promise you might have noticed I like writing about food. If you saw me on Jeopardy! you can probably guess I like food with my wine, too. One of my collection of degrees is culinary school, after all, and while I don’t get fancy all the time, I definitely like writing about food and cooking.

Given how many of my characters are Slavic, that’s probably not surprising. I’ve been working on expanding my story “Storm-Spun” (Tales of the Siblings Not-So-Grim) and keep wanting to veer off into things like the Slavic love affair with berry picking. 105699900_1135846986773986_1015250223524311536_n

When you find something edible in the woods and suddenly “I’m Katniss Everdeen, y’all!”

It IS berry season. I already have plans to torture characters with gooseberry picking (I have the scars to prove it), strawberry stands are open, and (see above) wild raspberries are ripening. I have “volunteer” sunflowers growing in my garden beds, and my gooseberry bushes produced almost nine pounds this year. The apricot, cherry, and pear trees are still too young, sadly. All of it had me thinking about what characters like Masha would be picking and preserving in a fantasy-Ukraine village, or what kind of fruit bushes and trees Eva would want from her real-world Crimean home to transplant to Denmark.

Of course, with Masha, I’ve run into a problem: when I’m writing a fantasy universe based on a Eurasia before the time of travel to the Americas . . . what would they really eat? Tonight for dinner I made a Moldavian fish casserole that involves a sauce of tomatoes (no), peppers (no), and is served over polenta (nope.) Sunflower seeds, the go-to snack of eastern Europe? Nope. North American native (though made into a commercial crop in Russia and re-imported.) All those fantasy Europes full of potatoes and pumpkins? They’re trading with the Americas somehow. No peanuts (South America.)

I ran into the opposite side of this working at the museum. I had to double-check native sources of sugar, to find that they didn’t in fact have honey. Honeybees are native to Eurasia and arrived, it’s thought, some time in the 1600s. They were alien enough some tribes referred to them as ‘white man’s flies.’ While there are maples native to Eurasia, sugar maple is a New World tree.

Maybe if I really want to make my characters do drudge work, they can try boiling birch sap. (I’ve done that research. Okay I ordered birch-sap drink from RussianFoodUSA. It’s not going on pancakes any time soon.)

This is actually starting to feel a little silly.

First, if you don’t follow me on Twitter (please do) you may have missed the link to my interview on ABC 57 yesterday morning (or you were asleep, like sane people are at 6:45 in the morning.) Definitely follow me on Twitter for Jeopardy! livetweeting, dog photos, goat photos, and griping about how much writing I’m not doing.

Seriously, when Corina said “Your life is going to change” when we were setting up between episodes I didn’t know she meant “You may want a media manager.” I’ve done interviews for the local newspapers including a follow-up, and I now have  two different local-interest magazine requests pending, my undergraduate university’s alumni magazine, have done interviews on the local CBS and ABC affiliates, and have been asked do something for WNDU so I’ll have hit the big three network trifecta. Good thing it’s the slow season at work.

It’s mentally kind of draining, actually.

I’m sort of stuck on the easier (relatively) turnaround of short stories, but that keeps pushing book-length projects back. And of course, with a book, there’s always the question of . . . what do I do with it? Unpopular as this opinion is I really hate “indie” stuff. It’s too much work, it’s too much up-front expense, and if there’s one aspect I loathe it’s marketing. I realize even with real publishers that’s still mostly on the writer these days, but at least I’m not stuck doing every aspect. And of course, there’s the chances of getting lost in the shuffle.

Of course if I’m too busy doing interviews and chasing dogs trying to tire them out, I’ll never get anything done anyway!

Oh, if you aren’t following Smoking Pen Press’s newsletter check them out for at least one interview that isn’t ENTIRELY about Jeopardy! in their next edition.

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