Even a year and a half after leaving Cake Clash, my celebrity status pursued me. Being a judge on one of the most popular television cooking programs in the UK had made me both famous and notorious. Especially when the photo went viral.
Chapter 1, Murder at the Great Jane Austen Cook Off
This is my current project and it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would, The idea, when it came, was fun, compelling, and I wanted to get started right away. The first sentence will not seem surprising if you love Pride and Prejudice. But the line encapsulates the idea.
"It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a disgraced TV baker will try for a comeback."
In the midst of other publishing projects, I wrote a couple of sentences. to fix the idea of a cooking contest that goes badly wrong, a blend of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie, and then went back to my other writing.
I have ideas all the time. Almost too many to pursue. And they come from everywhere. A few weeks ago, one of my Facebook friends posted this.
Photo: David Moeneclaey
My brain went into overdrive. And not in the way you might expect. I actually imagined a time-travel story. Having spent a lot of time lately in Regency England, writing "Colonel Fitzwilliam Meets His Match," my mind easily latched onto this photo and went wild. I plan to write it as a novella sometime in the next year. I even designed a tentative cover. I find that my imagination is boosted by creating a mock cover. If you want to know more about how a replica of an eighteenth-century merchantman rescued a crippled sailboat, click here.
Who knows, maybe I'll write a time travel series. If you're interested, let me know. I love to have reader feedback.
At the Ready arrives August 25. It's also the forty-ninth anniversary of the day I met my husband.
