From My Tastebuds to Yours!

Bon Appetit

By:  Marcia King-Gamble

I'm the first to admit I have something of an international palate. This is my fancy way of saying I pretty much eat anything you put down in front of me. The more exotic the food the fare the better. There are few foods I turn up my nose to.

Even as a young girl growing up in "the islands," I loved native delicacies like souse; a combination of pickled pig’s feet combined in a cucumber like sauce. On Saturdays we had black pudding. Some of you might know it as blood pudding. It's sausage stuffed with animal blood and it's yummy. Yes, yes I know it sounds gross but is anything but. One of my favorite breakfasts is a codfish stew with dumplings which you eat with bakes, otherwise known as Johnny Cakes.

Fresh out of college, I got hired as a flight attendant and with that came the opportunity to travel the world. Now the budding foodie in me had yet another opportunity to sample local international dishes. Flight attendant are always on a budget so we ate where locals ate and that usually meant plentiful food and cheap.

In Frankfurt we headed for the Gas Station for the best weinersnitchel there is. In India believe it or not, the Chinese food beat the curry. In London it was the curry, mushy peas and fish and chips that kept us coming back. Some of the best escargot I ever had was in Hong Kong, and the same can be said for rack of lamb. Although Kiwis might argue that.

No one makes a better salad than the French. And if you want to experience the way it should be cooked, then head to the Tokyo fish market. For excellent bratwurst it's Berlin.  And when it comes to cracked conch, the Bahamians have that market cornered.

Given all this talk of food, I am suddenly hungry, and sadly this woman is not a gourmet cook. What I am good at is finding wonderful holes in the wall, and some even take reservations.

Marcia King-Gamble hails from a sunny Caribbean island where the sky and ocean are the same mesmerizing shade of blue. She is a former travel industry executive and a self-proclaimed globetrotter. Marcia is particularly fond of Hong Kong, Venice, and New Zealand, not only for the scenery, but because of the mouthwatering food. A National Bestselling author, Marcia has penned 29 books and 5 novellas.  Her free time is spent at the gym, traveling, and with her animal family.

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Foodie Secrets of Japanese Documentary Filmmaking by Jamie Brazil

So I’d like to couch the last paragraph of this post with this statement: I believe Ruth Ozeki’s “My Year of Meats” is absolutely 100% true! Sure, the author claims this is a novel, but I know better since her fictional documentary experiences mirror my own real-life ones. She’s completely accurate. MYOM is the absolute real deal of what it’s like to work with a Japanese film crew.

The Japanese director I work with is obsessed with food. His #1 obsession is Korean barbeque, and he will travel hours out of his way to try out a new Korean restaurant. Seriously. I have learned that food is essential to the greater experience of making any documentary. It’s not just sustenance. Crew meals are wielded as a means of control, power, pleasure, and punishment.

Which brings me to “Oni the Lonely” (a book I wrote with my husband, who also works on Japanese documentaries and is entirely familiar with the world-wide quest for Korean barbeque). It’s a vegan-centric novel with demons, Buddhism, and a teenage protagonist battling a voracious appetite for chicken nuggets – despite being raised as a strict cause-no-suffering-to-others vegetarian.

How important is food – and MEAT – in novels? In all my pursuits, it seems to be a central theme. It plays as large a role in real life as it does on the page. It is a means of control, power, pleasure and punishment. A way to torture our protagonists and ourselves.

So here’s my secret foodie observation of Japanese documentary film making: When a day of filming sucks and everything is going wrong, we eat like the kings of Korean Barbeque… but when everything is going well and we can’t get enough great footage, it’s hello dollar menu. I once fed a crew of 5 for $17 at a Burger King in Flushing, NY. On another great shooting day, we ate 99-cent slices of cheese pizza made with questionable dairy products. Our intestines all paid a hefty price for that success.

This leaves me wondering if there is a food god in Japan. When things go well, we tend to focus on the job (or life). But when things change for the worse, do we make Korean barbeque offerings to the food gods to adjust our fates? I’ll have to do more research.

JAMIE BRAZIL

 Anyway, feast or famine, it all filters through to the page or screen eventually. Because it’s life, it’s passion, and it’s all good story telling. Right, Ms. Ozeki?

BLURB for ONI THE LONELY:

Mari Kato, 16, wants what everyone else her age wants: a driver’s license. Too bad a family curse, passed on by her Japanese-born Buddhist dad, who claims to be thousands of years old, transforms Mari into a flesh-eating Oni demon when she feels frustrated (like every time she gets behind the wheel). But when her geologist mom moves their vegan-lifestyle-obsessed family to Rock Creek, Mari stumbles upon the gates of Hell and a mining company plundering its depths. Add in an evil cheerleader determined to steal Mari’s first boyfriend and plunge the Earth into eternal darkness. Suddenly, getting the keys to the car isn’t as important as saving the world. Totally dealable… if she can find the courage to reveal her demon self.

Visit Jamie and learn more about her fiction and non-fiction books at http://jamiebrazil.com/ 

The Three Bears of Writing Size

by M.L. Buchman

Well, it's that time where bears are looking for places to hibernate with bowls of porridge and beds of just the right size to stretch out in.

And while bears aren't a big deal on the Oregon beaches, I'm sure they're up in the Coast Range hills, somewhere. We used to have a nice little brown bear that lived behind our backyard in Western Washington. Alas, we never saw him/her with a mate or cub, and we always felt a little sorry for it at this time of year having to curl up all on its lonesome. Friends who lived on various sides of its range always reported it alone.

Well, I've got some big, middle, and small presents to help while away the winter season. And I'll mention just a few things about them as I going.

I was always afraid of writing short stories, I "think" in novel and series lengths, not short fiction. "I don't write short!" I said it so many times that an editor I know said, "Okay! Now you will!" She invited me to be a name author on the cover of her Christmas Ghosts anthology. Well, like a bear backed into a corner, and knowing better than to even think about fighting with this particular editor--Kristine Kathryn Rusch (aka Kristine Grayson) can be fierce--I wrote a "Night Stalkers" Christmas story. I threw it toward her from my narrow corner and ducked, waiting for the laughter. Instead she purchased and published it...who says editors aren't confusing.

The result, available now in the splendid Fiction River anthology "Christmas Ghosts," from my "Night Stalkers" military romantic suspense series about which Publisher's Weekly says:

>Among the standouts are M.L. Buchman’s “The Ghost of Willow’s Past”<

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Once I stopped struggling and whimpering, the story took less than a week to come together. Now that my baby bear seemed to be resting happily, I had to think about my Mama Bear. Mama Bear's are fun. The mid-sized, short romance novel, especially the romance Christmas novel is so much fun to write! It's an opportunity to just go in and play as an author. It's not like a short story, which I still find a bit scary, with all of its fussy little details having to fit together like a tiny jigsaw puzzle (ever try to make a baby quilt? they're like that only worse). Nor is it the papa bear of a full-length novel in a series (that I'll get to in a moment).

In my "Angelo's Hearth" contemporary foodie-romance series, I admit to being startled when Angelo's mom showed up in his restaurant and announced that she was his new pastry chef during book #2 in the series, Where Dreams Reside. It didn't take me long to understand that Mama Maria Amelia Avico Parrano and her Italian pastries weren't going to settle for merely cooking in the background. Within just chapters of her arrival she started messing with her son's love life and befriending his love interest causing no end of consternation from one end of the cook line to the other.

So, she insisted on her own book, but she was a pretty determined woman and she knew what she wanted. She started working on me last spring for her own book and, as Mama Maria always does, she got exactly what she wanted. I'm thrilled to present Maria's Christmas Table.

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Then there's Papa Bear! My Papa Bear this Christmas season will be book #4 of my "Night Stalkers" series. Originally conceived back in 2010, he'll be crawling out of his cave on December 3rd. A beast like that can literally take me years to build properly. While writing other books, I'm reading research. In between edits and publishing of other works, I'll work on character, story, plot. I can't begin to tell you how many walks with my wife turned into brainstorming sessions (thankfully, she's a very patient woman). Then I get it a third written...and I begin to weep, because that's where I always get stuck in any book. (did I mention how patient my wife is?) And finally with the help of many people including my wonderful editor Deb Werksman at Sourcebooks, copyeditors and the like the book is ready to be born.

Take Over at Midnight is already garnering such praise, I find myself a bit surprised and more than a bit humbled.

• Fans of Buchman's Night Stalkers series will delight in this strong fourth installment -Publisher's Weekly
• Buchman proves his literary military romance prowess with likable and multifaceted characters, a good plot and riveting action. -4 stars, Romantic Times
• Once again Buchman takes the military romance to a new standard of excellence. -Booklist

It is currently available for pre-order (due out Dec 3rd):

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Hope you feel as snug as I do!

Thanks so much for reading.

Matt