Mock Apple Pie and Desperation Cake

The day has finally arrived when my new western romance is on the press and due for release September 1. Though it has been a month since my last blog, and the world is full of harrowing events that deserve examination, the event calls for something lighter. Writing any novel takes the author on many journeys of research. Maddie called for more than most. One chapter involved an old fashioned  barbecue to celebrate Abe's sixteenth birthday. The entire town of Peachville pitched in, everybody bringing a food dish. I wanted to have old recipes that had been in families for years and that sent me browsing through my collection left over from the days I wrote a cooking column for a newspaper. I'll share a couple of them with you.
The first is Mock Apple Pie, a creation that is at least as old as 1940. It's an invention of the Ritz Cracker people.Though called "apple pie," it doesn't have any apples and was all the rage in the 40s--something like "Green Bean Casserole," which is a must at Thanksgiving. Start with a baked pie crust. Crumple 36 Ritz crackers into the crust. In a saucepan boil 2 cups sugar, 2 cups water, 2tsp. cream of tartar for 15 min. Add 2 tblsp. lemon juice, grated rind of 1 lemon, some butter and cinnamon. Cool. When cool, pour syrup over crackers.

Desperation Cake. The story is this was created by a cook on payday. The cupboard was bare and no money to shop, so this is a dessert made from almost nothing. Beat one egg and a half cup sugar. Add 1 cup flour mixed with 1 tsp. baking powder and 1/4 tsp. salt. Then add 1/4 cup milk, 3 tblsp. melted butter and 1 tsp. vanilla. Bake in a greased and floured  11" x 7" pan in preheated 350 degree oven 25 minutes. Serve with any syrup or crushed fruit.

Okay, one more. Chocolate Gravy.  This is one Maddie, who is from New York, never heard of, but is a Southern favorite, served with biscuits. She becomes acquainted with this along with sweet tea and Jalapeno Corn Bread. Melt 2 tablsp. shortening in skillet. Add 2 heaping tblsp. flour and heat until golden brown. In a mixing bowl combine 1 cup sugar, 4 tblsp. cocoa, 2 cups milk, 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Pour into skillet mixture and cook until thick. Serve over hot biscuits.
Go to my website to read more about Maddie's Choice.  http://joycezeller.com

I Want To Write A Book, or....Where do ideas come from?

So you want to write a book. What should you write about? How do you find an idea?

I've published two books, appeared in one anthology, have a western romance coming out later this year and have two more finished novels and a novella to sell. Where did the ideas come from?
You've been told, "Write what you know," but what if you don't know anything? You're not an expert on anything and you don't know anyone who is. You just want to write a good, entertaining story.

Ignore this  advice. Being smart is not about what you know; it is how fast you can find out. Research is half the fun of writing fiction. My new book, Maddie's Choice, due in October, is about modern day cattle rustling in the Midwest, Angus bulls, motorcycle gangs, methamphetamine dealers and PTSD--all of which I knew almost nothing. Once i had the idea I had to research everything and met a lot of interesting people in the process. It is part of writing. I discovered people love to answer questions. So where did the idea for this book originate?

I live in a tourist town in Arkansas, and one weekend members of a large motorcycle gang known as Hell's Angels came to town to celebrate an event. Yeah, the gang Marlon Brando made a movie about. This group is from California and the East coast. There is another gang, called the Bandidos, out of Texas who consider this their private territory, and they arrived to throw the others out. A knife fight ensued. Paramedics were called, along with police and the FBI, who happened to be in town, because the meth trade in this country is controlled by motorcycle gangs and the Feds had been watching them. I didn't know anything about drug trafficking, biker gangs, and the FBI, but I knew a story idea when I heard it.

About that time the newspapers were reporting several cases of cattle rustling at the small ranches in the area. That's when the "what if" question that is the start of every novel, hit me. What if there's a drug dealing motorcycle gang in the area--let's call them The Red Hand--and  they're about to get a big delivery from Mexico? To keep the local police too busy to notice they start rustling cattle from these small ranches who can't afford the loss. The book could end with a big gun battle.

So far, so good, but this is a romance. Besides a small cattle ranch right outside Peachville, Arkansas, I need a man and a woman, who must live together on the ranch, in unlikely circumstances, who can't stand each other but have to get along.
Okay. Let's suppose the woman, Maddie a romance novelist with a thriving career, from New York who's never been near a cow, has writer's block and desperately needs a change of scene.

The guy will be moody, and rough-edged. He's Gideon, the ranch boss--big, handsome and hostile to women, especially New York Bimbos. He clearly needs the love of a good woman but he's afraid to get near because he's suffering from PTSD, a result of ten years in combat in Special Forces. Oh yeah, he's guardian of two orphaned nephews yearning for the love of their uncle. Throw in an Angus bull addicted to chocolate, a barn cat named Deuteronomy, and we're on our way.

I had a lot of fun and pulled out all the stops writing this book. I added some evil dirty guys, some eccentric small town residents, a lot of romantic dialogue, passionate sex, and some really good fights between Maddie and Gideon before they finally get together. The final kicker: Twenty thousand dollars worth of Angus cattle were rustled in Southern Missouri last week.
 Maddie's Choice, to be published by Coffeetown Press this fall thanks to my agent Jeanie Loiacono.

Fragrance and Missed Opportunities

The perfume industry is full of missed opportunities because no one is courageous enough to try something new.

The thousand-year-old theory of Aromatherapy maintains that some natural fragrances send signals to the brain telling us how to interpret our environment when we sense their presence. Why isn’t this used?

Some scents tell us to feel happy, optimistic; some inspire us to action and decision-making; some make us feel nurtured, loved, and in a safe haven.

It’s common knowledge that some essential oils, when absorbed into the system, will change a mood or stimulate an emotion. I used this idea in my book, Accidental Alien,” when Daniel mixed a sensually stimulating oil for a female friend. He used Champaca oil, from a flower that is a relative of frangipani. This oil is no secret in perfumery. It just isn’t talked about. I had this oil in my store and had a lot of fun with it, demonstrating it o customers who quickly became believers after a few sniffs. To my knowledge, it has never been used commercially and I can’t imagine why.

A perfume company in New York used St. John’s Wort oil briefly. I had the cologne in my store. It was wildly popular because of the special oil, which lifted the users’ mood almost immediately. Inept marketing put the company out of business.

Sometime in the 1980s Haarmann and Reimer, the international fragrance giant, commissioned a study on this subject, the aim being to divide humans into personality types who would then respond to certain fragrance notes, and be attracted to persons wearing that scent. The study was published in six volumes titled, “The Psychology of Fragrance,” and is probably still available. Not much came of all this research and I’ve often wondered why. My thirty years experience as a custom perfumer taught me that absolutely certain personality types are attracted to certain fragrance blends.

Instead of creating a fragrance that smells good to the client, why not create a scent that will tell others how to feel about you? It would say to the beholder, “This is the kind of person I am and this is the kind of person I would like to be with.” Even more daringly, use them to communicate in a crowded room, reaching out to the kind of person you’d like to have as a friend. Humans are attracted to each other by hormonal scents that their nose can't detect, so why not fragrance?

I experimented with this in my store and discovered that, while not perfect, there was enough truth to warrant further exploration.

What a missed opportunity for some courageous perfume house!

I don’t have room to explore this deeply, but I can give you an overview. You’ll just have to find the books for more. There were five unisex personality types.

1.                    The Dynamic Activist – energetic, natural leaders. The party gets going, and things get done when they’re on the scene. Very fresh, citrus, lightly floral appeal here.

2.                    Sensitive Individualist – they prefer evenings alone rather than with someone they don’t like. Warm, spicy fragrance, amber, maybe frankincense.

3.                    Extrovert – Lively, cheerful, surrounded by color, modern and unconventional. They show courage in the face of adversity. They like unusual scents—fruity like orange, fresh, green notes.

4.                    Emotionally Ambivalent – They need stability. They are organized, cautious and careful. They like floral, sweet and oriental fragrances, mossy, animalistic, and impeccably correct.

5.                    The Rebel – The women I this group have an impossibly wild streak; the men are pure masculinity. Musk appeals to this group, tempered by balmy odors of wood and amber. 

Aliens and Killer Wasps

There’s more than one way to kill a Protagonist.

It had been a couple of months since I’d finished my romance novel, Maddie’s Choice—coming out later this year from Coffeetown Press—and I was casting about for ideas for my next book. A member of my writer’s group was a naturalist and an entomologist who spent most of his time in the woods, and each week he’d read about what he’d learned. He told about a South American wasp whose venom was so lethal one drop could put a human into a coma. There was no antidote. The Department of Defense had been trying to copy this venom for years to use it as a weapon.

Wasp’s do not eat dead food. They paralyze their victims and keep them alive in the nest until they get hungry. Sounded like a murder mystery to me, but killing by hypo is pretty boring.

But wait. What if the killer was not human? Maybe she’s a beautiful woman, part wasp, who killed by injecting victims with poison stored under her fingernails? An alien, maybe, but why is she here? She’s been sent to Earth to destroy another alien—a plant who looks like a man, my alien, Daniel. He was a seedpod, now hatched, and left behind by mistake by an exploring party from the planet Agra, a world inhabited entirely by intelligent plants that have learned to clone human-like beings that are capable of doing labor. He’s roaming around and he must be destroyed before the humans catch on. Aine is physically a plant, but she looks human and she’s been sent to kill him.

I decided that her weapons, all made from natural earth-borne plant or mammal DNA.  A swamp plant, duckweed, makes it possible to inflate her cells and become airborne. She has a lethal electric charge from an Amazon River eel. For the heck of it, let’s give her a set of human female hormones so she falls in love with her target, Daniel.

I’m an aromatherapist so I used that knowledge to make Daniel a natural healer. To protect himself, he can duplicate DNA from any thing living and become that thing. He changes his shape at will into an insect, a bush, a bird or, a wolf.

I’m off and running. I’ve got a superwoman female assassin who loves to kill, a gorgeous man who can’t harm anything unless he becomes murderously angry. Throw in some gangsters who become the dirty guys, indulging in human trafficking. set the book in Las Vegas, where Daniel learns how to play Texas Hold’em. add some confused detectives who are suddenly surrounded by maybe dead bodies, and rumors of werewolves. All this while Daniel is trying to make sense of human behavior, which is the most illogical, confusing mystery he can imagine.  He concludes that Earth would be paradise without the humans.  Daniel is a peaceful person until he gets very angry, which happens. He slips into killer mode determined to destroy the criminal element in his town. To do this he must change into some lethal creature, but what?

I admit the search for the must deadly living thing was a hoot.  Top of the list is a tiny frog, about two inches long, the Yellow Dart Frog from South America. Its skin is so toxic that to touch it means instant death to any human.  There’s a beetle in New Guinea whose bite brings death instantly. Clearly, those two won’t work. Being attacked by a tiny frog or a beetle is not scary enough.  I needed something terrifying enough for anyone. I settled on the Indian Taipan, the world’s most deadly snake.

Offing that gang of murderers was most satisfying.

Accidental Alien is an e-book available on Amazon.

Critical Thinking on Same Sex Marriage

I've become a fan of critical thinking. By that I mean: Consider what the experts say, but reserve judgment. Never mind all those authoritative books that explain how it is, and assemble your own facts, connect the dots, and draw your own conclusions. This is especially important when your decision affects another life. Last week there was a prime example of a city council having the courage to draw their own conclusions.

   

           The City of Bisbee, Arizona  decided that there are two kinds of marriage: the secular, or civil union that bestows legal rights on a couple wanting those rights defined as legal, and the religious kind, sanctified in a church of your choice.   

            Well, it’s about time. The mixing of religious dogma and civil law in the matter of marriage should have never happened. It is a blatant violation of our Founding Father’s intent to keep church and state separate. 

            Civil union is a legal document of entitlement giving the rights and privileges of a couple to manage their finances, their health and welfare and the welfare of their children within the limits of the law, without discrimination. This is a freedom we've forgotten we advocated in the Declaration of Independence. 

             Religious marriage commitments, another thing entirely, are within the authority of the church, and a private matter between couples and their religion.

            My town became the first in Arkansas to grant some rights legally by legislation passed in  2007. We call it the Domestic Partner Registry.  The sitting council realized State law did not recognize common law marriage or domestic partnerships. That meant that these disenfranchised couples had no survivors’ rights over guardianship of their children, nor were those partners or their children able to be included in company hospital plans. Partners were not even allowed in hospital ICUs. 

             I was on the council at that time and we all, unanimously, felt that this was discrimination against children and partners. We could at least remedy some of that by passing an ordinance, recognized by many states and corporations as legal, if presented signed from anywhere, that would grant the right to be on a partner's company hospitalization plan. So we passed the DPR. 

             Kudos to Bisbee for their courage, because the religious right is going to come down on you in a big way, uttering the rallying cry of “Same Sex Marriage.” During passage of that bill, I received at least a thousand e-mails from all over the world, instigated by something called “The American Families Assn.” or whatever, telling me hell awaited if I voted for this thing.  I didn’t care because they didn’t live here. I was even featured in their hate film, They're Coming To Your Town.

            So congrats to Bisbee. The following is a partial quote from the news release in The Los Angeles Times.

             “It is in the best interest of the city of Bisbee to refuse to continue to remain silent on this issue, in the face of discriminatory practices that are inconsistent with the principles upon which our country was founded,” the ordinance states.

            Zavala Badal, Mayor of Bisbee, said,  “A civil union certificate would allow a slew of city benefits for an unwed couple, such as disability or compensation for the partners of city workers and even family discounts at the local pool. Currently, partners don’t qualify. As it stands now, there are several important life decisions that are not available to unwed partners, For instance, partners cannot give authorization as to where their loved one should be buried in the city’s cemetery. Only family members can make that decision. 

            The Supreme Court of the United States is now considering the matter. It will be interesting what they conclude.