Cooking up stories 👩‍🍳

These two practices in my life have many parallels.

In this newsletter…
🍲 Similarities between the empty dish and the blank page!
🚀 LAST CHANCE! Grab my space opera KINFOLK for free!
👽 Tons of free sci-fi and fantasy!

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I sent this newsletter on 11/11 at 11:11 (my time)! Angel numbers for you, in case you need the luck. 🪽

Now… I wanna talk about some of the parallels between writing and cooking… at least, in my experience. Because whew… I love cooking up stories. 😮‍💨 (I’m brewing up a new collaborative urban fantasy series right now that’s got me dancing with devilish delight…)

Writing and cooking are surprisingly similar practices. As a writer, you start with what you have at hand—your life experiences, the literature you’ve read, the writing lessons you’ve been taught. When you go to cook something, you’ve got the ingredients you’ve got! Of course you can go to the store, just like you can expand your reading and writing practice horizons, but often you must adapt what you were intending to do with what is available to you.

Similarly, the quality of your ingredients matters. When I get the chance to grow my own produce, or help care for the animals my meat comes from, the meals I can make with those ingredients really show the difference in quality. It’s the same with writing: to be a good writer, you have to read good books, taking in skillful prose and quality storytelling.

Does that mean there’s no room for pure entertainment! Of course not—junk food crops up now and then in the meal plan. But a life of nothing but sugar, salt, and fat won’t be a life for too long, and the meals and stories both will get stale.

The 2025 season’s final bounty of unripe tomatoes from my garden.

Recipes are helpful, but your circumstances will ultimately dictate what works. I make bread with weight measurements rather than volume, because I live in a super wet state, so our flour is dense as heck. This means that the volumetric measurements of those recipes are often way off… as they should be. If I followed the recipe to the letter, I would end up with bread that was too dense or too wet.

Following a format or a process in writing can be very useful. Myself, I love the Story Genius method (so much that I repackaged it in my own book AND, SCENE! to help people apply it right away!)… but I let myself stray from it, too. Sometimes my characters speak to me and I know I need to let them wander off the rails, and that’s where some of my best material surfaces.

Make lists constantly. As a caterer, my husband Jake is a serial list-maker. He’s always got menus, shopping lists, and orders jotted down at hand. Lists are such an important mechanism for externalizing things you can’t afford to forget, especially in the kitchen!

I love to make lists for my stories, too. Lists of character notes, ideas I don’t want to lose but am not ready to integrate yet, world details, things to research, and stuff to consume as inspiration. If I’m feeling annoyed by the next step I need to take on a project (such as when I get to the editing phase 😬), I’ll make a list for some aspect of the project instead, and often that clears my mental blocks.

Never stop making lists, in the kitchen or for your stories. There’s a psychological reward to checking things off, and plus, braindumping often helps you get to ideas you might have neglected if you were just skimming the cream off the surface in the moment.

Cook things to your taste. If you like salty foods, make salty foods. If you like dark stories, try writing dark stories. Not everyone likes to write what they read (for example, I enjoy crafting romance storylines, but they’re not my genre of choice to consume)… but it’s certainly a good place to start if you’re feeling uninspired.

I like to revisit an exercise I call “Cool Things to Write About™️” when I find myself in a rut. (Read more about it here.) It’s one of the ways I can reground myself in what motivates me to tell stories and find something so deliciously tempting that I’ll be unable to resist writing about it.

And now, the reason I cooked up this newsletter idea in the first place…

In 2019, my husband Jake and I co-wrote a book about how to teach yourself to cook. It’s not a cookbook, though there are a few recipes, along with overviews of kitchen considerations, ingredients to keep around, and a method to approach expanding your recipe repertoire.

WHY AREN’T YOU COOKING? was always a love letter to our relationship as much as it was a book about learning to cook. We bonded in the kitchen as we worked side by side; we processed danger and panic and mistakes on a small scale, which was kind of like inoculating ourselves to adversity. We quickly learned how to best work together. I wanted to capture that sense of partnership in the process of (and perhaps the text of) writing the book.

And then, we rushed through finishing and publishing WHY AREN’T YOU COOKING? early on in the pandemic, because we figured there might be a lot of folks out there struggling to cook for themselves for the first time (at all, or in a while at least). If they needed such a text, I wanted it to be out there.

This year, just past the book’s fifth anniversary, I decided it was time to give WHY AREN’T YOU COOKING? a new lease on life. I hired my friend Reno Carillo to whip up a new illustrated cover… and he absolutely delivered.

I can’t show you the whole cover yet! But here’s a little teaser…

This refresh is beyond charming! Next newsletter, I’ll share a fun interview with Jake about the trials and tribulations of teaching me to cook, and reveal the full cover for WHY AREN’T YOU COOKING?

What’s your favorite thing to cook up—stories, schemes, food, or something in between? Hit reply to tell me all about it!

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The Free-zer

It’s another installment of THE FREE-ZER—the section where you’ll find something that will cost you zero monies. (That’s no dollars, cents, pounds, pesos, Republic credits, Monopoly money, latinum, or dubloons.)

👉 Today is THE LAST DAY for you to grab a free copy of KINFOLK, the first book of my trilogy “A Mutiny of Pirates” (set in the Realm of Reason). All you have to do is leave an honest review. (Someone left it two stars during a past review blast… ⭐⭐ And that’s totally cool! I learned a lot!)

👉 When an orphan teen girl makes an impulsive decision to rescue a Doberman named Shadow, she’ll uncover a supernatural world of ghostly suspense in Lost Cause by Jill Hedgecock. Grab your free copy of this series prequel!

👉 Royal Healer Calabre longs to connect, but she’s revered for her magic… not her bedside manner. But when a deadly illness strikes the nobility, Calabre must put aside her pride to save the ones she loves. Snag your free copy of In the Hands of Healers, a fantasy mystery by Katie Fitzgerald!

👉 Grab some FREE SCIENCE FICTION / FANTASY STORIES from this StoryOrigin bundle! A few covers drew my eye:

• Fetch by Sara Blake 🐺

• Dragon’s Mirror by Nina Quintal 🐉

• Tailspin: The Awakening by Jennifer Kyrnin 🐲

• Lightning Hunter by Cathryn deVries 🍄

👉 Or see what you might like for free from the MEGA FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION GIVEAWAY bundle on Bookfunnel! I was delighted by these covers:

• Dragon’s Voice by D. Lambert 🐉

• Weird Space by A.M. Wiley 🌽

• Wolf Healer by Huckleberry Rahr 🐺

• Mirror of Ice by Jennifer San Filippo 🏰

👉 If you’re still not satisfied, and your November reading list isn’t long enough, check out the TURN OVER A NEW LEAF bundle on Bookfunnel… more on this one next time!

See you soon,
August