#FoodTuesday #bookstagram #vegetarian #writingprompt
So I took a notion and made this thing. I used canned crescent rolls, vegan cream cheese, Penzeys Vanilla Sugar. and mango slices.
Hardly sweet at all and oh, so good! If I ever do this again, I’ll cut the fruit up into smaller pieces. Definitely a success.
Today’s BSP (blatant self promotion) is for a book with a history. I started writing it in 1968, when I was in high school. I thought it would be funny to write a gothic romance (orphan girl hired or married into a house filled with secrets) but with a boy instead of a girl. I poked around at it for decades, until I had to either update everything in it or keep it set in 1968. Lazy as I am, I kept it set in 1968, even though that now makes it A HISTORICAL. OMG, shoot me now.
It was originally called SOME DISPUTED BARRICADE, which is perfect, but nobody liked the title. It didn’t let people know what it was about. I said, “What should I call it, then? A DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE?” And everybody said, “OMG YES!”
“It was 1968. Like a lot of seventeen-year-old males that summer, I was thinking about death. Not Bobby Kennedy’s or Martin Luther King’s. I was contemplating my own. I could feel my eighteenth birthday looming and I had to wonder if I’d spend my nineteenth in Vietnam, in Canada, in jail, or in the Great Hereafter. It was nearly the last mentioned, and not at the hands of the VC, either. I came this close to having my goozle slit right here at home in good old nothing-ever-happens Faelin, Indiana.”
Mitch Franklin thinks he’s got it made when the town’s wealthiest eccentric hires him to look after her two lapdogs. Then he meets her family. Five years ago, the last guy she hired played head games the family and servants are still trying to recover from. He also wound up dead. Now, some people think Mitch might be just like him. Some people think Mitch might BE him, back from the grave. Will Mitch survive the anniversary of his predecessor’s death, or will he be another DEAD GUY AT THE SUMMERHOUSE?
Here’s an excerpt:
We turned to the doorway at the sound of approaching footsteps. The woman who came in was tall and probably about Mr. Walton’s age. Her hair was black, but it wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t worked at it, and she had it pulled back into one of those French twists. She was very pale, with frosty blue eyes looking down a length of straight nose, and lips pinched closed. Her makeup clung to her face like candle wax on a tablecloth. A dark blue sweater was draped around her shoulders and a pair of half-glasses hung from around her neck by a black cord. She looked like The Librarian from Hell….
“Mary,” said Aunt Missy, “I asked you to come down. I want you to meet Mitch Franklin, who will be helping me look after the dogs from now on.”
Mr. Walton and I had stood up when the Dragon Lady came in, of course. Now she looked me up and down and said, “Will he, indeed?”
I felt intimidated and had an idea that she wanted me to feel that way, so I said, “Yes, ma’am. I will, indeed.”
“Mitch, this is Mary Seldon-Hardesty, who married my late brother Alain. Mary is Lydia’s mother.”
We had studied sex education my junior year, but I could not imagine this barracuda giving live birth.
“Really?” I said, and wished I hadn’t.
“Adoptive.” Mrs. Seldon-Hardesty bit the word out, as if she resented sharing the information. So there are worse things than spending your life in an orphanage.
Available in print, for Kindle, and audiobook.
P.S. The cover art is by friend, fellow author, and #4 Daughter Sara Marian Ignacio, done when SHE was in high school!
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: High school
MA
