Bookish goings-on in Texas for the week of January 17-24, 2021, compiled by aTexasBookLover exclusively for Lone Star Literary Life.
Interview with Kimberly
Fish
Comfort Foods reads like a book written in real time, how long ago did you write this story?
I’ve known for a long while I’d have at least four books in the Comfort, Texas set of stories: Comfort Plans, Comfort Songs, Comfort Foods, and in 2021, fingers-crossed, Comfort Zone. Though the other three novels had been plotted and rough-drafted years ago, Comfort Foods is my COVID-19 novel. While in lockdown in Spring of 2020, I wrote this book with liberty that comes from having no other distractions. Thankfully, a wonderful editor was also benefitting from lockdown and we were able to produce this story in record time.
Was Lacy Cavanaugh based on a particular social media celebrity?
Lacy Cavanaugh came to life many years ago as younger sister to Kali Cavanaugh while I was writing the serial Emeralds Mark the Spot. Several elements of her character were already in place and I leaped off what I’d previously written and gave Lacy the pizazz and shine of the self-styled lifestyle bloggers popular on Instagram and Facebook. She came to the story mostly fully formed because of her role in the EMTS novella, but it was a pleasure to work on the internal conflicts particularly the perception that beautiful women date easily and have instinctive skills to navigate difficulties. Logically we know that not’s true, but in today’s oversaturated, visually stimulated world, that’s a truth easily forgotten.
Who inspired your character of Rudy Delgardo?
Though I’ve had the pleasure of knowing several chefs, I’d say the movie “Chef,” starring Jon Favreau, really informed my decision to explore the world behind the kitchen door. I then spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of famous chefs talking about their life stories and the dynamics of a professional kitchen and trying to get a handle on what drives that need for precision and creativity. Rudy Delgardo, despite his excellence in the kitchen, is a mess in his private life—and I think that when someone enjoys marshalling others at work, they forget how to interact on the home front. That made for a rich playground of potential conflicts in this story, and I wish I could have written more about Rudy’s very complicated backstory. Maybe another time.
You seem to be creating an active friend group with your Comfort stories, will all the characters always appear in every novel?
I’m a victim of their charm and can’t let these characters go. Plus, I know how vital a friend group is for navigating life. For those without tight families, it’s the peer group that gives the sounding board for all the deep questions and decisions. Colette and Beau Jefferson, Kali and Jake Hamilton, AJ and Luke English, Lacy Cavanaugh and Rudy Delgardo, step all over these pages because friends frequently ignore boundaries. This group is growing quite large and may be too big to give free reign in the upcoming story, but in Comfort Foods it was important because Lacy is Kali’s sister, and they don’t have a traditional family dynamic so their friends play the role of parents and extended relatives.
The cast of supporting characters in the Comfort stories transfer from story to story also, right?
Yes, several minor characters pop in here and there, because in small towns you run into many of same people doing errands, attending church, and going to social events. I keep a notebook so I can remember who these folks are, and in each novel, I try to expand the town’s cast. Comfort itself is not a big place, and it would make sense to see familiar faces between the books. There are a few of these characters I particularly enjoy and like to give them a speaking role as often as possible.
Is there a dog in this story too? You’ve written a dog into every other Comfort book.
My characters, like many readers, can’t resist a puppy. But, with the exception of Beans in Comfort Songs, none of the dogs in my books are truly cute. Cornbread was an old, gassy blood hound, and the mutt in Comfort Foods is a complete—and smelly—scoundrel. But these guys also manage to steal the show, and make people love them, so it’s hard to ignore a creature with such personality. I guess, I could try my hand creating a loveable cat. Do you think readers would like a cat in the next story?
How many more stories will you create and set in Comfort, Texas?
I’m at work on Comfort Zone, and for now, that feels like the last of this particular Comfort set. But, knowing me as I do, I wouldn’t say that’s the last story I will set in Comfort. Something about the heat, rocky soil, and call of hawks flying overhead is just too entrenched in my imagination to walk away and never revisit that area for another book.
| 1/12/21 | Guest Post | Hall Ways Blog |
| 1/12/21 | Review | Sydney Young, Stories |
| 1/13/21 | Excerpt | Forgotten Winds |
| 1/14/21 | Review | Jennie Reads |
| 1/14/21 | Author Interview | Texas Book Lover |
| 1/15/21 | Review | The Clueless Gent |
| 1/16/21 | Review | Jennifer Silverwood |
| 1/17/21 | Guest Post | All the Ups and Downs |
| 1/18/21 | Review | Momma on the Rocks |
| 1/18/21 | Character Interview | StoreyBook Reviews |
| 1/19/21 | Review | Book Bustle |
| 1/19/21 | Guest Post | That's What She's Reading |
| 1/20/21 | Review | Carpe Diem Chronicles |
| 1/21/21 | Review | It's Not All Gravy |
| 1/21/21 | Review | Bibliotica |
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Excerpt from The
Black-Marketer’s Daughter
By Suman Mallick
Her first winter in Texas is mild and dry. Apart from a short trip to Washington, D.C. to visit Iskander’s parents during the holidays, it passes slowly and methodically, in the kitchen, at the library, in front of the piano.
She
makes a new year’s resolution to finally master Balakirev’s Islamey, but
as the weeks progress, she finds herself spending more time doubting the
foolhardiness of undertaking that enterprise than on her piano bench. She can
get through the first section effortlessly, but then has to slow down the tempo
to negotiate all the octaves and double notes. It irks her to contemplate that
unlike the soldiers whose triumphs in hard-fought battles inspired the
composition of such a challenging masterpiece, she might lack the endurance to
truly capture its essence by pounding on strings with a hammer. At other times,
she feels somewhat grateful that at least she can recognize the limits of her
own abilities. She decides she is glad that she isn’t like Frances Ha, a
character portrayal she and Marianne both immensely enjoyed on screen, but one
whose blindness to her own limitations, whose persistence and struggles, are
truly foreign to her sensibilities.
One
afternoon the following spring, the sky turns menacing into abstract shades of
dark gray. As Zuleikha drives home from the library, a woman’s voice on her car
radio (which by now has discarded all pretense of cooperating and stays
permanently on) makes an urgent announcement about a tornado watch. Zuleikha
hurries inside their house just as the winds begin to act drunk and disorderly,
and then all of nature gets violently ill. She calls Iskander at work, leaves a
voice message, tries him again before hanging up. After a while he returns her
call, chuckling, saying she had better get used to those “tornado things,”
because they’re just a fact of life in north Texas. And by the way, the shelter
is the hallway closet in the middle of the house and away from all the windows,
just in case the siren sounds. She can just see the sly smile on his face as he
speaks on the phone, the pressed lips.
When
the siren does sound, she hides in the closet, feeling alternately ridiculous
and terrified while hail rattles the roof. It’s the first time she has been
inside an enclosed space this small. A black leather jacket hangs in a clear
garment bag. She looks closer and sees the thick wide scrapes on the leather.
On the shelf are a toolbox and an old compact-disc player. A closer inspection
in the space between them reveals a tattered, torn glove. Zuleikha reaches for
the glove and picks it up just as lightning strikes nearby and the power goes
out. She screams.
After
the eye of the storm has passed and electricity has been restored, she sits at
the piano, still unsettled, playing short pieces from memory, jumping from one
fragment to another, alternately upset with her husband for the chuckle and
with his wife for panicking so easily; scolding, willing herself to continue
playing.
She
lingers on the first of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes,
a staple at school and a favorite ever since she borrowed a bootleg copy of The Painted Veil from Papajaan’s store
and watched it with her friends from the academy. The piece is dark and simple,
nothing like Islamey, or even Chopin’s Nocturnes or Liszt’s Concertos that still frustrate her to
no end, and when she is finished, a voice startles her.
“Amazing,”
Iskander says. Instead of leaving his car parked outside and coming in through
the front door as usual, he has entered through the garage and has been
standing in the hallway, listening, for how long she doesn’t know. It
embarrasses her.
But
isn’t this the type of affirmation from a man she’s dreamed about all these
years?
Now
her husband comes up and stands behind, his clothes, smelling of the damp air
and the rain, brushing against her. He places his hands on her shoulders and
says, “That was stunning, Zu. And in
this weather! I thought I’d walked into a haunted house up on a hill instead of
my own.”
In
an instant the chuckle from earlier is forgiven. His words spark a desire in
her, they rekindle the memory of an unforgettable high school chemistry
experiment she once observed. A pile of the dangerous but innocuous white
powder of that mercury compound (thio-something:
was it called?) was ignited, and burned with a blue flame at the tip to emerge
in the shapeshifting form of a large, winding, pyrotechnical snake, while the
students gasped in awe. It even had a fantastical name to boot: the Pharaoh’s
Serpent. All evening, Zuleikha smolders, she slithers, and she debates. It’s
about taking the initiative, which until now she hasn’t, even though they have
been amorous often enough in the way newlyweds are, or are supposed to be. But
he’s been the one leading, always. It’s about her putting an exclamation point
at the end of a remarkable evening he started with a simple word that says so
much. She wants to show how he has touched her with his appreciation for her
one true gift, which is indubitably not her culinary prowess. It’s about the
way these poignant moments always resolve themselves in her favorite movies.
When
the pregnancy is confirmed a few weeks later, she knows with all the confidence
in the world that the baby had to have been conceived that night, and on no
other.
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1/6/21 |
Promo |
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1/7/21 |
Review |
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1/7/21 |
Guest Post |
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1/8/21 |
Review |
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1/8/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/9/21 |
Review |
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1/10/21 |
Excerpt |
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1/11/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/11/21 |
Review |
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1/12/21 |
Playlist |
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1/13/21 |
Review |
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1/13/21 |
Scrapbook Page |
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1/14/21 |
Author Interview |
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1/15/21 |
Review |
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1/15/21 |
Review |
Are
You Ready for the End of the World?
Or Are
You the Walking Dead?
Guest
Post by Richard Cox
Originally
posted December 2019, to Medium.com
At 9:29 AM CT tomorrow, every unshielded
electronic device on Earth stops working, including the microchips and
transistors and power transformers that manage your vehicle and your home and
the entire electrical grid.
You may be stranded on the highway or at
work or at home. Your children may be at school, miles away, and now there’s no
way to call them or reach them in a timely manner. Maybe they’re at Grandma’s
house, who lives in the small town where you grew up, a six-hour drive away in
your car that won’t start. At this point your kids might as well be on another
continent.
Unless you’ve already prepared for such an
event, you might be confused by what’s happened. You may not realize your fate
is already sealed. Your first instinct may be to gather your family, even if it
takes hours. You may rush to the grocery store, where you find an anxious mob
of shoppers trying to buy food and supplies with debit and credit cards that
would carry no value even if the self-checkout registers weren’t dark.
In minutes or hours, the perishables in
your refrigerator will begin to spoil. The food in your pantry will survive
longer, but not much, because you never bothered to supply yourself for months
when grocery pickup was always minutes away.
Even if you carry cash and manage to load
up on dry goods, your first visit to the store will probably be your last,
because the trucks that deliver food to your local grocer are stuck on the
highway somewhere. The aisles are ghostly, you can barely see anything, because
grocery stores do not typically invest in windows. Most of the supplied light
comes from candles that will soon be purchased or stolen.
Maybe worst of all, you’re not even sure
what’s happened. Was it a military attack? A celestial event? Unless you own a
battery-operated ham radio, unless it was shielded or runs on tubes, how will
you ever find out? Does it even matter at this point?
Does anything?
Because let’s face it, the water taps are
going to dry up in hours or days, and you live in a metropolitan area along
with two million other people, and pretty much all of them will be on the hunt
for drinking water, same as you. And almost none of them are prepared to purify
raw water. And without pressure, there are no more flushing toilets, no way to
carry waste of any kind out of the city. Which means it’s time to leave.
But where will you go? Maybe you own a
gun, and maybe you think you’ll hunt for food. But the other two (or five or
seven or fifteen) million people have the same idea, they’re headed out of town
in all directions, on roads not built to convey so much traffic, and by the way
there is no longer a real or implied police presence. You’re on your own. The
air is choked with smoke from impact sites of airliners that crashed minutes
after the event. Pharmacies have been looted for opiates and insulin and
antibiotics. Whole city blocks are ablaze. Everyone is on foot or on bicycles or
basic motorbikes. Occasionally you hear the engine of an old pickup or VW bus,
vintage vehicles not dependent on computers to run. Maybe you own one of these suddenly
valuable vehicles. What do you do when the gas tank runs dry? How do you stop
someone with a gun from stealing it?
Besides, you probably don’t own one of
these cars. You’re the walking dead. Because even if you survive the initial
journey, if you get away from the city, there’s not enough game to feed your
family. You’re not a very good shot and waste most of your rounds not killing
the rabbit you happened to spot behind that clump of weeds. Your mouth is
parched. Your children are desperate. They can’t walk any farther. You sit down
and make camp and then, miraculously, rain begins to fall. You’re so thirsty.
Only you have no way to capture all those precious drops that don’t fall into
your hands or your mouth. And now your book of matches is ruined.
Want
more? Continue reading on Medium.com.
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1/5/21 |
Guest Post |
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1/5/21 |
BONUS Promo |
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1/6/21 |
Review |
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1/7/21 |
Deleted Scene |
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1/8/21 |
Review |
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1/9/21 |
Excerpt |
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1/10/21 |
Excerpt |
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1/11/21 |
Review |
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1/12/21 |
Guest Post |
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1/13/21 |
Review |
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1/14/21 |
Review |
