Yesterday I got a lovely surprise in my mailbox: author copies of the gorgeous North American edition of The Paris Cooking School, published by Alcove Press!
It’s a beautiful hardback, with a great dustjacket sporting a new blurb, colour author pic and a couple of nice quotes on the back, as well as gilt writing on the internal spine.
So wonderful to hold it in my hands, especially ahead of the publication day next Tuesday, August 6, in the US and Canada!
I’ve just come back from a lovely few days in Sydney, visiting fantastic bookshops, talking to enthusiastic booksellers, signing piles of copies of The Paris Cooking School and talking at a fabulous event at the Alliance Française, presented by Sydney-based French writer Olivier Vojetta. It’s been an absolutely invigorating, fun and exciting time, culminating in discovering at Sydney Airport that my book was number three bestselling book in their very popular bookshop! Here are a few pics from this week.
Sumptuous…Romantic..Escapist: The Paris Cooking School is now available for pre-order via the Ultimo Press website. Exciting! The book will be released in November. On the pre-order page there’s also a new author photo of me, one of a portfolio of several fabulous new author portraits, in both colour and black and white, which the very talented Lorena Carrington has created for me.
I’m very pleased to announce that Cold Iron, The Green Prince and The Firebird, my three YA fantasy novels that were originally selected for the fabulous Untapped project and republished as ebooks available to buy and borrow, will now also be republished in print, by Brio Books/Booktopia. The books were originally published in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, and were popular with readers, so it’s wonderful to see them acquire a new lease of life in both print and e-editions. And just look at their striking new print covers, below! (You can also see a link to the page for each book, under its cover.) The novels are being published over July, August and September this year within the Untapped series, which includes lots of other wonderful, previously out of print books by a large range of fantastic Australian authors, both for adults and young adults. You can check out the whole series here. All books are available to be pre-ordered now.
Sydney Under Attack officially comes out tomorrow, looking forward to seeing it out there! And the international blog Writer Unboxed, to which I’m a regular contributor, did a Take Five Q and A with me about it, which has just been published. You can read the interview here.
Today I’m posting the recipe for the final part of our Basque-themed meal. It’s probably the most famous dessert in the French Basque country, and is known simply as ‘Gateau Basque’. In A Hundred Words for Butterfly, my characters enjoy a slice or two of it more than once!
Rather than a ‘cake’ as such, the Gateau Basque is a pie with a yummy buttery, eggy pastry, filled with a lovely egg custard flavoured with rum. There’s also a less common black cherry-filled version in some areas of the Pays Basque which are known for their cherries. Today, the pastry sometimes incorporates almond meal as well as flour, but it’s more traditional not to use it, as almonds are not a traditional part of Basque cooking. But it’s up to you!
Found on family and celebration tables and in every patisserie across the region (with people flocking to the best examples of it in town and village patisseries and fervently discussing the relative merits of each!) it’s both simple and utterly delicious, a real treat to make and to eat!
Gateau Basque (this recipe serves 6-8 people)
Ingredients for the pastry: 300 g self-raising flour (or plain flour with one teaspoon baking powder), 125 g unsalted butter (chopped into pieces), 220g caster sugar, 3 egg yolks, grated zest of one lemon
For the custard cream: ¼ litre milk, 25 g plain flour, 60 g sugar, 3 egg yolks, one tablespoon rum
Method for the pastry: In a bowl, tip in the flour, make a well in the centre, add the chopped butter, the egg yolks, and the lemon zest. (Also add in baking powder now if you are using plain flour). Mix thoroughly, working the pastry into an elastic, homogenous whole. (You can add a little water—a very small amount!– if you have trouble making it stick). Let the pastry rest for about half an hour.
Method for the cream: While the pastry is resting, mix the egg yolks, flour, sugar and rum in a bowl. Heat the milk to boiling point. Pour the hot milk onto the egg mix in the bowl, stirring the whole time. Tip the mix into a saucepan, and heat carefully, stirring as you go, till the mix is nicely thick. Do not let it catch. Turn off the heat, let cream cool.
Putting it together: Divide the pastry into two parts, roll out each of them to make two circles. Butter and lightly flour a springform cake pan, lay one of the pastry circles on the bottom, then put in the thick, cooled cream. Put the second circle on top, crimp the pastry edges together so cream is completely hidden. With a fork, score the top of the cake (without going right through), brush with a little reserved egg white and put in a hot oven for 30 minutes.
Serve warm or cold (the cake keeps really well–that is, if you can hold off eating it all!)
I’m two-thirds of the way through writing my audio novel now and it’s going really well. I’m also exploring next steps to make the actual audio book a reality(more on that another time, when plans have firmed up) but something that’s happened recently is a pretty important change: the title of the novel.
A Turn off the Path was a good working title to begin with. It conjured up for me quite a few things: the path literal(ie the Camino) and the path metaphorical(ie the different turns we take as we go along our life’s path). But after discussion with other people who suggested it might perhaps not quite be the right final title for it–not strong enough or memorable enough or unusual enough–I decided it was time to think of something else. For a while, it foxed me–titles can be tricky beasts to catch!–and then quite suddenly it came. It was there all along, hiding in plain sight, in a text message conversation between two of my main characters, Helen and Tony, and Tony tells Helen that there are a hundred words for butterfly, in Basque…
I’d written that quite a while back, and just seen it as part of a conversation, though one that Helen really responds to, as an imaginative artist. But suddenly, I knew that’s what it had to be, the new title: A Hundred Words for Butterfly. It felt right, at once. It was simple yet enigmatic. Memorable yet not overdone. It could conjure up so many images in so many cultures yet was distinctively expressive of something from that place, that setting. I tried it out on other people, especially those who had expressed a certain dissatisfaction with the original title, and they confirmed their immediate affinity for this new one, too.
So that’s what it’s going to be. A Hundred Words for Butterfly…
Delighted to say that I’ve just heard that I’ve been awarded a Small Project Quick Response Grant from Create NSW, to work in the new year on a fabulous project: the first draft of a short adult novel (around 30,000–35,000 words), intended for the audio format, which I will write over the first four months of the year. As I write it, I’m also going to be documenting its creation through a series of posts on this blog. More soon about the book itself!
It’s going to be such a fun project, an exciting challenge to try my hand at something different, and I am so looking forward to it! And I’m very grateful to Create NSW for their generous support.
Yes: THAT moment! Every writer knows what it’s like, when you’ve worked on a novel for months and months, maybe even years, and finally you get to a point where you know, you just know, everything’s worked, all the strands have been woven in satisfactorily, your work for the moment is done–and you can write THE END! Even though I take out those words before I send the ms off to my agent, I do find it satisfying to type them in before that, as I actually finish, just for the sheer, if maybe childish 🙂 pleasure of seeing it there in black and white, even for a moment.
And with this particular novel I’ve just finished, it was even sweeter to do that. In a post last month for the international writing blog Writer Unboxed, I wrote about the difficulties I was having in finishing this novel, in these very ‘singular times’. Although it was literally almost finished–I had just written the second-last chapter- when the pandemic shutdown first started really making an impact on our lives here in Australia, back in mid-March, the novel just came to a stuttering halt and for weeks and weeks I just couldn’t bring myself to even go near it. It’s an adult novel this time, a multi-POV narrative with many enjoyable twists and turns, set in France, with both Australian and French characters, and I’d loved writing it up till that time. Coming to a stuttering halt wasn’t an experience I’d had before, not at this point in a novel, anyway–normally, when I get so close to the end, there’s no way I want to stop. But the turmoil of feelings brought on by the situation we were all so suddenly in had led to a lack of purpose, a sense of irrelevance, which made it pretty much impossible to finish the novel, try as I might. In the end I just laid it aside and worked on other things, as I describe in that Writer Unboxed post–creative activities to put online, journals, bits and bobs of all sorts. Slowly, doing that began to change things–and by the time I wrote the Writer Unboxed post in mid-May, I had gone back to the novel, advancing again, albeit much slower than I was used to. And then, just a few days later, suddenly, the ‘oomph’ for the novel came back, I knew exactly how to finish, and for days after I wrote and rewrote the last chapter and the epilogue and went back over the novel, carefully. Until yesterday, the first day of a new month, the first day of winter, when, filled with more than the usual exhilaration, I finally typed those magic words: THE END!
This new blog series, ‘Celebrating new books in troublesome times’ is about showcasing and celebrating promoting new books that have come out this year, especially but not only those coming out in these next few months, books whose authors were looking forward to celebrating with launches and other events, which have now been cancelled in the face of the situation we all face due to COVID-19. It’s also about giving authors a promotional space with guest posts which I hope may help them to connect with readers.
I first suggested the idea in the fantastic Facebook group set up to help Australian authors with new and upcoming books, Writers Go Forth. Launch. Promote. Party.Several authors contacted me about it, and today I’m featuring the first of them, Lisa Walker, who writes for both adults and young adults, and whose new novel, The Girl with the Gold Bikini is out with Wakefield Press.
Enjoy! And remember–bookshops are still open for orders, even if online!
Surfing the words to the shore
by Lisa Walker
Writing a book with a surfer-girl heroine has made me reflect on the relationship between surfing and writing in my life. One of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami, has famously said that everything he knows about writing he has learned from running. For me, it’s surfing.
My surfing and writing journeys both started when I moved to the north coast of New South Wales. The surf was at my doorstep, it seemed a shame to waste it. My hometown is world-famous for its waves. A looming basalt headland captures the big swell and a rocky reef creates smaller waves on the inside. With such waves at my doorstep, what else could I do but buy a surfboard?
So I bought myself a beginner’s surf board – soft and fat. Each time I took it out I challenged myself to stay in the water for a little longer. I floundered around in the whitewash, falling off and getting pummelled by the waves, emerging with nostrils full of saltwater and hair caked in sand. But then I started catching little waves. I glided over the reef. I was hooked.
For twenty years now, I have surfed almost-daily. If I count it up, allowing for times when I was away from home, or the surf wasn’t happening, by even a very conservative reckoning this is thousands of hours immersed in the water.
My process of learning to write was somewhat similar. I got less sand in my hair and water up my nose but the slap downs were still painful. With both writing and surfing, you need to be able to take a pounding and come back for more. It takes hours and hours of thankless practice. You are going to wipe out. Get used to it. I wrote three complete novels before I got my first one published. That’s a lot of words. A lot of practice. A lot of rejections. Every writer and every surfer is different. Different doesn’t mean wrong. You can learn from others, but there’s no point in trying to copy them.
You need to go out as often as possible, no matter the conditions. Some days are good, others not so good, but as long as you keep turning up, you will get somewhere. Once in a while everything goes right. The waves are perfect. The words flow. Those days are rare, but oh so beautiful.
Both writing and surfing are more about the journey than the destination. You don’t surf with the aim of getting to shore. Nor does it make sense to focus on the outcome – the book, rather than the process of getting there. That’s where the magic is. There is always another wave on the horizon, another story to tell.
My social links are:
Website: https://www.lisawalker.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisawalkerhome/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LisaWalkerTweet
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawalkerwriter/?hl=en
Blog: https://lisawalkerwriter.wordpress.com/
Buy links
Wakefield Press, Booktopia, Readings, Amazon Australia, US, UK
Feathers of the Firebird 