Cooking is Magic, Part 6: Play with Your Food

Robot cake I made for Nora’s third birthday party, with working sugar cookie gears

Writing a novel can be long, grueling work. It took me two years and two months to complete my first novel. The second came in at just under a year, and it looks like the third will be more like six months, so I seem to be getting better at it. Still, it’s sometimes disheartening to pour months of work into something that people will read in a day or two. Sort of like spending hours on cooking a really good meal that your kids then inhale in ten minutes, fifteen if my teenager goes back for seconds.

So why do it at all? Simple: because it’s FUN.

Cooking your own meals and desserts means you have total creative control to do anything and everything you like. Your three-year-old wants a robot birthday cake with moving gears? Sure! Your ten-year-old is obsessed with dragons? Make a cupcake tower with dragon cookies perched on them. Launching your first novel? Make a cake that looks just like your book! I love cooking and baking challenges, and my children do, too. One of my great parenting joys is helping them to realize their own crazy ideas in chocolate and candy and fondant.

And yet… cooking is limited to the available ingredients. In writing, anything is possible. I can create a character who grew up on Mars and needs an exoskeleton to visit Earth, or a frog prince obsessed with baseball, or a village where everyone is a monster, but they’ll never admit it. Right now, I’m writing about a thirteen-year-old elf girl fascinated by math and programming who’s been roped into helping rescue a magical, sentient baby tree who’s been kidnapped by someone who basically thinks he’s a Norse god, all because the elf girl’s grandmother has a secret agenda. Whaaaaat? How does that even make sense?

Well, it makes about as much sense as making candy sushi or books out of marshmallows and graham crackers. And you know what, I love every crazy second of it, even when my plot goes sideways and I have to spend ages revising. i love creating whole worlds and the fascinating people in them who live and strive and fail and pick themselves up and keep on going. It was inevitable, i think, that I’d end up writing about a young witch with a flair for magical baking. And I love that I get to share these stories, not just with my friends and family, but with everyone, everywhere.

For some examples of the crazy, fun, wild things I’ve made, please visit my Facebook page. And for more about that young witch and her friend, the pixie who discovers she has more of a knack for magic than she ever imagined, preorder A Pixie’s Promise before the Kickstarter ends in just a few scant hours. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until it comes out in September.