Sometimes I can’t believe my own good luck.  I have a built-in excuse to do the strangest things without one smidgen of guilt.  Yesterday, for instance, in the middle of writing a chapter that does NOT want to be written, I got the urge to bake a pie.  So I did.  Without feeling the least bit reluctant.  Pies are a big, big part of Happiness Key and Fortunate Harbor, the sequel, in progress now.  And it was time to put a recipe up on my website for Happiness Key.  Could I do that without trying the pie myself?  Would I do that to my faithful readers?  I mean, it’s GRAPEFRUIT pie after all, and it definitely needed a test drive.

So now the pie is baked and very soon the recipe will appear on my Happiness Key book pages, where you can try it, too.  I can honestly tell you that this is worth an afternoon in your kitchen.  In fact if I do say so myself, it’s delicious.  Even without whipped cream on top, just the way you see it here.  Yum!

As if that wasn’t enough fun, this afternoon I’m off to Charlottesville where my daughter-in-law and I are going to take a pie baking class tomorrow night.  And that will be after I spend the day learning how to use the family metal detector.  All in the name of research.

With Happiness Key about to debut, I’ll be talking about happiness a lot in the coming months.  Like Wanda, in Happiness Key, I can say that baking pies makes me happy, too.  Look for the recipe in mid-June and enjoy.

Meantime, don’t forget to comment on my interview with Diane Chamberlain if you’d like a chance to win one of Diane’s wonderful novels.  You have until June 3rd.

So, do you really believe novelists just make stuff up?  After all, they call this fiction.  We don’t know how it’s really done, so we fudge?   

 

Well, that would be the easy way out, but truth is, novelists HATE those letters you write us that point out Ash Wednesday and Easter do NOT occur during the same week (I knew that!), or our heroines really can’t have a certain bust size and be the height and weight we claim (a good writer friend got that one recently, complete with charts.)  Given that none of us want to make errors, a lot of research is necessary.

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