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Please take out your pencils

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  In the nearly three years since I published Hearts at Dawn , I’ve had a few surprises, but by now, I figured they were over. But I didn’t take into account that people notice different things, which makes writing (not to mention life) endlessly surprising.   Recently, a new writer friend and I have been reading each other’s books. I was thrilled that he liked Hearts at Dawn   - but there was something he’d found confusing. He’d noticed that at one point Orin describes Beauvoir, the town Claire’s brother lives in (and, eventually, an important plot point), as being  “almost exactly due east” of Paris. But every other time I’d described where it was situated, he noted, it was said to be west of the city.   When he told me this, I was totally shocked.   In all this time that Hearts at Dawn  has been out in the world, no one else has ever noticed this - myself very much included. I’ve re-read my manuscript multiple times, including once last year, just before my friend  Rip Coleman , fo
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Time traveling, basements, and other news

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  La Joute des mariniers  by Nicolas Raguenet   ( image source )   Researching the past isn’t easy - and I’m learning that certain time periods are even more difficult to visualize and understand than I might have expected.   What I hope will be my next novel is taking me to a different time in Paris’s history, and I’m trying to get down to the depths of it, to be able to see and hear and smell it (even though it apparently smelled pretty gross) -- as much as someone who didn’t actually live then, can. One thing I can be sure of: The traditional shape of a brioche hasn’t changed in centuries, as this 18 th  century painting by Chardin attests!   Detail from   La Brioche by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin   ( image source )   This need to do some serious time traveling to a different era means that I’ll be taking a break for a few months from posting on this blog.   I will always be fascinated by the Siege of Paris, and I continue to read firsthand accounts for fun. For instance, my most
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Making a Siege of Paris holiday dessert

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Paris, December, 1870: Under siege by the Prussians since September 19, the city has run out of a number of basic cooking ingredients, including most common sources of meat (cat, rat, dog, horse, and for the extremely wealthy, zoo animals, are usually substitutes), as well as milk and cheese.  Flour is also in short supply; the bread distributed by the city’s boulangeries is becoming a repugnant mix of assorted grains, dried peas, and even straw.   So what can you make for Christmas dinner?   Christmas of 1870 is considered one of the saddest in Paris's history. Besieged residents couldn’t leave the city to visit or reunite with family and friends, and food and heat were in short supply. Still, many citizens must have made the most of it.   We have a few menus that have survived from this time (yes, restaurants stayed open during the Siege - this is Paris, after all), including the most famous, that of the restaurant Voisin, which shows an array of different meat options on the men
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