I don’t read cookbooks for pleasure. They are more like lawn mower repair manuals from my perspective – the words are necessary, but rarely inspiring. The exceptions to my disinterest in cookbooks are the ones about bread baking. I can imagine the texture and pull of the loaf when I read bread recipes.

Today, I was dipping into my latest library catch, The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, and found myself fascinated. She lists a dozen unfamiliar words all of which refer to different types of pre-ferments, mixtures of flour, water and yeast which precede the actual dough in some kinds of breads.

She says, “At first these terms put me off, and I was resolved to avoid them in this book, thinking that the all- encompassing term starter was all I really needed, but gradually these special words became familiar friends. This common language serves not only to distinguish the type of starter but also to connect us to a history and family of bread bakers around the world.”

I agree. Some words are exceptionally cool. Sort of like kids you knew in high school who were not only good at everything they applied themselves to but were also friendly, kind and likeable.

Your average hardworking words like Go, or Thing, or About are like this.  Useful, no doubt. In some cases, irreplaceable in their simplicity. They are the basic iceberg lettuce of our conversational salad — not particularly nutritious, infinitely forgettable.

But words like venary, or concentric, or antithesis are the kind of words which you can chew. Mustard green, sun-dried tomato, sourdough sort of words. They fill your mouth with exact flavors. They pull at your teeth, pepper your tongue and compel you to pay attention to their tang and texture.

We need both, of course. There is a place for vague in our speech. The world would be a poorer place without mashed potatoes. Or macaroni and cheese. Or the boring kind of grilled cheese.

But comfort food loses its charm if that’s all we ever eat.

So bring on the levain, the madre blanca, the sponge, the poolish, the altus brat. Because they give our bread and our writing a depth of flavor and make our words ring in the memory like the taste of sourdough on our tongue.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

Book review Wednesday strikes on Thursday. Shaking it up, here.

I haven’t read a lot of graphic novels, but I like the freshness of them. The Boy is Back, Meg Cabot’s latest foray into adult romance isn’t exactly a graphic novel, but the format is so much fun it made me laugh out loud.

One of the challenges of writing romances is finding the balance between the way people communicate in books and the way they communicate in real life.

Which is, of course, the point.

Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?”

Fiction writers are encouraged to focus on the extraordinary moments of otherwise ordinary lives. But sometimes it’s a relief to read a book which describes the prosaic with the level of joy and appreciation which The Boy is Back exhibits. There is a pivotal love story but the ordinary life around the couple is almost a third character.

And a very special thank you to Cabot for the family tree at the very beginning of the book. There is a special place on the aggravating book shelf for the other kind.

You know.  The ones in which you struggle through three hundred plus pages trying to remember just how Henry is related to the main character. You only learn he is her long lost step uncle when you stumble on an appendix on page 327.

There must be some readers out there who leaf through a book ahead of time marking appendices and footnotes with unseemly relish. I’m not one of them.

Which makes me wonder about who those people are and what else they do with their time. Dust moldings daily? Fold their dirty laundry before heading to the Laundromat? Use partitioned plates for meals so the green beans don’t touch the mashed potatoes?

I like a sense of organization, but I am well aware it is a losing battle. And I like books which reflect that. Hence this book review.

Cabot cleverly mimics the pace of online communication. It’s not a gimmick – it’s a device. And it’s a believable device. Most of us do communicate this way now, although perhaps not all as intensely as the family in this story does.

And while what she describes in those communications is ordinary life, she does so with such vigor and particularity, it is anything but dull.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

It’s a Sign. Of something.

Every week on my way home from the supermarket I drive by an unpretentious dry cleaning establishment. It offers same day service. On the side of the building there is a startling banner which proclaims: Alterations Men Women Children.

It’s not so much the punctuation issue, although that probably is an issue. You know – the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma,” and “Let’s eat Grandma.”

It’s the idea one could alter oneself overnight which fascinates me. How convenient.

In one day you could have better eyesight and shinier teeth. You could be taller, shorter, wider, narrower. And the changes would be temporary too, since you could go back the next day and reverse them.

I would like to try out being tall, for instance, although I might like to return to my original height once I had bumped my head too many times.

It might be fun to have wings. Or to be able to jump like a kangaroo. Or to have a tail to hold that extra bag of groceries or to swing from one library stack to another. Clothes might be a problem but the dry cleaner probably offers alterations on clothing too.

But why stop at physical alterations?

I’d love to be better at accounting, for instance. I’m not good at drawing either, but the tailor could alter that. I’d love to speak the world’s languages fluently, to be able to dance like a professional, to throw a baseball one hundred miles an hour. Or to be able to swim like a seal and catch fish in my mouth. Well, maybe not the fish part.

And then there are less positive attributes, like laziness or unwarranted melancholy. I could use an alteration in my mood some days and in my self-discipline on others. Some days, both at once.

But truthfully, even if the drycleaner’s sign was accurate, I wouldn’t take advantage of it. It’s not that I don’t want to change and grow. I do.

But I want to be the agent of that change myself. Being the alterations mistress of me is a lot more fun than having someone else do it. Even if that means I can’t have wings or a tail.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.

Turns out joining a group can be fun!

I never had much experience with the benefits of group membership as a child. The groups I was acquainted with were the unpleasant sort. The kind which incorporated mean kids and ruled the playground with an iron fist.

But as an adult, I have slowly come to understand how helpful a group can be both as a social bridge and a professional aid. Which is why I have become such a fan of the writing community and the groups which it forms.

At Rhode Island Romance Writers monthly meetings, I’ve received advice on writing, branding and marketing skills. Just as important, I’ve been able to meet a group of actual writers who, it turns out, are amazingly friendly.

As part of attending the Boston area romance writers conference, I joined New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America (NECRWA). At the conference I had the chance to meet several of the members. They too have been uniformly welcoming and helpful.

The NECRWA conference itself was an extraordinary experience. On a professional level, I was exposed to in depth information on the business of writing and selling books I wouldn’t normally have had access to. But the social aspect, again, took me by surprise.

I made friends.

I don’t know if this is a function of the groups I am meeting, but I’ve been blown away by a universal camaraderie. Experienced authors share information and advised rank beginners with a notable and laudable spirit of generosity. Fellow beginners share their knowledge, secure in the sense that this experience is not about competition but about lifting each other up.

Someday, I will attend the big one – the Romance Writers of America conference. I don’t know whether I will find the same level of welcoming friendliness there, but I think it’s possible.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about writers since I started meeting them, it’s that we all have the same hill to climb and we have to climb it again every day.

This takes a lot of the hierarchy out of writers’ groups.

Because even a million dollar writer starts out every morning the way she did when she first began – staring at a blank sheet and hoping the words will come easy today.

Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.