Witches and Wedding Cake by Bailey Cates

Jenn McKinlay: I remember when I was lucky enough to read the very first Magical Bakery Mystery - Brownies and Broomsticks - I loved it and all of the volumes that have followed! And now, here we are celebrating number NINE! Congrats on your recent release, Bailey, and thanks for visiting us today. 

Bailey Cates: Hello everyone! I’m so delighted to be here (thanks, Jenn!) and to talk a little about the latest Magical Bakery Mystery (#9!), Witches and Wedding Cake. As you might guess from the title, this is the one where Katie Lightfoot and Declan McCarthy finally get married – though there are a few hiccups along the way. 

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Like when his little sister finds the dead body of her ex-husband in a seedy motel room.

This is the second fictional wedding I’ve planned, and those are the only weddings I’ve planned. While I have a long-time partner, I’ve never been married, and at this point in my life don’t plan on it. The first wedding I wrote about was based on a lovely, simple ceremony I attended some twenty-five years ago. This time around, I researched carefully, asked for suggestions from friends (so many opinions!), and free-wrote a kind of interview with Katie to see what would best fit her character. She’s a bit of a free spirit, and it turns out she’s not too worried about tradition. 

Enter her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Eliza McCarthy. She’s the oldest of the five McCarthy offspring, all of whom are women except for Declan, who falls right in the middle. She’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, a strictly by-the-book sort, and right from the beginning, she takes issue with Katie’s plans. She doesn’t like that the bridesmaids are anything but “maids”, if you know what I mean, since all are either partnered, married, or divorced. They range from a very pregnant twenty-something to a spritely octogenarian. She doesn’t care for the mismatched vintage furniture supplied by the event rental company. (It’s a real company, and I fell in love with the dreamy pictures of distressed, white-painted tables and chairs on their website.) She’s upset that there isn’t a rehearsal or a rehearsal dinner planned. Eliza also doesn’t care for Katie’s plan to start the party – the wedding is in the backyard of her and Declan’s newly renovated carriage house – then pause it for the ceremony, and start it back up again after they’re officially hitched. Even the wedding cake, a tiered stand covered with seven different kinds of yummy cupcakes, isn’t traditional enough for her.

Katie is an only child, and she finds navigating the complexities of suddenly having four sisters thrust upon her somewhat challenging. As it happens, I’m an only child, so it’s not hard for me to imagine this. Perhaps because I have such a small family of origin, family is really important to me – both extended and made. Like Katie, I have a cadre of close friends I consider to be family, as well as cousins and my partner’s sisters. In the end, Katie manages just fine. Oh, and she also finds a murderer. 

Next up, I’m planning a fictional baby shower. This is another thing I’ve never done in real life, and I have to admit I don’t love attending baby showers where there are lots of games and such. Any suggestions for how to make this one unique and fun? I’d love to hear them!

Bailey Cates Cattrell 

Like many of her cozy characters, Bailey Cates believes magic is all around us if we take the time to look for it. She lives in Colorado with her guy and Cheesecat the Orange, a tabby who looks an awful lot like the one in her books. When not writing, she loves to cook, garden, hike and bike the gorgeous terrain outside her door, and occasionally play a round of mediocre golf. She’s currently working on the 10^th Magical Bakery Mystery, Spirits and Sourdough. You can find out more about Bailey and her books at www.baileycates.com.

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Special event notices: 

Please join Lucy Burdette and Deborah Crombie *tonight* in 

conversation about Lucy's new book, THE KEY LIME CRIME. 

6 pm at Books and Books Key West. The event is free, but you'll 

need to register here...

Lucy Burdette and Deborah Crombie

Let's Talk Book Covers by Laura Bradford

JENN McKINLAY: Yay!!! One of my very favorite author pals is popping in today, and I love her post so much. It's the twisty turny tale of cover art and what it does to authors. Except Laura's story is crazier than most! Here she is to tell it as only Laura can...

LAURA BRADFORD: I can’t speak for all of my fellow writers, but I suspect I speak for many when I describe that moment right before you see your latest cover for the first time as nerve-racking. Because, as we all know, people do, in fact, judge a book by its cover. Granted, different covers speak to different people for different reasons, but they do speak and they speak loudly. 

They can also incite nightmares and trauma, but we’ll get to that…

Next week, my 34^thbook (A Killer Carol) will release, and I have to say that the artist assigned to this particular series hit it out of the ballpark (See: Exhibit A). In fact, when I saw just the black and white sketch at the beginning, my jaw literally went slack for the second time in my career. 

Yep, A Killer Carol’s cover is, in a word, stunning. 

Exhibit A

S-t-u-n-n-i-n-g.

Now, before we move on, I need to say that I have been pretty fortunate in the cover department. The artist that designed A Killer Carol has worked on just about all of my mystery series with Berkley. She listens to my cover suggestions, actually reads the books from what I can tell, and delivers something I’m excited to see out in the wild. 

But that excited-to-see-out-in-the-wild part? That hasn’t always been the case…

Back in late 2004, I was literally on the edge of my seat waiting to see the cover for my very first book, Jury of One. The book had taken me close to five years to write on account of having two little ones at home. But it found a home with a small, (now defunct) independent publisher and was set to come out in spring 2005. Because I’d spent so much time with this book, I had a very specific idea for the cover.

In my mind, I saw a nighttime setting. In the foreground was a beach. On the beach, I envisioned a body—face down—with a shadow looming above. In the background, the lights of a boardwalk beach town (ferris wheel, etc.).

As I would soon learn, that’s not the cover I got. 

To make this more fun, let me set the stage for the day I saw this cover for the very first time. I’d been alerted by my editor that the cover was in the mail and so I was pretty much hanging out by the mailbox waiting. On the day it was supposed to arrive, there was no mail in the mailbox at all.

Zip. Nada.

The next day? Same thing. No mail. Nothing.

About an hour after the mail carrier usually came, we got a knock at the door.

It was the mail carrier.  His mail truck had caught fire the previous day (nope, not joking) and much of the mail was either burned or damaged by the water used to put the fire out. Anything that was salvageable would be delivered on Monday.

Monday came. So, too, did a pile of mail, rubberbanded together, with one of those notes that say something along the lines of due to circumstances beyond our control (yada, yada). But in that moment, all I cared about was the singed envelope, bearing my publisher’s name in the upper left hand corner.

I pulled it out of the pile, carried it into the kitchen, ripped that sucker open, and found this (see Exhibit B)…

Exhibit B 

Felt your jaw go slack, too, didn’t you?

No nighttime scene…

No lifeless body in the foreground…

No shadow…

No boardwalk lights…

I have to admit, that the sound that came out of my mouth at that first sighting was part sob/part laugh. I mean, after the whole fire-on-the-mail-truck thing, it was hard not to look around waiting for Peter Funt of Candid Camera to walk out of my pantry.

But, alas, there was no Peter Funt.

There was just me and my pink cover… A pink cover with a green sun…

 JENN: I have no words and, just so we're clear, that never happens! If "cover stroke" was a thing, I'd have had it.

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A footnote, for those who are curious: 

1)   I still have the singed envelope.  

2)  Jury of One was picked up by Worldwide Mystery later that year. The new cover, while better, was still nothing I’d pictured.

So, how about it, Reds and Readers, what's your take on book covers? Any horror stories? Any covers that got you to buy a bad book? What do you like to see in a cover?

Laura Bradford is the national bestselling author of An Amish Mystery series, as well as the Emergency Dessert Squad Mysteries, and the Southern Sewing Circle Mysteries (the latter written as Elizabeth Lynn Casey). In addition to her work in mysteries, Laura also pens women’s fiction novels. Her latest, A Daughter’s Truth, released in May and is a Fall 2019 Book Club Pick for Mary Janes Farm Magazine. 

To learn more about Laura and her books, visit her website: www.laurabradford.com.  

On Facebook? So is Laura: https://www.facebook.com/laurabradfordauthor/.

What Marks Your Spot? Leslie Budewitz, Bookmarks, and GUILTY AS CINNAMON

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Recently I sent a meme to a friend of mine who's a librarian — maybe you've seen it? It says something along the lines of "Bookmarks are for quitters." While I applaud the sentiment, we mere mortals sometimes have to mark where we are in a given book—whether it's to go to work, make a meal, or get some sleep. 

I have a few bookmarks that I love for sentimental reasons. One's a bookmark with a photograph of Winston Churchill and the quote "Never, never, never give up." There's one from a childhood friend that says "Keep Calm and Eat Cupcakes." And an engraved silver one from my first reading, which was at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Co. 

Author Leslie Budewitz, though, has a long and varied history with bookmarks, both comical and poignant. 

Leslie is giving away a copy of her perfect-for-the-holidays new book, GUILTY AS CINNAMON and a tea infuser to one lucky commenter.
 
Take it away, Leslie!

"When I get a little money, I buy books. 

And if there is any left over buy food."

— Deciderius Erasmus

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Don’t you just love the name Deciderius? What were his parents thinking?

I haven’t even started yet, and I’ve already digressed.

Not long ago, I needed to check a quote from a John Donne poem. (Don’t laugh; these things happen.) I pulled my ragged Norton’s Anthology of English Literature off the shelf and found not just the quote, but an amazing collection of old bookmarks.

I dragged out other volumes, shaking my head at what I discovered. The lost-and-found bookmarks read like a map of Seattle, where I spent most of my twenties and early thirties. A map of departed bookstores, dearly loved: Bailey/Coy Books on Broadway, where I bought the gray paperback editions of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey books, one at a time. The shop where I found Barbara Pym’s novels, gems of sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued storytelling. Second Story Bookstore in Wallingford, on the second floor of an old grade school. (The café next door was called “Recess,” the menu written on the ancient blackboards.)

The tour brought me back to Montana as well: A memento from Electric Avenue Books, the deeply-missed local bookstore, showing a two-story building with high arched windows. You’d recognize it in a flash on a stroll down our main street. I was surprised at the variety of bookmarks from the last indie in Kalispell, also closed. They changed seasonally, and always included a sketch and a literary quote, like the line from old Deciderius, above. Another, sporting an old roadster, quotes André Gide: “To read a writer is not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.” (Fittingly, I’d tucked that in Making Certain It Goes On: the Collected Poems of Richard Hugo, who often took road trips with friends and students around Montana and wrote poems inspired by the towns—and bars—they visited.)

And why I stuck a bookmark from Partners and Crime in New York in a Mary Oliver volume, I have no idea, but I think it would make the poet smile.

Quite a few of the bookstores still exist. I’ve signed at Seattle Mystery Bookshop several times, as have many of the Reds, and it touched me to find a bookmark from the shop’s early days, not long after Bill Farley opened it. I was a reader then, with no thoughts of writing. Newer versions hang on my office wall, along with bookmarks from other shops where I’ve read or signed.

Sadly, in a volume by e.e. cummings, I found a tasseled book mark bearing the smiling face of a toddler who’d been murdered by his father. His grandmother, a witness in an unrelated case, pressed it into my hands as we sat outside a federal courtroom.

I also found bits torn from envelopes, and a totally unfamiliar scrap of wallpaper. Crumpled maple leaves—remnants of my days at Notre Dame, a campus studded with magnificent trees. Course syllabuses—or syllabi, as Deciderius would probably call them. And in my copy of Montana: A History of Two Centuries, my first business card. Not long after I started my first law firm job, my parents visited. My father asked for my card, and then, eyes twinkling, stuck it in the book he was reading—now on my shelf.

(After I came back to Montana and joined a small law firm in a small town, I was working in our library one day, and found a business card from the long-deceased father of a high school classmate. I hadn’t known he’d once worked there, but of course, I plucked out the card and gave it to her.)

On another shelf, there’s a tottering pile of bookmarks from favorite writers, conferences, and friends. No doubt you have a similar stack. But have you got a reindeer bookmark?

Will someone find one of my bookmarks in a treasured volume some day? I can only hope so.

Reds, do you collect bookmarks? Always use the lovely Italian leather bookmark your brother brought you from Florence? Or mark your place with a candy wrapper or a toothpick?

And don't forget, a book and a tea infuser to one lucky commenter.

GUILTY AS CINNAMON, second in the Spice Shop Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime, December 1)

Pepper Reece knows that fiery flavors are the spice of life. But when a customer dies of a chili overdose, she finds herself in hot pursuit of a murderer…

Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries and the Spice Shop Mysteries—and the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. She fell in love with the Pike Place Market as a college student in Seattle, and still makes regular pilgrimages. The president of Sisters in Crime, she lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat Ruff, a cover model and avid bird-watcher. Connect with her through her website and blog, www.LeslieBudewitz.com, or on Facebook, www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor

To Market, To Market — Farmers Markets by novelist Leslie Budewitz

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Lovely readers, do you love a farmers market? I do (hello Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket with your homemade doughnuts and hot-spiced apple cider) — and so does today's guest, double Agatha award-winning novelist Leslie Budewitz. 

She's the author of The Food Lovers' Village series; however, her newest novel, ASSAULT AND PEPPER, coming March 3 from Berkley Prime Crime is the first in her latest, the Spice Shop Series. And its setting is a farmers market — THE farmers market — Seattle's Pike Place Market. Here's a taste:

Just a pinch of murder... After the year from you-know-what, Pepper Reece finds a new zest for life running a busy spice shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Her aromatic creations are a hit and everyone loves her refreshing spice tea. Pepper is convinced she can handle any kind of salty customer—until a murder ends up in the mix.

And here's Leslie on Seattle's Pike Place Market as well as the legendary markets of France — take it away Leslie!

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Does anyone not love a farmer’s market? The Pike Place Market in Seattle originated in 1907 when the city council created a market for farmers to sell directly to “housewives.” On the first day, THE farmers ran out of produce before they got their trucks unloaded.

I fell in love with the Market as a college student in the late 1970s, not long after it was saved from the wrecking ball of “urban removal.” Later, as a young lawyer working downtown, I ate my way through the Market several days a week. I’d start at the front entrance with a slice of pizza from DeLaurenti’s walk-up window, browsing the covers of the magazines at the First & Pike Newsstand— eyes only until my hands were clean! I’d sip a sample cup of tea at Market Spice while watching the fishmongers throw salmon and amuse the crowd with their comedy routine, pick my produce and cheese for the week, and end with dessert—a hazelnut sable from Le Panier, the French bakery, or a Nanaimo bar from a now-departed shop in the warren off Post Alley.

A few years ago, Mr. Right and I spent a month in France. We loved everything about it, including the markets, small, medium, and large. Our first was in Arles, a city with Roman roots and medieval history, once home to Van Gogh and Cezanne. At the Arles Wednesday market, you can buy everything from herbs and spices to sausages to sunglasses and goats.

The next Sunday, we found ourselves in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a magical town. Once again, produce, cheese, and sausage were king, but here too were tables of antique monogrammed linens, silver cutlery, and other French treasures. Accordian music. Duck sausage. (We ate a lot of duck in France. We fed a lot of ducks, too, to make up for it.) Ravioli made before our eyes. The produce seller who asked when we intended to eat the cantaloup—and rejected three before finding one he promised would be ripe the next day. And he was right, bien sûr! 

Roussillon is not a historic market town, but no matter: the butcher, baker, cheesemonger, and a few produce sellers crammed into the village’s single parking lot on Saturday morning, beside a beekeeper, a soap maker, and handful of artists. Best macarons of the trip.

Back in Paris, the Sunday Market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir, directly behind our hotel, left us speechless. Food lovers’ heaven. Vats of olives, baskets of mushrooms we couldn’t identify, bread so beautiful it made our eyes water. We wandered the blocks, eavesdropping on the Parisians as they filled their baskets and rolling carts for the next few days, and bought a picnic for our last evening on the banks of the Seine.

Markets are inherently festive. They fire up our senses and spark our imaginations. They make us hungry—and offer us everything from fresh-roasted peanuts to fresh-baked piroshky. And they bring us back, again and again, to see what’s old and new.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: What about you, Readers? Do you have a favorite farmers’ market or a memory of one? Leslie is giving a copy of ASSAULT AND PEPPER and a bag of Market Spice Tea from Seattle to one lucky reader!

The first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Leslie Budewitz lives in NW Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their Burmese cat, a book cover model and avid birdwatcher. For more tales of life in the Great Northwest, visit her website.