The Hats!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: On Friday night, I finally finished watching the Queen's funeral. It was a busy week, but I had recorded the entire ten hour program on PBS, so I sneaked in bits as I could. The final service in St. George's Chapel was very moving, but I have to admit I was distracted by the hats!

I am a hat girl! I adore hats, and it really irks me that Americans aren't into millinery. I love visiting hat shops when I'm in the UK, and would be seriously tempted to carry hats home on the plane if I had any occasion to wear them.

So it was that I noticed the many fabulous hats worn by the women both at Westminster Abbey and St. George's Chapel. (Here's a nice piece from the Guardian.) But I kept wondering if there had been a huge run on hat shops. Did everyone have a suitable black hat on standby? Did milliners and dress shops and department stores keep back an appropriate selection? Who got first dibs?

And it seems that this was indeed an issue, with even the Queen's granddaughter Princess Beatrice forced to leave shops empty-handed. Dignitaries flying in for the services and assuming they could pick up a hat last minute in London must have had a panic! 

There were the broad-brimmed, the pillboxes, the feathered, the be-ribboned, the fascinators, the rakish. And the veils! 

REDs and readers, did you have a favorite? And what style would you choose to wear if you had the occasion?

P.S. I haven't forgotten that our Jenn has a new Hat Shop Mystery coming in January! I'd love to know what Scarlett and Viv thought of the finery on display!

JENN: Well, since you asked. I expect Viv and Scarlett would no doubt be thrilled by the last minute crush in business, despite being distraught over the death of the queen (Viv is a monarchist, you know, and not just because it's good for business). And given that upscale milliners can get a 600 pounds for a hat - it's not a bad industry to be in, if you're British.

P.S.S. Karen in Ohio, you are the winner of Michael Stanley's A DEADLY COVENANT! Email me your address!

What We're Writing - Jenn McKinlay

Jenn McKinlay: Technically, what I'm writing is Buried to the Brim, the next London Hat Shop mystery (2020), but I'm also writing the publicity posts for The Good Ones a bookstore rom-com (Feb 2019), finalizing the page proofs on Dying For Devil's Food, the next Cupcake Bakery mystery (May 2019), copyediting Word to the Wise the next Library Lover's mystery (Sept 2019), writing the proposal for One for the Books, the next-next Library Lover's mystery (2020), revising The Christmas Keeper, the second bookstore rom-com (Oct 2019), and working on a top-secret super special project completely out of my wheelhouse. So, what I'm writing is...well, it's complicated!

After much dithering, I decided to share the opener to Dying for Devil's Food, mostly because I just received the cover art, after much angst on the artist's part, and I have to say it is fantastic!

May 2019!!!

As the New York Times bestselling series continues, it's going to take every recipe the Fairy Tale Cupcake crew has to whip up a quick defense for Mel Cooper when her high school reunion goes from a cake walk to a car wreck...

Chapter One

     “Squeee!”

     At the screechy noise, Melanie Cooper squeezed her pastry bag too tight and frosting shot out of the tip into a big glob on top of the cupcake she was decorating for a wedding the next day.

     “Angie DeLaura, what was that?” she asked. She blew her blond bangs off her forehead as she glared at her business partner, who had just come running through the swinging doors from the front of the bakery into the kitchen where Mel was working.

      “That’s Angie Harper to you, and…” she paused to strike a pose and fan herself with a large envelope and fancy looking invitation, before she continued, “to everyone else we graduated high school with fifteen years ago.”

     “Huh?” Mel frowned at her recently married, petite brunette friend.

     “Our fifteen-year reunion,” Angie said. She pointed to the envelope in her hand. “It’s coming up and guess who they want to bake cupcakes for it?”

     Mel stared at her childhood friend and business partner. How could she put this as tactfully and delicately as possible?

     “No.” Mel used a rubber spatula to scrape the glob off the ruined cupcake and flicked it into the large garbage bin to her right.

     “What?” Angie froze in mid-fan. “What do you mean, no?”

     “I have no intention of baking cupcakes for those people,” Mel said. 

     She bent over the cake in front of her. It was a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting. She was keeping it simple and working the frosting in a thick smooth swirl that she then sprinkled with small red hearts. Just the thought of going to her high school reunion made her want to mainline the frosting and shove a whole cupcake into her mouth like a boss.

     “But…but,” Angie stammered. It was clear she hadn’t anticipated this sort of response, which boggled Mel, but she continued on.

     “No buts,” she said. “You’re welcome to go to our reunion but I refuse.”

     “Mel, I don’t think you’re grasping the big picture here.”

     “Oh, I’m grasping it and I’m tossing it away.”

     “But look at us,” Angie said. She swung her arms wide to encompass the kitchen and beyond. “We’re hugely successful. We have franchises all over the country. That gives us a moral imperative to show up at our reunion.”

     “No.”

     “Mel, I know there were some people who hurt your feelings back in the day—“

     “Hurt my feelings?” Mel straightened up. She grabbed a pinch of heart shaped sprinkles and didn’t sprinkle them so much as threw them onto the freshly piped frosting. She stared at her friend. “Angie, they called me ‘Melephant,’ they bullied me about my weight, and Cassidy Havers, in particular, wrote my name in all of the boys’ bathrooms with my phone number. She was vicious and mean and cruel and if I never see her again, it will be too soon.”

     “She’s Cassidy Havers-Griffin now,” Angie said.

     “Griffin?” 

     “Yes, as in Daniel Griffin.”

     “She married Danny?” Mel asked. She felt her old high school crush spread its wings and rise out of the ashes of her adolescent heart like a phoenix. “When?”

     “A couple of years ago,” Angie said. “I think you were in Paris at culinary school at the time.”

     “And you didn’t mention it?” 

     Angie just looked at her and Mel nodded. Yeah, she wouldn’t have told Angie if her high school crush had gotten married either. Oh, wait, her crush had been Tate Harper and he had gotten married six months ago. To Angie.

     “But you’re going to marry Joe,” Angie said. “And you had a much deeper and longer lasting crush on Joe than on Danny, right?”

     “Well, of course, but I can’t believe he married her,” Mel said. She shuddered. “I mean he was captain of the basketball team and totally out of my league in high school, and she was the homecoming queen so I guess it makes sense, but I always hoped he’d meet someone…”

     Mel’s voice trailed off. She was not going to say it out loud.

     “More like you?” Angie guessed.

     This was the problem with besties, they knew you too well.

***

So, who gets iced at the high school reunion? Yeah, I'm not telling. You'll have to read the book to find out ;-)         

Now how about you, Reds and Readers, are you a fan of high school reunions, or not so much?

Jenn McKinlay on her Identity Crisis

 RHYS BOWEN: I am often told that I am driving myself into the ground for writing two books a year. But I've come up with someone who is even crazier than I. Jenn McKinlay is my good friend and neighbor when I spend my winters in Phoenix and we've done some fun events together. But I am in awe of her writing schedule. Beside her, I'm a slacker. And she'll tell you why.  Take it away, Jenn. 

 Jenn McKinlay: Who do I want to be today?  No, really, I have a variety of names to choose from.  Some people have a tough time choosing what to wear, I have a hard time choosing who to be.  Just kidding, mostly.

     So far in my mystery writing career, I’ve written under three different names for five different series.   I am Lucy Lawrence, Josie Belle and Jenn McKinlay, the latter being my actual name.  People often ask me why I write under different names.  I tell them it’s because I don’t want to hog too much shelf space, but the truth is that I want to have multiple aliases in case I am ever in trouble with the law and have to flee the country.  Yes, that’s a lie.  Clearly, fiction writers are not to be trusted even with their own backstory. 

     The truth, so boring, is that because I kept submitting new and different ideas to my publisher, all of which were rejected, I think they finally had a meeting, which no one will confirm or deny, and decided that if they offered me a book to write, I would, please god, go away. 

     So, they asked me to be a writer for hire and pen a series about a woman who works in a paper shop and does decoupage for a hobby.  I became Lucy Lawrence and took on the job.  Knowing decoupage was about as timely as macramé, I quickly offered up more series ideas so that I would not find myself out of work before the ink dried on book three.  I sold a series about cupcakes, thought the fad would be quickly over, and another about libraries, also thought they were going the way of the dinosaur, both under my name Jenn McKinlay. 

     Convinced I would fail with these series, yes, I was having some confidence issues, I took on another writer for hire work and wrote a bargain hunter mystery series under the name Josie Belle.  Then I got a wild hair to write a book set in London, I really needed a vacation, and sold another series set in a hat shop in Notting Hill as Jenn McKinlay.

     Now with three different author names and five distinct series, one might wonder if I suffer from multiple personality disorder, a split personality or just a general identity crisis.  I do.  Oh dear, another lie!  Seriously, I don’t.  Not really.  My author names don’t define me any more than my married name does, yes, that’s yet another name.  See? I really could flee the country if I had to -- just sayin’.   

     When I was new at this writing game, I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear writers talk about the world they had created as if it was real.  What a rude newb I was!  Now that I have had to develop some multiple book story arcs, I get it.  I have caused great pain and suffering to some of my characters, I have shattered dreams and occasionally killed off people I didn’t want to die which caused some tears of my own.  For real.

     For me, being an author is a lot like being a reader.  When I was a kid, my first out of body experiences happened while sitting under a big dogwood tree in our yard where I went sleuthing with my two besties in my blue roadster and when I fell through the back of a wardrobe during a game of hide and seek and found myself in Narnia. 

   

  Writing is a similar experience for me.  It really is like falling down a rabbit hole, observing what is happening around me and trying to put it into words so that someone else can share the adventure.  The wonderful thing about being both a writer and a reader is that I get to live all sorts of lives and have endless adventures.  I wouldn’t change my job for anything.

     How about you?  If you’re a writer, how does it work for you?  Is it like taking notes while visiting a new world?  If you’re a reader, how do you feel when you are immersed in a great story?  How far do you wander from your actual surroundings into the world the author has crafted?

     Thanks for inviting me to visit, Rhys.  It’s always a pleasure to visit the ladies at Jungle Red.

 RHYS: Thank you, Jenn. Fun post. And Jenn will be giving away a copy of her latest hat shop mystery, DEATH OF A MAD HATTER for the best comment of the day.