YAY! THE CUPCAKE COOKBOOK IS HERE!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Confetti! Rose petals! Champagne! CUPCAKES!

Today we are celebrating like mad–our brilliant talented pioneer woman, Red Jenn McKinlay has expanded to yet ANOTHER facet of her already incredible career–writing a cookbook!

I will pause for her well-deserved standing ovation! YAAAY!

The first volume of the recipes from the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries will be available to ALL on September 6th, wherever books and ebooks are sold. But of course, Reds and readers, you are hearing about it here first!

And then..run run run and get a copy. Or three. What a great gift, for yourself or anyone you know or anyone you’d like to know.  Jenn and Christe, we are SO happy and SO proud of you!

And here's the inside scoop-- It's cupcaketastic!

When You Need a Chief Baking Officer

JENN McKINLAY: I’ll bet you didn’t know that was a thing. Well, it is. And for me it became a quite necessary thing. Here’s the back story:

I started writing the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries a million years ago—okay, it was really thirteen years ago but it feels like a million. I’m currently writing the fifteenth volume in the series with the sixteenth on deck. 

To be perfectly honest, I thought this series with cupcakes as a hook was going to be done in three books, maybe five if I got really lucky. It never occurred to me that I’d be penning them into the double digits. 

Averaging four recipes per book, that’s a lot of cupcakes. 

Unsurprisingly, readers started asking for a cookbook with just the recipes in it about seven years ago. Because copyright is complicated, I asked, and my publisher thought about it and thought about it. Finally, they said, “Yeah, sure go ahead.” It was my turn to think about it and think about it and drag my feet—as you do when you are out of your comfort zone and have back to back deadlines and no time to take on such a massive project.

Enter my Chief Baking Officer—Christie Conlee.

A few years ago, when I slid into women’s fiction as well as mysteries, keeping up with the promo part of the business just became too much. I was tired and just getting the books written was taking all I had. 

At the encouragement of my friend, author Lori Wilde, I hired her personal assistant to help me out. Well, we got on like a house on fire, y’all! This is of course when a house on fire is a good thing! LOL.

As I got to know my new assistant, I discovered we spoke the same language, frequently having entire conversations using just gifs, and she was a home baker. Seriously, this woman was putting up pictures of cakes on her social media that she’d baked that made me swoon. We started talking about crafting a cookbook. She was all in. I was swamped in deadlines. Finally, I saw a very narrow window to get it done and she took a week to do nothing but bake thirty-two different kinds of cupcakes with the crazy ingredients required, because each recipe was crafted to match the stories, one of which has a zombie walk in it – I’m just sayin’.

To my surprise and delight, I started getting photos from her like this: 

And suddenly I was full of enthusiasm and excitement and that’s when I knew what I had been waiting for all along was a Chief Baking Officer!

Our first volume of the recipes from the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries drops on September 6th, wherever books and ebooks are sold. 

And while it was an ENDEAVOR to put together the recipes from the first eight mysteries, I have the utmost confidence that when I finish book sixteen and we put together the recipes from the next eight books, that it will go much more smoothly. 

Unless, of course, I forget everything I learned and have to relearn it all over again. Thank goodness, I have my CBO to get the recipes and the baking right, at least!


HANK: Oh, hurray hurray hurray! Reds and readers, what’s your favorite cupcake? Are you an icing person? Or is it frosting? And yay for Jenn and Christie!

Buy Links:

Fairy Tale Cupcakes Cookbook (Kindle)

https://amzn.to/3POJU9U

Fairy Tale Cupcakes Cookbook (Amazon print)

https://bit.ly/3QtR4Rv

Fairy Tale Cupcakes Cookbook (Barnes and Noble - both)

https://bit.ly/3cyglLa

Fairy Tale Cupcakes Cookbook (Bookshop.Org)

https://bookshop.org/books/fairy-tale-cupcakes/9798986503400

This Could NEVER Happen

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: When I read this blog, I first thought–no. No no no. That could never EVER happen.

I read it again, a second time, I thought…nope. NO way. It could never NEVER happen.

But mes amies, peut-etre it could.

The wonderful (and completely adorable) Gillian Harvey has lived it. And lucky for us, not only realized it, but wrote a whole book about it.

It deals with France, and life, and wine, and love, and beauty. 

And–our own foibles.


RE-LIVING THE DREAM
By Gillian Harvey

Whenever I tell people I live in rural France, they respond with comments like: “lucky you!” or “living the dream.”

For the first year or so of living here, I’d have agreed with them. The problem? Living in a holiday destination does not make your life a holiday. At least, not all the time.

After a while, the daily drudgery of life steps in. Yes, you’re living somewhere beautiful and doing a job you love (freelance writing), but you still have to clean the bathroom. You still have to trudge around the supermarket, and work out what to have for tea. Bills still need to be paid.

Eventually, the beautiful, French location fades into the background and life begins to feel ‘normal.’ You take the kids to school, meet your deadlines, cook dinner and – if lucky – get to do a little reading or watching TV at the end of a day.

You stop exploring.

You forget to look out of the window.

You start taking it all for granted.

Reader, I went ‘France-blind.’

Luckily, things changed when I began to write my latest novel.

My first two novels were set back in my old stomping ground of England.

But for the third, A YEAR AT THE FRENCH FARMHOUSE, I decided I wanted to shake things up a bit. What if my main character decided to throw caution to the wind and hop across the channel, just as I had over a decade ago?

It was a fresh direction for me, and I began to get excited about the project. What’s more, the words flowed from my fingers: I’d unknowingly been ‘researching’ this book for over a decade simply by living my life (although unlike the main character in ‘A Year at the French Farmhouse’ I hadn’t accidentally bought our French home on eBay).

Over time, I noticed a change in my own attitude to continental living. Taking a step back to look at my surroundings afresh, finding words to describe the old stone buildings, the beautiful backdrop of rolling countryside, the dancing diamonds of light that flicker across the beachside lake on a spring morning, helped to open my eyes once again to the beauty of the place I now call home.

I started to realise that not everyone gets to munch their morning cereal in front of uninterrupted countryside views, that most people aren’t raising children who can chatter away with ease in two languages. That walking to the patisserie in the morning, or choosing locally made cheeses from the weekly market, or spending time at one of the many lakes a stone’s throw from my front door is something that nobody should take for granted.

I also began to revisit some of the memories of my first years en France – the mishaps, misunderstandings and mayhem that comes with adjusting to a new language, a new culture. A culture in which jokes sometimes fall flat, where both humour and confusion can be created through mispronunciation or misunderstanding.

The time when I told my neighbour about a plumbing issue, but used a word more suited to a sexual act, or when I upset a restauranteur by asking for my steak ‘bien cuit’ (well done). The friends we’ve made, and their beautiful accents, the idiosyncratic mispronunciations that I’ll never correct because I love them (one friend says clothesies for clothes and I don’t want that ever to change).

Like a relationship that had settled into a rut, my life in France had become – to me, at least – ordinary. And sometimes, dull.

But writing the novel opened my eyes all over again and made me realise just how lucky I am.


HANK: France-blind. That is incomprehensible to me! But think about it, Reds and readers. What things in YOUR world would be fabulous and enthralling to a visitor? Have you forgotten wonderful things about your own life?

Or: tell us one wonderful thing about your memories, or imaginings, of France!

A YEAR AT THE FRENCH FARMHOUSE

A new direction for Gillian Harvey, author of Perfect on Paper and Everything is Fine! Escape to France with this warm, witty romantic read, A YEAR AT THE FRENCH FARMHOUSE.

After ten years of loyal service Lily Butterworth has been made redundant. Like any clever woman, she knows the cure to redundancy is a little too much wine and her best friend. Only the next morning, Lily has more than a hangover . . . she has a whole new house – in France! Seeing this as an opportunity instead of a disaster, she’s excited about finally moving to France, just as she and her husband always dreamed of.

However, Lily is in for another surprise. Despite planning to move there for over 20 years, her husband never actually intended to go. So begins a year in France, alone, renovating the gorgeous old farmhouse that is held together by wallpaper and wishes. Will a year at the French farmhouse be just what Lily needs? Or could it be the previous owner, Frederique, that is the answer to Lily’s dreams?

GILLIAN HARVEY
After graduating from university in 2000 with a degree in English literature, Gillian Harvey trained as a secondary school teacher. She worked in the profession until 2009, when she decided (on the spur of the moment) to move to France with husband Ray.

It was there she began working as a freelance writer and has since built a career writing features, opinion pieces and short stories for national titles including Woman’s Weekly, People’s Friend, the Independent, Guardian and Metro.

Gillian also works as a columnist for popular Writing Magazine, a role she has held since 2020. She was also a columnist for Prima Baby magazine (2015-16) and Living France magazine (2017-2019).

Gillian’s first novel ‘Everything is Fine’ was published in May 2020. Her second, ‘Perfect on Paper’ was published in May 2021 (both with Orion).

Her latest novel ‘A Year at the French Farmhouse’ is due for publication with Boldwood on 29 September 2022. 

Gillian lives in Limousin, France, with her husband and their five children.

Why I Love the Wild West

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Let me put it this way. The wild west may have saved my marriage.  That’s because whenever there is a western on TV, I can rely on the reality that Jonathan will be lost in it, absolutely lost in it, and I will be able to get in a few hours writing  and he will NEVER know that I am gone. 

Which I why when I saw the title of the fabulous Ryan Steck’s essay for today, I burst into  laughter.   (Even funnier because when Ryan’s book FIELDS OF FIRE arrived here the other day, Jonathan grabbed it, and now he’s lost in THAT!)

I will carefully tentatively say that “westerns” are kinda not my genre of choice.  They are—and I know this might sound silly—too sad. Know what I mean? But that’s just me.  And ”off the grid” to me means, um, well, where am I gonna plug stuff in? But that’s just me.

Anyway! We are so delighted to have Ryan here today—you all know him of course, from being the founder and editor in chief of the irresistible The Real Book Spy, the place to go for all things thriller! And more on that in a minute.

But first, hurray! We are celebrating Ryan’s debut novel. And, no matter if you are an aficionado of the wild West or more a city type, you’ll adore it.

So read on—-And I’ll give a copy of FIELDS OF FIRE to one lucky commenter! (But it won’t arrive by Pony Express.)

Why I Love the Wild West

by Ryan Steck

As The Real Book Spy, I have spent the last decade of my life covering the thriller genre, from authors to their characters, and thousands of new releases. I’ve had the pleasure of reading just about everything. Then again, most of that reading is for “work” rather than pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but even I need a break from the daily routine sometimes, and when I need that escape, there’s always one place I head for—the wild West. 

When it comes to the modern-day western, authors like C. J. Box and Craig Johnson have long been the gold standard. Now, though, we’re seeing a resurgence in such stories from Hollywood too, with shows like Yellowstone and 1883 dominating ratings charts, not to mention award shows. 

And as the western comes roaring back, fast becoming a mainstay in today’s pop culture fabric, I think it’s worth looking at why that is, and what it is about the West that people love so much. 

I can only speak for myself, but I think in today’s high-tech world of gadgets and electronics (I mean, we now have refrigerators that can provide weather forecasts and automobiles that can self-diagnose issues and order their own parts), one of the most appealing things about out West, or at least our perception of it, is that it provides a simpler way of living.

 In a world where most people can’t go two minutes without checking their iPhone or uploading pictures of their dinner plates to Instagram, there’s something so appealing about living off the land, disconnected from technology, where streetlights and skyscrapers don’t obscure the starry night sky. Peace and quiet, too—that’s something else most of us crave after being overly stimulated by the sights and sounds of city living. Is that part of the appeal? 

Then there’s the creative side of things. When I was preparing to transition from literary critic to author, I knew I needed a story and setting unlike anything I’d ever covered. So I chose to set Fields of Fire, my debut novel, in a small town smack-dab in the middle of Montana. All the reasons outlined above played into in that decision, but more important was the reality that those factors can create the perfect storm for plotting. 

For example, out West, backup doesn’t always exist, and if it does, the response time can be hours, not minutes. Likewise, tension can be heightened by the fact that when a character is out on their own, the stakes are raised considerably. A non-life-threatening injury becomes far more concerning when alone in the vastness that is the wild West. For me, the opportunity to take advantage of those things was a no-brainer. 

The allure of living off grid is a tantalizing one, and as the world continues to chug onward into the digital age, it makes sense that storytellers would look to the wild West, one of the only places that is both a slice of familiarity and a great unknown with limitless potential. And that is why I love it so much. 

What about you?  

HANK: Exactly, Reds and readers! How about you?  And hey, tell us what your favorite off-the-grid wide-open-spaces book or movie is. That would be fun to know!

And remember, a copy of the wonderful debut  FIELDS OF FIRE to one lucky commenter!

(And don't forget to check out The Real Book Spy!)

Ryan Steck is an editor, an author, and the founder and editor in chief of The Real Book Spy. Ryan has been named an "Online Influencer" by Amazon and is a regular columnist at CrimeReads. TheRealBookSpy.com has been endorsed by #1 New York Times bestselling authors Mark Greaney, C. J. Box, Kyle Mills, Daniel Silva, Brad Thor, and many others. A resident of Michigan, along with his wife and their six kids, Steck cheers on his beloved Detroit Tigers and Lions during the rare moments when he's not reading or talking about books on social media. 

Fields of Fire

A Matthew Redd Thriller

by Ryan Steck

“You know Ryan Steck as the Real Book Spy. Now, get to know him as the author of Fields of Fire, his debut thriller featuring Marine Raider Matthew Redd in a battle that will leave you speechless and begging for more. Lock and load!” —Jack Carr, Navy SEAL Sniper and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil’s Hand

Waiting to be deployed on a critical mission, elite Marine Raider Matthew Redd stops to help a stranger and wakes up hours later to learn his team was wiped out in an ambush. Unable to remember anything, Redd can’t deny the possibility that he’s somehow responsible for the information leak that led to the massacre. He’s given a deal to avoid a charge of treason, but it means walking away from the Corps and the life he loved.

As he faces his loss, Matty gets a cryptic message from his adoptive father, J. B.: “Trouble’s come knocking. . . . Might need your help.” He points his truck home to rural Montana, only to discover that J. B. is dead and the explanation for his death is far from satisfying. Determined to dig up the truth, Redd uncovers a dark global conspiracy with his hometown at the center and no team at his back—except one he might find among past friends, old enemies, and new allies, if he can figure out who to trust.

Get your copy here!