I’m pleased to announce the release of Fatewalker–book 2 of the Fatecarver series!
What will you become–woman, falcon or snake?
Kalish is a Fatewalker, chosen by the god Iskra to save her people and their enemies from a common threat. But how does a young woman who’s been banished by her own clan convince anyone to listen to her?
As her shape-shifting power grows, her influence does too, but Kalish’s personal goals—a home and a people she belongs to—seem as far away as ever.
Personal and societal struggles intertwine as Kalish and her followers grapple with the question, not of who they are, but of who they wish to become.
Book 2 of the Fatecarver trilogy is another action-packed fantasy, full of strong female characters and magic realism! Pick up your copy today and continue your adventure!
I can’t come home from the library without at least one cookbook. This week’s gem was Snacking Cakes by Yossey Arefi. The general premise of the book is cakes you can whip up with a whisk and one bowl. How could I resist?
There are 50 recipes in this book, and they’re not all just the same recipe with one ingredient changed. Along with standards like pineapple upside down cake and several different chocolate cakes, there are some intriguing and unusual ones.
My first foray into the book was Lemony Currant and Rosemary Cake. There are four teaspoons of chopped fresh rosemary in the cake (along with the obvious lemon and currants), and the top is sprinkled with sugar and coarse salt. The result is a delightful sweet/savoury combination that invites me to snitch a bit every time I walk through the kitchen.
I’d invest serious time in making a cake that tastes this good, and yet this cake mixed up in just a few minutes. The return on investment is huge!
I can’t wait to try some of the other cakes—Salty Caramel Peanut Butter, Oatmeal Chocolate Chip, Powdered Donut, Buttered Walnut, Grapefruit White Chocolate, and Coconut Lime Cake all sound fabulous. The speed at which these cake can be made, I could make a different one every day after work!
Some of the notes about this story I’ve been scribbling over two years.
There’s a live Arlo Guthrie album (I can’t remember which one) in which he’s talking between songs, and at some point he says, “I know I’m supposed to be singing. But you can’t always do what you’re supposed to do.” To which the audience roars approval.
It’s true. You can’t always do what you’re supposed to do.
The second Fatecarver book (Fatewalker) is with the editor, and I really should be working on book 3 if I want to keep the books in the series coming out at a reasonable pace for my readers.
But a couple of weeks ago when I sat down to start book 2, a different book began pouring out of my fingers onto the keyboard.
It was like a flash flood. Within a few days, 15,000 words of a book I shouldn’t be spending time on right now had flowed out. I gave in and have let it flow. I don’t even have a title for the story, which has been kicking around in my head since New Zealand’s first Covid lockdown in 2020, but it’s already over a third written.
Here’s the gist of the story. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you. If things carry on this way, it won’t be long before I can.
Alex Blackburn has inherited all her Grandmother’s possessions. And all her secrets.
When she discovers an ancient book on summoning spirits among Gran’s books, she … sort of accidentally summons one of them.
It’s three metres long and looks like a centipede.
And it’s just eaten Gran’s dog.
She drags Gran’s neighbour, Shelby, into the drama because the book came from his great-great-great-grandmother. Alex can’t work out how to get rid of the demon, but maybe Shelby’s inherited some of his ancestor’s ability with magic.
Or maybe he’s just terrified of centipedes.
While the demon munches its way through the neighbourhood pets, Alex and Shelby scramble to find a way to send it back to where it came from before it …
Has babies.
This fantasy set in small-town New Zealand will have you sitting on the edge of your seat (while checking underneath it for centipedes), and cheering on Alex and Shelby as they bumble their way around magic and each other.
I have a kitchen full of bakeware—muffin tins, mini-muffin tins, individual mini tart pans, specialised slice pans, a set of tiered cake pans, square tins, round tins, heart-shaped cake tins … the list goes on and on.
But until two weeks ago, I did not own a Bundt pan.
This icon of 1970s baking somehow never ended up in my kitchen. Every time I came across a recipe calling for a Bundt pan, I just used two loaf pans. And of course that worked just fine.
But I still wanted a whimsical, circular tube pan.
For a while, I did have an angel food cake pan—a beaten-up old aluminium one that tended to leak out of the removable bottom, due to a ding it suffered at some point. That pan vanished in a clean out some time ago. Last I used it was for my daughter’s birthday 12 years ago, when she asked for a ‘flower’ cake—I stuck a vase of fresh flowers in the middle, which she thought was pretty. (She was only 6 then, and hadn’t yet learned to ask for crazy impossible things like octopus cakes, or alpine vegetation cakes).
My first Bundt cake ever, made last weekend, was a chocolate coconut pound cake. I was intrigued with how glossy the cake appeared—a product of the brand-new non-stick interior, no doubt.
I normally wouldn’t ice pound cake, but the Bundt shape begs for it. The result looked a bit like an iced turd. But it was every bit as delicious as the same cake baked in loaf pans.
I’m tickled with my new Bundt pan, and looking forward to more delicious iced turds. 🙂
Robinne Weiss 