Guest Post - Maia Chance

Maia Chance is a new author who is hitting the scene with two series.  First up is this Fairy Tale Fatal series with Penguin Prime Crime and second, The Discreet Retrieval Agency, is with St. Martin's press and won't be released until 2015.  Ms. Chance is a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle, where she shakes a killer martini, grows a mean radish, and bakes mocha bundts to die for.

Please welcome Maia to our M&MM!

Series Result of Procrastinating on Homework

When people ask me where I got the idea for Snow White Red-Handed, I’m not sure where to start. I can say with certainty, however, that the entire Fairy Tale Fatal series began as a self-indulgent, irresponsible project.

Yes. Call it Escape from Academic Drudgery. Charge me as guilty for writing an entire novel as a way to procrastinate on my homework.

This is what happened: I’ve always been fascinated with fairy tales, so when I had the chance to pick my texts for a freshman comp class I was teaching, I decided to use fairy tales and fairy tale criticism as a way to help my students learn to write about literature. So I had fairy tales on the brain, big time. The next thing I knew, the fairy tale stuff had cross-pollinated in the back of my mind with the nineteenth-century American literature texts I was reading in preparation for my PhD qualifying exams. Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman . . . yeah. How the heck does that crowd mix with fairy tales? But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I’ve always loved stories with outsider protagonists, and a Yankee girl in the Black Forest sounded like a book I wanted to read. So I decided to write it. Kind of for fun. And as a way to procrastinate on grading student papers and chewing through that pesky PhD reading list.

Once I got started writing and researching Snow White Red-Handed, other things worked their way into the story. Some of them are personal. For instance, my heroine Ophelia Flax is a variety hall actress, and one of my great-grandmothers was a singer on the variety hall stage.

Other personal ingredients are the Baden-Baden and Heidelberg settings. When I was in college, I spent two summers in Heidelberg working as an orchestral violinist in Heidelberg’s Castle Festival, and I traveled a couple of times to Baden-Baden on my days off.

Baden-Baden has a simply amazing thermal spa, by the way, if you aren’t averse to getting whacked on the rear after your scrubbing has been completed by a muscly attendant. Seriously. I was enchanted by the area, and it evidently left its mark on my imagination. I even have a recurring dream of hiking to a castle inhabited by elves, hidden on a mountain above Heidelberg. There is a story to that, and no, it doesn’t involve a psychotherapist. Although maybe it should.

Another personal inspiration: I’ve always had a secret crush on the composer Johannes Brahms, and Brahms spent a lot of time in Baden-Baden. In fact, even though the hero of Snow White Red-Handed, Professor Penrose, is British, I picture him like the young Brahms, plus spectacles.

Okay, so I had this amazing setting that I’d always been in love with, a hero who looks like the young Brahms, and the fruitfully absurd concept of a practical Yankee variety hall actress who finds herself in the patently impractical land of German fairy tales. Add a castle, a murder, and a cast of shifty characters, plus a hapless friend for Ophelia by the name of Prue, and off I went.

There were times, I’ll admit, when writing Snow White Red-Handed seemed like a lot more work than just doing my homework and grading my students’ papers, by golly. The historical research was time consuming, though once I found Mark Twain’s two travelogues The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, things got smoother. Getting my characters’ speech to sound historical without confusing twenty-first century readers was also tricky (fingers crossed that I pulled it off). Oh, and then there was the little issue called the mystery plot. Tangled, indeed.

In the end, though, Snow White Red-Handed almost miraculously turned out as that book I’d wanted to read: an unexpected, frivolous, magical, adventurous, and romantic romp. I am so delighted that Berkley Prime Crime picked up my Fairy Tale Fatal series, and I hope readers will enjoy escaping into the mysterious woods of the nineteenth century as much as I did.

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THANK You Ms. Chance for that delightful blog post.  

If you are needing a little something different this year in your Thanksgiving feast, consider a different take on your cranberries.  Try this delicious Cranberry Orange Bread, which is a sure fire crowd-pleaser.

Cranberry Orange Bread

Ingredients
    
     2 cups all-purpose flour
    1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
    1/2 teaspoon baking soda
    1/2 teaspoon salt
    1 tablespoon grated orange zest
    1 1/2 cups fresh cranberries
    1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
    1/4 cup margarine, softened
    1 cup white sugar
    1 egg
    3/4 cup orange juice

Directions
    Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x5 inch loaf pan. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir in orange zest, cranberries, and pecans. Set aside.

    In a large bowl, cream together margarine, sugar, and egg until smooth. Stir in orange juice. Beat in flour mixture until just moistened. Pour into prepared pan.

    Bake for 1 hour in the preheated oven, or until the bread springs back when lightly touched. Let stand 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool. Wrap in plastic when completely cool.

    Pour a 1/2 cup glaze of orange juice, powdered sugar, & vanilla over the loaf while it is still in the pan--just adds another layer of flavor to an already great mix of tart & sweet.  

Originally from AllRecipes.com