Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Amanda Usen | Mother Knows Best: How a Chef Became a Romance Writer
Author Guest / January 16, 2012

My mom often reminds me that I’ve always loved to cook. She also likes to remind me that every time she left me in charge of the kitchen, she had to call the plumber to clear the clogged sink afterwards – usually on a holiday. In fact, her plumber still talks about all the potato peels he unearthed from the drain the night I held my “Host a Murder” party in high school. (Sorry about that, Ma. I wish I could say I’ve learned a lot since then, but my husband would disagree, citing the great latke clog of 2008.) So take a budding cook who likes to write and always has a trashy romance novel hidden in her purse and send her to college…Pre-med. Ha! I switched my major to creative-writing faster than you could say calculus. However, I failed to write the literary short stories I longed to master. Every story I turned in was filled with post-adolescent lust and heartbreak, thinly disguised scenes from my own life. Even then, I was writing romance, and let me tell you, the group critiques of those babies were awkward, especially since I was usually dating someone in the class. Ouch!…