Favourite comfort foods and why

Long and Short Reviews have a great topic this week – comfort foods. I am not a cook, so recipes are not my forte (if it’s more complicated than “put it in the oven” it tends not to happen) but I’m as fond of comfort food as the next person, and the advantage is that it’s usually straightforward and easy to make.

My favourite comfort food is mashed potato. Possibly this stems from many a happy Saturday evening meal of my mother’s cottage pie, which I still say is the best cottage pie ever invented. I make it with a small amount of milk and lots of butter, and mash it just enough to remove the lumps while still giving it texture – I know MasterChef likes you to whip it, but I don’t like it too smooth.

As a Brit, I also love to sit down to a fish and chip dinner. I like the chips greasy, with plenty of vinegar and mushy peas over the top, and the batter needs to be crunchy – far too often I end up with soggy batter. I’ve just moved house so haven’t yet found out if the nearest chippy is decent, but I’ll be rectifying that shortly.

And to finish off, I love honeycomb cheesecake. The English Cheesecake Company do an amazing one which is also big enough to fill an entire shelf of the fridge. Chocolate-coated honeycomb and creamy cheesecake – what more could you ask for?

So what are your favourite comfort foods?

Favourite websites, podcasts or blogs

This topic from Long and Short Reviews was a tricky one. I don’t listen to any podcasts and don’t follow a lot of blogs. I do, however, have a number of favourite websites, so I have those to fall back on.

Until fairly recently my favourite website of all time was Etiquette Hell, which had a blog section to post etiquette fails and also a forum to discuss everyone’s experiences. Last year the forum closed; I still read the blogs, but my primary attention has migrated to Bad Manners And Brimstone, a newly created forum for people who still want to discuss etiquette questions and bemoan stories of rudeness in today’s society. For anyone who has been pissed off by someone yelling on their phone behind them on the bus, or who has witnessed an appallingly rude customer swearing at a hapless shop clerk, this is the place for you.

Similar to this is Customers Suck, a forum primarily for customer service workers who have to deal with rude people every day. Despite the title, it’s not a place for people to brag about how badly they treat their customers – people who try that get short shrift. It is, however, a haven for people who have been given abuse by someone who wanted the sale price for a shirt that wasn’t in the sale.

My other favourite for relaxation is, unsurprisingly, Facebook, but primarily for two games that I love to play. Criminal Case is a found-objects game with a plotline where you are a detective solving murders and uncovering conspiracies along the way. I could play that all day, as I could SongPop, a game of guessing the songs and artists from brief clips.

So what are your favourites?

Characters I Want to Meet

The main problem I had with this topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was narrowing it down. Nearly every time I read a good book I find a character I want to meet.

However, the first time I can remember feeling this way was when I read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Hari Seldon, the inventor of psychohistory, is a highly intelligent and also highly charismatic character, able to present a fascinating area of study in an interesting way. I particularly enjoyed him in Prelude to Foundation, where he is shown as a young man, ably fighting off attackers with martial arts and charming Dors Venabili, the woman who would become his wife.

My favourite female characters, on the other hand, are Cassandra Mortmain and Emma Woodhouse. Cassandra, of I Capture the Castle, is a writer and acute observer of people, capable of feeling intensely while also flawed enough to make her human. And Emma, of Jane Austen fame, is equally flawed but also equally witty and intelligent. I love watching her try to matchmake other people while being blissfully unaware of her own heart.

Of course, as a writer myself, I often find myself writing characters I want to meet. So I’ll finish off with my favourite hero Ash Drake from The Hand He Dealt. 

Tall, blond and athletic, Ash initially presents as a stereotypical meathead, a college football player who knows his way around women. But as my heroine Astra gets to know him, she finds a passionate and exciting man underneath.

So which characters would you like to meet?

A Day in My Life

This topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was a tricky one because, as a writer, you would probably expect me to say that I write all day. I’m deeply envious of writers who can do this, but I have a day job, so I can’t.

On weekdays I am a debt advisor, so I spend most of my day attempting to reassure clients who are understandably worried about their debts. My evenings, at the moment, vary a little because I am in the middle of moving house – we haven’t sold the old house yet so I will probably make at least one trip to collect a box or two of stuff to bring back to our new place. On nights when we don’t do this I will write for an hour and then spend the rest of my time with a can of Strongbow catching up on junk television and reading on my Kindle.

On weekends I will write for a few hours, then if the weather’s good my husband and I will go out somewhere with his camera so he can photograph wildlife or get high altitude aeroplane shots. In the evenings I’m likely to put a film on – I have dozens saved on my V+ box and usually have a few on rental as well. I love horror, but I also enjoy historicals, action films and biopics, so we have a wide range of options in our blu-ray rack.

So how do you like to spend your day?

Favourite Hobby and Why

This topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was an interesting one. I’m not a person who does arts and crafts or sports, so my idea of a hobby was always going to be less practical and more sedentary. What do I like to do in my spare time?

The cinema.

A lot of people will say that dinner and a film is an unimaginative date, but seeing films at the cinema is one of my favourite things to do. There’s something about the experience of watching a film on the big screen – the atmosphere, the darkness, the surround sound – that I absolutely love. I’ll see almost anything, although I’m not a lover of comedy (apart from Blazing Saddles). Action, historical, biopics – and of course horror.

Horror films are my guilty pleasure. Other than torture porn, I’ll watch any kind of horror and probably enjoy it. I particularly love paranormal horror, as there’s something about the paranormal that fascinates me – I’ve even been on paranormal investigations, although I highly doubt I’ll ever see anything real. But watching a really good horror that scares you out of your skin is something I absolutely love.

So what are your favourite hobbies?

Fictional Worlds I'd Rather Not Visit

This topic from Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was an interesting one. I’ve read a lot of dystopian fiction and have, on occasion, found myself staring at the book thinking “You know, this doesn’t actually sound that bad.”

Take the “Uglies” series, for instance. The concept there is that teenagers are classified as Uglies until a certain age (16 or 17, I can’t remember which) when they are given extensive surgery to make them manga-inspired Pretties, at which point they move to New Pretty Town and spend the next couple of decades partying with their pretty friends. Sounds fine to me. The characters want to remain Ugly on principle, especially when they discover that Pretties also have brain surgery to make them more docile, but even with that I found myself thinking I’d be quite happy to go ahead.

However, if you take something like “The Hunger Games”, that’s a world I’d like to stay away from. A corrupt government who pits children against each other for entertainment and makes half the population live in poverty? Definitely one to avoid.

And the other one that I would hate to visit? “Matched”. This is a series about a controlled society where the powers that be choose your partner for you and everything is limited – they only have one hundred songs, one hundred stories, one hundred poems and so forth. The matching of a partner is one thing – it seems to work out OK for a lot of the characters. But only having one hundred stories? I could work through those in the space of a year.

So which fictional worlds would you avoid?

What to read to learn about the Princes in the Tower

This week’s topic in Long and Short Reviews’ blog hop was a tough one. While I write erotic romance, I don’t read a lot about it, so that was off the table. The main subject I read about is history, and my favourite era is the Wars of the Roses. So my best topic is probably Richard III and the Princes in the Tower.

It's a part of history that always fascinated me. What really happened to the Princes? Were they killed? Did they escape? Who was responsible? History, of course, is written by the winners. What if the official line wasn't actually the case?

I didn’t know much on the subject until I read Bertram Fields’ “Royal Blood”. This was the first Ricardian take on the Princes in the Tower I had ever heard of. Most historians, over the years, have followed the Tudor line and blamed Richard III for their disappearance – but what if it wasn’t him? Fields comes up with numerous suggestions, the primary one being Henry VII, who scoured the Tower immediately upon taking the throne. He seemed very sure they were dead – so did he do it?

A good background comes from “The Mythology of the Princes in the Tower” by John Ashdown-Hill, but a particularly interesting take is “The Survival of the Princes in the Tower” by Matthew Lewis. Their survival, or at least of one of them, has been discussed before since Perkin Warbeck attempted to take the throne, claiming to be Prince Richard. But Lewis suggests that the Princes never died in the Tower and were hidden away to live out full lives in hiding.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. The bones which were found in the Tower are highly unlikely to ever be tested for DNA. But it’s an interesting idea.

So what do you like to read?