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  • 06.06.13
    Why Pickling Can’t Solve Everything
    On Writing

    Why Pickling Can’t Solve Everything

    or, How to Bait a Trap for Yourself by Eli Brown In Cinnamon and Gunpowder, the narrator, chef Owen Wedgwood, is kidnapped by a pirate and forced to cook for her on her ship. Despite the paucity of ingredients, his meals must delight her or she’ll kill him. Even in early drafts, I was tickled by this tension. Soon, though, I saw that in trying to hook the reader, I had set a trap for myself. What had been an interesting challenge for one of my characters had now become a daily challenge for me. How to make pie crust with half-melted lard? How to make bread without clean water or yeast? What could a dessert taste like when the only sweet handy is gritty honey? If I cheated and made the puzzle easy to solve, one of the chief dramatic pillars of the novel would crumble. I was in for a struggle.

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