Pinky's Book Link

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

What to Feed a Fussy Guest!


We have a guest staying at the Poinker menagerie. It’s a human for a change.

Scotto’s sister, my sister-in-law Maz; a prolific political blogger, a published poet, a fiction/nonfiction writer and a freelance editor who has worked on entire books! Like… a WHOLE book! A real book published on PAPER!

Can you imagine how exciting that is for Pinky? Finally, an educated, qualified mind to pick and irritate with incessant, vapid questions like, “What if I can’t think of a good ending to my book? Can it end by the protagonist waking up and it was all a dream?”

“Would you like to read the first chapter of the novel I’m writing?” I coyly asked my literary pinup girl, a mere sixty seconds after she walked in the door after an uncomfortable three and a half week flight up from Melbourne.

Naturally, I was hoping for an ecstatic review and overwhelming praise.

I watched like a hawk as she read it and sat with my toes curling up in my Ugg boots. They squirmed like nervous, knobbly worms and I salivated in anticipation; twitching like a headless chook anxiously awaiting her reaction to my carefully crafted baloney.

“Ah! That was a surprise,” she coolly commented when she arrived at the theatrically spectacular denouement of my Magnum Opus. 


I stared in muted veneration.

“You might like to delete some of those adverbs though.” Maz augmented her literary critique with the final crushing blow.

“But… but… I love adverbs,” I bleated. “They’re my main thing.”

“Kill your adverbs with malice of forethought,” she murmured commandingly (and with what I thought was a bit of unnecessary malice of her own… speaking from a personal viewpoint, just sayin’).

“I do use too many adverbs…” I acknowledged gloomily, dejectedly and forlornly… and a bit sorrowfully, if I’m being perfectly honest.

But the advantageous aspect is…I think having Maz here will improve two things; my writing and my cooking. Constructive criticism has never killed anyone, has it?

You see… Maz doesn’t like mince. And mince forms the unimaginative, featureless flagship of all my recipes.

So now I have to investigate other forms of meat. Like baby lambs and beef and pigs and other cute furry animals.

I do prefer to cook with mince because as we all know mince doesn’t come from animals. And it’s cheap.

Mind you… my kids complain about the lack of variety at dinner time as well so it’s probably about time I shook things up.

But at least I know, when the chips are down, someone likes my Spaghetti Bolognese.


                                     Ermahgerd!!!!

Linking up with Grace at With Some Grace