Good morning and welcome to my inaugural blog post.

If you’re here, it’s already too late. You’re reading this. I have readers. I’m an everlasting opening act, a juggler who keeps dropping flaming torches into the audience, but the doors are locked and the lights are dimmed, so you might as well go along with it. Better to happily suffer the inevitable.

Anyway! It’s been a long, difficult road to get here (think: Louisiana roads) but The Time Walker is published and I’m now the painfully self-conscious creator of two novels buried within unpopular genre. My little brother is currently halfway through reading one of the many proof copies I have on hand, and I caught him chuckling to himself yesterday, which is the highest praise I could have ever hoped for. If this books flops, at least I will have achieved this: impressing a teenage boy with my wit.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve gotten your hands on The Time Walker. If you’ve done that, chances are that you’ve read the author’s note, and you already know where the story came from and a bit about the Louisiana-quality road I walked to the anticlimactic finishing line of self-publication. Cheers.

I wrote that note over a pint of Inch’s cider at a little pub called the Machair in Glasgow. I had just finished baking school, and I was staying with my older sister for a few weeks between work placements in Cardiff and Edinburgh. It was 5:00 PM and the Machair was mostly-empty. We sat in a booth with our laptops and irreparably threw off the vibe of the whole establishment. This was the week before Easter Sunday. It was also three days before I hopped a train to East Lothian for a job interview.

Here’s everything that’s happened since I wrote that.

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If you didn’t know this before, I’m a baker. In my books (hahaha) there are two kinds of bakers: 1) cupcakes & powdered sugar & bake sales & bad piping skills, and 2) blood, sweat, tears, & bread. I think once I was the former, but I’ve grown to detest the moment of tension when I am forced to admit my profession and the person who has the misfortunate to converse with me says something to the tune of “Oh, my friend’s a baker—she has a cupcake decor business”. Excuse me while I dash out my brains with this dowel. It’s akin to mistaking a violist for a violinist (God forbid).

Even if I once engaged in gloopy buttercream and Betty Crocker, I am now the latter of the two baking types. I went to baking school, where the three food groups were bread, bread, and Stichelton cheese. I spent 6+ months on a rural estate in the East Midlands of England, somewhere near Sheffield. Welbeck is a sprawling property on the edge of the Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. It’s home to pheasant, miles of secret tunnels, and the School of Artisan Food. The baking diploma program takes 18 students per year. That’s a dangerously small group to spend 6+ months together.

I lived in a stone cottage called Grotto. When we weren’t baking, we were walking around the woods and exploring secluded trails near the white stag farm on the estate. We drank yeasty beers at the Welbeck Brewery next-door and beat paths to the Cresswell Crags, where a mining site was converted into a cave-painting tourist attraction which has been reduced to a grand title for a dog-walking path.

17 students (one wasn’t able to make it), all different nationalities (Canadian, Korean, Ecuadorean) and ages (20-70), in close proximity for 6+ months. What could go wrong?

This sounds like the buildup to a novel. Don’t worry, I’m very aware of that. I said it multiple times. To be exact, I announced several times that this setting and the Z-list actors cast in this particular season of my life seemed like food for a murder mystery. Word got around. By mid-year, a few people knew I was a writer, but most didn’t know I’d actually published anything. Regardless, we started changing people’s names and deciding who got offed in my imaginary best-seller.

The Welbeck Murder Mystery is actually half-written. Is it any good? No. But it’s got enough material for whenever I feel it’s time to finish the story: material gathered along mossy winter paths walled with gnarled roots and craggy stone; standing in the middle of a pitch-black tunnel textured with bulbous sea urchin carvings; sitting at my desk in a bedroom scarcely the size of a closet, staring into the backyard at packs of posh, protected pheasant crowding the Forbidden Road to the Welbeck Abbey.

I’ve got it in my back pocket. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly aware that this is writing material.

———

People I haven’t seen in months or years greet me with “You just got back from culinary school in London, right?”

You’ll understand that I don’t correct them. The truth is a bit more difficult to explain.

Following a final assessment (8 hours of solo baking resulting in about 40kg-worth of 5 different breads), I set out for Wales for a 2-week placement at a bakery outside Cardiff. I stayed in an Airbnb in a mining town. The Airbnb title was “Luxury Cabin — Actually Just a Shed in the Garden”. I am not making that up.

I stayed in this converted hot-tub shed for 2 weeks, battling a large, grumpy turkey the hosts called their pet. The turkey’s name was Humphrey. We did not get along. During this time I followed the bakery owners on a fantastic tour of what southern Wales had to offer: hiking and rain and a day-trip to Bristol bakeries.

From Cardiff I traveled to Glasgow with my entire life in suitcases and tote bags. I stayed with my older sister for a few weeks, before my next slew of placements began. (If you don’t know Claudia: my older sister lives and works in Scotland, where she earned her Master’s in Traditional Music from the school where David Tennant and Colin Morgan studied acting. This is her claim to fame.)

During this time, we went to the Machair. I wrote the author’s note for The Time Walker. The manuscript was in the hands of beta readers, and I was anxious and aimless waiting for the feedback.

During this time, I also had a job interview and trial shift scheduled. I wanted to stay in the UK, preferably in Scotland near my sister. On a Wednesday at 6:00 AM, I hopped a train to Edinburgh, and then a long, bumpy bus to East Linton. The interview went well. I loved the bakery. Three days later, I got the job.

I was still anxious.

I migrated to Edinburgh—my favorite city in the world—and stayed with some friends of my sister’s for 2 weeks while I staged with an insufferable French baker, and then with one of the loveliest groups of bakery people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. I walked a lot and consumed a lot of Meal Deals, read in the Royal Botanical Gardens and beat a trail through the Old Town.

I went back to Glasgow and awaited my flight back to Tallahassee. I’d accepted the bakery job, but I needed to wade through the visa process, and I needed to do that from the other side of the Atlantic.

So I went home.

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Beta reader comments came back. Amidst jet-lag and a part-time baking job, I finished editing The Time Walker, jumped on formatting, and started ordering proof copies.

I guess you know the rest.

As of now, I’m still in the middle of the visa process. It’s taking a bit longer than any of us anticipated, but I’ve got a job waiting for me back in Scotland. I’ve got a copy of my second novel in my hands. It’s a lot of words and a lot of milky white pages that probably should have been off-white or cream, but it’s the story that brought me home to the gentle place that is my writing reverie; characters and dialogue and snippets of plot that have clung to me across the years, the foreign cities, and all the strangers I’ve wrestled into friend-shaped boxes (or, alternatively, the friend-shaped boxes I’ve stubbornly bent into the shape of inevitably temporary acquaintances).

On June 27th, the day The Time Walker was released, I sat down and reopened a document from months prior. The story needs some work. It rambles. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’s got much direction, and the fickle god who crafted these chapters seems like she was sleep-deprived or chaotically emotional when she wrote that one line.

Welcome to the show. The program was crafted by idiots. They forgot to tell you that this act—the first act—the opener—is in fact the only act. My torches have gone out. I take a bow (I’ve burnt off some of my own hair, see?). The audience sparkles with anxious sweat and claps out relieved applause into a dank theater.

Thanks for coming to the show! Don’t forget to tip your waitress.