Jordan Castillo Price talks about ... food and sex
I'm very (very) excited to welcome Jordan Castillo Price to the blog today. She's on a blog tour, sharing with us the fascinating details of her writing process and also her thrilling new novel The Starving Years. I've been following Jordan's work since I first fell in love with her Channeling Morpheus - Payback cover (how shallow am I??) but it's the writing I fell in love with. For me, it's the rich, evocative, beautifully balanced prose, the vivid and *dangerously* sexy characters, and a combination of wit and plausibility in some seriously UN-real situations! And the subject of today's post emphasises one of her themes that I've really taken to heart as an author in the past.
Also to note: Jordan is the keynote speaker at this year's UK Meet for GLBTQ readers / writers / reviewers / fans in September. Come and meet new and existing friends in a lovely venue - and hear Jordan speak :). All the details of the programme, location, sponsors and attendees, and how to book are HERE.
And now, I'll take my squeeing fangirl off to a small quiet corner, and let you hear from Jordan herself ...:)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Food is a lot like sex.
When people ask me what my secret is to making my sex scenes memorable and unique, I tell them that when I write a sex scene, there’s one thing in the forefront of my mind: what that scene is about. Because the poking and prodding and licking and fondling and whatever other hijinks the characters in that scene get up to? That’s not what the scene is about. Not at all. It’s about the subtext, the stuff that’s going on beneath the surface.
It occurred to me that writing about food is like that, too. Because scenes that involve food are not about the food itself. Rather, the food is there to showcase or augment the characterization, the worldbuilding, and sometimes even the plot.
My latest novel, The Starving Years, takes place in a society where a superfood called manna was invented fifty years ago, and that superfood wiped out hunger. Manna is a gelatinous block of alfalfa-cheese flavored to taste like mint, mushroom, chocolate, almond, or whatever other flavors might entice a jaded buying public. Manna didn’t become popular because it was yummy, though. It displaced most of the other food sources in the world simply because it was cheap.
Here’s a snippet of a scene where the characters settle down to eat, and they find a manna stash to dig into.
“Park Avenue manna,” Tim said. “How’s that?”
“I don’t remember you having that fancy-schmantzy stuff in your truck,” Randy said.
“I didn’t. I don’t. I’d never pay so much for…it was here. In the upper cabinet.”
“What flavor?” Randy drawled. “Truffles or caviar?”
“Eggplant tapenade.”
“Shit. I was just kidding.”
Since the last time Nelson had found an opportunity to sample French Cuisine was in grad school (Advanced Palate #506), and since he hadn’t had anything at all to eat since Tim had offered him a bland slab of uncooked rice-flavored manna in the truck, he was struck by a sudden and profound desire to find out exactly what tapenade-flavored manna tasted like. Even if it really was nothing at all like olives, just some food chemist’s weird approximation, as so many flavors of manna were. “I’m game. Slice it up, Tim.”
Here, the focus of the scene is not what they’re eating, but rather a way of demonstrating their personalities by the way they interact with the food. Randy is skeptical of it and later doesn’t care for the way it tastes. His personality is a basic kind of guy’s guy. Tim is eager to serve the food and he takes over the role of putting together the meal. His deal is that he gets off on taking care of people. And I get some extra mileage from Nelson here, since he’s currently the point-of-view character. The context in which Nelson places manna is different. Manna means more deep things to him, since he’s a food scientist and manna is his specialty. He’s eager to taste it, and whether or not he will enjoy it is irrelevant to him. He’s in it for the experience.
Not everyone’s willing to jump on the manna bandwagon, though. Here’s a passage where the characters are approaching Chinatown:
Despite the fact that the immigrants here lived in apartment buildings rather than corrugated metal lean-tos, the third-world smell wasn’t that different from the shantytowns of Caracas. Piss and garbage. Smoke. Fish. The fish bodies rolled in on trucks filled with ice in the wee hours of the morning, where they were traded in the back rooms of the jewelry exchanges and the bail bonds shops. Manna might be nearly as cheap as its packaging, but that didn’t mean the older refugees ate it. The food of their culture was all that remained of their identities. Ironic, when those who stayed behind in Asia were now subsisting on rice-flavored manna.
This passage functions in a number of ways. It sets the current scene: you can feel (or, more accurately, smell) the chilly pre-dawn aroma of New York’s Chinatown. But it also says something about the point-of-view character, Javier. It reminds him of Caracas, so it’s implied that he’s well-traveled. He has a sense of what’s going on in Asia, so we can see that he’s aware of the current conditions in other countries and cultures. And he also has a sense of how the immigrants are sourcing their exotic foods, in a way that demonstrates he’s also street-smart.
The mere presence of absence of certain foods can tell you a lot about a character. In this scene, Tim’s neighbors have requested a few pounds of manna to tide them over until the closed grocery stores re-open.
[Tim says] “Grab some of the perishable stuff out of the fridge.”
Javier picked up the partially thawed veg-o-mix from the arm of the recliner to put it back in the freezer. He’d expected to find ice cube trays, frozen meals, maybe some ice-dream. But Tim’s freezer was stacked with boxes, plain boxes labeled protein + mineral in English, Spanish, French, and Korean. The ice cube caddy was stocked with first aid kits.
The single pocket of recognizable food was mostly plain, flash-frozen vegetables. Javier tucked the veg-o-mix into a gap among the other plastic bags and quietly closed the freezer door. He looked at Tim. Tim had leaned in so close to the monitor he could practically lick it. His eyes tracked back and forth as he watched code scroll past.
Javier took the opportunity to peek into one of the cupboards.
Completely filled, top to bottom. More plain brown boxes, these stamped in some Arabic-looking languages, and French. 5-year complete protein. No wonder Tim only had two mugs. There wasn’t room for any more. Javier eased open another cupboard, this one bursting with a bank of canned manna with once-colorful labels, now faded, the text possibly in Chinese. He couldn’t tell what the contents were supposed to be, even by the pictures-cubes of jiggling off-white manna, awash in a bath of syrup, with birds and lotus flowers dancing around the dripping spoonfuls.
“In the fridge,” Tim prompted. “Something that looks, y’know…normal.”
In terms of worldbuilding, this survey of various types of manna (and some minimal vegetable presence) functions to demonstrate what sorts of manna are typically available, as well as what would be considered weird (in this case, the canned manna.) The word “cream” has been dropped from the name of the frozen dessert, as dairy products are now prohibitively costly to produce, and so over the past five decades, people have lost the taste for real dairy and prefer their imitation manna counterparts instead.
The personalities of the characters involved are advanced by the scene, too. Javier is the point-of-view character in this scene. The fact that he’s poking through Tim’s refrigerator and cupboards shows that he doesn’t know Tim well, he’s curious, and doesn’t think it’s below him to snoop around. Tim’s background is evident in the sorts of strange foods he has amassed-survivalist, or hoarder, or a bit of each? And then that lovely bit of self-awareness emerges, where Tim admits to Javier that he knows his food stash is far from “normal.”
What are some of the most memorable appearances of food in fiction you can recall? And more importantly, what did you take away from those instances that wasn’t about the food at all?
EDITED TO ADD: Jordan is offering a free copy of The Starving Years to one commenter from today. I'll draw the winner over the weekend :)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jordan Castillo Price is the author of the PsyCop series and the owner of JCP Books LLC. She writes paranormal, horror and thriller novels from her isolated and occasionally creepy home in rural Wisconsin. Connect with Jordan in the following places:
JordanCastilloPrice.com
JCP Books: Jordans online bookstore
JCP News,Jordan's monthly newsletter
Facebook: Jordan's fanpage
PsyCop fanpage
Jordan's LiveJournal blog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Starving Years
Imagine a world without hunger. In 1960, a superfood was invented that made starvation a thing of the past. Manna, the cheaply manufactured staple food, is now as ubiquitous as salt in the world’s cupboards, pantries and larders.
Nelson Oliver knows plenty about manna. He’s a food scientist-according to his diploma, that is. Lately, he’s been running the register at the local video rental dive to scrape together the cash for his exorbitantly priced migraine medication.
In a job fair gone bad, Nelson hooks up with copywriter Javier and his computer-geek pal Tim, who whisks them away from the worst of the fiasco in his repurposed moving truck. At least, Nelson thinks those two are acquainted, but they’re acting so evasive about it, he’s not sure how they know each other, exactly.
Javier is impervious to Nelson’s flirting, and Tim’s name could appear in the dictionary under the entry for “awkward.” And with a riot raging through Manhattan and yet another headache coming on, it doesn’t seem like Nelson will get an answer anytime soon. One thing’s for sure, the tension between the three of them is thick enough to cut with a knife...even one of those dull plastic dealies that come in the package with Mannariffic EZ-Mealz.
Read the first chapter of this fast-paced m/m/m thriller and BUY at http://jcpbooks.com/ebook/starving.htm
[Clare: it's my No, #1, impatiently-awaited holiday read over Easter!]
Also to note: Jordan is the keynote speaker at this year's UK Meet for GLBTQ readers / writers / reviewers / fans in September. Come and meet new and existing friends in a lovely venue - and hear Jordan speak :). All the details of the programme, location, sponsors and attendees, and how to book are HERE.
And now, I'll take my squeeing fangirl off to a small quiet corner, and let you hear from Jordan herself ...:)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Food is a lot like sex.
When people ask me what my secret is to making my sex scenes memorable and unique, I tell them that when I write a sex scene, there’s one thing in the forefront of my mind: what that scene is about. Because the poking and prodding and licking and fondling and whatever other hijinks the characters in that scene get up to? That’s not what the scene is about. Not at all. It’s about the subtext, the stuff that’s going on beneath the surface.
It occurred to me that writing about food is like that, too. Because scenes that involve food are not about the food itself. Rather, the food is there to showcase or augment the characterization, the worldbuilding, and sometimes even the plot.
My latest novel, The Starving Years, takes place in a society where a superfood called manna was invented fifty years ago, and that superfood wiped out hunger. Manna is a gelatinous block of alfalfa-cheese flavored to taste like mint, mushroom, chocolate, almond, or whatever other flavors might entice a jaded buying public. Manna didn’t become popular because it was yummy, though. It displaced most of the other food sources in the world simply because it was cheap.
Here’s a snippet of a scene where the characters settle down to eat, and they find a manna stash to dig into.
“Park Avenue manna,” Tim said. “How’s that?”
“I don’t remember you having that fancy-schmantzy stuff in your truck,” Randy said.
“I didn’t. I don’t. I’d never pay so much for…it was here. In the upper cabinet.”
“What flavor?” Randy drawled. “Truffles or caviar?”
“Eggplant tapenade.”
“Shit. I was just kidding.”
Since the last time Nelson had found an opportunity to sample French Cuisine was in grad school (Advanced Palate #506), and since he hadn’t had anything at all to eat since Tim had offered him a bland slab of uncooked rice-flavored manna in the truck, he was struck by a sudden and profound desire to find out exactly what tapenade-flavored manna tasted like. Even if it really was nothing at all like olives, just some food chemist’s weird approximation, as so many flavors of manna were. “I’m game. Slice it up, Tim.”
Here, the focus of the scene is not what they’re eating, but rather a way of demonstrating their personalities by the way they interact with the food. Randy is skeptical of it and later doesn’t care for the way it tastes. His personality is a basic kind of guy’s guy. Tim is eager to serve the food and he takes over the role of putting together the meal. His deal is that he gets off on taking care of people. And I get some extra mileage from Nelson here, since he’s currently the point-of-view character. The context in which Nelson places manna is different. Manna means more deep things to him, since he’s a food scientist and manna is his specialty. He’s eager to taste it, and whether or not he will enjoy it is irrelevant to him. He’s in it for the experience.
Not everyone’s willing to jump on the manna bandwagon, though. Here’s a passage where the characters are approaching Chinatown:
Despite the fact that the immigrants here lived in apartment buildings rather than corrugated metal lean-tos, the third-world smell wasn’t that different from the shantytowns of Caracas. Piss and garbage. Smoke. Fish. The fish bodies rolled in on trucks filled with ice in the wee hours of the morning, where they were traded in the back rooms of the jewelry exchanges and the bail bonds shops. Manna might be nearly as cheap as its packaging, but that didn’t mean the older refugees ate it. The food of their culture was all that remained of their identities. Ironic, when those who stayed behind in Asia were now subsisting on rice-flavored manna.
This passage functions in a number of ways. It sets the current scene: you can feel (or, more accurately, smell) the chilly pre-dawn aroma of New York’s Chinatown. But it also says something about the point-of-view character, Javier. It reminds him of Caracas, so it’s implied that he’s well-traveled. He has a sense of what’s going on in Asia, so we can see that he’s aware of the current conditions in other countries and cultures. And he also has a sense of how the immigrants are sourcing their exotic foods, in a way that demonstrates he’s also street-smart.
The mere presence of absence of certain foods can tell you a lot about a character. In this scene, Tim’s neighbors have requested a few pounds of manna to tide them over until the closed grocery stores re-open.
[Tim says] “Grab some of the perishable stuff out of the fridge.”
Javier picked up the partially thawed veg-o-mix from the arm of the recliner to put it back in the freezer. He’d expected to find ice cube trays, frozen meals, maybe some ice-dream. But Tim’s freezer was stacked with boxes, plain boxes labeled protein + mineral in English, Spanish, French, and Korean. The ice cube caddy was stocked with first aid kits.
The single pocket of recognizable food was mostly plain, flash-frozen vegetables. Javier tucked the veg-o-mix into a gap among the other plastic bags and quietly closed the freezer door. He looked at Tim. Tim had leaned in so close to the monitor he could practically lick it. His eyes tracked back and forth as he watched code scroll past.
Javier took the opportunity to peek into one of the cupboards.
Completely filled, top to bottom. More plain brown boxes, these stamped in some Arabic-looking languages, and French. 5-year complete protein. No wonder Tim only had two mugs. There wasn’t room for any more. Javier eased open another cupboard, this one bursting with a bank of canned manna with once-colorful labels, now faded, the text possibly in Chinese. He couldn’t tell what the contents were supposed to be, even by the pictures-cubes of jiggling off-white manna, awash in a bath of syrup, with birds and lotus flowers dancing around the dripping spoonfuls.
“In the fridge,” Tim prompted. “Something that looks, y’know…normal.”
In terms of worldbuilding, this survey of various types of manna (and some minimal vegetable presence) functions to demonstrate what sorts of manna are typically available, as well as what would be considered weird (in this case, the canned manna.) The word “cream” has been dropped from the name of the frozen dessert, as dairy products are now prohibitively costly to produce, and so over the past five decades, people have lost the taste for real dairy and prefer their imitation manna counterparts instead.
The personalities of the characters involved are advanced by the scene, too. Javier is the point-of-view character in this scene. The fact that he’s poking through Tim’s refrigerator and cupboards shows that he doesn’t know Tim well, he’s curious, and doesn’t think it’s below him to snoop around. Tim’s background is evident in the sorts of strange foods he has amassed-survivalist, or hoarder, or a bit of each? And then that lovely bit of self-awareness emerges, where Tim admits to Javier that he knows his food stash is far from “normal.”
What are some of the most memorable appearances of food in fiction you can recall? And more importantly, what did you take away from those instances that wasn’t about the food at all?
EDITED TO ADD: Jordan is offering a free copy of The Starving Years to one commenter from today. I'll draw the winner over the weekend :)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jordan Castillo Price is the author of the PsyCop series and the owner of JCP Books LLC. She writes paranormal, horror and thriller novels from her isolated and occasionally creepy home in rural Wisconsin. Connect with Jordan in the following places:
JordanCastilloPrice.com
JCP Books: Jordans online bookstore
JCP News,Jordan's monthly newsletter
Facebook: Jordan's fanpage
PsyCop fanpage
Jordan's LiveJournal blog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Starving Years
Imagine a world without hunger. In 1960, a superfood was invented that made starvation a thing of the past. Manna, the cheaply manufactured staple food, is now as ubiquitous as salt in the world’s cupboards, pantries and larders.
Nelson Oliver knows plenty about manna. He’s a food scientist-according to his diploma, that is. Lately, he’s been running the register at the local video rental dive to scrape together the cash for his exorbitantly priced migraine medication.
In a job fair gone bad, Nelson hooks up with copywriter Javier and his computer-geek pal Tim, who whisks them away from the worst of the fiasco in his repurposed moving truck. At least, Nelson thinks those two are acquainted, but they’re acting so evasive about it, he’s not sure how they know each other, exactly.
Javier is impervious to Nelson’s flirting, and Tim’s name could appear in the dictionary under the entry for “awkward.” And with a riot raging through Manhattan and yet another headache coming on, it doesn’t seem like Nelson will get an answer anytime soon. One thing’s for sure, the tension between the three of them is thick enough to cut with a knife...even one of those dull plastic dealies that come in the package with Mannariffic EZ-Mealz.
Read the first chapter of this fast-paced m/m/m thriller and BUY at http://jcpbooks.com/ebook/starving.htm
[Clare: it's my No, #1, impatiently-awaited holiday read over Easter!]