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Three Book Themed Cakes

30/3/2018

This is an old, old photo. My baking and decorating skills have been much improved, but this is still great book/cake blog fodder, so indulge me!

During 2010-12 I chaired a writing group in Towcester, Northants, and became really involved with all things books in the town library, where we would meet each month. World Book Night came along, and I baked for the event.

Can you guess which books these are based on? Probably not, haha, they're not very well done with hindsight, but hey, it was a lot of fun. Answers below this photo, if you're interested....

FYI - World Book Night is on 23rd April - get involved!

Answers: The ugly, blobby cupcakes are based on the idea of Small Island - Andrea Levy. The cake with 'Room' written on it is about, you guessed it, the fab novel Room by Emma Donoghue. My piping skills have improved somewhat since then!

Cake amateur-ness aside, both books are a great read, in my top 10, I think. I'd definitely recommend them if you haven't already had the pleasure.

If you want to see some of the more impressive and professional cakes I now make, take a look at my company website: 280 Bakes.

Lou x

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Inspiration on the Road

30/3/2018

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Today I'm lucky enough to have Amy Morse, author and entrepreneur, guest blogging for me. Amy, I am happy to say, is a friend, and a truly energetic, inspirational person, and I'm pleased to be able to introduce you to her. Take it away, Amy!

Inspiration on the road

Writers find inspiration everywhere. We observe and create stories from the small things we see and experience. Travelling is a fantastic catalyst to feed your imagination; seeing new places, meeting new people and having new experiences feeds our creativity.

Often, the spark of inspiration comes from two words: what if…

It was visiting the Archaeological Museum in Varna, Bulgaria and seeing the amazing finds discovered at the Varna Necropolis that prompted me to ask ‘What if?’

What if something mysterious and dangerous was unearthed by archaeologists? What lengths would people with different motivations go to in pursuit of such power?

The Varna Necropolis was discovered accidently in 1972. Subsequent excavations uncovered the oldest gold jewellery and adornments in the world. The site dates to 6,000 BC - thousands of years older than the pyramids and the pre-historic people occupied the site have been named the Varna Culture.

Researching this site was the catalyst for my debut novel, The Bronze Box and the starting point of a trilogy of books, The Sheridan and Blake Adventure Series.

Since publishing the first book in 2013, I’ve published Solomon’s Secrets and Gabriel’s Game (Parts 1 & 2) – all centring on the mystery of a fictional bronze box, unearthed at the Copper Age Varna Necropolis.

I was living in Bulgaria at the time of writing The Bronze Box, just outside Varna. It was only having escaped the hustle and bustle of UK life that I rediscovered my love of writing.
It’s one thing to see something in a museum and be awestruck, quite another to see history in situ.

On road trip through beautiful Bulgaria, the pieces finally slotted together and I could feel myself walking in the shoes of the heroine of my books: archaeologist, Dr Sasha Blake and the leading man of the stories: Agent Tom Sheridan - of a covert organisation that specialises in repatriating looted antiquities; The Agency.

The air conditioning blasting in our hire car, we rattled along a rough village road, rutted from horses and carts and punctuated with frost shattered potholes. After a few yards, the road become a dirt track leading into a field.

Expecting to see a dusty hole and perhaps a few bits of broken pottery we were astounded to find ourselves walking into the live archaeological excavation of a Thracian warrior king’s tomb.

Under a crude plastic tent, an archaeologist was on her knees, brushing sandy dirt from an ancient chariot. She invited us in to look around and we watched as gradually the chariot revealed itself, complete with the skeletons of two horses.

The partially excavated site was littered with pottery, animal skeletons, urns, amphora, metal, glassware and even a stone box with a bronze clasp.

I featured the image of this box on the cover of the first edition of The Bronze Box.

In the first book; Sheridan and Blake embark on a mission spanning Europe to find the missing bronze box, and in the later stories, unravel the mystery surrounding its disappearance and unlocking the power it possesses. Throughout the books, an undercurrent of sexual tension between the two characters’ simmers away in a will-they-won’t-they thriller that tests them to their limits.

Bulgaria was a fascinating back drop for the birth of these books. One of the most impoverished countries in Europe, it joined the EU in 2007 with hopes of a better life for its 7 million citizens. It is one of only a handful of countries whose population is decreasing; partly due to economic migration but also due to an aging population that struggles to subsist on the fringes of the West. Blighted by corruption and organised crime it’s struggling with high unemployment, minimal economic growth and poverty. Sparsely populated, four inhospitable mountain ranges transect the country and with unprecedented rural depopulation, huge areas of its fertile, dramatic and wild landscape have been claimed by nature and are archeologically unexplored.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the central plains of the Valley of the Thracians.
As you travel along the irregular and poorly maintained roads through this part of Bulgaria, snuggled tightly between the Balkan and Sredna Gora mountain ranges, dotted across the landscape are thousands of burial mounds. Manmade swellings, looking out of place, protruding from the flat grasslands and borderless fields. These mounds are from Bulgaria’s ancient empire when it was home to the now extinct Thracian people.

There are more than 1,500 of these mounds in the valley and so far, only 300 have been researched, even fewer excavated. Across the whole of Bulgaria there are estimated to be between 10,000 and 60,000 Thracian burial mounds.

A culture with no written language, very little is known about the Thracian people who can be traced back to the 6th century BC. All that is known of these early Europeans comes from the writings of Homer in the Iliad and from ancient Roman and Greek texts. The rest of our knowledge comes from what they left behind in their elaborate funerary rituals, sites of worship and remains of their settlements.

Homer described the Thracians as a mosaic of different tribes. The Copper Age civilisation that left the Varna Necropolis, the Varna Culture, would probably have been ancestors of Thracian tribes in this part of Bulgaria although the origin of the Thracians remains obscure.
Walking onto a live dig, past a makeshift portable cabin serving as a site hut, through grasslands - still in the summer heat and buzzing with the hum of insects – that was the moment I imagined myself in the world of Dr Sasha Blake.

I captured elements of this experience in the opening chapters of The Bronze Box.
The enduring lesson I learned from this experience was; you can read about a place, you can pore over books and websites and maps and photographs, but for something to feel real to you and therefore be real for your readers, it needs to be a multisensory experience.

To feel the atmosphere of a place, to smell it, touch it, taste it and to listen.

Places have a way of speaking to you, your job as a writer is to be ready to listen.

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Thank you Amy - really reminded me of a book I've just finished reading, set in archaeology and Homer's history.

To find out more about Amy and her books please visit her website
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More on Amy's books:
The Bronze Box
Solomon's Secrets
Gabriel's Game: Part 1: The White Queen
Gabriel's Game: Part 2: The Black Knight

Lou x

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Blogs: My Recommendations

28/3/2018

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So, I may not have been so prolific in my own blog writing in the last year, but I've discovered some corkers I regularly check in on, and I'm here to share.

My Baking Addiction: by Jamie, who self-certifies herself as someone who bakes too much. I love it!

The Environment Agency has a great blog, for scientifically minded people and those who are not so - always hot on subjects affecting the UK's environment and beyond.

A new find: A Cranky Flier. Brett, the blogger, writes regular posts sharing his three favourite links to travel news on the web - among other great content.

A dear friend and past colleague of mine writes a fab mental health blog. Take a look at WYSE THOUGHTS, and say hi to Paul.

Gray (with an 'a') Matter has some great stories, always something interesting to read and learn here. A recent favourite of mine was the post on beautiful metro stations you can find across the planet.

Huffington Post has a Good News blog - brings warm feelings from around the world.

Let me know if I've missed your favourite!

Lou x

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Why I've Stopped Writing

28/3/2018

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You may have noticed, my blog posts here have been few and far between for the last couple of years, and my 'work in progress' isn't so 'in progress'... Here's why I've stepped back a little on the whole writing she-bang.

I used to be a prolific writer. I was writing monthly for a magazine (around 2010,, for a couple of years), I blogged at least weekly here and on my travel blog, and I participated in group and online writing challenges. I had (have!) a great idea for a work in progress, and I loved every minute of penning an idea and creating a story.

So why did I stop?

I guess that's a little unfair. I haven't stopped writing for fun/enterprise entirely. I still blog weekly for my baking business 280 Bakes and it's going great guns. However, the last post (aside from two in early March when I panicked and got keen again for a day) on my Born to be a Tourist travel blog was exactly a year ago, and on here, my poor writing/lifestyle blog has been severely neglected. The last post here was posted in May last year. Call myself a writer??

Well, actually I don't think I do call myself a writer any more.

I write. I do. I use my skills in writing all the time: I write emails every day, to people as diverse as my Grandma (catching up) to the Lord Mayor of Bristol (a VIP event invite for 280 Bakes), I write reports, minutes, emails in my 'day job' in an office in Bristol... I was praised yesterday, in fact, for my easy style of writing - which prompted this post. Unfortunately though, it's just writing a shopping list that's missing from the list of things I seriously sit down and write. I just don't do creative writing much nowadays.

And it's not like I cut back consciously. It happened gradually perhaps, and time flew by; suddenly it had been months and years since I'd worked on anything bigger than a 500 word blog about cake.

I think my writing time was diminished for a number of reasons:

a) Life got busy. Busier. Married, a (new) full time job and a business to run on the side, a pup, living in a new town with things to discover, more financial responsibilities... all these things take up time, no matter how pleased I might be to welcome them into my life.

b) Moving from Northamptonshire, I left behind me an awesome writing group which I Chaired. The group was such an inspiration, and the discipline of having to write a short story or selection of poems each month was a real driver for creativity. The group is still going, I hear, I still miss it.

c) I think, honestly, I've moved on a little from writing, too. I felt a bit guilty about this for a while, and I have no idea why. It's not like I was letting down millions of fans. A few thousand followed me on the blogs, but I am sure no one cried. I was fully aware I was never going to get rich writing, but was keen at one stage to see my skills and portfolio develop professionally. Now, I guess, I have other interests, but should use writing more as a hobby or an outlet more.

d) I went through some dark times - anxiety and depression doesn't encourage creativity, but with hindsight, it could have helped. At the time though, I couldn't face writing anything with concentration levels on the floor and low self-esteem. No one wanted to hear from me, I was sure, and I didn't really want to get stuck in writing negatively centred things.

However, there's hope. The fact I'm writing this post is a positive sign. Hey, life is always busy - it's about making time for what you want to do, your priorities. I've not found a writing group in Bristol which works for me, and I don't know if I'm that enthused about going along, really, now. And you know what, it's ok if writing isn't a priority for me now. It's just there, hovering in the background, something I can dip into as and when. Moving on isn't a bad thing, in many aspects of life, but I know I can always go back to it. Life has taught me a lot in the last few years, and I'm sure there's something I could say, especially now I'm much-improved mentally. Still working on it every day, but much mended.

I have 39 unfinished drafts for Miss Write and many more for Born to be a Tourist. Maybe I'll have a crack this weekend. A long, potentially wet weather Easter weekend is a perfect excuse for some inner expression. Watch this space - but don't hold your breath.

Lou x

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Three Book Themed Cakes

Inspiration on the Road

Blogs: My Recommendations

So, I may not have been so prolific in my own blog writing in the last year, but I've discovered some corkers I regularly check in on, and I'm here to share.

Why I've Stopped Writing

You may have noticed, my blog posts here have been few and far between for the last couple of years, and my 'work in progress' isn't so 'in progress'... Here's why I've stepped back a little on the whole writing she-bang.

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