A (Hopefully) Tasty Twist

Exhausting. Inspiring. The Z-Baby is both. Because of her, I have a new project to work on. Because of her, I'm having a hard time getting much traction on it -- or anything else.

I'm excited to get the project going this week. See, for years I've thought of writing a memoir. I've had an uncommon life, with kidnapping to a foreign country, a twin and a handicapped mother in the mix. However, memoir writing has always seemed the height of vanity to me.

Now I feel the need to write something down for the Z-Baby. I'm a writer. It's what writers do.

Then, I stumbled on an idea... what if instead of a straight memoir, I wrote a series of essay/stories from my life and family history that center around a recipe. Food has always had a huge role in my life. My mother taught me and my sister to cook. I've made food for all the people I love, using recipes passed on from my mom or lifted from cookbooks and fiddled with.

So I've created a new blog -- A Twist of Taste -- as a way of getting myself to write a piece of this every week. My goal is to take what I write and, in a year or so, edit together a memoir/cookbook for the Z-Baby, which I'll get printed for my family. It's a project I'm doing for myself as well as her. A way of making writing fun and doing something I care about.

Which is not to say I'm giving up on my novel. Writing that is a totally different process than this essay-blog and I look forward to getting back to it once the Z-Baby starts to sleep more than 4 hours a night (Month Four?).