Happy Memorial Day, everyone! (Retroactively…)

I’m grateful for this holiday. Freedom is one of the most expensive blessings we enjoy, and Memorial Day helps me remember to reflect on that. I am extremely grateful for American military service members who gave everything for this amazing country and the values it represents.

I apologize for the delay on this blog post. In addition to celebrating Memorial Day with extended family, my family got food poisoning at some point over the extended weekend, and I don’t think I need to describe the mess that turned into—sick husband, sick pregnant wife, sick toddler. Here’s the weird thing: we’re two for two with regards to getting food poisoning at big family events (on this side of the family). If this happens a third time, should I assume one family member is trying to off the rest?…

Bloggyness Review—Is It Cake?

Is It Cake? (in addition to being a tonal whiplash from the above) is a bizarre game show/cooking competition where contestants attempt to bake cakes that hyper-realistically imitate everyday objects, the goal being to fool a rotating panel of judges. The show was inspired by a viral trend that, I think, mostly made its home on Tik Tok.

If you don’t like game shows, you can probably immediately skip past all this, because Is It Cake? will not change your mind: it is still disposable entertainment through and through. But, sometimes, after a long day, when the wife and I are tired and we just want to eat a snack and wind down for sleep, Is It Cake? is the perfect kind of low-effort entertainment for our tired brains.

I also doubt that Is It Cake? will have much appeal for enthusiasts of baking shows. I will admit that I have never watched Hell’s Kitchen, The Great British Baking Show, or any other such examples of famously-baked goodness, but the clips I’ve seen (of those shows) suggests that Is It Cake? leans much more into game show than cooking show, at least for what a cooking show enthusiast would expect. There is a brief period at the end of each episode where judges eat the cakes and, depending on whether the cake fake was discovered or not, use flavor to separate the winners from the losers, but these moments really aren’t the focus of the show.

Anyway, with all that aside: I think Is It Cake? is fun.

Is It Cake? is bizarre, almost surreal at times, in no small part thanks to the host, Mikey Day. I don’t watch SNL, but apparently Mikey is an alum, making him a professional comedian of sorts—truthfully, I rarely find him funny. But I do usually find him interesting. The way he acts makes me imagine what an alien might act like when doing its best human impression after doing minimal research. Have you read Strange Planet? He’s like the aliens in a Strange Planet comic, only without as strong a vocabulary. If this all sounds weird, it is, but at least it’s an engaging (and not usually annoying) kind of weird.

And we haven’t even gotten to the cake yet.

Is It Cake? does a pretty good job at introducing the contestants and letting you know just enough about them to pick a few that you really want to succeed without getting as long-winded or saccharine as American Idol or [Insert Country]’s Got Talent. At least, every season my wife and I had two or three contestants that, early on, we felt pretty committed to seeing winning, and that significantly added to our enjoyment of the show.

But the cakes… the cakes! That should be the biggest focus of Is It Cake?, yeah? And… yeah. I mean, most of each episode is about picking what cake each contestant will make, watching them work, then setting their cakes among decoys so judges can try to figure out which object is real and which is cake. That said, Is It Cake? struggles with a blessing-curse where a few contestants managed to make cakes so startlingly real (relatively early on in the show) that nothing afterward even vaguely compares. Even the many excellent cakes that tricked me (and I watched the baker bake the cake), they all completely pale in comparison to two or three cakes that still… haunt me… in my dreams…

The crab… it’s impossible, that had to be a real crab, not a cake… shudders

Don’t go out and get a Netflix subscription for Is It Cake?. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend a streaming subscription at all—I think owning is better, and I think the majority of what streaming services put out aren’t even worthy to be called disposable, inoffensive entertainment. But Is It Cake? passes all the minimums and has enough bizarre personality to be worth a try if you’re already on Netflix—or, better, can borrow someone’s password.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is kicking my butt. But, that’s a good thing. Or I hope it will be, when the book is finished.

I forced my way through a draft of part 2 of the book—admittedly, with many scenes existing solely as brackets with notes I left for myself, of what I want to do, or what I think I need to do, and other such scene ideas, things I haven’t figured out how to write yet, even if I am confident I need something along those lines to make this part work. The plus side to this approach is that I have identified so many questions that need answering, problems that need working out, for me to make this narrative work, things I wouldn’t have imagined if I hadn’t just pushed myself forward—the negative side is my frustration when I look at the page and realize just how much longer part 2 is going to take to write than Part 1. Ugh.

So, rather than a word count update this week, my update is that I think I finally cracked the code on part 2—I think I finally know each character (old and new), including their arcs, the general plot movement, and what puzzle pieces have to be present, and where to put them, to make a worthwhile picture. And all this planning means it’s time to write actual scenes…

Part 1 of this book is about 90,000 words. I think parts 2 and 3 are going to end up of similar length. I might have accidentally written myself, in terms of average novel length, a trilogy in one book.

As for Inner Demon… as mentioned last week, Baen did not accept my submission. Since then I have submitted to about five agents and four publishers, and gotten two or three rejections. It’s looking more and more like this book will come to light as a one-man project once again. But we’ll see.

Send-Off

Have a good week, and don’t get sick…