Month of Joy: Of Flying and Baking: How Researching Novels Changed My Life by Claudie Arseneault
One of the greatest joys of writing is how it can make you look at something new, push you to research it, and discover new passions. When one of my characters really loves something, I tend to not only read on it, but to experience it myself. So in 2011, while I was still in the process of drafting Viral Airwaves (and learning how to write at all, too), I went on a hot air balloon flight, and it was amazing. It was early in the morning, and as I held the balloon’s envelope while huge fans pushed air into it, I could hardly believe my luck. The sun shone, the pilot was funny and easy to approach (my boyfriend asked him tons of questions about everything because I was too shy), and the flight remains one of the most peaceful moment of my existence. I was up there, a tiny notebook in hand, scribbling observations while a choir of angels sang in my head. And a lot of it made it into Viral Airwaves, too, notably the description of forests as broccoli, and the use of the thick red emergency rope.
Month of Joy: The Holiday Party by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Every year, we have a colonial Christmas tea, where I cook a combination of Sri Lankan traditional party food (rolls, chicken patties, mackerel cutlets, ribbon sandwiches, milk toffee, marshmallows, love cake, and arrack sours) with British traditional tea party / Christmas food (cucumber sandwiches, roast beef and horseradish sandwiches, mushroom sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, berry trifle, fruitcake, mulled mead and mulled cider). Plus some extra sweets. I feel that I should get something good out of colonialism, after all, and traditional British holiday fare is delicious. Cooking a feast is an opportunity to put my day job as a professor aside, and even the SF novel I’m writing, and sink deep into food and domesticity, some of my own enduring sources of joy. Especially when I get to share the cooking (and then the eating) with my partner, children, and friends!
Month of Joy: The Smell of Masa in the Morning by Sabrina Vourvoulias
There is a particular smell to corn that has been soaked in wood ash lye, then washed and hulled and ground into a fine meal. It is the aroma of freshly made tortillas, of tamales as they steam, of my mother’s huipiles. Really. No matter how freshly laundered, no matter how many cedar balls or lavender sachets have been thrown in the drawer to keep the moths away, the distinctive hand-woven Guatemalan blouses my mother wore retain the smell of a grain turned more aromatic, more flavorful, more nutritious by the nixtamalation process.
