My first book signing is next week!  On Halloween, appropriately enough.  For those of you who live withing hailing distance of Los Angeles, it is at Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont. The full address is 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90004 and the phone number is 323-465-1334. I’ll be there from 11am until 1pm, so please come — I have visions of myself sitting all alone with a stack of books!

And it won’t just be books — there will also be a big bowl of Parma Violets (Belladonna’s favourites)!  Well, there will be if I don’t eat them all between now and Halloween…

I love cooking. And even more than that, I love the history of food and cooking. And, of course, I love books. All of which means that I collect old cook books (mostly pre-1890) and read them cover to cover. Sometimes I even have a go at some of the recipes, though there’s generally quite a bit of guesswork involved in that as most of them don’t use measurements.

So the other day I was leafing through Soyer’s Modern Housewife (1851), a book of “Nearly One Thousand Receipts.” It was written by Alexis Soyer, a French chef who worked in England, primarily at the Reform Club in London (yes, the same Reform Club that features in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days). Soyer was an innovator who came up with many concepts that we now take for granted, like cooking with gas, refrigerators and ovens with adjustable temperatures. In addition to all of this, he wanted to widen the horizons of British housewives and teach them how to cook properly.

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Spellbinder is now officially published! I’m so excited. It’s in book shops and online both in the US and UK. The UK title is The Last Ghost and the cover is a creepy orange and black. All of which means that I can now call myself a writer and people won’t think I’m just nursing a screenplay at home (like 99.9% of the other inhabitants of Los Angeles).

I still haven’t got over the thrill of opening it at random pages and seeing my own words, though. I hope I never do — it would be a shame to become blasé about something so wonderful.

So now I’m hoping that people will like it…which is much more nerve-racking than waiting for the book itself!

Eep!