Warren Laine-Naida

Good question. Probably those of feeling simplicity and safety. My mother in the kitchen eating toast. My father picking me up from a friend’s house at the end of a long day. A jar of crayons slowly melting on the windowsill of my bedroom window. An old “Dare” cookie bag filled with bottle caps I had collected over the summer from the beach and safely stored beneath my bed.

I have been writing for so long. I remember a story I wrote in grade four, about a monster chasing me, and then I expired beneath it. My teacher said it was a good story but that it was not possible to write a story about yourself expiring – how could you have written it? This was also probably the first, but not the last, time someone gave me poor professional advice. I wrote a great deal in school. English and History were my favourite subjects. History because it is far enough removed from our reality that it is remarkably similar to fiction.

Chocolate is a fantastic medium. You can enjoy it in either its fluid or solid state. When it begins to solidify, you can see both states at once, and there is a beautiful motion that is captured within. Chocolate is also organic, and it changes over time. From shiny brown to faded white. This process of change is integral to art. Art as process if you will. Working in chocolate gave me access to food art, and to a medium for sculpture. It is a very forgiving medium – if you break it, you can melt it down and begin again. I wouldn’t be very good with stone, or wood.

Well, my advice to writers is always to make notes, and it was the advice given to me by a author friend of my father’s when I was very young. I was always taking notes, but it was in London that I began turning them into stories. The catalyst for this was my discovery of a community theater that went by the name of Theater Faux. I had a summer love affair with a girl from university who used the term “faux” and there was the term in large letters. Being new in town, I volunteered to work there, and in the end met people with whom I am still close friends with to this day. London is a university town, and many of the ideas for my novel stem from Theater Faux, the university there where I studied part time, and the restaurants where I began my apprenticeship as a chef.

I was lucky enough to have had the book developing in my head for some time. As well, I was doing a lot of exhibitions at the time, so photographs were readily at hand. My only challenge was having the publisher renege on his agreement for the books to be published. In the end he left me with a large bill and very few printed books which I was unable to challenge in court due to the legal fees. Afterwards I discovered he had done the same thing to other authors. Using Amazon and IngramSparks services is so much better, and I wish I had done that in 2009.

That’s a good question. They all have a history. Probably the white chocolate goat cheese parfait. Here is my favourite, signature, combination of chocolate and cheese. It’s not a combination you have every tried, so don’t pretend. Wink.

This is the fault of my father. I wanted to be a policeman, but always a writer. My father said I needed a trade, and I was moving from Canada to Europe and so needed one. This is ironic because I has spent so much time at college, but this hadn’t prepared me for more than talking about philosophy and literary theory. I was always cooking a home – my mother taught me, and my father sometimes dabbled. I had worked in restaurants and hotels as a waiter for many years, and once as a marketing manager. I thought it important, if I was going to sell food, that I understand how it is prepared, so I began working in the kitchen on my days off, first as a dishwasher and then prepping. Cooking for yourself is very important, so anything you learn benefits first yourself. I loved food and wine, and everything that these two encompass. Travel, love, colours, textures, aromas, history, politics – everything revolves around our ability to eat. So, a chef was born.

Hmm. I encourage self-discipline as much as possible. I teach children, adults, and seniors, but mostly adults. I expect they are learning something because they want to, and so I don’t expect to have to hold their hand. I think if we show people the power of learning something, the difference between not being able to do something and being able to do it, that we are empowering them. This I hope is the spark that ignites their passion, and the belief in themselves for continued learning. Learning is a lifelong task, never ending.

My whole life has been connected to universities in one way or another. My father was a professor, and he introduced me to both the genre and to the real place. I read a lot of David Lodge, PG Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh when I was growing up. There is a lot of romanticism, history, and elitism associated with the campus university. Universities were very cloistral, historic, magical places when I was a child – and in some ways I still find them that way. We enter university at a very special time in our lives - the first time away from home, with our own choices and our first loves lived out within our first mini apartments. They are bubbles – very much removed from the rest of our life, or from those that don’t attend university. Mini cities, ivory towers. In many ways they are so ripe for storytelling.

I did cook, and work at a university for many years; and in a small, university town like the novel is set in. I was also the treasurer of a university club. I love the campus novel genre, but never found a book about the gastronomic part of university life – another type of book I like to read. So, very many years of both parts of my life went into writing the book. Initially it was meant as a compilation of short stories, vignettes – but I wanted to challenge myself to write dialogue and to tell a longer story. The novel is the result of that.

Marta is a compilation of women. She is the sensible foil to Jessie’s chaotic goings on. She is the feisty, foreign, girl next door, single working mum, can do kind of woman we all know and love. She is the women I have known and loved myself, but whose intelligence, tenacity, and abilities scared me off. My loss.

Keep on writing. Keep on reading. Collect words. Taste them. Move them about. Try them on for size. Explore them. Keep a notebook or blog or journal and write what you think. Take those moments that stand out and save them in your own words. Retell what you experience. Adopt and modify, manipulate, and reform how you see your reality. Remediate it. If you do this each day, you will find yourself with a book of your own creation.

There are print books and there are eBooks, and each offers something of value. Holding a real book in your hand is special. Going to a bookstore and browsing, meeting people, having coffee, walking – you cannot do in the virtual world. You can’t save things in an eBook – not like a dollar bill, or a love note, or a train ticket from Prague. Books are treasure chests. An eBook on the other hand enables you to take a library with you on the plane, or on the bus for the morning commute. eBooks democratise and enable reading more easily than print does. There are some books I can read on a tablet and others I need to hold in my hand. People said print books would die out, but in the last decades they are still going strong. I like that.

I am in the final edits of a non-fiction book about Digital Marketing. It will be released on September 1. I have spent the last twenty years, when not in the kitchen, working on first my own website and digital marketing, and then on that of private clients. The book is a culmination of five years of monthly blog posts about the subject.

AllAuthor is brilliant! The service, and the people there are fab. All the tools that are offered, like the banners and the weekly tweets – for the price this is incredibly amazing! I wish, however, that I could include reviews from all amazon platforms – like those of amazon.de