Better Late Than Not At All

I’m a little late this week. I flew back from Chicago Wednesday night.  I usually travel on Saturday so I was all mixed up on what day it was yesterday. In other words, forgot it was Thursday, the day I usually write my blog.  I did spend the day going back and forth with my agent over a new idea.  I think we came up with a really fun idea. Now to write the proposal.  

After a week of up and down weather in Chicago it was nice to come home to some sunshsine.  Really, one day I barely needed a jacket in Chicago and the next day it was snowing and the day after that flooding rain.

It was however a good time to stay inside and write.  I worked on the next Yarn Retreat mystery.  There’s always research to do for the plot even when I’m well into the writing.  In a happy coincidence something on a local TV show featuring the winners in a food entrepreneur contest led me right where I needed to go.  Watching these two twenty-somethings who’d  come up with an egg white snack item, I  wondered what there path was like.  What sort of background they had.  I’d always assumed you had to be a food scientist to come up with a new product.  Thanks to the Internet all the answers were just a few key strokes away.

These two guys were college drop outs with no background in cooking.  I guess they were playing around in making a snack for themselves at first.  Eventually they got money from a Kickstarter campaign and some sort of grant from a big food company.   Once they’d perfected the product they got it into a couple of local stores.  In an effort to spread it further they entered the contest I saw them win.  The prize was distribution through a grocery delivery company.

While I was researching I found out there are shared kitchen facilities that food entrepreneur can rent. There was even a start-up that offered services to help food entrepreneur with all the paper work involved in creating a new food product along with with other help in launching it.

It was more than information than I needed and eventually I was fueled by curiosity. But I definitely got stuff I could use in my manuscript. And who said that watching TV was a waste of time.