"The Lost Art of Mixing"

Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of The School of Essential Ingredients and Joy For Beginners. Her most recent novel, The Lost Art of Mixing, was released on January 24th, 2013.

Bauermeister applied the Page 69 Test to The Lost Art of Mixing and reported the following:

It was a bit of a shock when I opened The Lost Art of Mixing to page 69 – its contents there only because of the vagaries of editing and typesetting – and found the small scene that had started the whole book going in my imagination.

I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients. I had sent the characters from that book off into their lives and I thought they would do well enough without me. But one day an image showed up in my head – Lillian, my chef, standing in the restaurant kitchen doorway inhaling the smells, just the way the first book started. Only this time, the smells overwhelmed her and she was realizing she was pregnant – unexpectedly and unsettlingly so.

The scene rattled around in my mind over the course of the next few years. I’d be thinking about a different, new character, and somehow he would know Lillian. I would go for a walk, inhale a new smell, and there would be that scene again, knocking at my imagination. I wrote a different book. The scene was still there waiting when I was done. And finally I was so curious I couldn’t stand it anymore and I started writing.

So I guess it only makes sense that that’s what I found on page 69.

Learn more about the book and author at Erica Bauermeister's website.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Essential Ingredients.

--Marshal Zeringue