To follow on our interview about successful humor blogging, the hilarious Cake Wrecks blogger known only as Jen has taken a few moments to discuss the upcoming Cake Wrecks book with Suite 101.
Suite 101: Your blog Cake Wrecks “When Professional Cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong”. Is a huge hit! In your December 2nd “Calling all Wreckporters” post, you gave fans a hint of things to come: a Cake Wrecks book! Can you tell us more about the project, and what to expect?
Jen: Sure! We’re looking at a hardcover gift-book which will hit shelves next fall: just in time for Christmas ‘09. It’s going to have all the fun of the blog, but with added features like behind-the-scenes chats with yours truly and reader-submitted cake stories. (I’m particularly excited about those; I’ve had so many hilarious e-mails detailing cakey disasters, and now I get to share! Yay!) I’m still writing the book, so I may throw in some more surprises, too – you just never know.
Suite 101: For a careful grammarian (particularly surrounding the use of the apostrophe), you are prone to coin new words in your Cake Wrecks world, such as “Wrecktastic”. Will the upcoming book have a glossary?
Jen: Hah – now there’s an idea! Still, I like to think my made-up lingo is pretty self explanatory, so no, no plans for a glossary.
Suite 101: Just how many chapters do you intend to devote to the evils and messy fingers of CCCs – especially since you’ve recently defined sub-genres of CCC?
(For the uninitiated: "CCC" is the Cake Wrecks shorthand for a Cupcake Cake - basically when a series of perfectly innocent cupcakes are slathered with a single layer of icing in the attempt to create a recognizable "shape" - this practice results in an inordinate number of wrecks. This is not to be confused with a well-decorated individual cupcake. Those are much more difficult to wreck.)
Jen: I’ll do my best to spread the snark evenly among all cake horrors, so I don’t expect CCCs to feature much more than, say, baby shower Wreckage.
Suite 101: You’ve hit upon the web 2.0 version of the American dream – writing for the fun of it, and it catches on, and takes on a life of its own. Do you have any non-cake related writing projects that fans can look for to see more of your work?
Jen: Nothing yet, although you can bet I’ll be doing more writing in the future that’s actually NOT cake-related [gasp!]. Cake Wrecks isn’t going anywhere, but once the book is completed I am looking forward to having some time to devote to other projects. Wrecks is an abbreviated glimpse into my sense of humor, so I’d love to write a more traditional book where I can expand on that - even ramble a bit – and not be limited by time or space constraints. Wrecks will always be my first love, though; I’m not going to forget where my opportunities have come from, or all the fantastic people who have encouraged me along the way.
Alicia King - Alicia King has been writing for Suite 101 since June of 2007. For over a year, she was the Featured Writer for the Suite section about ...
