Given the sumptuousness of the desserts found in this cookbook, the photo of slim, trim author Marcel Desaulniers found on the back cover flap simply astounds. What's that old saying? Never trust a skinny chef? Well Marcel must have diabolical connections, because after trying this cookbook I trust him completely when it comes to the kitchen!

When I first bought this cookbook I was in a lamentable phase where chocolate just seemed to be "too much" if it wasn't tempered with other flavors. Despite that I found much to love in this cookbook: Sliced Blood Oranges with White Chocolate Sauce and Caramel Banana Chocolate Chip Ice Cream are fabulous. Fresh Berry Tulip with White Chocolate "Ice Cream" is spectacular, strewn with strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries. Chilled Orange Cappuccino Cream with Grated Chocolate could melt you straight into a puddle. No matter what your dessert fetish, you'll find something for it here.

Each recipe comes with a delectable photo that will leave you reeling with choices. Do we make the Dark Chocolate and Pumpkin Cheesecake this weekend? Or the Tipsy Chocolate Pecan Crunch Ice Cream? We'd make both if it weren't for the fact that these are *not* light dishes by any stretch of the imagination.

At first the recipes may look daunting. Don't let this worry you, though. While some of these recipes are indeed complex, many of them are simple. And most of the long pages of directions are a result of the author's wish to detail every step with precision so that you *don't* get too confused or overwhelmed. Few of the recipes call for unusual ingredients (the blood orange recipe is one of them), and any equipment from the lists that you don't have you can probably substitute for (although it really helps to have a stand mixer).

Besides, how can you possibly resist recipes with names like: Danielle's Temptation. Caramel Rum Delerium Ice Cream Cake. Chocolate Demise. Chocolate Devastation. Chocolate Phantasmagoria (yum!). Double Mocha Madness. And of course, Death by Chocolate.

Marcel Desaulniers is the most consistently amazing dessert cookbook author I've ever come across. Take, for example, Martha's Chocolate Freckles Fresh Blueberry Ice Cream Cake. It's based in a "Chocolate Freckles Cake," which is a non-chocolate cake with finely-chopped or grated chocolate mixed into the batter. A homemade blueberry ice cream fills the space between the layers - this is honestly one of the best ice creams I've ever had, with a tart flavor created by the sour cream, cream cheese, and lemon juice. The topping is sweetened, vanilla-flavored whipped cream, and further fresh blueberries are ringed around the top.

Next we made Marcel's First Birthday Chocolate High and Fluffy-on-Top Cake. This is a chocolate cake with a vanilla frosting. It sounds so simple, but it's so delightful! This is truly the ultimate icing: sweet, not too buttery, and remarkably fluffy. I have never had such a fantastic icing before, and intend to use it on cake after cake in the future.

You'll find everything in here from Chocolate Rocky Road, to Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake, Chocolate Caraway On-the-Rocks Trifles, Chocolate-Dipped Orange Fry Cakes with Coffee and Cream, Uncle Sam's in the Black Cake (with a toasted oatmeal raising topping), Chocolate Tender Passion, and much more! Each recipe comes with a gorgeous picture. The recipes are inventive and of consistently excellent quality; the directions are thorough without being labyrinthine. They're several pages long for each recipe, but I never feel lost. Marcel repeats the amounts of the ingredients in the instructions so you don't have to flip back and forth to the ingredient amounts.

You'll probably not want to get this book unless you have a stand mixer--the key to many of these delights is loooong mixing times, sometimes of stiff batters. Other than that, however, Marcel tries to limit himself to common household equipment and time-scales. In short, if you like to cook and love chocolate cakes, buy this cookbook!

Mr. Johnson spends the beginning of the book trying to explain what he means by a "story promise." He admits himself that his students often have a difficult time grasping it, and it doesn't help that his use of terminology seems somewhat fluid. Eventually I figured out that what he refers to as a "story promise" is something most writers would call a theme. To be fair, it's possible that Mr. Johnson would say "no, that isn't it at all." But even if that wasn't what he meant, he could have cut and clarified his clunky 45-page explanation drastically by comparing and contrasting the two ideas rather than starting from scratch.

In addition to those 45 convoluted pages, Mr. Johnson has a wordy and often redundant style. However, there's also a lot of good stuff in this book. If you're having trouble making your stories dramatic and attention-grabbing, this book could seriously help you. Johnson's explanation of why the"story promise" is so important to drama makes a lot of sense to me. He believes that "issues of human need" are what pull an audience in and cause readers to invest emotion in a story. He goes into plenty of detail on the how as well as the why.

He uses examples from well-known movies and books; these help to prevent you from using his suggestions to accidentally create formulaic stories. I'm not saying that his system creates formulaic novels. However, there is a type of formula that could serve as an example of what he's trying to teach, and you could easily fall into it out of sheer familiarity without even realizing it. The examples help to prevent this because he likes non-formulaic examples. However, the book could really use a section about this trap, how to notice if you're falling into it, and how to avoid it.

This book teaches a valuable enough way of thinking about writing that I feel vaguely guilty pointing out its flaws. But the truth is that while Mr. Johnson's methods are fabulous, his expository writing can be convoluted and confusing. With some changes in the writing and some extra material on formulaic writing this could easily be a five-star book, but for me it's currently a three-star book. It's well worth your time and energy, but it may cause frustrations along the way.

Drama produces excitement in our writing. It keeps the reader interested. And how do we create drama? By playing with conflict, action, and suspense. Noble's book covers the basic concepts of drama, confrontation, pulling on the reader's emotions, escalation, and immediacy. He also deals with elements that keep your story moving: appropriate grammar, charged images, shifts in point of view, and contrast. He does a good job of telling us the how and why of things, rather than simply telling us what to do.

He touches on suspense's relationship with all sorts of basic writing issues such as dialogue, openings, cliffhangers, mood and atmosphere, character development, point of view, pacing, endings, and so on. Noble does a good job of focusing on specific techniques relevant to suspense for the most part.

It isn't a perfect book. It isn't as dry as most textbooks, but it could certainly be better than it is. Some of the examples that Mr. Noble makes up to use in the book are a bit on the overblown side, which kind of undercuts some of his points. He might have been better off using more examples from published fiction. Also, some of Mr. Noble's assertions regarding his topics have since been proven to be wrong. For example, when talking about the logic of settings: "...And a horror-suspense story would have problems if it was set in the unfolding of a miracle." I've seen this done quite well, actually.

This book was originally copyrighted in 1994, and this may be part of the problem. Since then some of the techniques that he lauds as strong and effective have become over-used and trite. (Overused techniques became that way precisely because they're so effective.) Some of the things he says can't be done have been done. As it is, this book serves as a very good example of why you need to do a lot of reading in the fiction field you want to write in. Otherwise, how will you know which of his techniques have been over-used, which can be seen as trite if you aren't careful how you use them, and which are still seen as solid, useful methods?

Eric Maisel's "Living the Writer's Life" is one of the best books I've found on the writer's life, right up there with Rachel Simon's "The Writer's Survival Guide". Palumbo's, unfortunately, is not so spectacular, although it definitely has its merits.

One of Palumbo's best-conceived ideas is that in order to be happy with our writing, we must learn to enjoy the process for its own sake, not simply for external rewards such as sales and good reviews. I particularly like his view of writing as meditation, "a hushed, private space"--a calling more than a career. Palumbo talks about the problems all writers face, and it might help you to realize that you aren't so alone after all.

As much as I loved the good parts of Palumbo's book, however, there were definitely some parts I didn't like. For example, I took real issue with some of his claims regarding bipolar disorder, particularly his claim that bipolar is nothing more than an unhelpful label. As someone who HAS bipolar disorder (a genetically-inherited, biologically-based *illness*), and whose life was very much aided by the proper medication, I can say that such "labels" can be very helpful indeed! If you're worried about somehow losing your creativity if you medicate and calm your manic phases, I can personally testify to the fact that in many cases medication makes it much easier to actually sit down and take advantage of your creativity, rather than taking it away.

It is clear that Palumbo has some very strong feelings on certain matters, and every few chapters these feelings detract from the usefulness of the book. He bashes would-be writers who haven't yet written anything, comparing them to someone who says that they've always wanted to give heart surgery a try one of these weeks (the analogy holds merit in that writing requires skill, but falls apart in that writing requires more learning-by-doing, and can at least be attempted, explored, and practiced by the unskilled!). If there's one thing I took away from Maisel's book, it's that every writer was once a would-be writer. And the line between "wanna-be" and "would-be" isn't something we can assume just by looking at someone.

I don't recommend this book to the novice or "would-be" writer. Unlike Maisel's book, it's likely to give you a few skewed ideas about creativity and your own role in writing. On the other hand, it has a lot of very useful suggestions for writers who have some experience and are looking for help with the ups and downs of their craft. Palumbo has written lots of scripts and screenplays, so he has plenty of advice that is of particular use to those writers dealing with Hollywood.

Victoria Schmidt was told in film school that scripts about female heroes didn't sell, and instead of meekly giving in she started doing research. She latched onto the woman's journey into the self: the tale of the descent of the goddess Innana. She connected this to such works as "The Wizard of Oz," "Titanic," and other stories and films, and decided a book was in order. Jack Heffron, editor of most of the writing books I've ever read & reviewed, said sure, but what about the male hero while you're at it? And thus this book was born.

Ms. Schmidt discusses the difference between a stereotype and an archetype. She talks a bit about individualizing characters using aspects of appearance, what the characters care about and fear, motivations, how others see the character, and so on. When providing examples of each archetype she deliberately provides a wide spectrum of possibilities so that you can see some of the variations that are possible.

My only problem here is that I can still see, having read through the book, how it would be easy to accidentally get trapped into creating stereotypes using these character archetypes. Why? Because many of our stereotypes are variations on (or simplified, judgmental versions of) these archetypes, and it's hard not to let all that history influence us. Perhaps if Ms. Schmidt had included an extra (small) section within each archetype reminding the reader to play with things, and including a few further suggestions and examples for how to do so, it would have allayed this fear.

The archetypes are quite detailed. Each has both a positive and a negative side. The author includes all sorts of information about the archetypes, from things they tend to care about, to which other archetypes they pair well with, and what their assets and flaws tend to be. Then Ms. Schmidt does more in the list of examples to break the stereotype worry than she does anywhere else. She includes examples from TV, film, literature, and history, so no matter what your reading or viewing pleasure, you should find something you can relate to.

Oddly, while the character archetypes are what sell the book, they turned out not to be the main attraction for me. There's a great section on supporting characters, for example. But best of all, roughly a full 95 pages of the book cover the feminine and masculine archetypal journeys. This is where things really take off and catch at the imagination. All in all, this book is interesting, useful, and well-detailed. If your characterizations could use a little help, this might be a fun place to start!

"Idea Catcher: An Inspiring Journal for Writers" sounded like a cool idea. It's filled with little "prompts," and you use the blank page beneath each to free-write or take notes on things you can use in your writing. Normally I enjoy prompts and exercises, but this journal didn't thrill me.

Some of the prompts are engaging, but most just left me flat. Sure, some of this is going to be individual preference. However, I think I do have a few valid quibbles. For example, each prompt comes with the rest of one blank page of paper. Great in theory, but some of the prompts clearly seem to be exercises that will take up *much* more than one blank page of paper. Other prompts just don't seem to suggest anything further to write about at all.

The book is broken up into a handful of sections--Ideas, People and Characters, Conversation and Dialogue, Descriptions, Observations, Names and Titles, and Dreams and Anecdotes. The introduction suggests that, for example, if a person somewhere strikes you as interesting, you should flip to the "People and Characters" chapter and jot down your observations. First, this makes the book sound more like a workbook or, well, a blank notebook that happens to have some quotes in it, than a journal. Second, none of the pages are numbered. So if you want to flip to a certain section, it could take you a while to find what you want.

This book's problems boil down to two things. It can't quite decide who it's aimed at: Writers who want guidance to help them write about something every day? Writers who think blank notebooks aren't good enough to do free-writing and take down observations in? It also can't quite decide what it wants to be: Is it an exercise workbook? Is it a journal with something interesting for people to write about every day? Is it a notebook for taking down observations in, that just happens to have quotes across the tops of the pages?

Ultimately, I don't recommend this book. If you want a journal, you can do better by cutting neat quotes out of the newspaper, copying interesting exercises out of writing books, and pasting them at the tops of the pages in a blank notebook. And if you want neat prompts, there are plenty of books out there that will give you much more bang for your buck, like Heffron's "The Writer's Idea Book" or Rekulak's "Writer's Block".

"Write Mind: 299 Things Writers Should Never Say to Themselves (and what they should say instead)" is a book of affirmations - positive things you say to yourself in an effort to put yourself in a better frame of mind. This is a surprisingly versatile little book with a lot to say. It was written by psychotherapist, writer, and creative consultant Eric Maisel, author of two of my other favorite writing books--"Living the Writer's Life" and "Deep Writing."

Maisel's affirmations are surprisingly practical. They don't always tell us that we're right; they don't encourage us to adopt a blind, everything-is-okay approach to life. But they do encourage us to move on despite our problems. Not everyone agrees with the precepts of cognitive therapy. One of its implications is that we don't need to understand or address where our "bad thoughts" come from--we just need to address those thoughts. There are plenty of people who believe that until we figure out and address the root cause of our traumas, we can't be free of them. Maisel takes a balanced approach to this. He admits that he doesn't know for sure whether such a cause-based approach is better for you. But he does point out that trying a cognitive approach (on its own or as an adjunct to other therapy) can't hurt, and certainly might help, so why not give it a try?

Obviously not every affirmation will be right for you straight out of the box. The idea is that you learn how to create your own--ones that suit your particular issues and problems. The affirmations that Maisel provides will give you plenty of examples to start from, and he brings in a touch of humor here and there to lighten the mood. But perhaps this is best summed up by one of my favorite examples from the book:

Wrong Mind: "Dan just published another book. I'm going to Amazon right now and give it a terrible review."
Right Mind: "Let me get back to my novel."

"Writerrific" is subtitled: "Creativity Training for Writers." The idea is that it gives hints, tips, and exercises that will help you to get past what author Eva Shaw calls "page fright" and turn yourself into a font of creative ideas. There are some topics in here that sound interesting, including "Writeriffic and You: Styling Your Creative Life", "Your Inner Writer", "Your Writer's Voice", "Creative Kick Starts", and "Can You Make It as a Writer?". But don't get excited just yet; these only take up about 14 pages, largish print with very large section headings.

On the other hand, the advice here is useful. Ms. Shaw is the author of many (many!) books and magazine articles, and the teacher of an online class, and she has some practical and handy advice to pass on. Ms. Shaw strikes a nice balance between encouraging anyone who wants to try to write, and reminding us that writing takes skill and work.

I think the exercises are good. Not stunning. But certainly if you're having trouble getting started, the exercises provided here might get you going. Some of these are fairly traditional (pick a word at random from the dictionary and start writing on it). A few are actually a little different (cut photos from magazines of people and animals and match animal heads to people bodies. Write using your creation as a character). Technically there are 19 exercises. Many of them have plenty of possible variations, however, so if you don't get bored, they can keep you busy for a while.

On the one hand, the single blank page that goes with each exercise might lower the barriers of resistance when you're trying to get yourself to do the first exercise or three. On the other hand, I hardly feel that it was necessary to make the latter two-thirds of the book entirely blank as well. The back of the book lists its price as $14.95--I can get a stack of cheap notebooks or scrap paper for that price (or just pop open a word processor window on my computer for even less)! I would be much happier to pay a third of that (maybe half) for the part of the book that contained text and exercises and buy my own paper. Ms. Shaw could done this without sacrificing the single blank page that goes with each exercise.

Ultimately, if you find this one in the bargain bin it's worth getting. It is not, however, worth the full cover price unless you have too much money on your hands.

The author of this book seems to think that the way to awaken your creativity is to throw lots of little word puzzles at you. Oh well--what works for one person doesn't work for another. I found some of the exercises similarly annoying, but again, everyone is different.

At first the author of this book came across as exactly the sort of writing author I dislike--early in the book he seems to be saying, "My way of writing is right for everyone." Given the wide variety of types of writing and writing styles out there, this is never a good claim to make. Luckily he turns out to be much more reasonable later in the book.

Many of the author's hints are directed specifically at novel authors (in particularly, "category" or "commercial" novels). On the other hand, there's quite a bit of material in this book of use to any sort of fiction writer, so this isn't a big problem. Part 1 of the book is something of a general primer on creative thinking. Part 2 contains exercises for coming up with ideas related to specific projects. And part 3 addresses "The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Writers." I prefer other books when it comes to general creativity, but there are some great exercises in here to help you specifically address the needs of your particular projects.

This book is probably most useful for people who want to make the transition from writer to published writer. There's information on what publishers are looking for, how publishers think, and how you can catch their eye, and the focus is on creating fiction that will sell. I suggest, however, that you not accept everything in this book blindly. Read other books on writing as well. Use your own common sense. Experiment, play around, and see what works best for you.

As a book to help writers of commercial fiction, Alice Orr's "No More Rejections" might make a better choice. For a general-purpose creative thinking book, I recommend Mari Messer's "Pencil Dancing," Monica Woods' "The Pocket Muse," or Eric Maisel's "The Creativity Book."