Tabitha
Kia ora, friends.
I’m going to try something new. I’m going to try to write a serialised… something. I’ll work on getting a bunch of chapters done before it starts, so I have a bit of a lead before I commit to an instalment every week/other week, but what I would ideally like to do is have an entry every Thursday/other Thursday, to make this feed a bit less random. I might also try to make some of this content paywalled, but first I have to finish some chapters and then I’ll think about that some more.
So this series is about a young woman named Tabitha who loves to cook (and who may just appear again in another story, who’s to say?) and her journey through her late teens and early twenties. The initial part of the story will set some exposition, to get readers up to speed with who the character is and what she’s about, and then I’m going to get into her time serving in the New Zealand Armed Forces as a chef. Don’t worry, she’s not a cop; she is just making the most of the opportunities laid out for her, as a low-to-middle-class New Zealander in the mid-to-late 2000’s.
One thing I’m excited about doing with this is exploring some kiwi culture from the 2000’s, and hopefully educating some non-Aotearoa-ans a bit on things like Outrageous Fortune, Bic Runga, Tūī (the bird, not the beer), and L&P. I’m a big fan of our little country down here, and while I know we are far from perfect, we have some really cool stuff to talk about!
So anyway, here’s the first short snippet I’m happy to share from this adventure, below.
Tabitha loved to cook. And she was really good at it, too. Even from before the time her parents would let her hold a sharp knife, Tabitha was a kitchen prodigy. She started out small by fancy-ing up her 2-minute noodles, cutting up frankfurters or ham and adding that to the bowl, along with a little parmesan cheese if there was any in the fridge. But soon she moved on to baking; cookies, cupcakes, even bread, and she was so good at it. Tabitha’s parents encouraged her too – once she was allowed access to all of the cooking instruments at hand, she was unstoppable, and cooked dinner for her parents every weekend. When she started high school, she also started doing online cooking courses and learned how to make soups and stuffed chicken breast and filo pastry and spanakopita. Tabitha only had one girlfriend during her time at school, Aria, and she wowed Aria’s parents at dinner on many occasions. Aria and Tabitha broke up the year after they left high school – they were going to be moving to different parts of the country, and so it was a mutual thing. They both knew such a long-distance relationship would be too hard for them, and they were never that serious anyway. They missed each other and spoke on the phone from time to time, and they were both happy to just stay friends.
So what do you think? Obviously this is a very small section of what I hope to become very long by the time I decide to wrap it up. As I said above, I would like to make this into something serialsed with a new instalment every one or two weeks, but what would you like to see for Tabitha in the future? Check the poll below!
Well that’s it for this time. I hope y’all are continuing to enjoy reading what I’m writing. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment on the website or it me up at the social medias in the links at the bottom of the page. I believe you can also just reply to this email too, if you’re getting it in your inbox, so go ahead and give that a try!
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Thanks for reading! I’ll talk to you all again in a few days.
Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚
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