Focus on the more elegant lifestyle angle, and how it requires more elegant behavior.

I had a brief fling with a dancer (ballet). Let me tell you, being handed down the stairs makes you feel like the Queen of All You Survey. Being presented everywhere we went together became exhausting, though fun while it lasted. That seems to me a large part of the difference between ordinary manners and manners as practiced by Goths. More theatrical, more awareness and care in the presentation, as by inclination Goths *are* very aware and willing to take pains to present themselves as they wish to be perceived. It's part of the esthetic.

If this fiction gig doesn't work out, I suppose I could always write cookbooks. (Translation: I'm really pleased with this paragraph.)

...

Entering Mercier's kitchen was like entering another world. One where the aromas of chicory brewing and the house gumbo simmering and butter melting over crusty, fresh-baked bread combined into a mélange so rich and heady, it created an ambience where time and season had little meaning. In this one small corner of New York, it wasn't a frigid, blustery early January day. It was coffee and sugar-dusted beignets on a Garden District balcony shaded by ancient oaks draped in lacy Spanish moss. It was a leisurely evening stroll along the Mississippi and the joyful noise of the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street and the frenetic intensity of Mardi Gras. In here, it was always spring in New Orleans.

It was no wonder, really, that I spent more time here than I did in my own apartment.

...

ETA, on subsequent readings, I'm not sure that "ambience" is the precise word I want, so if anyone has any suggestions, feel free.

Hungry now. And warm. And it is only 65 in my apt.

Hee! And how hard am I laughing that when I went back to the home page, the quote that generated for me was William's bad poem?

That's a great paragraph.

And I can't wait until Jilli's book comes out.

James M. Cain would have preferred writing about food to writing Noir fiction. He did produce at least one cookbook to the despair of his agent who complained about how little profit that yielded compared to spending the same time producing a novel.

Barb, there's always food porn.

And y'all wonder why I despair, sometimes...

Vanitha Sankaran's WATERMARK set in 1320 in Narbonne, France, when church-controlled parchment made paper making a near-heresy, told by a young albino mute woman the literate daughter of a papermaker imprisoned when the inquisition finds her using paper to write troubadour poetry about courtly love, to Lucia Macro at Avon, by Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff & Associates (NA).

Literate albino mutes.

Literate albino mutes.

Well, they're terribly underrepresented in literature, and they have an important tale to tell. Like how the thriving papermaking industries of France were being harrassed in the 1300s and a teacher was found who was willing to take the disabled daughter of a mere craftsman as a student.