Day 3, 7,040 Words, and Finally a Cronut!

Somehow it took me over 7,000 words to introduce the cronut into my novel about cronuts. But in other news, a haunted house strip club actually exists. I couldn't believe it when I googled "haunted house strip club" and there were actual entries. Anyway, here's something from what I wrote today. The bakery is called Juliet's Bookstore and Bakery, and there is a very lovely story as to how it came to be, but I guess you'll have to read my novel.


If Chloe had to pick out the day when all of that changed, she probably would have said that it all began on November 1st, 2013. Everywhere that Chloe looked, things just seemed different. A particularly intense pre-workday ball hockey game was happening outside of her apartment, and as Chloe was locking her door a guy wearing a “Canada Eh!” t-shirt who seemed to be referring to himself as “J Diddy” scored what appeared to be the winning goal with an assist from his teammate, a short and pushy brunette who was playing with a child-size Sidney Crosby hockey stick. Aspiring novelists were typing furiously on their keyboards in coffee shops all over town, hoping to make it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. As she pulled up to the bakery she was sweating more than usual because she had been biking faster than usual, because she was later than usual. This time, it wasn’t because the day before the Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair had held a press conference to share the news that the infamous Rob Ford crack video had been uncovered by Toronto Police Department and had the potential to finally be viewed by the entire world (well, not entirely because of that). Instead, she was still feeling the effects of the night prior. Several of the Juliet’s Bookstore and Bakery employees had decided to celebrate Halloween by going to the Boo!-bie Mansion, a haunted house-themed strip club in one of the seedier parts of town.

On the last day of the month, the Boo!-bie Mansion, owned by the infamous businessman who referred to himself as Gordon the Vampyre, would host an all-male revue. Chloe, who tagged along because of curiosity more than anything else, had never seen anything like it. The men on stage looked very odd indeed; it was a monster mash, bordering on a graveyard smash. One stripper was wearing a ghostly sheet with a strategically placed diamond cut out. Another man was so hairy that his only costume option was probably the werewolf, and and all he was wearing was a fur posing pouch. The vampire had edible (or so she had heard) blood smeared all over his body with a small bat hanging from his nether regions. A mummy was dancing seductively while slowly unwrapping his bandages. A man-o-lantern had a face painted on his stomach, and nothing else. Well, unless you count the “cheeky” face painted on his posterior. One man, who Chloe assumed to be an ode to “Thing” from the Addams Family, was covered in head to toe with black paint, save for his “manhood.” One of the men was tanned to an orange crisp, had a ridiculously good body, and was only wearing tiny white shorts (but not for long) and the mask of the serial killer from Scream. He was dancing in a come-hither and, dare I say—bewitching—manner to the tune of ‘Hips Don’t Lie.’ His certainly didn’t. Finally, there was a Frankenstein stripper, who was oddly doing a robotic shimmy accompanied by the Charleston. To say that it was uncomfortable would be insufficient. It was an extremely sexy nightmare.

They were all several cauldrons deep into the Boo-bie Brew when Juliet had left suddenly, saying that she needed to get back to the bakery right away. Chloe had just assumed that she had caught sight of the stripper that was dressed up as Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and was making an excuse to leave because she had lost her taste for the Boo!-bie Mansion as well as keeping her eyes open. But when Chloe unlocked the back door and took in the scene in the back room, it appeared as if Juliet really had rushed over to the bakery and hadn’t left since. It looked as if the kitchen had exploded; dough, flour, and icing were everywhere.

“What happened?” Chloe nearly shrieked. She was so unused to seeing the typically pristine kitchen looking like a scene from Twister, but sadly, without Bill Paxton.

“I was inspired last night,” Juliet responded, not looking up from the bowl that she was mixing feverishly.

“I thought that you had been inspired to roofie yourself because of the stripper who had touched you with his claw hands.”

“I mean, of course I thought about it,” Juliet said, still not looking at Chloe. “But if I was going to roofie myself, it would have been after Gordon threw his cape over me and started re-enacting a scene from the Olsen Twins, Steve Guttenberg and Kirstie Allie classic, It Takes Two.”

“That’s what he was doing? I thought you were into it.”

“You’re fired.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m crazy about my idea!” Juliet said, finally looking up. “Seeing the way that things were coming together that you wouldn’t expect to go together—like ghouls and sexuality—I started to think about desserts that you wouldn’t expect to work together. And all of a sudden, it came to me. What if I made something that is a mix of a donut and a croissant? Like, a croissnut?”

“Oh god, a croissnut? That’s awful. Just call it a cronut.”

“Yes,” Juliet cackled. “I will create the cronut!”