Michelle Miles: Finding Inspiration in the Weirdest Places (With Parenthetical Thoughts)

This past weekend was a “stay at home and work around the house” weekend. The husband was in the yard most of Saturday and Sunday and I cleaned up around the house, did laundry, hung a ceiling fan (instead of baking a cake – I was super proud of NOT baking a cake even though I was dying for cake). While the Man was in and out and I was puttering around the house and also browsing Amazon Prime, I ran across this show called Just Add Magic.

Now, I will tell you I am definitely NOT the demographic target for this show. Nor do I have a pre-teen girl in the house. But the premise sounded cute and I ended up watching the first episode on my laptop.

Guess what? I got hooked.

Silly, right?



In a nutshell, the story is about three best friend girls in middle school who find a magical cookbook in the attic in one of the girls’ house. Kelly has learned to bake from her grandma (played by Dee Wallace – you’ll remember her as the mom in E.T.) but something is wrong with Grandma and she no longer speaks. Kelly figures out she’s under some magical spell. Kelly is determined to break the spell on her grandma. She drags Hannah and Darby along for the ride and lots of funny things happen when they bake the recipes from the magical cookbook.

It’s a 13 episode season and I ended up watching the first 7. I was drawn into the storyline and, naturally, each episode is a cliffhanger so you HAVE to go to the next one to see what happens. No word on whether or not it will be renewed for a second season. (And, by the way, I’m still trying to wrap my head around these series that are only on streaming media like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Makes me wonder if Network TV will be a thing of the past anytime soon.)

Anyway...so what does this have to do with writing? I have a magic story about a witch that’s been brewing (did you see what I did there?) for a while and I just couldn’t figure out a few things about it. The show has given me some new ideas on what I need to do to go back and revise the storyline. Not that I have time to work on that, of course, because I have 230948 projects ahead of it. So right now I will enjoy the remaining shows while that story continues to brew.

What about you? Hooked on any streaming shows lately?