Calling Librarians Everywhere!

Wow. Library Journal wrote a positive review of my book. This is huge. It's where librarians go to decide which new books to buy. I am delighted! If my only sales were to every library in the country, I would be one happy author. Here's what they said: 

"Computer scientist Cameron (Cam) Flaherty turns her back on the corporate world to manage her great-uncle’s small Massachusetts farm. As a self-described geek-turned-farmer with rusty social skills, Cam finds the whole “getting to know you” process of small-town life tedious. Still, she plugs into the locavore community and does her best to make friends. But things go topsy when her recently fired farmhand is killed with a pitchfork in her greenhouse. Cam is now a prime suspect, while she thinks everyone else is acting suspiciously. At the same time, someone is systematically sabotaging Cam’s fields and crops, upping her unease. The killer astutely figures out Cam’s greatest fear and uses that weapon next. VERDICT Another topically relevant cozy debut introduces a fledgling organic farmer keying into the local foods movement and encountering some whack jobs along the way. This would partner well with Chrystle Fiedler’s “Natural Remedies” series."

Readers, feel free to quote or forward this review to your local library when you ask them to acquire my book. It's one of the best presents you can give an author. And thank you!

Rehab Reading

I've been quiet around here because I went in for knee-replacement surgery on January 15. The recovery is very painful and sitting at the computer is particularly uncomfortable. I'm certainly not getting any new writing done yet.

The upside is that all I'm really capable of doing is reading and sleeping, and watching the occasional movie. And that means I get to read almost ALL THE TIME. For a woman like me with a way-too-busy normal life this is a huge treat. 

When I was recuperating from my back surgery two years ago, I did the same. I wrote a review on this blog of each book I read. I'm already behind schedule, but I hope to catch up, at least for the books that I really loved.

So far I have read the following novels:

• Wrath of Shiva and Last Call for Justice by Susan Oleksiw
• Deadly Offer by Vicki Doudera
• Retirement Homes are Murder by Mike Befeler
• Purgatory Chasm by Steve Ulfelder
• Lie Down With the Devil by Linda Barnes
• A Plain Death by Amanda Flower
• Shadows of A Down East Summer by Lea Wait
• Pies and Prejudice by Ellery Adams

I got halfway through a novel on my Kindle by an author new to me until I realized I just didn't like the story and the writing enough to finish it. So many books on my list and so little time!

Short stories and novellas include the following:

• The Monday Night Needlework and Murder Guild by Kathleen Valentine
• "The Rising of the Moon" and "Dead Letters" by Sheila Connolly

I'm even reading some non-fiction:

• The Orchard, a memoir of Ipswich by Adele Crockett Robertson
• What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

So stay tuned for reviews!

Inspiration

How do we get inspired to write? What experiences have planted the seed of an idea for my stories and for the various scenes in Speaking of Murder? Sure, we're advised to write what we know. For fiction that has its limits, but familiar events and scenes can also prompt the imagination to take off running. When that happens, I and my fellow writers have to race to keep up, getting as many words down in the first draft as we can.

Some years ago, I was driving home from work after dark. I saw a road crew digging a big hole in the ground to work on pipe or wires or something. Floodlights illuminated the area and it looked like a movie scene. All you could see were the workers in the spotlight. A few weeks after that I saw a man walking in Beverly, Massachusetts, who just did not look American. Italian, maybe, or Portuguese. Full head of dark hair, although he wasn't young, and pants and shoes of a cut you don't see in Macy's or Walmart. So I combined those into a story of a granite cutter from Portugal who works at night and his romance with a librarian. Never got it published, but I worked hard to craft the characters and I still feel good about the story.

My story, "Obake for Lance," which was published in Riptide (see the Publications tab), was loosely based on someone I knew when I lived in Japan. A fellow English-conversation teacher, he was deported on spurious charges. The story I wrote is fiction, but many of the scenes and descriptions stem from my experiences in my two years of teaching English there.

Melanson's Boat Shop was an Ipswich fixture. I was intrigued by it when I moved here and walked along the river. It was decrepit, strange, mysterious. I had already written it, renamed Pulcifer's, and a fictitious resident into a short story and into Speaking of Murder. Then last summer when we were in Maine for a week, my son called and said the boat shop was burning down. You can hardly make this stuff up. So the fire got written into the book, too. I don't know the actual inhabitant or anything about him, except that he survived the fire, so I felt free to continue to invent his character and subsequent events.

In the sequel to Speaking of Murder, Lauren walks on Ipswich's Crane Beach. I spent a lot of time on the beach this summer, as much as I could. And I noticed the area to the west where the wooded hill comes right down to the sand and rocks at the edge of the water. I thought, "Looks like a great place to find a dead body." And as I wrote along in the Challenge on the new book, bingo! A dead body happens along as Lauren runs on the beach.

What experiences have sent you to the keyboard to write a scene or a story? What stories have you read that you suspect have a basis in fact?