This past April, while wallowing in my non-fiction book about New England craft beer, I wanted to get back to fiction. But I didn't want to get mired in my work in progress (WIP), a novel called No One to Bury, whose characters I've been writing since 1986. No typo's. Yes, it's been that long.
I had just had an email exchange with a friend, an older woman who has an edge to her personality and to her life. I thought, "What if I created a character who was a "nice" version of this woman. Not too nice, not too edgy. I jumped into my April Nanowrimo writing, "Murder on Cabbage Island," featuring Patsy Mason, owner and chief cook and bottle-washer of Coastal Lobster Bakes.
I continued working on the beer book, and wrote an average of 350 words a day in the new mystery. Writing daily was my goal, as well as fleshing out a "cozy" mystery novel. I ended up with 31 new pages, a new novel, and a new series character/protagonist. "Cold case, meet hot chowdah," was my tag line, and I still crack up when I read it.
Okay, here's where real life likes to come knocking: I discovered that there is already a mystery series set in Maine with a protagonist whose job is putting on clambakes I'd chosen that "job" because we were going to celebrate my husband's upcoming "odometer" birthday with a lobster bake on Cabbage Island, off Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I was worried about the event: would everyone get to the boat on time? Would we get home before dark? Dumb stuff. So I decided to make our upcoming event into a mystery about a cold case involving the disappearance thirty years before of Patsy's younger sister.
I have a legal background, and didn't want to get embroiled in a fight about whether I'd plagarized this other clambake series. So I talked to my husband about it one day, and decided: apples. That's the answer. She doesn't have to do lobster bakes. She can be a Pomologist, an expert about apples.
Real life again: Walking our dog Henry the other day, I came on an old apple tree amidst the maples in a little woods on our property line. There were dozens of yellow apples on the ground with many still on the tree. I gathered some and brought them in the house. I'd just heard an interview with Rowan Jacobsen on Radio Boston (www.wbur.org/radioboston) about heirloom apples and how people were growing them again. I grew up in apple country in Littleton, Massachusetts. That area is Johnny Appleseed country, so apples were a big part of my childhood.
"My" yellow apples weren't pretty, but Mr. Jacobsen had explained that many types of apples were quite ugly and not meant for eating, necessarily. As a title examiner, I knew that there were a few farms on our road and that our land had most likely been part of one. So today we drove up to Cayford Orchards in Skowhegan, Maine. I brought my homely apples with me and asked the young farmer about them.
"They could be Tolman Sweets," he said. "Are they ready now?"
"Ready?" I asked "There on the tree and on the ground." I had no idea what he meant, but got it later.
"The spots on these apples are caused by a fungus we call "Spotty Blotch."
Ahhh. So these apples are meant to be prettier. One mystery solved. "Is it possible to bring the tree back?"
At this point, my husband, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and who thinks apples grow in the supermarket, starts to grimace. "Oh, no," I hear him think, "not another project of Kate's."
"How would I do that?" I ignore the grimace
And the nice 7th generation Cayford farmer told me about pruning. When I got home, I consulted the U. Maine Cooperative Extension service, which had a short paper on "Renovating old apple trees." And it isn't that bad of a project, even though they try to warn you that it might be.
I smiled while reading about my Tolman Sweets, a very old apple that may have been first grown in Dorchester, MA before 1700. They are a cider apple and cooking apple, and no mystery, very sweet.
And I smiled even more when I realized that I was not wasting a beautiful October afternoon doing research on apples. My new series character will still know a thing or two about cooking lobster, but her real expertise is all things apples. Murder of the Apple of my Eye? Murder with MacIntosh?
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