Sheila Connolly Talks Seasons (and Apples and Murder)

Welcome guest blogger Sheila Connolly, whose new mystery novel Rotten to the Core came out on Tuesday.

Thank you so much for inviting me to blog with you, to help me celebrate the release of the second book in my Orchard Mystery series, Rotten to the Core.

The series revolves around my ex Boston banker heroine Meg Corey trying to learn how to manage an orchard for profit with zero experience. I have to say writing the series has made me much more aware of the seasons this year.

In the first book, One Bad Apple, Meg arrived in Granford, Massachusetts in the dead of winter to renovate the 18th-century house her mother had inherited. January is not the best time to see rural New England, and Meg wasn't charmed. She didn't even know she had an orchard, and she learned of it just as a developer was threatening to pave it over as a parking lot for a new shopping center. Her first thought was to patch up and sell the house ASAP and leave town.

But of course she didn't, and she managed to save the orchard–and solve the murder of the developer, whose body was found in her yard. Not the best way to start life in a new town, but she finds she is beginning to enjoy the positive aspects of small-town living, not least of which is having neighbors who know you and look out for you.

Rotten to the Core picks up in the spring, when the apple trees are coming alive–it ends with the first bloom. Meg has had to learn a lot about orchard management: she's taking a class at the local university, and she's hired a young manager to help her out. She's also facing tough decisions about whether or not to spray the orchard with pesticides and herbicides–apples seem to attract a lot of problems. If I had known how tricky it is to produce apples that conform to the perfect standard that consumers expect, I might have run too. It doesn't help that the body of a local organic farming activist (or should I say, fanatic?) shows up in the orchard.

The third book, Red Delicious Death (due out next March), is set in the summer and finds Meg pacing like an expectant mother waiting for her apples to ripen. To distract herself she agrees to help a young couple from Boston who want to open a much-needed restaurant featuring local foods in Meg's small town, a plan that almost gets derailed by the death of their sous-chef. And of course the fourth book (not named yet) takes place during the apple harvest. There are a few complications, like the unexpected arrival of Meg's mother and yet another murder.

I'm not a farmer, and I have a brown thumb, but I've gained a lot of respect for those who manage to raise anything. It's heartening to see increased interest in gardening, from the President on down, and I hope that people will realize that local food tastes a whole lot better than stuff that's been shipped halfway around the world. This year I've put in a vegetable garden for the first time in years–not the best year to try it, since we had something like 21 days of rain in June, and the slugs have gone wild. But I figure if I'm going to write about farming, I should know something about it and get my hands dirty. I've even planted a couple of apple trees on my front lawn–and watched them get attacked by pests and plagues. I can only imagine what it must be like to watch it happen on a large scale over many acres, especially when your livelihood depends on it and there's not a lot you can do about and still produce a healthy crop.

But those small farmers who are willing to tough it out deserve our support. I'm beginning to sound rabid about the evils of corporate farming–just ask my family and friends–but bigger is not always better, and paying less for mass-produced food may be more expensive for us all in the long run. Meg's a convert too, and we both say: buy local!

Summer of my Discontent

I'm not a summer person. Give me howling winter winds any day.

Or even better, give me howling winter wind outside to inspire my imagination while I'm tucked away inside reading a good book. The kind of book where a crack of thunder will make me jump.

With the bright summer sun shining outside, I'm not inspired. Being from California, this is a problem. So what do I do? I draw the blinds, light some candles, and turn on a thunderstorm track on iTunes.

(Really, I have a couple great storm recordings. I think they're supposed to be for "sleep and relaxation," but they're great for setting the mood for reading or writing an atmospheric mystery.)

I have the same issue with summer travel. Hiking around castle ruins isn't nearly as awe-inspiring when the sun is beating down on you and throngs of tourists are squeezing by in the same turret.

Needless to say, give me a snow-covered stone circle in the dead of winter in England (at right) over a beach any day.

On the bright side, San Francisco summers are full of fog. Not quite as nice as a snowstorm, but I'll take it.

--Gigi

Martha Days Of Summer

Growing up, Summer was my glimpse of "what life should be." Three months of trading in school uniforms and homework assignments for all day pajamas, reading by the creek, and tending to tomato and bean plants with my grandparents.

Being an Adult With No Kid, Summer is a time forgotten. Life hasn't slowed down since that first desk job I got years ago and while I've still observed the vagaries of Independence Day, Labor Day and Memorial Day, they are poor substitutes for a real Summer.

To be honest - part of why I want to be a writer is this idyllic notion of a year-round-Summer-Life. Of staying in my pajamas all day. Of reading by the beach (because we all know the best writers spend a lot of time reading.) Tending to my garden.

Dangerous, isn't it? Most writers keep their day jobs to pay the rent. Most writers are handcuffed to their desks, hunched over teeny laptops. Most writers work really damn hard.

But I can't shake that dream - that idea - that hope. This year, my Summer begins with three back to back writing-related trips to Washington DC, New York, and Los Angeles. I can't help the buzzing excitement "what if what if what if what if" - what if I can make it happen? What if I can have Summer all year long?

Dangerous, indeed - but it keeps me here, at my laptop, typing away.

* I had a lovely picture to share of me sitting on a bale of hay. Really. Me. On Hay. But Technology (my scanner, my laptop, the internet) hates me so instead I have nothing. *

Summer's Bounty

by Lisa Hughey

For me, summer is inextricably bound with food.

Perhaps this stems from my roots, my great-grandmother worked a farm until she was in her late eighties and then still had a fairly large vegetable patch squatting and picking until she was ninety odd years old. Summer meant going to visit my MaMae on the Eastern Shore, eating her sweet custard corn bread and savoring an abundance of fresh strawberries and corn and eggs.

Maybe it’s from visiting my grandparents in Baltimore during the sweltering humid days of June, eating peaches and tomatoes so big, one slice would extend outside the edges of bread slathered with a mayonnaise and salt & pepper.



Growing up in Illinois, summer meant farm stand corn bought on the side of the road, the day it was picked. My dad would come home and shuck the ears and minutes later the corn would be in the pot. Steamed and drenched in butter with a smattering of salt, so hot it almost burns your fingers, but you can’t wait for that first mouth watering bite.

Summer meant going strawberry picking, then making jam, canning jars in the hot steam, until you’re so tired you can’t see straight but not tired enough that you won’t sneak another berry, licking the juice running down your fingers from fruit so sweet it’s like candy. Hot summer nights where our entire dinner was salads: potato salad, skin on, celery, mayo, paprika, salt and pepper; egg salad; green salad with a little Parmesan cheese, garlic, olive oil and lemon juice; fresh sliced tomatoes.

Even though the farm is gone, my grandparents passed away, and the farm stands of my youth have given way to housing subdivisions and grocery stores, I’ve tried to carry those same traditions forward for my children. We get our produce locally, fruits and vegetables from organic farms and farmer’s markets. So while they won’t have the experience of going to the farm directly, hopefully they will remember the taste and experience of fresh produce picked and then eaten. And we planted our first vegetable garden this summer...together.



I hope you enjoy all of summer’s bounty.

Lisa

ps–Martha thinks I planted my garden because of the potential coming apocalypse, so please don’t tell her it had more to do with my farmer roots...although I guess I’ll be prepared. :)

Pastimes for Hot Days

L.G.C. Smith

Summer is not my favorite season. It’s too hot too often where I live, and I spend a lot of time lying low. Shades drawn, air conditioner blasting. If I have to go outside, I wince. Sure, the house is filled with the perfume of case after case of tree-ripened cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, and nectarines from my sister’s organic farm, Froghollow Farm, and I do like to make jam and the odd batch of peach ice cream, but mostly? Summer is for reading and writing.

It always has been, as this excerpt from my doctoral dissertation reminds me. It was written perhaps fifteen years ago, and the day I described happened longer ago than I care to remember, but the memory remains as fresh as the scent of peaches rising from the basket in front of me now.

“Lynn, you have to read this book. It’s soooo good,” my younger sister, Jan, urged time and again the summer I turned seventeen.
“Really,” agreed Sarah, the youngest of us. She rolled her eyes and shimmied her eleven-year-old body. “You gotta read it.”
I didn’t demur.
“I’m not going to read that crap.”
I was confident in the moral superiority of my chosen summer reading list: Dickens, Ken Kesey, Sylvia Plath, and Thomas Hardy.
“Well, it’s here in the bookcase if you change your mind,” Jan insisted, slotting the little book into a space. “You’d like it if you’d give it a chance.”
“Remember, that one’s the best,” Sarah said. “Beware the Beast. By Anne Mather.”
As a junior literary critic, the veteran of two semesters of Shakespeare, one of each advanced composition, British poetry, and 19th century American literature, I was not going to lower myself to read a book titled Beware the Beast. I had read the backs of the small but rapidly growing collection of white paperback Harlequin Presents that my mother had shelved next to our leather-bound Harvard Classics. Given the choice between real literature and those simplistic, silly tales of young English girls swept away by Dutch doctors (or British peers, expatriate businessmen living in exotic locales, Australian and Canadian ranchers, or an assortment of wealthy, titled European macho men) and reading with substance, I opted for the canon every time.
Until one day when everyone was gone.
There were no witnesses to capitulation, no urging voices to resist. It was hot; too hot to be depressed further by The Bell Jar. Between late adolescence and the weather, I was already far too close to crazy to read another miserable word of that. Wandering across the living room to the bookcases in the corner, I slid my hand along the smooth spines of the Harvard Classics. Tales of the Arabian Nights had proven dull. Dr. Johnson did not beckon. Plato made me sigh with despair. Bacon, Milton, not even my favorite metaphysical poets could rouse a fragment of interest.
I came to the dozen or so Harlequins. I drew my hand back.
No. I would not read one of those.
I looked back through the Classics.
No, not those either.
Like a sneak thief cohort of Oliver Twist, and before I could think the better of it, I snatched out Beware the Beast. The back cover titillated with the teaser - a young woman is bargained away by a careless, financially ruined, and now deceased father to marriage with a ruthless Greek shipping tycoon more than twice her age.
Oh, dear.
But what would it hurt? Having actually read one romance novel, I would be able to more effectively criticize them. Thus, with an attitude of mingled contempt and fascination, prepared to rip the book to shreds (perhaps literally) before my chastened sisters, I read my first romance novel.
Within the hour, I was hooked.

Just possibly, that might have been one of the best miserably hot summer days I’ve ever had.

Huzzah, and All That

--Adrienne Miller

When I was a teenager--late teens, mind you--all of summer was a lead up to one glorious event. Four or five unforgettable weekends each summer that I like to think shaped who I am...or, at least, shaped my arsenal of stories that make Martha wince. 

Before we get there though, I think a little preface is in order. I’m not sure if we’ve had enough time together for you to grasp my full geekiness. Oh, I’m sure we’ll get there...Star Trek conventions, Swedish pop bands, Dr. Who, an obsession with Converse...the stories will all come out eventually. I’m not ashamed of my geek status. It was hard earned.

Because when I was younger I spent every summer at...The Renaissance Faire.

Oh, sweet Ren Faire, with your fake english accent and and strained iambic pentameter, how I loved you.

My friends and I would pile into someone’s car and drive up to the Black Point Forest in Marin. 100+ degrees outside and all of us dressed in about twenty pounds of cotton and wool that covered every inch of us except our chests. We had a contest to see who could get their cleavage the highest...the renaissance was a bawdy time, you know.

I remember the smell of damp earth and duff that hit you when you walked through the gate. There were other, more noticable, smells--this was an outdoor event, mind you, filled with people and animals that all had to go sometime--but these are my memories, so I’m choosing to ignore them. 

Flowers and ribbons in our hair. Tarot cards read by a gypsy wearing gold coins. Giant, greasy turkey legs for lunch. 

And the boys...You didn’t think it was solely my love of history that brought me back week after week, did you? 

The Ren Faire was where I learned to flirt. Ordinary-world Adrienne, the jeans and T-shirt version of me that everyone knew, she wasn’t so good at flirting. But cinch me up tight in a bodice and drop me in the middle of pretend Sherwood Forest and suddenly I could bat my eyes and smile at any cute guy who crossed my path. 

Cause that was all the Ren Faire was--pretend. A group of people coming together to all play make believe for a few weekends each summer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. 

Then one summer the owners of the property sold off the land to a company who decided the land would be more profitable as a golf course. The faire found a new home further south, but by that time I was hanging out with a different set of friends. I’d met a guy who I could flirt with regardless of what costume I was wearing. I stopped going. 

It wasn’t a sad parting. Other little summer rituals have taken the place of the Ren Faire. But when I think of summer there is still a little part, deep inside of me, that yells out Huzzah!

Missing Pawnee Wells

Above: the cabin as it looks today.
A bit worse for wear, but still standing!

Juliet here:
When I was a mere stripling, my parents bought a 20 acre parcel of land in Northern California's Siskiyou Mountains, east of Yreka --$8,000, back in the day. My dad talked his good buddy, George Heskett, into buying the plot adjoining ours sight unseen, and for the next couple of decades my folks and their three girls would spend the summers up on the mountain with the Hesketts' three girls, along with whatever hangers-on were willing to brave the mosquitoes. Our place was dubbed Pawnee Wells, and the Heskett's was Dinky Springs.

To the right: my sisters helping me to walk on the foundation logs of the "temporary" cabin, built by hand by my mother and father

Surrounded by Klamath National Forest, sixteen miles from the nearest town -- Fort Jones, boasting all of 500 residents-- There was no power or telephone, but there was a creek nearby with the sweetest-tasting water...apparently in those days we were either blissfully unaware of water-borne illnesses, or they weren't so much of a problem.

To the left: me "helping" my dad, starting me on a lifelong career as a painter

Sure, we sat around innumerable campfires, sang, ate S'mores, and told stories. But it was much more than that.

Here are some memories of those long, hot, blissfully lazy summers, in no particular order:

Going to Jones Beach, a small patch of sand at the banks of the Scott River, riding the rapids in massive inner tubes, reading, and soaking up the sun...

Catching frogs and digging clay out of the clear cold creek beside the cabin, convinced we could make a fortune selling "natural" pots...

Scrounging around in that very same creek, determined to find just one more Shasta Grape Soda floating around in the murky bottom of the "cooling hole" where we kept our drinks....

Spending several days setting up a "haunted trail" which all adults were invited (read: required) to tour, including an entrance fee and plenty of chances to throw money into the Haunted Well and the Haunted Grave...

Making "snakeskins" by putting Styrofoam cups on the end of sticks and letting them melt and twist in the fire (these were then featured along the Haunted Trail, see above)....

Waging a merciless campaign of nagging and cajoling that began about one week into the vacation, wherein we children would target some poor adult with the aim of getting them to take us the twenty-five miles into nearby Etna (population 700 --the "big town" in the Scott Valley), which had a theater that ran third-run movies ( I remember seeing "House of Blood"). This outing always included a stop at Dotty's Jolly Cone, which served chocolate-dipped soft-serve ice cream that would inevitably drip down your arm before you had a chance to eat it.

To the right: My very tired (yet handsome) father with his three girls (me making a face, of course)

It was the kind of multi-week summer idyll most of us don't have time for anymore. I know I don't.

When I returned to California after spending ten years back East, I packed my boy, a couple of brave friends, and a whole lot of supplies into my truck and headed north, cleaned out fifteen years of mouse droppings and deteriorated furniture, jacked up the porch, laid down some tile, cleared the fire circle, and set up summer residence once again in the cabin that my folks built by hand.

When they built it, they declared it was the temporary structure that would suffice until they built their dream home on the mountain. Things change, plans go awry. But the cabin is still standing, guarding our memories and summer secrets.

I was bound and determined to go up this summer to lay on the beach with a book, write by hand on a pad of paper, and trek into town for a soft ice cream cone (which, I have to admit, is not nearly so sweet now that I can drive myself any time I want.)

But no luck. With two manuscripts (for two different series) and a media tour planned this summer, I finally had to admit last week that I wasn't going to make it to Pawnee Wells this year, after all.

But I expect part of my mind, and most of my heart, will always remain at Pawnee Wells, relishing the never-ending summers.

And once I make a my fortune and find the time, you'll know where to find me...just stop in at Charlie Bob's bar in Fort Jones, and ask for directions.

Waiting For Fall

Ah, summer.

I hate it.

Okay, there are a couple of nice things about summer, I suppose. I admit them if pressed. I like it when I'm in Yosemite and the air smells of heat and pine and dust. I like long evenings on the porch with wine and fresh tomatoes. I like swimming in the lake and drying off on the bank. I like....

Whoops. I ran out of things.

I hate heat -- my naturally sunny disposition turns sour as soon as the mercury soars anywhere above a brain-melting 72 degrees. Too much sunshine gives me a headache, which then turns into a migraine, from which I try to hide in the bedroom with too much light, in a house with no air conditioning. And I whine, and whine, and whine.

See? Summer makes me annoying.

Give me a cool, fall day, when the edges of evening are crisp like the top of an apple crumble. Or a stormy winter night when you worry if the roof can take the weight of the water. Or a drizzly spring morning when you wonder if it will ever dry out enough to mow the newly happy grass.

I know I'm an odd duck, but I love the problems of inclement weather. I like worrying about oil slicks on the highways, and whether my windshield wipers work. I like making sure my umbrella still opens (although I never want to carry it). I love it when the house is too cold when I get up to write, when I have to stumble around the house making coffee while wrapped in layers of wool, waiting for the heater to fire up and take off the chill enough to put my fingers on the laptop and start working.

Heat ennervates me. I have no brain. No creativity. Certainly no drive. On really hot days I lie in my front of my fans in a wet dress and turn my sound machine to the rainstorm option. Over the rain, there's a computerized plink-plink that I can just imagine is a stubborn drip hitting a bucket outside.

I spend summer writing storm scenes and waiting for fall.

The Way Summer Ought To Be

by Sophie

School's been out for a couple of weeks and I'm crazy thrilled to have my kids home. I'm not so thrilled about all the driving, arranging, scheduling...the sports camps, the music camps, the reading ahead for fall semester...not even about the charitable project one of the kids is doing (yeah, yeah, yeah, it builds character - um, mine. Moms ought to get the f'ing Eagle badge or whatever it is, just for getting through all the nagging and prodding and encouraging without turning to drink. It is ironic that the project involves something called a "Peace Pole"...conversations about its completion date are far from peaceful...)

When I was a kid, summer was a do-it-yourself affair. My mom didn't work, but I don't believe it ever occured to her that it was her responsibility to amuse us. The first she expected to see of us was dinner, as long as we got our chores done.

Needless to say, that led to a certain amount of creativity.


My favorite summer project was one I undertook with my brother. Mike made a brick mold out of scrap wood, and we started turning out bricks made from Missouri clay dirt. While we waited them to harden to a construction-ready consistency, we got some of the neighbor kids to help us dig a hole in the woods next to our house. If you're familiar with midwestern soil, you'll know that excavating sufficient rocks, roots, and clay and shale deposits to create a hole big enough for four kids to crouch in was a considerable effort. Our fingernails stayed black and our bare feet built up calluses that would send any self-respecting manicurist screaming. Many days later, we were ready to cover the thing with an old piece of drywall boosted from some dad's workshop. We made a bunch of Ritz-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and hunkered down there waiting for the apocalypse.

Drywall isn't really good for exterior walls, as the next storm proved. The bricks - whose possible use eluded us - melted back into mud. We found something else to do.

Fast forward to 2009. I'm knocking myself out to meet my deadlines while my kids turn to Resident Evil Five for company and wait for me to get hungry enough to take them to Subway. Meanwhile, on the other coast, the Best Niece Ever has found her way back to summer as it was meant to be, summer filled with imagination and magic and stories in her head.

Evidently she took a long look at her dad's Shamus plaque and thought to herself....well, this is what she thought up:



And her dad didn't help. He just....let it happen, like parents from the Olden Days.

Today's report from my brother is that my nephew now wants to get in on the action. "The pistol inspired him to make his own: 24 lego handguns, in various colorful colors. He then lined them up on the front windowsill and announced that he was opening his own gunshop."

Ooooh....I'm getting a little misty. Now that's what summer ought to be.

Topics Coming Soon

05.31.09 Writer

06.01.09 First Lines

06.15.09 Characters

06.29.09 Summer

07.13.09 Creativity

07.27.09 Movies

08.10.09 Food

08.24.09 Deleted Scenes