Hooking For Trouble

I finished the copy edit of GONE WITH THE WOOL before the deadine. It required moving it from a Word document to a Pages document and back to Word. Thankfully, it survived all the changes without getting wonky.

When I got down to the end, I had that tug at my heart feeling as usual. It’s always hard to let it go when I know this is the last time I can make any big changes. This really is the big good bye to the manuscript.

But I did finally hit send and it went off hurling through cyber space. I gave myself a few minutes off and then it was back to the next Molly book, HOOKING FOR TROUBLE.

The story is a little like the Hitchcock movie Rear Window with Molly thinking she sees things happening in the house behind her. Since I am using the house being built in he yard behind me, I have spent a lot of time peeking through the bushes to see what’s going on back there, though I keep it to Sunday when no one is working. I wouldn’t want them to think I was some kind of nosey neighbor.

I can’t say I am happy about the big house going up back there. As Molly’s mother says, “there goes my plan for nude sun bathing.” Really there goes our privacy. We used to have almost a complete view of greenery and now this monster is looming over us. So, at least if I can use it for something, it makes it a little less objectionable. And there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.

They are going to put up a fence on their side eventually. I heard it is going to be some white vinyl thing that seems so popular now. It will definitely cut down on my ability to see what’s going on there without the aid of a ladder. But hopefully by then I will be finished with the book anyway.

Will whoever buys the house have any idea of what I imagined going on there? The house I used for HOOKED ON MURDER is across the street. There were different owners then who never closed their curtains and when I used to walk my dog, I couldn’t help but look in. The owners were often in plain view and I wondered if they had any idea they are living in the house where Ellen Sheridan was murdered.

It is convenient to use what’s around me for research. Julius, the cat down the street, became Julius the cat in the Yarn Retreat Series. The only problem is Julius and his family moved. So there went my inspiration. There’s another black cat who lives nearby we call Fake Julius. He’s or maybe it’s she is a little short on personality. Julius seemed to think he owned the neighborhood. He would come in our backyard and sit staring at me through the window. Fake Julius comes around at night and sits outside our front window taunting our cat Rocky. Fake Julius is definitely a cat’s cat, while the real Julius was more into interacting with humans.

Now that I am done with GONE WITH THE WOOL, I have set aside the crocheted butterflies, and the cowls I made on the knitting loom. In HOOKING FOR TROUBLE the crochet in the spotlight is going to be Tunisian Crochet. It is done using either a long hook or a hook with a cable attached and instead of working one stitch at a time, it is worked in rows and resembles knitting - sort of. I look forward to the new challenge.