WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW by Gloria Alden

I chose to write my Catherine Jewell Mystery series in a fictional town called Portage Falls in northeast Ohio where I’ve lived all my life. The town is a composite of the small towns in my area and my imagination.

Conservatory in Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia

My main character Catherine Jewell is younger than I am and is a botanist who works part time in a large public garden. She also has her own garden center where she sells plants. So how is she anything like me? Well, I love gardening so it seemed like the way my character should be, too. I’m not into cooking so I wouldn’t have a food series. On the many vacations I’ve taken over the years with my siblings, we always make a point to visit large gardens like Longwood Gardens. I’ve been their twice now. So that’s how I’m able to describe Elmwood Gardens where Catherine works part time. Am I a botanist? No, but I have a sister who is and who helped me out sometimes in the beginning. What else do Catherine and I share? She lost her husband and only child, a daughter in an accident ten years before the book started. I lost my first born son John to cancer, and I know the pain of losing a child never quite goes away. I also lost my husband but not to death.

What about the other characters in my books? The other main character is John MacDougal the police chief in this small town who has never had to deal with a murder before in the first book. What do I know about a policeman’s job? Only from the hundreds of mysteries I’ve read over the years. He, of course, will eventually be Catherine’s boyfriend.

My brother who died 7 years ago. I miss him.

Then there’s Ed Flavian, who is based on my brother although my brother never worked in a public garden, he was an avid gardener who even propagated hostas of his own, and had many, many rhododendrons and other plants around his beautiful farm.

In my second book Bruce Twohill an environmentalist comes to town to try to stop a huge freeway from going through a wetlands. When staying in the bed and breakfast run by the police chief’s mother, Martha MacDougal, he ends up talking her into going on a backpacking trip with him on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. She tells Catherine all about it in the next book.

Here I am backpacking on one of my trips.

I’ve always been interested in saving the land, but what do I know about backpacking? When I was sixty years old after reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, My sister, Elaine thought we should do that so we bought backpacking equipment; back packs, small stoves, water purifier, backpacking tents, etc. and with three of her teenage children we drove down to Shenandoah National Park and hit the AT that went through there. At first her son had to put my pack on, but in a few days I could do it myself. We covered about thirty miles in the five days we hiked.                                                                                                     

A year when brother Phil, Cathi & her husband Bill joined us.

                                                                                 

The next year my sister Elaine with only her son that year, our younger brother Phil, with his two teenage sons, and my Washington state sister Catherine, with her teenage son went back down to hike more of the AT that year.

 From then on my sister Elaine and I continued the AT trail with her son, and sometimes we backpacked some Pennsylvania trails, too. After Elaine had a heart attack, we stopped the back packing. She survived and is just fine, but cell phone service in the mountains is unreliable so that ended our back packing although one of my brother’s sons did the whole AT a few years after we stopped. Would I like to go back packing again? Yes, but I don’t know anyone who would go with me, and I’ll admit I wouldn’t be able to go as fast and as long as I could before.

One thing that I have in every book is the breakfast meetings with elderly men in the local restaurant. It’s one of the things I noticed if on our camping trips we decided to go to the nearest restaurant instead of cooking breakfast in the campground before we headed out on a hike or on to another place.

 In my third book,Ladies of the Garden Club  I have three members of the Garden Club poisoned. (Thank you Luci, the Poison Lady).  I do have four books on poisons, and I am quite aware of what plants are poisonous that I grow, too. I pull up the deadly nightshade that grows by my barn and get rid of it in case it spreads into the pasture where my ponies graze.

In the fourth book, The Body in the Goldenrod, I haven’t been to a Civil War reenactment, but I have been to Gettysburg, and a woman in our writers group writes only Civil War books and stories. She and her husband are re-enactors.

In the fifth book Murder in the Corn Maze I made a point of going to walk in one since it had been a long time since I had gone to one.

In the rest of the books it’s been mostly my imagination except for Catherine’s grandfather going into a nursing home. My father was in one and so were several cousins.

And now we get to the tenth book I’m working on, Daffodils in March. The newspaper is full of the opioid problem so I’m bringing that into this book as it just came to Portage Falls.

This is not near my house.

     

Also, I decided it’s time to bring a few Amish families to the area around Portage Falls because I have Amish families in my township. Horse and buggies go down my road, and the blacksmith who trims my ponies’ hooves lives a few miles from me. I have to drive there to pick him up. Once he was busy mowing the field behind his house so his wife invited me in. When she heard I wrote books, she was interested and said she loved to read so I gave her the first book in my series.

P.S. My collie Maggie barks at them from the living room or beside the house. I think she doesn’t believe horses should be on the road. At least she doesn’t go near the road.  

This is an Amish nursery my sisters and I visit every spring.

                                                                                                                                                                         What do you feel comfortable writing about in your books?

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