Deadly Row to Hoe Cover

Cricket McRae

Here’s the official cover for my sixth Home Crafting Mystery, Deadly Row to Hoe. I’m really excited about this revamp! The book will release this November.

Looks pretty different from the previous covers in the series, doesn’t it? This is the direction all the covers will be going from now on, and the earlier books will likely change over to this illustrated style in subsequent printings.

Now don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the wonderful photographed covers put together by Midnight Ink’s Lisa Novak. She captured the clean, spa feel I wanted for a series featuring a woman who makes her living making soap and bath products.

However, the home craft featured in in Deadly Row to Hoe is vegetable gardening, specifically a community supported agriculture farm. Another photographed cover would have probably involved vegetables, and a few people have already commented that the books look a bit like cookbooks – despite the fact that one has soap and bath oil on the cover and another is all about fiber and yarn. Granted, though, a lot of traditional colonial crafts involve food. ; )

So this illustration captures the whole farm (and even includes a mountain that looks a lot like Mt. Rainier in the background – how cool is that?).

Many thanks to Midnight Ink for making this change, and to Lisa for spearheading the mockup and finding the illustrator!

Change is good.

Of Herbs and Stewing SNIs

(with apologies to JRR Tolkien)

The trick to planting herbs is to contain them in pots. That is, unless you want your garden overrun with mint and sage and oregano and thyme. I stick to this rule, because I want my garden to produce tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers too. Except there’s this one peppermint plant that went rogue years ago. It’s small, I thought, I’ll be able to keep it tamed. Besides, a Buffalo winter will surely kill it.

I’ll pause so all you gardeners can laugh.

This is that peppermint plant today:










The only way I keep it out of my garden is ruthless hacking. I make tea from the leaves, so it’s a useful beast, but an unruly one.

Which brings me to SNIs (Shiny New Ideas). I’m deep in the sequel to Force Of Habit. Yet there’s this YA that’s nagging me. On top of that, this morning as I drove to the grocery store I saw a deserted parking lot with seagulls fighting over some stale bread, and I started to write an entire scene in my head. For yet another book.

Just like the rampaging peppermint, if I don’t contain these books, they’ll devour my sequel time. This is why I keep pen and paper in my glove compartment. I sketched out the scene. It was like giving a treat to my hungry cats so I could finish a task before feeding them. The SNI settled in its corner, gnawing its tidbit of attention. Like this oregano:








When the sequel is with betas, I know I’ll have time for the SNI files. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I’ll squee as I open their boxes and dither over which to play with first. I’ll allow the many scenes and characters and story arcs I’ve tucked away to audition for the starring role of my new WIP.

I can hear them now, rehearsing their parts, putting on their best makeup, shining their tap shoes. They’ve seen what a well-tended plant in the right pot can look like and they want the same result.

Since rogue herbs don’t yield a useable crop, I’d love to hear how everyone else handles this. All the writers reading this post (writers of fiction, nonfiction, songs, anything): how do you contain your peppermint?

THE ZUCCHINI THAT DEVOURED NEW JERSEY

The first thing you have to know about me is that I’m a city girl exiled to the suburbs. I’m much more comfortable in a concrete environment with mass transit than the land of malls and minivans. The second thing you need to know about me is that I have two black thumbs. With few exceptions, plants see me coming and commit suicide rather than suffer a prolonged death at my hands.

Heaven knows, I’ve tried to develop a green thumb, but I swear there’s a conspiracy in the Garden State. Whatever I don’t kill, the squirrels devour. Along the squirrel grapevine the word is out; my address is passed from varmint to varmint. They hold conventions in my driveway and feast on whatever I dare to plant, leaving my neighbors’ gardens full of flowers and produce.

One day I arrived home to find what looked like cloves of garlic scattered all over my front porch. On closer inspection, I discovered they were the remains of the spring bulbs I had planted the day before. Every single bulb had been dug up, and while I was running errands, the squirrels had been throwing an all-you-can-eat party on my porch.

Another morning I looked out my kitchen window to find a squirrel perched on my gas grill, a green tomato between his thieving paws. I went outside to shoo the little bugger away and check my two tomato plants that the day before had been loaded with green tomatoes. Every single tomato had been yanked from the vine, chomped a few times, then discarded in the dirt.

After years of gardening frustration I finally discovered the one plant that seems to be both Lois proof and squirrel proof -- zucchini. The first time I planted zucchini, I made the mistake of planting three, figuring that if the garden gods were smiling down on me, one might survive. All three not only survived but thrived. And that’s a heck of a lot of zucchini. Zucchini is the gift that keeps on giving. And giving. And giving. And giving.

The strange thing about zucchini is its rate of growth. In the morning it’s the size of your pinkie finger, and by evening it’s big enough to feed your teenager’s football team. There are only so many ways you can disguise a zucchini and fool your family into believing they’re eating something other than those green things taking over the backyard. So that first year I wound up giving away a lot of zucchini.

Ever since then, I only plant one zucchini each spring. Still, I have a bumper crop of zucchini from early summer to late fall and continue to give away almost as much as I serve. But I’ve become very adept at zucchini camouflage. You wouldn’t believe the dishes I hide zucchini in. Remember the scene in Forest Gump where Bubba rattles off all those different ways to cook shrimp? I now have just as many ways to serve up zucchini. Here’s one of my favorites that even the most vegetable-hating kid will enjoy:

CHERRY CHOCOLATE CHIP ZUCCHINI MUFFINS

(makes 24)

3 cups flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 eggs

2 cups grated zucchini

¾ cup vegetable oil

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

¾ cup chocolate chips

½ cup dried cherries

Beat eggs, then stir in oil and vanilla. Mix all dry ingredients together, then add gradually to egg mixture, mixing until smooth. Fold in chocolate chips and cherries. Coat muffin tins with non-stick spray. Fill tins 3/4 full. Bake 15 - 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

New Jersey is known for its Jersey tomatoes. I’d love to be able to grow my own instead of having to resort to the supermarket. It would also make a nice break from zucchini. If you’ve got a sure-fire way to keep the squirrels at bay, I’d love to know your secret.

What's Your Sign?

Cricket McRae

Beauty is all well and good, but beauty plus practicality gets me going every time. I was talking with a friend about my grand plans to create a potager garden in the backyard. In case you're wondering, a potager is a vegetable/herb/edible flower garden which has been landscaped like a decorative garden, with borders and hardscape planted for aesthetic value as well as plenty of edible produce.

My friend remarked that I’m such a nut (Nut? Bah.) about such things because I'm a Taurus.

Sigh.

Fine. Take my fabulous and unique personality and boil it down to a star sign. A quick online search told me the other things which supposedly define the majority of us born in May.

Loyal, patient, calm, good with money. Good cook and homemaker. Nurturing. Warm-hearted, fair-minded, unpresumptuous, down-to-earth. Dependable. Strong. Trustworthy. Efficient, nature-loving, morally and emotionally courageous. Healthy. Not easily provoked or deceived. Generous.

Looky there. I'm a saint. Maybe this astrological stuff is right on the money after all.

Oh wait. There's more?

Thick-necked (!) Lazy, plodding, conservative. Overindulgent, stubborn and resistant to change. Sensitive, aggressive, stoic. Obstinate. Fond of luxury. Materialistic. Have a propensity to gamble. Either muscular or plump (depending on the degree of laziness one exhibits). Fond of fine food and drink.

Good Lord. I sound like Henry VIII.

So there you go. Forget the 25 random things about me tags, the Facebook quizzes; there I am in a nutshell.

Did I mention the tendency toward sarcasm?

Despite having neither a propensity to gamble nor being particularly resistant to change (Random thing: I've lived in fifteen different towns, three of them twice.), I'm fascinated by how the characteristics reflect two sides of the same personality coin.

I'm playing around with a new series idea, and want the characters, none of whom I've written about before, to be fully developed before I plot too much. In my experience those kinds of characters practically plot themselves, making my job a heck of a lot easier. This admittedly cursory look at the zodiac made me think about their personalities in terms of how traits may be interpreted differently by those around them: Is my protagonist practical or plodding? Strong or obstinate? Depends on your point of view.

Alternatively, the same trait might be affected by nature or nuture. For example, someone who could be good with money ends up being a gambler instead because they're lazy and overindulgent.

Now, I'm not sure I'm inclined to assign my characters zodiac signs as launch pads for their personalities, but it's a thought. At least I might mix it in with my usual detailed backstory and occasional character interviews.

How do you add layers of meaning and motivation to your primary and secondary characters? Have you ever thought about your characters' astrological signs?

Not the Hands of a Writer

Cricket McRae

I went for a manicure yesterday. Apparently, I should go more often, because within seconds of sitting down, I detected the distinctive sound of tsking under the nail technician’s breath.

Finally, she asked, “What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

That usually results in a question about what kind of writing I do. Not this time. This time I received a single quirked eyebrow and a look that said, “Sure you are, honey. These are not the hands of a writer.”

Which is true. I have the hands of a gardener. Of a cook. A soap maker. And that’s just the beginning. I’ve kept chickens, made cheese, baked bread (and a lot of other things), canned and pickled and dried a ton of food, made jerky … hell, once I even butchered a deer in my living room when I was a starving college student (not as messy as it sounds, honest). And for the record, I’m not a farm girl.

I know, I know. Nutso. Crazy. Wacky. They’re coming to take me away, ha ha.

Ha.

Seriously, why does anyone do this stuff? I mean, I canned grape leaves for dolmades last week, for heaven’s sake. I make my own cultured butter.

Frugality. Nostalgia. Uniqueness and/or a gourmet touch. Self-sufficiency. Creativity. Tradition. Stubborn neo-Ludditism. A Martha Stewart complex.

All these apply to me to some degree, except the last one. But mostly? It’s about knowing how things work. About being in on a process from the ground up.

Of course homemade soap is satisfyingly practical: inexpensive, better quality than commercial soap, milder, customized with my scent blends, a source of creativity while at the same time providing sudsy cleansing goodness on a daily basis.

And yes, my great-grandmother saved her bacon grease all year, and each fall she and her neighbor built a fire under an iron tripod in the driveway between their two houses in Sheridan, Wyoming, where they spent the day making the lye soap she used to wash everything from her toes to her clothes.

But I don’t know if she thought about how cool it is that you can mix oil (acid, sort of) and lye (alkaline) and through the chemical process of saponification end up with soap (which is essentially a salt, however weird that may sound). But I do. Think about it, I mean.

Okay, I know not everyone is fascinated by how yeast creates maltose and alcohol as bread rises, or what a mesophilic cheese culture will produce as opposed to a thermophilic one. I know I’m a little odd that way. But you know who is interested is finding out what makes things tick? The protagonist in my home crafting mysteries, Sophie Mae Reynolds, that’s who.

I’m often asked the ubiquitous question, “Is Sophie Mae really you?” I always used to give some variation of the answer, “sort of.” Now I’m starting to wonder whether the qualities that cause me to research natural fiber dyes and actually consider using the traditional mordant to set those dyes (urine, honest-to-God, and no, I’ve not gone down that road), are the same qualities that make her not only run a handmade toiletries business, but also poke her nose into the whys and wherefores of neighbors dying and cases of botulism that make no sense. She’s curious. She wants to know the guts of how something happened.

And you know what else? Between her gardening and chickens and preserving and soap making, I have no doubt Sophie Mae is badly in need of a manicure. Let’s just hope her friendly neighborhood nail tech isn’t a tsker.

What are you nerdy about? What odd fascinations do you have that aren’t exactly cocktail party fodder? Come on, give.