The Morelville Mysteries Full Circle Collection Boxed Set

The Morelville Mysteries Full Circle Collection Boxed Set-3

The only reason Dana wound up in Morelville in the first place and meets Sheriff Melissa Crane is because she had an informant that lived in the area. She had no way of knowing that the tiny village might end up becoming the center of her universe...at least for a while.

On Writing: Using the Amish in a StoryOriginally published April 8th, 2015

There are pockets of Amish people all over the southern half of Ohio. In the southeastern quadrant of the state and to the east as far north as Canton, you can find them wherever you can find tillable countryside. They are abundant around the little village that I live in and, about 20 miles away, they practically own the town of Coshocton. They're also the largest cultural set in the village -fast turning city - of Berlin (Ohio) and of Millersburg named after it's Amish founders. Surnames like Miller, Gingrich, Yoder and Hershberger are as common around here as Jones and Smith are in the rest of the country.

Go into any Amish owned or operated general store or gift shop these days and you're likely to see an interesting site: romance books focused on Amish relationships. They're being sold primarily to the 'English' customers of these Amish businesses, of course. The vast majority of Amish women don't read such things...at least not that we ‘English’ would ever know about. There seems to be a pretty strong market for the books that has no doubt been fueled by the nationwide exposure the Amish orders are getting on their culture and lifestyle from hit television series like 'Breaking Amish' (TLC), 'Amish Mafia' (Discovery) and 'Return to Amish' (TLC). Women are buying these books full of sweet (read 'chaste') romances.

In the village where I live, interaction with members of the Amish order that predominates in this area is pretty common. They use the post office and buy supplies and feed at the store. They eat in the pizza shop. They buy ice and sometimes fuel (for those whose particular church allows power tools) at the gas station. There isn't a homeowner in town who hasn't contracted at some point with an Amish roofer or carpenter. Most have bought livestock feed or lumber from Amish millers, vegetables from Amish farmers, and baked, canned and dried goods (like noodles) from Amish women.

Amish roofers put a new roof on our garage shortly after we bought this house. We bought it with the full knowledge that the roof leaked like a sieve. During the replacement work, we had an interesting conversation with a young Amish man who just didn't get the concept of a female head of household and no men around to speak of. His father and boss, long used to dealing with the 'English', just laughed at his confusion and told us 'Amish man' jokes.

Young Amish carpenters set the posts and fixed the support beams for the deck that leads from our back door some 48 feet to our above ground pool. They were from an order that completely forbid the use of power tools of any kind, even those powered by battery. The dug holes for and placed 30 4"x 4" support posts by hand. They affixed support beams with huge lag bolts - by hand. When it was time to lay the decking, our then 17 and 19-year-old nieces helped by running drills as the Amish carpenters set the thousand plus screws the whole operation took. Of course, in the heat of July and with an open pool before them, you can imagine what the young ladies were wearing. The young Amish men didn't have to imagine it at all...

With books featuring the Amish for an 'English' audience already out there and sold in Amish stores, with the Amish featured on cable television, and with the proliferation of their interaction with the worldly people around them - including with me personally - it's an enticing thought to use them or some sort of interaction with them in a story. If you've been following this blog at all, you know my current published books, 'Relic' and ‘Busy Bees’ are works of lesbian themed mystery fiction. My next book, 'Dana's Dilemma' continues the series and features the same two lesbian protagonists. The book has a secondary story line focused on an Amish character.

Have I crossed the line? Is it bad to include an Amish or former Amish character in a book that has lifestyle themes so different from the Amish lifestyle? Thoughts?

Hitched and Tied won't be Vegan FriendlyOriginally published May 14th, 2015

We're mostly omnivores out here in the heartland. Where I live, farming - both crops and animals, raising vegetable gardens and hunting are a way of life. Even most kids that live in the 'city' (defined as a nearby town of about 17,000 people) are involved in 4H or FFA or both because either farming or some other type of a land based lifestyle is represented somewhere in their families. People out here eat meat with their meals and they enjoy it. They bond over summer cookouts and hog roasts and over county fairs and fall hunting rituals. It's all part of the culture when you live in farm country, USA.

When my spouse and I started dating, my son fell in love with her family's farm. He hung out there with her nieces and nephews. They were all involved in 4H and so we got involved too. 'The boy' loved it. He raised a dairy market feeder calf one year but that was a difficult project for him because we had to keep the calf at the farm and we lived more than an hour away in the suburb of a major metro area. We relied a lot on the nieces and nephews to help out.

In subsequent years, we raised chickens and turkeys right in our suburban garage in a poultry palace one of my nephews helped to build as part of a carpentry 4H project. One of our fondest memories of those times is the way the neighbors would all come out to gawk when we rolled the big pen out of the garage to clean it and let his turkeys wander around in the yard while we did it.

County Fair time was a fun time and it was a hard time. Kids don't always do what they should do when they should do it. Animals almost never do what you want them to do or exactly what you hope they will. Couple those things with the constant watchful, vocal presence of members of P.E.T.A. and of the Humane Society of the United States (NOT to be confused with your local humane society) and you had a recipe for a little heartburn...sometimes a lot.

More than a few of my city living lesbian friends are vegetarians or vegan. They espouse the benefits of an all-vegetable lifestyle. I get where they're coming from. I just don't happen to agree with them. Life in the big cities is quite a bit different than life in the small towns and tiny villages of the heartland. Food out here is as much about community as it is about nourishment. There's less pretension and more shared spirit. Unexpected guests show up at dinner time? Grab a plate! There's always room for one more.

'Hitched and Tied' will be as much about county fairs, kids raising livestock and learning responsibility and about learning how to feed the world in subtext as it will be overtly about mystery and romance. Not a meat eater and can't accept people who are in the subtext of a story? Maybe you should just skip this book...

The Places Characters Take You - Hitched and TiedOriginally published May 31st, 2015

The best made outline for a novel - or, in my case, the best made template for one - sometimes gets sidetracked by where the characters take the author. For example, when I first contemplated the story line for Book 2 in the Morelville Mysteries series, Busy Bees, one of the detectives with the Sheriff's Department only had a minor role. As the story evolved, the role became much more pronounced and it became a thread left hanging at the end that carried over into Book 3.

Now, well into Book 4, Hitched and Tied, following the template I created, a minor character with a bit part became far more important to the story. While writing the single scene featuring Barb Wysocki, bar owner and former love interest of Sheriff Mel Crane, the dialog just flew and before I knew it I had a full chapter and a new plan going forward.

Sometimes characters take you places that you never expected to go. Sometimes they even take you places that completely change the story and for the better. I'm excited to see who else steps up in Hitched and Tied and takes off with the story.

5 Harsh Realities of Setting a Story in a Hick Town

Originally published June 15th, 2015

A note from Anne: What follows is a blog post that was directed more at the myriad writer friends I’ve acquired in my short time as a self-published author. I’ve included it in this Companion compilation because it gives so much of the setting background that I build my novels on.

Morelville is a hick town. It's a figment of my imagination based, in part, on the real life tiny, unincorporated village (population around 400) that I live in. This imaginary rural place is set in the heart of the very real Muskingum County, Ohio with the County Seat, the City of Zanesville (population 25,435), as a back drop in my stories and sometimes as a major player. Zanesville can't be classified as a hick town but it's certainly surrounded by and influenced by them and it's in those sorts of small town, hick town settings where Sheriff Melissa 'Mel' Crane lives and plies her trade and solves crimes as the County Sheriff.

The Urban Dictionary defines a hick town as:

1. A town with one, if any, stop light.

2. Most of the inhabitants drive trucks or other oversized SUV

3. Cow/horse pastures everywhere

4. If you're lucky, 2 convenience stores, a gas station, and a liqour store

5. One road in and out

6. Usually full of Hicks, Rednecks, Country boys, and similar.

7. Most everyone knows each other and loves their town

Let's examine those points and determine hick town status for the Morelville setting specifically, shall we?

1. Morelville doesn't have a stop light. You have to go to Zanesville to see one of those. Zanesville has many.

2. People farm in and around Morelville and there's no way to get around in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in the winter without four wheel drive. Everyone owns some sort of truck or SUV.

3. Cow and horse pastures are everywhere in the immediate vicinity of Morelville.

4. Morelville has a general store where you can buy food, toiletries, hardware and feed, a gas station, a pizza shop and not much more. It's a mostly dry town where 'liquor' (read, BEER) has to be carried out from the pizza shop, a bar out of town, out on the state route (see ‘The Boar’s Head in Book 4: Hitched and Tied, coming soon) or a gas station with a license to sell it in the next town over.

5. There's one main road into Morelville, period. It's surrounded by farmland and forest on the other three sides so no road goes 'through' it. That's not to say that there aren't dirt tracks everywhere for the oil men, the loggers, the hunters and the moonshiners...especially the moonshiners who can get in and out of town without ever approaching the main road.

6. Place a check mark here - it goes without saying.

7. Ditto point six, above.

So what are the harsh realities of having such a town as a setting for stories? I'll tell you:

Harsh Reality #1 - No Transient Coming and Going

Unless your setting is some sort of off the beaten path tourist attraction, you're stuck with creating stories that involve only the usual residents, the occasional serviceman/deliveryman, out of town visitors and, once in a series, a drifter that just appears as if from nowhere. When you set your stories in a geographically separate local without any sort of tourism trade, you either need very strong characters that can carry your plot in one off stories or you need to consider having it be in close proximity to a slightly more urban local. The Morelville of my stories sits about a half hour away from Zanesville.