Today on the Sharon St. George website I’ve invited the protagonist from my Aimee Machado Mystery series to post a story about life in fictional Coyote Creek, where she lives with her fictional boyfriend and her fictional grandmother and step-grandfather.

Hi,

My name is Aimee Machado. My boyfriend, Nick Alexander, and I live in a ranching community in Northern California called Coyote Creek. Our apartment is a converted bunkhouse over my grandparents’ llama barn.

I’m a hospital librarian at Timbergate Medical Center, a few short miles from where we live, and Nick is a corporate pilot. But when we’re at home, we’re all about country life.

Sometimes it’s just routine, like helping my grandmother Amah and her husband, Jack, feed and care for their llamas and turkeys. Other times, something a little different comes along.

Like last weekend, when Amah was out of town visiting her brother, and Nick was away flying his billionaire boss to meetings in another state. I was enjoying a relaxing evening, watching Hugh Jackman in Logan, when Jack knocked on my door.

“Aimee, the setting hen just left her nest with three of her hatchlings. Come help me catch them before they scatter. She needs to be caged with them for a while, or they’ll fall victim to all sorts of predators.”

I paused my movie, reluctantly, I admit, and headed out to participate in a poultry roundup. We caught the three little ones easily, and settled them in a large, roomy cage with their mother hen. Jack provided food and water, and I thought we were finished. Back to Logan.

No such luck. Jack had checked the hen’s vacated nest and found one egg still there. The egg was pipped, which meant the poult was still inside, trying to get out, but it was too late to put the egg with the hen. As far as she was concerned, her incubating time was over. She had three offspring to take care of, and she had moved on.

Jack took the egg to the main house, put it in a box and set a lamp over it, hoping once the little one broke out, we could take it to its hen. But nothing was happening. After a few hours, Jack decided to assist by opening the shell himself. The poult was alive, but feeble and floppy, as newborn turkeys usually are for the first few hours.

“This has happened before,” Jack said. “Your Amah usually puts the little one under her shirt next to her heart for a few hours. Then when it’s strong enough to walk on its own, we give it to the hen.” He gave me a meaningful look. Would I volunteer?

“Does that always work?” I asked. “I thought the hen wouldn’t take a baby that had been handled by humans.”

“Not true, at least not with our turkeys,” Jack said. “We’ve done it successfully a few times before. Mama hen and baby both have a strong, instinctive desire to connect.”

I’ll skip to the finish and tell you that the little one came along just fine. After a few hours of cuddling next to my heart, it could stand and run around with sufficient strength that we were able to put it in the cage, reunited with the rest of its family.

Now, back to Logan. He and his fellow mutants have performed amazing feats over the years, but have any of them played nursemaid to a baby turkey? I think not.

To see what Aimee and her crime-solving cohorts are up to these days, have a look at Spine Damage, the newest release in the Aimee Machado Mystery series. If you’re not sure where the Azores Islands are, you’ll know all about this nine-island archipelago by the time you’ve taken an armchair trip there with Aimee and Nick.

“There are many well-researched crime and medical details which lend authenticity to the novel . . . Readers who enjoy detailed world and character building with sweet romance will thoroughly enjoy Spine Damage.” —Claudette Melanson for InD’Tale Magazine

http://indtale.com/reviews/mystery/spine-damage-aimee-machado-mystery-4

Some of us are old enough to remember the jokes about “Cabot Cove Syndrome” that were going around back when Angela Lansbury’s mystery writer, Jessica Fletcher, was solving murder cases. Others may have discovered Murder, She Wrote through the ever-present reruns on the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel.

The program about a small fictional town in Maine featured a new murder every week, and with the small population there, it seemed townsfolk were dying off like flies. The jokesters had a saying that still rings true as good advice for mystery writers today. “Don’t move to Cabot Cove.” This is particularly important if they’re writing an amateur sleuth series or cozy mysteries, which are often set in small towns.

Eventually, Jessica Fletcher’s writers picked up on the problem, and sent her off to New York City where she kept an apartment. Then they began sending her to all sorts of other cities and countries to practice her detecting skills. She kept her home in Cabot Cove, but far fewer murders happened there.

So how do we place our mystery series protagonist in a small town, yet still offer her, or him, the necessary room to roam? In my case, planning ahead before writing the first book in the Aimee Machado Mystery series was the key. Using what I knew about the world outside my own hometown seemed like the way to go. What were the reasons my protagonist might break away temporarily from her hometown and her job as a hospital librarian to solve a crime?

First, I gave her parents who live half a world away on a mid-Atlantic island in the Azores. Something I was familiar with, because I’d been there.

Then, I gave her a corporate pilot as a boyfriend. Something else I knew about, because there was a general aviation pilot boyfriend in my own past. With a pilot and a plane at her disposal, Aimee can hop to all sorts of destinations when the need arises: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, even the Azores.  No problem.

And remembering Jessica Fletcher’s New York adventures, I gave my protagonist a grandfather and step-grandmother who are actors living in New York City. Something else I knew about, as I had spent a lot of time around New York’s theatre scene while living on the East Coast studying for my Theatre Arts degree.

And last, but far from least, my protagonist lives on a llama ranch owned by her other set of grandparents. Her home is a converted bunkhouse above their llama barn. Conveniently, it’s only a short drive to the hospital where she works. In the second book in my series, her experience with llamas gave her the opportunity to hike in the mountain wilderness near her home when tracking down a missing character.

So a small-town setting may be a great home base for a mystery protagonist, but it’s a lot more fun for readers if that character has plenty of room to roam. I know it’s a lot more fun for me.

In Spine Damage, the fourth book in the Aimee Machado Mystery series, Aimee and Nick travel from their hometown of Timbergate, California to the Azores Islands and then to San Francisco’s yachting scene. They’re on a desperate search for clues to the fate of a missing teenage girl held captive on a superyacht whose destination is unknown. We’ll know if they find her in time when the book is released May 15, 2017.

In a temporary lull between final edits of the fourth book in my Aimee Machado Mystery Series, and working out the plot of book five, I found myself tempted to take a plum role in a local theater production of Ken Ludwig’s Edgar-winning play. The Game’s Afoot, or Holmes For the Holidays.

Several years had passed since I last trod the boards, and I had spent those years following my dream of becoming a published mystery novelist. Once that dream became a reality, I thought I had conquered my addiction to live theater. I was confident that I could take on this role, strictly as a favor to the director, of course, and when the run was over, I’d go back to my keyboard and my life as a mystery novelist.

And that’s exactly what happened, but something else happened along the way. I discovered that fiction writers and actors are very much alike. One of my fellow cast members made a remark in the green room about her long-ago desire to write fiction. She said she gave it a try, but everything she wrote seemed stiff, so she decided she wasn’t a writer and gave it up. Hearing her say that made me sad that she had given up so soon, because I recalled going through that same experience. Not only in writing fiction, but in my first attempts as an actor. Stiff. Self-conscious. Blah. I wasn’t “gifted” with spontaneous ability in either art form, so why even try?

For me, the reason to try acting was the feeling, when I attended live theater productions, that I didn’t belong in the audience. I couldn’t stop thinking I belonged on the stage. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized where that feeling came from. As a two-year-old, I was signed up for dance lessons by my mother, and for the next ten years, I was always on stage, never in the audience. First came the hula, then Spanish dancing, rumba, tap, and ballet. Finally, when it became clear that I did not have the feet of a ballerina, my dancing years came to an end. Instead, I turned first to live theater, and then to writing fiction.

After my recent return to acting, it struck me that fiction writers are, in a sense, actors who play all the parts. In theater, we actors usually create only one character—the role we were cast to play. We start with a script, and within the context of the story, we gain some idea of what our character is like. But we must bring that character to life with attitude, emotion, personality quirks, a past, and best of all, a secret. We do everything we can to flesh out that character on a live stage and to give the audience something to understand and relate to.

In writing fiction, we do the same, but instead of creating just one character, we create all of them. In our writing space, we put our physical bodies in a chair and tap a keyboard. But in our minds, we’re becoming any number of living, breathing people. We know what they look like, sound like, think like, and act like. Are they sane or crazy? Healthy or ill? Happy or sad? If we’re doing our characters justice, we could step into any of their skins and take them on a stage, fully formed and ready for an audience who will see them as we do in our minds.

In SPINE DAMAGE, book four of the Aimee Machado Mystery Series, Aimee and Nick are on their way to the Azores to hunt down clues to a missing teenage girl who vanished after attending a party on a luxury yacht. They stop off in Boston to visit Aimee’s grandfather, an actor who is appearing in a Boston theater’s production of BUS STOP. Although they enjoy the play, the mystery surrounding the girl’s disappearance deepens, and solving it becomes a deadly race against time. SPINE DAMAGE is due for release on May 15, 2017.