Harvesting Inspiration, a Guest Post by Sarah Stewart Taylor

RHYS BOWEN:  So many good books coming out around this time! Not only are we celebrating my release and Lucy's next week, but several good friends of the Reds also have new books out. I'm happy to be hosting Sarah Stewart Taylor today, calebrating her new book HUNTER'S HEART RIDGE. And Sarah is here to share about a subject close to my own heart: flowers.  I love flowers. When I go to the farmer's market to buy beans and plums I often return with a bunch of freshly cut flowers as well. I'd love to have an English garden full of scents and blooms but alas I live on a hill where deer wander freely and devour anything that isn't oleander. But I'm living vicariously through Sarah's flowers today!

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR:

 While harvesting flowers in my cut flower garden this morning, I thought to myself, “Alice Bellows would be so proud of my scabiosa.”

Alice Bellows is not a real person. She is a character in my series of novels set in 1960s rural Vermont. In the series starter, Agony Hill, Alice, who has returned to her hometown to live after the suspicious death of her CIA-connected husband and a lifetime of espionage adventures of her own, makes flower arrangements for a town celebration, gives arrangements to friends, and spends hours upon hours in the peace of her meticulously-designed and well-tended gardens.

At some point over the last couple of years, I realized that my interest in flowers and Alice’s had begun to flow together so that I wasn’t sure where one started and the other ended. Like Alice, I became absolutely obsessed with growing cut flowers for bouquets.

I’ve always loved growing things. We have a perennial garden, planted by my late mother-in-law, at our farm that I have fun caring for, and I have often planted sunflowers or zinnias and enjoyed harvesting the blooms. But two years ago, after one too many visits to Floret Flower Farm’s Instagram account, I realized that I wanted to try growing cut flowers myself and that I wanted to learn how to arrange them.

There’s something about being able to present a friend or family member who is celebrating or going through something difficult with a glorious arrangement of home-grown flowers. Flowers, lovely but short-lived, force us to slow down and notice the sublime, to revel in the miracle of nature’s wildly varied colors and shapes.

So, last summer, I started preparing the beds and grew a few varieties of zinnias and cosmos. Over the winter, I read and researched and ordered way too many seeds. When my husband gave me a seed-starting set up, complete with grow lights, my new hobby began to bloom, so to speak.

While snow blanketed the ground outside my windows, I started about twenty varieties of cut flowers from seed: snapdragons, scabiosa, yarrow, strawflower, feverfew, veronica, celosia, gomphrena, zinnias, cosmos, and more. Every day I would check the little seedlings, watering them, turning them to the lights, and dreaming about the day they would finally reach maturity.

I can’t tell you how much joy it has given me to watch them grow, first inside and then out in my garden. In so many ways, cut flower gardening is an excellent antidote to the ups and downs of writing and publishing. Weeding and watering give me a great excuse to get up from the computer and when my words don’t feel particularly well-composed or beautiful, I can create order and art with the flowers. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this passion; I’m hoping to have a farmstand and sell bouquets at some point, but I have a lot to learn before that will be possible. 

Doing the work of growing all of these flowers has helped me to understand Alice better too. After the danger and uncertainty of her married life, she has found peace and satisfaction in her gardens. There is also a secret in her past that draws her to her beds and borders and, since these are mystery novels, in Agony Hill and its follow up, Hunter‘s Heart Ridge, which comes out August 5th, Alice begins to suspect that her past in the intelligence world is not completely in the past. 

Whatever happens to her though, I know she’ll keep growing flowers and I’ll be gardening and arranging right alongside her.

Have you ever shared a hobby with a fictional character?

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR is the author of the Sweeney St. George series, set in New England, the Maggie D’arcy mysteries, set in Ireland and on Long Island, and Agony Hill and Hunter’s Heart Ridge, set in rural Vermont in the 1960s.

 Sarah has been nominated for an Agatha Award, the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and the MWA Sue Grafton Memorial Award and her mysteries have appeared on numerous Best of the Year lists. A former journalist and teacher, she writes and lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. You can learn more about her at www.SarahStewartTaylor.com. Visit her on Instagram and Facebook to see more of her flowers!

Writing What You Don’t Know: Former Spy Writes Supernatural Thriller

 LUCY BURDETTE:  When I met Alma Katsu recently at the Connecticut Fiction Fest and heard about her career as a CIA analyst, I was wildly jealous. That's exactly the kind of background (says me) that translates into a bestseller kind of platform (me thinks.) But Alma is here today to tell us why it isn't as easy as it seems. Welcome Alma!

ALMA KATSU:  When I was an analyst at CIA, many of my coworkers thought about sitting down one day and writing a spy novel. Obviously, few did. (Even I didn’t: my first novel, The Taker, is historical with a supernatural element and had nothing to do with my intelligence career.)

But one analyst had penned a spoof of The Hunt for Red October as if it had been written in the rigid style taught to analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. I wish I could show it to you—I’ve been told that a copy is floating around the Internet, but I couldn’t find it—because it perfectly illustrates the difference between being a spy in real life and being one in a novel. Needless to say, it made real intelligence analysts laugh so hard they blew Coke through their noses when they read it.

I worked in intelligence for nearly thirty years, splitting my time between the National Security Agency (known to you civilians as “the super-secret National Security Agency”) and CIA. Thirty years is a long time to do anything, long enough to ingrain the many quirks and peculiarities of the intelligence business into my DNA. (For instance, I find I must correct the inaccurate statement I made above, though it is a common misconception: technically, intelligence professionals are not “spies.” The people they recruit to give up secrets are spies.)

I was midway through my career as an analyst when I decided to return to writing fiction, something I’d abandoned once I started at NSA, as being a published writer is pretty much incompatible with working in intelligence. When literary agents found out about my day job, they’d invariably encourage me to write a spy novel. “You could show what it’s really like,” they’d say, and I took them at their word.

So I wrote a spy novel. It was a lot of work. I wanted to pick the right international conflict, one that I found interesting and I thought Americans should know more about. I wanted it to be accurate: my professional reputation was on the line.

I showed it to agents. To say they were underwhelmed is putting it kindly. I remember one telling me pointedly, “No one wants to read about someone doing their job.”

Of course, many writers are perfectly able to write great thrillers based on their day job: bookshelves are crammed with novels written by doctors, lawyers, police officers, pathologists, detectives, military personnel, police, you name it. For me, the decision not to write spy thrillers came down to this: it wasn’t fun. To me, writing is a means to be somewhere I want to be, with characters I want to be around—an escape. Writing spy novels kept me tethered to my workaday world, and it wasn’t rejuvenating.

Writing The Taker was fun, in that peculiar way we have of deriving enjoyment from mastering a difficult task. It took ten years to get it right, but it is a book I am proud of (Booklist chose it as one of the top ten debuts of last year, so my pride feels a little justified). The Reckoning was less fun to write, if I’m honest, because of the pressure that comes with writing your second book. Oddly enough, the reviews are better than the ones for The Taker, so maybe all that neurotic polishing paid off.

Will I write a spy novel? Someday, maybe. For now, my editors have asked that I stick to writing more books like The Taker. But stay tuned: I haven’t ruled it out.   

Alma Katsu’s novels have been compared to Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander: historicals with romantic and supernatural elements, but with a unique character all their own. For more information on Alma’s books, visit her website at http://www.almakatsu.com. She’s giving away a NOOK tablet ($199 value) to celebrate The Reckoning’s release; the contest is open until June 30 and you can find details at http://www.almakatsu.com/contest.php