Guest Blogger: Lea Wait

LEA WAIT FOR MAYHEM AND MAGIC

 

Maine author Lea Wait writes the Shadows Antique Print Mystery series and the Mainely Needlepoint series. She’s also the author of historical novels set in nineteenth century Maine for ages 8 and up, and LIVING AND WRITING ON THE COAST OF MAINE, about her life as a new wife and author of 15 (so far!) books. She invites readers to check out her website, http://www.leawait.com for more about her and her books, and to friend her on Facebook and Goodreads.

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            Thank you for inviting me to visit Mayhem and Magic!

            Beginning a new book, whether a stand-alone or the next in a series, means creating new places, new challenges for characters, and (if the book is a mystery) figuring out who to kill and why.

            When I began planning the latest book in my Mainely Needlepoint series I puzzled over those questions, and then decided to have fun: I’d include things that I liked to read about when I looked for a relaxing read.

            Which is why THREADS OF EVIDENCE, set in the working waterfront town of Haven Harbor, Maine, also includes a large deserted Victorian house where a teenaged girl died in 1970. (Did she drown in the fountain there? Or was she murdered? Maybe her mother, a serious needlepointer, left clues in the panels she stitched and left in the house.) Each chapter begins with an eighteenth or nineteenth quotation about needlework, or the words a young girl stitched on a sampler centuries ago.   

            As a fourth generation antique dealer who loves house sales and auctions and unexplored houses, I left the deserted house furnished. And when a famous Hollywood actress buys the estate, she hires Angie Curtis, who has private investigator experience, and her friend Sarah Byrne, an antique dealer, to appraise everything of value in the house, dump the rest … and organize a major lawn sale. (What an opportunity!)  

            But THREADS OF EVIDENCE is a mystery. Everything is not as it seems. Why would a Hollywood actress buy an estate that people in Haven Harbor assumed would be torn down some day? Why is she so interested in what happened back in 1970? And, then … why did a hummingbird die at that lawn sale?

            Add in her hunky son, the approaching wedding of Angie’s grandmother, and a cast of varied Maine characters, stir them together, give them secrets, and you have THREADS OF EVIDENCE.

            Yes, it’s fiction. (Isn’t it lucky most mysteries are?)

            But if you’d like to know what it’s really like to live 12 months a year on the coast of Maine, marry the guy you’ve loved for only 12,994 days, and write books (15 published since 2001, with 5 more under contract,) then I invite you to enter my world, and read LIVING AND WRITING ON THE COAST OF MAINE. Short, often humorous, essays, move from month to month in Maine, celebrating, dealing with weather, living with an artist in a house built in 1774, enjoying guests, and breathing salt air. I also include a section on the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing …. not “how to,” but “things authors consider.”

            Please join me in Haven Harbor … and then peek in my windows at my life. (Hint: I’ll probably be wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt and writing my next mystery!)