Cozy Up With Kathy: Born to Bead Wild - A Guest Post & Giveaway

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Born to Bead Wild - A Guest Post & Giveaway

I'm happy to let Janice Peacock take over Cozy Up With Kathy today. Janice writes the Glass Bead Mystery series. Born to Bead Wild is the fifth book in the series and was released last month.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas: This Author Is a Magpie

By Janice Peacock

One question I get often is: Where do you get your ideas? My simple answer is: From my imagination. But it’s more complicated than that. The honest answer is that I’m a bit of a magpie, taking shiny bits from my everyday life, the news, the various places I’ve traveled to, and the people I’ve met. Yes, it is true. If you are particularly interesting, you’ll end up in one of my books. But don’t worry, you’ll never know it’s you—but I will.

People aside, one of the things that is easiest to borrow from real-life are locations. It can be challenging to develop a unique setting in a book, so instead, I like to create a pastiche of several places, with some wriggle room for creative license. This process sounds more complicated than it is, but it does rely on my willingness to pull together disparate locations to create a new, unique, and cohesive setting for a book.

My most recent cozy mystery, Born to Bead Wild, is set at an art and crafts retreat called Full Moon Farm. It’s partly inspired by Crescent Lake Lodge on the Olympic Peninsula, a few hours’ drive from Seattle. My daughter went to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, so I would go to Lake Crescent whenever I could during those years. It is a beautiful, relaxing place I’ve missed going to during the last few years of staying home.

Lake Crescent’s Lodge is much like the one in Born to Bead Wild, located near a lake and with a grand lobby complete with a rock fireplace, floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, and deer heads on the walls. The lodge in my book has a few features that Lake Crescent Lodge does not—for instance, there is no direct access to the kitchen from the lobby in the real-life building, nor are there display cases ringing the room full of artifacts and awards. What is great about making things up—you can create a setting that allows the characters to conveniently move through their world and find the clue they need to solve a mystery.

Another inspiration for Full Moon Farm is Pilchuck Glass School. It is a world-renowned glass school that offers classes in summer that are usually two to three weeks long. I took a Pilchuck class about ten years ago, which was a life-changing experience. To be immersed in the world of glass art and surrounded by dozens of awe-inspiring artists was a dream come true. One of the things that I took away from Pilchuck that found its way into Born to Bead Wild was the gong. Pilchuck has a gong made from an old oxygen tank—it’s very unusual! It made quite a loud clanging sound and effectively brought people to the dining room for meals.

One more place comes into play when I think about how Full Moon Farm developed as a setting. It’s a place called Snow Farm in Massachusetts. Like Pilchuck, it is a summer arts program, but instead of just focusing on glass, they have classes in various mediums. I taught teenagers how to make glass beads for a three-week session a few years ago. The setting was rural, much like I imagine Full Moon Farms, with a dining room lined with long tables, so students and faculty could all eat together.

So, I took all my favorite parts from three places and pulled them together to make Full Moon Farm. The lodge is straight from Lake Crescent, the classes and cabins from Pilchuck, and the farm style from Snow Farm. Of course, overlaid upon this will always be the readers’ imagination about what they see in their mind’s eye when they read the book.

The world around me is inspiring, and I try to keep my cell phone tucked away, so I don’t miss any delightful details. Today I walked to the coffee shop and passed a man with the most unusual mustache. He was a skinny fellow with a tan face and a white mustache that swept across his face, from ear to ear, crossing under a prominent nose. It was like a mustache and horizontal sideburns all in one. Perhaps my description doesn’t do it justice. All I could think: Ohh, I’m going to have to put him in one of my books! He was such an interesting character, and I would have missed him if I’d been looking at my iPhone instead of paying attention to what I can see around me.

Often people will ask me if I put my friends—or enemies—in my books. The honest answer is no. I do like to create characters from scratch. Sure, I might borrow a person’s looks, like mustache-man, but I’ll give him a unique personality, perhaps drawing on endearing or annoying traits I’ve seen in others.

The other place I receive inspiration is from events in the news. I don’t want to give those of you who have not yet read Born to Bead Wild any spoilers, so I won’t mention what inspired that plot. I have to be careful when getting inspiration from the news, though. One of the reasons people read cozy mysteries is to escape the awfulness of the real world, and I certainly don’t want anything too horrible to creep into my books—other than a murder, of course. But every once in a while, a story intrigues me. One such true saga is that of Forrest Fenn and his treasure. Forrest buried a trunk of treasure somewhere in the forest and wrote a poem that contained clues to the location of the prize. Thousands of people looked for it, and finally, someone found it, though the details of that discovery have never been revealed. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect start to a cozy mystery novel? I think so!

I’m not sure if a story like Forrest Fenn’s treasure will ever make it into one of my books, but it is fun to think about. As for me, I’ll keep looking for unique locations to use as settings for my novels, keep my eyes open for unique people who can live within the pages of my books, and scan the news for tidbits that might be worth borrowing.

Yes, I’d say I am a magpie, hoarding my shiny bits of the world to use, someday, in a story.

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Born to Bead Wild: A Humorous Cozy Mystery (Glass Bead Mystery Series) by Janice Peacock

About Born to Bead Wild

Born to Bead Wild: A Humorous Cozy Mystery (Glass Bead Mystery Series)
Cozy Mystery 5th in Series
Setting - Olympic Peninsula, Washington
Vetrai Press (January 18, 2023)
Number of Pages: 252

Something is strange at Full Moon Farms—and it isn’t just Val’s Eggplant Surprise for dinner.
Jax, Tessa, and the rest of the arts and crafts retreat attendees are shocked when they find charred bones in a glass kiln. Are the remains human or animal?
The camp owners insist the bones in the coffin-sized kiln are from a deer, but Jax finds a clue that leads her to believe the owners are lying. After Tessa’s least favorite person turns up dead, there is no doubt that a killer lurks somewhere in the deep forest of the Olympic Peninsula. As clues lead Jax and Tessa down mysterious paths, they hope they live long enough to find the culprit and make it out alive.

About Janice Peacock

Janice Peacock is a cozy mystery author who specializes in craft and hobby mysteries. She loves to write about artists who find new ways to live their lives and perhaps catch a criminal or two in the process. While working in a glass studio with several colorful and quirky artists, she was inspired to write the Glass Bead Mystery Series. The Ruby Shaw Mysteries, which are set in a small hillside mining town, were inspired by her trips to Jerome, Arizona, and Jacksonville, Oregon.

When Janice isn’t writing about amateur detectives, she wields a 2,500-degree torch to melt glass and create one-of-kind beads and jewelry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, an enormous white dog, and an undisclosed number of cats. Visit Janice online at www.janicepeacock.com.

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