The Story Behind Goose in the Pond

When I was writing my first novel, Fool's Puzzle, I was working part-time at the Huntington Beach Library in California. I worked first in technical processing and then in the children's department. While working in the children's department I became acquainted with the library's full-time storyteller. She was the one who encouraged me to write about the storytelling world. Until then I didn't even realize there was a storytelling world! But like quilt guilds, they have their own guilds, conventions and a wonderful magazine. She told me it would be a wonderful place to have a murder because there is a lot of emotional people and competition in the storytelling world. I also warned my fellow library employees that someday I was going to set a mystery in a library. I put those two things together and out came Goose in the Pond.
The library I describe is actually the Huntington Beach library, not the San Luis Obispo library, mostly because I knew it better. We really did call going down in the basement going to the "pit." In my imagination I placed it on a bluff overlooking Laguna Lake (a real lake in SLO) even though there are no bluffs there.
The relationship between Gabe and his son was easy to write even though I don't have children because I've known my husband since he was fifteen and remember those fights he had with his father! Some things never change and a son trying to become independent from his father while still clinging to him is one of those things.