#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--AUTHOR J.V. CAGGIANO ON HOW WRITING A MYSTERY AND KNITTING GO HAND-IN-HAND

J.V. Caggiano has a day job as a part time feral child tamer. She has also worked retail and so knows true fear. She hoards yarn and knowledge, which guided her career and education choices to a masters in library and Information Science, or as she insists on calling it, her book dragon degree. She resides in the frozen wilds of suburban Anchorage, Alaska with assorted pets and relatives and the North American strategic supply of notebooks. Her website is under construction. For now, you can find her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

I will be honest with you dear reader; I have an obsession. Okay two if you count murder. Okay, three if we count chocolate. But we’re not. We are talking about the softest and most tactile of obsessions, the one currently easily occupying fifty percent of my limited storage space, the other fifty being filled with golden age mysteries, forensic manuals and true crime case studies. (Unfortunately, I don’t have anywhere near that much chocolate.) Before I digress for the second time in one short paragraph, lets get to the point. I am talking about yarn.

 

Yes, an obsession if we’re entirely honest, probably an addiction. Are there currently three packing cases stuffed to bursting with yarn in my office? Yes. Is there a basket under my coffee table the size of a hay bale also full of yarn.? Also, yes. Do I know the owner of my favorite yarn shop by name? Yup. Am I proud of any of these admissions? Well yeah, kind of. Can I drop triple digits in this fantasy land without breaking a sweat ABSOLUTLY. If you are ever in Anchorage, AK, stop at Far North Yarns on the corner of 36^th and Old Seward. You’ll leave broke, but you are not going to feel bad about it. Say hi to Annie for me.

 

Yarn is magic, and knitting is witchcraft. You make strange gestures and there is definitely cursing involved, but in the end that one long string turns into a thing! A thing you can wear or wrap around you. As an aunt and now great aunt, I do a mean baby blanket. Its magic in other ways as well. 

 

I have solved a lot of problems when elbow deep in a sweater pattern. It might be the repetition, the rhythmic pattern, but I find nothing fills a plot hole as well or as quickly as a few hours knitting. I plan my best murders when knitting. Knit and purl patterns work best for story beats and pacing but colorwork is my go-to for a good puzzle. Two color stranded knitting is particularly good for a tricky plot. If truth be told, like other mystery writers before me, I have found very few plot problems that can’t be solved by throwing another body in the mix, but a good Fair Isle or Nordic pattern is a very close second.

 

Perhaps the two are irrevocable linked in my mind because I found writing and knitting at the same time. I had learned very basic knitting, the occasional scarf and one or two half-finished blankets. I only pursued it in earnest when I was hurt at work. I couldn’t move a much between the back injury and the pain meds. We didn’t yet have cable in our first apartment, and you can only watch Divorce Court so many times, even on pain meds. But I will admit, it is the perfect way to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on VHS. 

 

So I tried a hat pattern, finished a blanket, and then made four more hats. Then I got brave and tried a simple sweater pattern. Something about the process scratched the spot in my brain that was made itchy by inactivity. Of course, as a right-handed dyslexic taught how to knit by a left-handed neurotypical, I have been told that I knit upside down and backwards. B it works for me, and it looks the same when I’m done. So I don’t worry about it. I write much the same way, starting with the crime and working backwards and sometimes upside down until I figure out what is going on. And while it’s different from how other people write, it looks like a book when I’m done

 

I was also going through a lot of books, reading things new to me. Somewhere between Agatha Christie and No Stone Unturned, something inside my brain clicked. I wrote a few pages about a lovely woman who owned a tea shop with her wife and had built it into a community hub. And then a few pages later I killed her. 

 

At first, I didn’t know who had killed her despite having created her and her killer. Finding out what happened to my imaginary friend was the most fun I had had in a long time. Now with one published novel under my belt and plans for two series, I hope I have enough patterns to see it through.

 

At Witt’s End

Agatha Christie meets Arsenic and Old Lace. A classic Golden Age puzzle with a character driven plot.

 

Cerridwen Evan Jones has a very brief to do list: Finish and publish her novel. Avoid the head of the local historical society. Make sure Great Uncle Teddy is wearing pants.

 

But when her historic neighborhood is rocked by the discovery of a decades old murder, her list gets a little longer: Find out who broke into her house. Solve a murder. Find out why the hot new neighbor is telling people they are engaged. Stay alive.

 

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