Inspiration behind The Spring at Moss Hill
Most of my stories start with one or more characters, and with The Spring at Moss Hill, I could see Kylie Shaw, as a relative newcomer to little Knights Bridge, deliberately keeping a low profile even as she falls in love with her adopted New England town. She expected her stay there to be temporary. She’s an illustrator of children’s books and rented a house for an “artistic retreat.” I’ve done that myself as a writer, although never for several months as Kylie does! I stayed in a cottage on the southwest Irish coast for three weeks—no car, even!—and while Kylie has her own reasons for her retreat, mine gave me insights into some of the benefits and the hazards. Unlike Kylie, of course, I was married with two grown children.
Enter Russ Colton, a private investigator from Southern California who is both an attraction and a threat to Kylie as she figures out what’s next in her life. She has a secret—she’s the illustrator and author of a series of popular children’s books about a family of badgers in a town not unlike Knights Bridge. Russ borrows a loft-style apartment at the renovated mill where Kylie has moved while she sorts out her life. Being from small-town New England myself, I am familiar with mills like the fictional one at Moss Hill, built in the mid-nineteenth century as a straw-hat factory. One of our favorite renovated mills is Simon Pearce, which produces hand-blown glass and has a restaurant on the Ottauquechee River near us in Vermont. It was great fun creating my own old mill with its own unique history.
Most of all, The Spring at Moss Hill belongs to the characters—Kylie, Russ and the people of little Knights Bridge.
Happy reading!
Carla
