Pumpkin Racing, Anyone?

My fourth book, Designed For Haunting, came out yesterday so Yay! me. I’m in the middle of my Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour as well as appearing on various other blogs. This book takes place around Halloween and is set in the fictional town of Vista Beach, California.

I enjoy incorporating my version of real events that happen around Southern California beach cities in my books. This time around I included Vista Beach’s version of a pumpkin race.

Every year Manhattan Beach holds a pumpkin race where people take their pumpkins, add axles and wheels and race them down the hill that leads down to the pier. Yep, that’s how we roll here at the beach. It’s a fun event for families. I lived here for many years before I realized it even existed. But when I did hear about it, I knew I had to have a pumpkin race in one of my books.

Here’s a video which will give you an idea what the event is like:

And here are pictures of some of the pumpkins I took at a race a few years ago:

For more and better pictures, here’s a pumpkin race album:

 https://www.facebook.com/pg/mbparksandrec/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1179824902119533

This year the race is on Oct 28th, 11:00 am at the Manhattan Beach pier.

It's G&T Time!

Yep, It's gin and tonic time! Although my preferences run to a nice glass of white wine or Maker's Mark bourbon, I'm still declaring it G&T time! I'm celebrating the turning in of my latest book to my publisher.

It's not completely done, of course. I have two edit rounds to go and I have to come up with back of the book copy for it. Plus we have to settle on a title. Designed for Haunting has been my working title for a while now, but I'm not completely satisfied with it. Will have to ponder more.

As you might have guessed, the fourth book in the Aurora Anderson Mystery series is set around Halloween. Rather a fun time of year to write about. Originally, I was going to put in a haunted house, but eventually decided, instead, to have an escape room experience. My fictional town of Vista Beach is in Los Angeles County. There are a lot of escape room companies around here so it seemed appropriate. Are escape rooms a popular thing in other parts of the world as well? I’ve heard of one in Scotland and of the Murdoch Mysteries themed one in Toronto.

The other item I put in was a pumpkin race. Yep, we race pumpkins here in the South Bay. Manhattan Beach has had a pumpkin race since 1990. I based the pumpkin race in my fictional town on it.

The travel channel has a video that describes it pretty well: http://www.travelchannel.com/videos/the-great-pumpkin-race-0188510 You'll have to tolerate a 15 second ad first, but the video's pretty fun.

So it's celebration time here. I'm currently on my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Creative Painting convention where I'm planning on having fun, but also hope to find some inspiration for things to put in the next book.