When I started researching witchcraft for Killer Tunes, I didn’t like any of the resources I found online, so I turned to my local library for help. From their online database, I found a couple of books that looked like they might be informative. Since they belonged to another branch, I ordered them, and waited for them to arrive at my local library. When I went to pick them up, they were wrapped in brown paper. My name was on a blue sticky note attached to the spine.
All was well until I took them to the circulation desk. When the twenty-something librarian ripped the brown paper off, there was no doubt they were about witchcraft. She looked shocked for a second, then kind of disgusted. After checking them out, she shoved them across the counter without making eye contact. I started to protest that I was just checking it out for research purposes, but something shifted in my psyche.
I thought, I am fifty-one years old. If I want to check out a book on witchcraft, that’s none of your business.
That experience helped with my research as much as reading the book did. When the time came to write the scene where my protagonist, Bailey MacIntyre, is looking for clues in the disappearance of her young cousin, who is dabbling in witchcraft, she’s afraid of the same kind of prejudice from the workers in the bookstore, as well as any of her mother’s church friends who might be lurking about.
Everything is fodder.
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