Reading · Moon Over Marisol

When I started putting together Moon Over Marisol: The Spooky Assignments for our September 1 Kickstarter, I wanted it to feel like my version of Spooky Season.

Vampires. Black cats. Skeletons. Old castles. Pumpkins. Strange little curses.

And, because I have spent decades working around produce here in South Jersey, tomatoes.🍅

A lot of tomatoes.🍅😅

I have spent years growing them, picking them, sorting them, selling them, watching people inspect them, asking which ones are ready, which ones need another day, and which ones are going to make the best tomato sandwich that afternoon.

After enough summers of that, a nice, ripe Jersey tomato becomes a very specific thing.

So naturally, I gave Marisol this assignment:

FIND ONE NICE, RIPE JERSEY TOMATO.

Seven days.

One tomato.

That was supposed to be the whole story. Book 2 in the omnibus.

Somehow, it became three books.

Marisol gets seven days to find one proper Jersey tomato.

Simple enough.

At least that is how it looks at first.

The moon sends her back.

Same assignment.

Same seven days.

Now there is an enormous vampire castle, a cheerful skeleton named Herby, far too many cats, and a forty-eight-mile walk through the castle just to reach the other side.

The tomato problem has grown considerably.

Yes.

There is a third one.

Apparently two entire attempts at finding one tomato were insufficient.

And this one has a little extra piece of South Jersey tucked inside it.

I make a very quick cameo. 😅

After all these years working around Jersey produce and all these years writing books, the two parts of my life finally ran into each other inside a Marisol story.

That feels pretty fitting.