Killer Stuff
This is quite similar to the crocheted bottle cap trivet Jane Wheel found at the garage sale near the end of Killer Stuff. A special thanks to reader and fellow Kankakean, Jackie Cross, for supplying me with a beautiful array of crocheted work. Our grandmothers believed in busy hands.
Dead Guy's Stuff
If you check out the cover of Dead Guy's Stuff, you'll see that a real punchboard was used in the photograph of "stuff" -- MY real punchboard! For those too young to remember them, these were pre-state lottery gambling for the tavern crowd. A metal key pushed out the rolled up scroll of paper with the winning or non-winning (far more frequent occurence) numbers.
The Wrong Stuff
These crocheted potholders might have been found at the moonlight flea market in The Wrong Stuff. I wish there were moonlight flea markets like the one I described. I hear that they do exist, but I haven't attended one. Yet.
Buried Stuff
These flattened pennies are one of my favorite things to collect since I can still make them if I have a shiny penny and two quarters to spare. I've embarassed my children in museums and highway rest areas by insisting on stopping to squish a penny. The older one here -- the good luck penny -- is one that Fuzzy planted in Buried Stuff.
Hollywood Stuff
I mention this Victor adding machine in Hollywood Stuff as well as in other places in my writing. This particular model kept my hands busy in the back room of the E Z Way Inn while I waited for the real Don and Nellie to get finished with work.
Also in Hollywood Stuff, Jane sees a ring of keys at the Pasadena flea market and offers to buy the whole thing from a young woman who is reluctant to sell it. In real life, Sharon saw this ring of keys at the Pasadena flea market and paid way too much for it. And it made my purse impossibly heavy. I hung it in my office and smile at it everyday.
If you read about any objects of desire that Jane or Tim or Claire find in the books and you would like an illustration, I would be happy to feature it on this STUFF page. Of course, I might not actually own the item—I might just covet it and satisfy my desire by allowing Jane to find it for almost nothing in the bottom of a box at someone’s estate sale, or I might have just made it up.
Fiction, you know, allows fantasy to come true. But chances are, if I mention an object in one of the books, I can get my hands on one long enough to photograph it and show it here. Email me and tell me what you’d like to see.
