Bernadette Calonego's Blog: Eventful - Posts Tagged "fisherman"

If one, like me, lives close to the locations that appear in my crime novels, there is sometimes a strange overlap of reality and fiction.
If you have read my series, you know that my main character, Detective Sergeant Calista Gates, lives in St. Anthony, Newfoundland, in a house on a large, overgrown, former campsite. When I drove past it recently, the police were there and the ambulance drove past me. Later I learned that a woman had turned onto the main road from the entrance to the campsite and had overlooked an oncoming car.
She barely survived the collision. I saw a badly damaged pickup truck in the ditch. As soon as I recovered from the shock, I thought of Calista: I have to warn her to be careful when she turns from her property onto the road. Only after a few seconds did I remember that Calista doesn't live there in real life. That's how close you can be to the people you invent for a book.
Serious accidents always scare me. Recently, a fisherman's entire arm was ripped out when he operated a hydraulic winch for shrimp on a ship and the arm became entangled in a cable. The man was rescued by the Newfoundland Coast Guard, but the helicopter had to make a stopover in Gander so they could give the man blood transfusions. He almost bled to death during the transport. Life is dangerous, and not only in crime novels.
Bernadette Calonego