Behind The Scenes

For the better part of his adult life, Mr. Lucy has had two obsessions: arcade games and koi ponds. For the better part of our relationship, I have been able to tolerate and sometimes even appreciate those obsessions from the safety of the sidelines.

“Oh, you bought two of the same pinball games so you have spare parts and now we’re going to watch four hours of YouTube videos on how to restore the game? Okey dokey!”

It’s only fair considering how many dozens of romance novel plots I’ve dragged this poor man through over the course of the last decade. So we put in a koi pond.

Mr. Lucy knew of an overstocked pond that needed to get rid of some of its gigantic, middle-aged koi, but because our pond wasn’t finished until fall, he didn’t want to move the fish when they were getting ready for their fish hibernation. (I should note he used more scientifically accurate terms, but I really wasn’t listening.)

So our backyard pond sat empty for the winter and the better part of spring until the Great Frog Insurrection of 2024. Have you ever heard a frog orgy before? I don’t know if you know this, but the frog mating call is a shrill scream that can be heard inside a house with the TV tuned to YouTube pinball repair videos cranked up.

Mr. Lucy bravely went to investigate before requesting my presence. “Look at them,” he said, dramatically wielding the flashlight over dozens and dozens of pairs of literal fucking frogs. We endured the entire springtime frog mating season and celebrated when they magically disappeared, only to be horrified by millions of tadpoles. So. Many. Tadpoles.

It was the kick in the pants we needed to finally transport the fish to their new home.

The day was April 23, 2024. I had just finished the first draft of this very book. A book where the heroine meets her hero when she gets hit in the head with a fish. Foreshadowing!

Here I am, in my fish transport outfit of Ted Lasso socks, a hat, and some dirty workout wear. This photo is before I was soaked head-to-toe in fish water.

Off we went to a tiny pond with a big net to emotionally traumatize fish that hadn’t been moved in twenty years. Mr. Lucy let me do the honors.

Our high-tech transportation system included a gigantic cooler we used for parties and a large trash bag. We managed to “fish” (ha) three koi out of the pond, stuff them in the garbage bag of pond water in the cooler, and drive back home without incident.

After a low-speed trip home to prevent unnecessary sloshing, we realized we were facing the most difficult part of koi transportation: Getting the fish from the cooler into the pond. I bowed to Mr. Lucy’s hours of YouTube research, where koi handlers (I wanted to call them koiboys—like cowboys but for koi—however I was outvoted) reached into tanks with their bare hands and picked up a fish.

So that’s what we attempted.

Mr. Lucy reached into the garbage bag in the cooler, grabbed the first fish he could find, and pulled it out.

In the next second, my fictional and real-life worlds collided as the slippery koi shot out of his hands like a scaly missile.

And hit me right in the face.

I’m a writer, but I still can’t find the words to describe the horror of watching an airborne fish sail toward my face. The meaty, wet thwack of it making contact. The eye contact.

“Oh my God! I’m Hazel!” I wailed as I stared down into the shocked fish face of Betty White. (I should clarify here that the fish’s name was Betty White.) While I cowered in terror, looking for bald eagles swooping overhead, Mr. Lucy rescued poor Betty White and safely deposited her into the pond.

After I recovered (and confirmed that there were no badly behaving bald eagles circling) and made sure Betty White wasn’t swimming in lopsided circles, the tremendous power of the words I write dawned on me. After all, I had just manifested a fish to the face. So from now on, I will only be writing stories about recent lottery winners with great skin who sleep nine hours a night and never run out of good books to read.

Well, after I finish writing about this hot-mess literary agent trapped in a small town with a very handsome landlord…

Xoxo,

Lucy

P.S. No fish were harmed in the writing of this book. Although Betty White is a little slower than the rest of her fish friends. But I think that’s more of a personality thing than a “head trauma from hitting a romance novelist’s face” thing.

P.P.S. Bertha the raccoon was named after Bertha the koi fish. Bertha is the size of a small submarine and has been enjoying her new, more spacious abode.