Fun Facts for “What You Get When You Buy a Car in Cornwall”

Factoid One
Camden got her name from one of my beta readers. I simply asked her what she thought would be a cool name for one of the characters.

Factoid Two
For Julia’s car, I actually went onto the BMW UK site and “built” the car I wanted her to have, selecting from the options available on the website. You really can customize and then pay for your car completely online. Then, once you’ve paid, all you have to do is choose a dealership to have your car delivered to for pickup.

Factoid Three
There is a BMW dealership in Falmouth, so naturally that is the one I based Surfside on.

Factoid Four
The flag of Scotland Story:
This actually happened to me. I bought a new car, was unloading the trunk of my old car, and came across a flag. Not from Scotland, but from Bermuda. No idea how it got there. I’ve been to Bermuda, so that was a good clue, but this wasn’t a tiny souvenir flag. It was a proper-sized flag. I could have run it up a flagpole.
My girlfriend and I decided that alcohol had been involved in the purchase of the flag, but how it ended up in the trunk of my car was lost to the mists of time.
It ended up in the trunk of my new car, and is now in a box in our garage.
It turns out that a good friend of my family’s is from Bermuda originally, and so I plan on giving it to him.

Factoid Five
Like Julia, one of my best friends is very klutzy, even though she looks as though she should be the paragon of grace and poise.

Factoid Six
Julia’s Birthday Present from Camden…I own that Atari video game system as well.

Factoid Seven
As you can tell from this book (and others I’ve written), I’m very big on women checking in with each other via text messages or phone calls when they’re out.
This was a habit my parents drilled into me when I was younger, and it is something that my group of friends all do for one another.

Factoid Eight
One of the things I enjoy most about writing these Cornwall books is coming up with the hyphenated names of the old women in Tremont. I often just think of surnames in my head and then try mashing them together until I come up with one that sounds appropriate for an old biddy.

Factoid Nine
In Chapter 13, I have Julia driving to visit Camden in Carnon Downs, and repeating “Quenchwell, Quenchwell, Quenchwell…” over and over.
That’s because as I was looking at a map of Carnon Downs, looking for a street I wanted Camden to live on, I loved the name Quenchwell and so chose that.
But the name was so odd, and required my mouth to move in unusual ways whenever I said it, that I got in the habit of repeating it over and over again.

Factoid Ten
Much like Katelynn in Chapter 15, my girlfriend and I will often buy something from a place like IKEA and then have someone else build it for us. Usually brothers of a friend, or maybe our fathers…
The only time we will attempt to build it is if we are so super excited to see it in our house that we can’t wait for someone to do it for us.
Typically, about a quarter of the way through, we usually end up regretting every decision we’ve made up until that point…

Bonus Factoid
Like Julia, I too have always wanted to have sex in a cemetery.