P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

I have been writing the Ohio Amish Mysteries for ten years now, and at talks I have given about my novels, I have always admitted to my audience that I make a rather obvious bargain with my readers – it will never be an Amish person who commits a murder in one of my stories. It just wouldn’t happen, and I wouldn’t want to write about it if it did. In the kind of story I write, I always figured that the fiction ought to imitate Amish lifestyle and culture faithfully, and since there had never been an Amish-involved murder in Holmes County, I considered myself safe in my assumptions.

But that all changed this spring, and now sadly life has imitated fiction in a way that has set me back as a writer, at least for a while. I haven’t been able to make progress recently on the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery (tentatively titled “Harmless as Doves”) because now four Amish people in Holmes County Ohio have been murdered in two separate incidents, apparently by other Amish people. The tragedy of this so completely dislodged me from my creative state that I have not written a word for three months.

In the first incident, a father apparently killed his son, his wife, and himself. In the second incident, a man’s girlfriend apparently killed his wife so that they could leave the Amish life and enjoy modern conveniences. So the world was turned upside down for me, and it took a couple of trips out of state to put my mind back in the creative condition I need to finish my seventh novel.

We first went south to the islands and “got out there” as they say, into the warm weather, the tropical waters, and the gentler mindsets of the Caribbean. There I am in the first picture, soaking in one of the pools on Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. They say it is currently the biggest cruise ship in the world, and I believe it. We were on the boat for seven days, and I saw only 40 percent of the thing.

Then we came home, packed the camper, and headed to Michigan’s “Up North” regions, where we needed jackets every night and warm clothes most of the days. In the second picture, I’ve found a peaceful chair at a campfire early in our first week out. We spent nearly three weeks up near Michigan’s “Tip of the Mitt” as they call it, and between the two excursions, I seem to have purged the mental sluggishness that was caused by the cruel reality of four non-fictional Amish-involved murders.

Now I’ll get back to the earnest business of finishing Harmless as Doves, which I started in January. I think I can now live with the irony that this is a story about a murder committed by an Amish lad, over a dispute about a girlfriend. Knowing that plot line, perhaps you can see why the new homicidal realities in Holmes County rocked me so hard.