Readers generally enjoy having animals included in their fiction, and cozy mystery readers are no exception, many almost requiring an animal in their books. For authors, adding a dog or a cat to their cast is fairly simple as well as enjoyable, since many of us have or have had pets. Writing about them therefore comes easily as we know how they behave, and we have plenty of fun memories to draw on. But how many authors have had fun times with an alpaca? Certainly not me when I began writing the Craft Fair Knitters Mysteries. So why did I choose adding an alpaca? It was a gradual but straight-lined decision. My main character, Lia, is a knitter, one who became proficient enough to sell her knitted items at a craft fair. Knitters tend to have favorite yarns, and Lia’s is the kind spun from alpaca fibers. I’ll let Lia tell you in the books about her many reasons for loving that yarn, but her favorite source for alpaca yarn wasn’t a yarn shop. It was an alpaca farm. Never having visited an alpaca farm myself, I needed to find one so that I could present it correctly to my…