He travelled the U.S. and Canada as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. He was a zombie on Saturday Night Live.

But the feeling Boothbay Harbor gave Gregory Allen in 1989, after a New York audition got him a summer of work at the Carousel Music Theater, really stuck with him.

He has vacationed here a couple of times since then, and now the actor turned author has made Boothbay Harbor a pivotal setting in his latest novel.

"I loved the feeling I got when I came to this town. I felt welcomed. And I wanted my character to feel that way as well," he said.

The main character in "Patchwork of Me" is an Arizona woman who comes here to trace a dark incident from her past. Raised in foster care, she eventually gleans hints about her childhood from dreams and therapy. The clues lead her Boothbay Harbor.

When she arrives in winter, much of the town is closed up and "a few people are carrying the town along," the author said. He has her stay at a bed and breakfast, with that sense of welcoming Allen remembers from his summer here more than two decades ago.

He doesn't use the names of actual businesses; it's better not to, he said, so that he can be creative in his depictions.

Released in April, the book has won the "Fiction: Chick Lit/Women's Lit" category of the 2012 International Book Awards, and the general fiction category of the 2012 New York Book Festival.

Allen, 43, of Hawthorne, N.J., was at the Tugboat Inn & Restaurant June 24 to sign copies of "Patchwork of Me" and his award-winning children's book, "Chicken Boy: The Amazing Adventures of a Super Hero with Autism." In March, that book got the most votes out of about 400 books to win the People's Choice award of MeeGenius Inc.'s Author Challenge.

The inspiration for "Chicken Boy" was Allen's godson, the son of a good friend he made in Boothbay Harbor when she, too, was doing summer stock at the Carousel.

That friend, Donna DeCicco of Nutley, N.J., made the trip to Boothbay Harbor with Allen last weekend. "Chicken Boy" made her son Gabriel a hero at his elementary school, she said. The book "pretty much nailed" the autism experience, which can be marked by a strong need for routine and sensitivity to noise, she said.

Allen has been writing and producing plays and musicals since he was 14. He manages an arts center in Bloomfield, N.J. For more information on "Patchwork of Me" and his other works, visit www.ggallen.net.