Writers Who Kill

Marilyn Monroe: A Life in 100 Takes & Years by Teresa Inge

2026-07-06T05:00:00.000-04:00

If Marilyn Monroe had lived to see 2026, she would have turned 100 on June 1—a milestone that invites us to look beyond the platinum hair, camera flashes, and famous white dress. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926, she entered the world with little security. Her childhood was marred by living in 10 foster homes, an orphanage, and, at age 16, marriage to her next-door neighbor, James Dougherty, to avoid returning to foster care. Dougherty later recalled that although he knew Norma Jeane Dougherty, he never knew Marilyn Monroe—the star she would become, to escape her early life.

I first learned about Monroe as a child, watching her movies with my mother. Years later, after reading her biography, I understood why fans remain fascinated by her life. It’s not only her beauty, but vulnerability, screen presence, and the star she carefully crafted to interest people.

Becoming Marilyn Monroe
After divorcing Dougherty in 1946, Monroe’s transformation from factory worker and model to Hollywood legend was not simply luck. She studied acting, the camera, literature, and music, while critics underestimated her. By the 1950s, films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot made her the most recognized performer on Earth.

Marriages & Production Company
Monroe later founded a production company to seek serious roles in an industry eager to package her as fantasy. Her marriages to Joe DiMaggio in 1954 and Arthur Miller in 1956 did not survive, strained by jealousy, pressure, and the glare of fame.

Creative Control
During that period, Monroe clashed with Hollywood studios over typecasting, low pay, lack of creative control, suspensions, and contract disputes. Her reputation for arriving late to set, keeping crews waiting, and reliance on acting coach Paula Strasberg after each take, made it hard for studios to take her seriously. Yet those struggles show how she was fighting to be understood, respected, and shape her own career.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President
In May 1962, Monroe sang "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. Shortly after, 20^thCentury-Fox fired her in June 1962, due to her absences from filming Something’s Got to Give, and the studio’s frustration over her going to New York for Kennedy’s event, despite production issues.

Death
Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962. Her death was officially ruled a probable suicide from an overdose of barbiturates.

Legacy
At 100, Marilyn Monroe remains a cultural icon. She stands as a symbol of beauty, ambition, vulnerability, and reinvention. A self-made artist who understood the power of image and celebrity long before the modern world had language for it. Her performances, photographs, and public persona continue to invite fascination because they hold radiance and mystery.

Diet Killers: Recipes for Readers and Writers – Day Late Firecrackers

2026-07-05T01:30:00.000-04:00

Photo by Trevor 205 from Pixabay

Welcome back to Diet Killers, my series that’s become a bit sporadic and doesn’t always (as I’d originally intended) spotlight a chocolate dessert. This month I have a 1970s recipe for a fruity, icy, slushy, refreshing drink called a Firecracker. It gets Its bang from a bit of rum.

My husband and I were introduced to Firecrackers at a 4th of July picnic in Abilene, Texas. Abilene is hot and dry, and if you have cats they bring lizards and horned toads in the house. Snakes, too, if they can wrestle them through the door. The wind blows so much red dust you can taste it in the air—in your living room. It’s the kind of place where you can really enjoy a drink like a Firecracker.

We lived in Abilene for four years and I’ve only made Firecrackers once since then. Without the wind and the snakes and the dust they seem frivolous. Try them yourself, though, because your mileage may vary.

Mileage varies when it comes to books, too, so take what I’m about to say with a pinch of salt. Margarita salt if you’re so inclined. All Shell Breaks Loose, my latest Haunted Shell Shop Mystery, came out this past week and I think it’s a real firecracker of a story. The series takes place on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. Ocracoke is a real place with a real history as a pirate haven.

The series is about Maureen Nash, a shell scientist, who finds a new life running a shell shop in Ocracoke. She also finds herself solving murders with the help of the octogenarian Weaver siblings, Glady and Burt, and Emrys Lloyd, the ghost of a Welsh pirate. In the new book, all shell breaks loose when the island’s eccentric doctor claims he’s bought a haunted sword. It takes Maureen, Emrys, Glady, Burt, a bulldog named Ben, and the ghost from the haunted sword to set things right.

So here’s my recipe for a spot of post-holiday relaxation. Stir up a pitcher of Firecrackers and sit back with a copy of All Shell Breaks Loose. It’s available in print, e-book, and audio editions and also at your local library.

Firecrackers

Ingredients

1 small can frozen orange juice

1 small can frozen lemonade

32 once jar cranberry juice

4 shots rum (more or less, depending on how piratical you’re feeling)

7-Up (chilled)

Directions

Mix all the ingredients, except the 7-Up together and freeze in plastic container you can scoop from. The mixture will freeze into a slush.

For individual drinks or a pitcher, mix equal parts slush and chilled 7-Up.

Molly MacRae writes the Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries, the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, and the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest, connect with her on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

The End Is Just The Beginning by Mary Dutta

2026-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes a story begins at the end.

Not usually for me. When I write a story, I start at the beginning and develop the plot until I reach a satisfying conclusion, usually one with a twist.

Other writers do it differently. Some write the ending they want, then craft a story to get them there. Some start with an inspired bit of dialogue and build a story around it. Some have a scene in mind, then work out the story that best supports it.

A recent local news story, though, gave me an end complete with a twist. A motorist reported a pickup truck parked on the side of the road, driver’s door open and engine running. When the police arrived to investigate, they followed drag marks from the pickup bed into the woods where they discovered two bodies, a man and a woman.

I could easily imagine a scenario where a murderer wants to dispose of his victims where they wouldn’t be found. But how to explain the idling truck? Did a co-conspirator spirit away the driver, leaving the truck because it could be traced to him or her? Why leave it running then, rather than abandoning it in the woods? Did another car come along, causing the body dumper to leap into his partner-in-crime’s vehicle and flee? Or did that other car contain an inadvertent witness, whom the criminal then forced to drive away at gunpoint to be disposed of?

Further investigation of the real-life incident revealed that the woman had been strangled. The police believe that the man found with her had killed her and intended to hide her body in the woods. Only he had a heart attack and died while executing his plan, never to return to the truck he had left running to make his escape.

Now that’s a real-life plot twist, one that has inspired me to begin writing a story at the end for a change. I know who died and how, now it’s up to my imagination to lead the reader back to the beginning.

How important are beginnings and endings in your own reading and writing?

Our National Pastime — Baseball and Witches? Guest Post by Lynda Allen

2026-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Given the holiday we’re celebrating tomorrow, let’s talk about our National Pastime. I’ve been a baseball fan all my life. I grew up in South Jersey as a Phillies fan, but my loyalties shifted years ago to the Washington Nationals (long story). I knew I wanted to incorporate my love of baseball into one of the books in my Liv Wilde Mysteries series. But baseball and menopause? Not exactly a natural fit.

Or, so it seemed at first. Yet, when I thought about how superstitious baseball players are, I realized it was a perfect complement to a storyline that featured a witch hunt in book three, Flashes of Fire and Fury.

Superstitions are found in all aspects of baseball, from the players on the field to the fans to the announcers. Heaven forbid a TV or radio announcer mentions a no-hitter or perfect game in progress. Their words will immediately cause a shift in the momentum of the game. If their team is behind late in the game, fans will turn their baseball caps inside out, making them “rally caps”, in hopes it will help the team make a comeback. Players have been known to wear the same socks for many games in a row or eat the same food before a game every day in order to keep a streak going. You’ll see players go through the same motions when they step into the batter’s box, whether making the sign of the cross or making a mark in the dirt with their bat. And don’t dare say the word sl*mp when a batter isn’t hitting well, or you will only prolong the unmentionable situation. It’s worse than saying Macbeth inside a theatre.

So, it seemed only logical (at least in my mind) to have a player from the local Washington Nationals minor league team, the Fred Nats, show up on Liv’s doorstep begging for her help to break a curse that’s keeping him from hitting. He’s tried everything to end his sl*mp and Liv is his last hope. She’s been asked to help people find a lot of things, but never someone’s lost mojo. Being a fan of the team and the game, she agrees to try to discover the source of the curse, even though she’s not sure she believes in curses. She knows that if he believes it’s true, then it will keep impacting his abilities on the field.

One of the joys of writing about our local team is that it gave me a reason to reach out to the general manager of the team, Robert J. Perry, and tell him about the book and ask for a tour of the stadium. He took my husband and me on a two-hour tour. We have been to many games there before, but it was such fun to see behind the scenes and in the locker rooms. We even got to see the “baseball mud” which was a whole new aspect of baseball for me. Apparently each ball has to be rubbed with a very specific mud – from New Jersey of course – before it can be used in a game. It’s the same mud across the minors and the majors. These are the tidbits I learn when I dig into the research for a book, that whether or not they make it into the book, make the story richer and more authentic. And all I had to do was ask. Now I’m looking forward to having a table at an upcoming game right after the launch of Flashes of Fire and Fury.

As the title of the book indicates, there is a darker element to the story. There is also a darker connection between baseball and the book. You can’t write about witch hunts without touching on the persecution of and violence inflicted upon women during the intense witch hunts in North America and Europe when an estimated 60,000 people, mostly women, were executed. While obviously not as dire as the witch hunts, athletics in the United States have long been an obvious area of inequity between men and women - and it was pretty damn dire for the young women and girls who were sexually abused in the U.S. gymnastics system. But you also need look no further than the recent debates about pay scales for the winning U.S. women’s soccer team vs. the not-so-winning (hopefully that will be different by the time you read this) men’s team to see the imbalance. In terms of baseball, a few women are finally playing at the collegiate level, but it wasn’t until 2025 that a woman umpire worked a game in the major leagues in the MLB. What reasoning could be offered for why a woman can’t be just as good an umpire as a man is beyond me. And there are more women announcers, women coaches, and women in the front office in management positions. Slow progress is being made.

Why is this all important to the Liv Wilde Mysteries? Because women and the relationships between them are the heart of the stories. In Flashes of Fire and Fury, the struggles women face to be accepted for who they are and the danger of blanket judgements made against them for who they are, are integral elements of the story. Liv would not be the woman she is and would not have been able to embrace her superpower without the support of her circle of friends and the solidarity of strong women she meets along the way. Looking around at the strong women who make up this blog, I’d say you all know just how important the women in our lives are.

###

Lynda Allen is the author of the Liv Wilde Mysteries in which menopause is a superpower! Since she had to put up with hot flashes every day, she figured she might as well make them useful. Lynda proudly infuses her writing with her Jersey Girl sensibilities and aims to create stories imbued with heart and humor. She lives in Fredericksburg, VA, where her mysteries are set, with her husband, their cat, and the incredible eagle friends who visit often. When she’s not writing about hot flash-induced psychic visions, she also writes poetry and is an artist.

Purchase links:

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Bookshop.org

Mixing the Personal with Fiction by Susan Van Kirk

2026-07-02T04:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wondered whether books you read have names, places, or happenings that are personal to the author? It’s like thinking about songs you loved and wondering how they came to be written and what they mean to the composer.

People who live in my town of Monmouth, Illinois, or in my hometown of Galesburg, only twelve miles east, often ask me if a particular place in my books is really based on a location in one of these towns. Oftentimes it is. That’s part of the fun of slipping in the personal.

Grace Kimball, the protagonist of my Endurance Mysteries, is a retired English teacher just like me. So, of course that’s personal. Her town is much larger than mine, but it shares many similarities. Like me, she is often running into adults she once had as students—sometimes two or three-generation families. Here’s a true—yes, it really happened—story Grace tells in the book Marry in Haste. She’s walking down the corridor of the Endurance Hospital when she sees a hospital aide pushing a patient in a wheelchair. She remembers: Andrew Weatherby. His locker was right outside my classroom his sophomore year. One day I heard a commotion and walked out to the hallway. It was a girl fight—the worst kind of fight. Andrew nonchalantly leaned against the wall and pointed out his twin sister Ally. “She’s the one on the top, beating the crap out of Lisa Watkins.” He leaned forward and shouted, “Hit her again, Ally!” Alphabetical propinquity. The following year, their lockers were moved to the lower junior hallway and all was quiet on my hallway again.

The town square in Endurance is more a circle than a square. No one ever knew how to drive around it because there were two lanes, and trying to change lanes to get off the square was forever difficult. Everyone taking driver’s education in our town knows what I mean. In Three May Keep a Secret, Grace explains, “No one knew the official rules for driving around the square, so defensive driving was the local custom. This was particularly true since Danny Walker, after a few beers at Patsy’s Pub, decided to cruise the square multiple times in the wrong direction and took out a fire hydrant and two signs for the Little People’s Daycare Center and Bert’s Collision Shop (‘You Scratch It, We Patch It’). The only thing Danny missed was the neon ‘Open’ sign for the Homestretch Funeral Home, but the hazy memory of seeing it go past several times undoubtedly contributed to his contrition once he sobered up.” Last summer, our square was totally renovated with lots of green space, flowers, and a new traffic pattern. It’s so much better and less dangerous, so the old square is simply immortalized in my mystery.

Finally, I should mention the huge old mansion that is in every one of the Endurance mysteries. I lived in it on the first floor when my husband and I first moved to Monmouth. It had been built right after the Civil War and was divided into five apartments by 1968 when we moved there. It has a very intriguing history, much of which I found out at the local courthouse. This scene is written almost exactly as I lived it in Death Takes No Bribes. Grace goes to the county clerk’s office and asks for the plat book for 402 W. Broadway (the actual address in real life.) The poor young girl explains that that book hasn’t been digitized yet. Grace still wants to see it. So the girl goes up to the attic and finds this gargantuan book, drags it down, drops it on the counter, and dust goes flying in every direction. Yes, that happened in my real life. The gorgeous handwriting of the various clerks from the late 1800s is beautiful to behold.

That house is in every one of the Endurance mysteries. A diary from the 1800s is hidden there, and Grace finds it in Marry in Haste. It tells the scary story of a young woman who lived in the house a hundred years earlier. Grace’s future husband, Jeff Maitlin, buys the house and renovates it to use as a bed-and-breakfast. Now you’re up to date.

The town of Endurance, a small town on the edge of the Illinois prairie, built by Scotch Presbyterians, civilized by women, and containing a town square, a huge Victorian, and a local college, are not figments of my imagination. Well, okay. I did change some of the details, but that’s why we call my books fiction.

If you're a writer, do you add the fictional to the real life adventures of your past?

Susan Van Kirk, an Illinois author, was educated at Knox College and the University of Illinois. She is the author of six Endurance Mysteries beginning with Three May Keep a Secret. Her standalone mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, was followed by the Art Center Mysteries: Death in a Pale Hue, Death in a Bygone Hue, and Death in a Ghostly Hue from Level Best Books. Her latest is a memoir about teaching called Mr. Vonnegut and Me (And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life.) Member of MWA and past president of the Guppy Chapter of SinC. Her website: susanvankirk.com

An Interview With Teresa Inge

2026-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

by Grace Topping

People often complain that they want to read but don’t have much time to do so. That’s when short stories can help. Short stories, which come in a variety of lengths, offer a complete story that can be read in a matter of minutes. Teresa Inge has made a career writing short stories that have appeared in a number of publications and really knows the world of short stories. She has also compiled and published short story anthologies that include stories by other mystery authors, including several of the Writers Who Kill contributors. Teresa is also a member of the WWK blog. It was a pleasure interviewing her and learning more about the world of short story writing.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Murder

First Comes Love, Then Comes Murder features nineteen juicy tales of revenge, betrayal, bad breakups, and a few I dos and some I don’ts.

Each short story takes ruthless relationships to an all-new level in all kinds of places like destination weddings, riverboat cruises, wineries, bachelorette parties, creepy stalkers, cheating spouses, and sneaky friends trying for their own version of happily ever after. So, settle in for some love stories with a twist of revenge, infidelity, and murder.

Featuring the writing talents of Teresa Inge, Heather Weidner, Debra H. Goldstein, Grace Topping, Maggie King, Ellen Butler, Kristin Kisska, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Marilyn Levinson, Sandra Murphy, Mary Dutta, Diane Fanning, Libby Hall, Frances Aylor, K.L. Murphy, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Leah St. James, Sheryl Jordan and Allie Marie.

www.amazon.com

Welcome, Teresa.

When you started writing, what made you focus on crime fiction?

I have always been fascinated by crime fiction. During my childhood, I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. As I grew older, I was drawn to private investigators Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Later, I watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Columbo, and Murder, She Wrote. So, writing crime felt like a natural fit.

Why short stories?

I’ve loved short formats since my teenage years, when I was reading Poe and other short crime stories. I also love reading a couple of short stories in one sitting and feeling satisfied that I have met the characters, entered the setting, and experienced the full story arc. The same holds true for writing them. I especially enjoy creating characters in a small town and using dialogue to move a short story forward because, in a short piece, every word, sentence, and paragraph must count.

I’ve heard it said that writing short is more difficult than writing long. Is that true, and if so, what accounts for that?

I have been a corporate reporter for many years at a global investment firm, and those articles always came with word counts. I also wrote for a local newspaper, where space was limited. So, writing short has been in my wheelhouse for a long time, and that experience carried over into short stories. But for someone new to the format, it can be challenging because every word must earn its place. A novelist may have room to add more character and setting description, but a short story writer must suggest those details with fewer words.

Your short stories have appeared in a number of short story publications and anthologies, but you’ve also published anthologies yourself. How challenging was that?

Since I have a schedule and format that I follow, it is not too challenging. I create the title and theme, select the authors, coordinate the project, and edit the book. For each anthology, I keep a spreadsheet of the authors, story details, and deadlines. I then submit each anthology to a traditional publisher for the widest reach.

Are all your stories in the cozy subgenre, or do you ever write darker?

My stories are cozy Southern mysteries set in small towns in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I create female protagonists who own businesses, such as a wine shop, beach shop, fabric store, or bookstore. Owning a business gives them a natural reason to be out in the community, which helps them uncover clues and solve crimes. This format works for me and my readers, so I plan to stay with it rather than write darker stories.

You have the reputation of nurturing writers who are trying to get established, either through organizing get togethers at writers’ conferences, working with professional organizations, and including new author works in anthologies you put together. What motivates you to do that?

I love working with a variety of authors on anthologies and bringing their stories into print. I also enjoy coordinating the stories into a collection, editing the anthology, and finding a publisher. There is something special about pulling all the pieces together and seeing the finished book. Of course, there are challenges, such as authors not meeting deadlines, but that’s part of the process. In addition, I plan dinners and serve in various roles at conferences and within the Sisters in Crime organization. Since my day job is as an admin assistant, I am used to assisting others, coordinating details, and helping plans come together.

You have written a number of short stories. Have you thought of writing novels?

I am editing my first novel The Bride Arrived DOA. It is set in the Outer Banks and features Cass Kennedy, who inherits a rundown motel from her brother, who died under mysterious circumstances. Cass moves there with her two adult daughters, both in their early twenties, to run the motel together. All three have catering and hotel experience, but when they arrive, Cass discovers the motel is anything but a premier venue. As she works to bring the property back to life, she also sets out to solve her brother’s murder.

You attend a number of writers’ conferences and make public appearances. Do you find them a must to promote your work, or do you get a lot of pleasure from them?

I find that attending writers’ conferences and promoting my work gives me the opportunity to meet both new and returning readers who support my books. I am also part of a local group that does book signings, and it is fun spending time with other authors.

In addition to writing, I understand that you have a thing about a vintage red Thunderbird. Please tell us about it.

During my teenage years, I hung out with the hot rodders, and we cruised strips like the one in American Graffiti. Since then, I have wanted a T-Bird, and several years ago I purchased a Torch Red ’55 Thunderbird. My husband also has classic cars, and we still love to cruise.

Are you able to combine your love of cars with crime writing?

I give my protagonists a cool car to drive in each story. Whether it is a T-Bird, a vintage Jeep, or a VW Bug with a great paint job, I love giving them a classic car to drive while they solve crimes.

What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned since you started writing?

The most valuable thing I have learned is to join a writers’ organization, such as Sisters in Crime, and network with other writers. It is one of the best ways to make connections, learn about publishing opportunities, develop your craft, and find an overall sense of community.

What’s next for you?

I recently submitted an anthology to my publisher featuring mystery stories by Virginia authors, all inspired by the King Neptune statue in Virginia Beach. The anthology will be out this year. I am also finishing a short story for submission to another anthology.

Thank you, Teresa. I look forward to reading your first novel.

To learn more about Teresa and her short stories, visit teresainge.com

Bio:

Teresa Inge is an award-winning mystery author whose work appears in collections, First Comes Love, Then Comes Murder, Coastal Crimes, Virginia is for Mysteries, Mutt Mysteries, and Murder by the Glass. She is actively involved with organizations Sisters in Crime, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the Virginia Writer’s Club, and regularly contributes to the Sand in our Shorts and Writers Who Kill blogs.

Inspired by her childhood passion for Nancy Drew mysteries, Teresa transformed her enthusiasm for both reading and professional writing into a career in crime fiction. During the workweek, she serves as an administrative assistant, corporate reporter, and notary coordinator at a global financial firm.

Outside of her writing pursuits, Teresa enjoys showcasing her classic 1955 Torch Red Thunderbird at car shows and makes her home in Southeastern Virginia and the Outerbanks of North Carolina with her husband AJ and their shepherd dog, Luke.

Grace Topping is the author of the Laura Bishop Mystery Series.

Burning the Boats and Booking the Cruise

2026-06-30T03:00:00.033-04:00

By Author Kathryn Mykel

Quilter| Quilt-Fiction Author| Quilt Pattern Designer

For years I had a private reward waiting in the back of my mind. When I finally “made it” as an author, I would celebrate with a fancy cruise.

I didn’t reach that goal in one dramatic breakthrough. I got there gradually by setting small targets and giving myself reasons to continue on each day. And, in a plot twist that may surprise readers who know me primarily for my cozy mystery novels, it was quilting that ultimately made that goal a reality and paid for the trip.

In my last guest post here, I talked about how story ideas often begin in ordinary places. During sewing days with friends, through casual conversations, and how the rhythm of creative work have shaped the mysteries I write. This post looks at the other side of that process. Inspiration and creativity may have started my journey, but structure and motivation have kept it moving.

Over the past five years, I’ve written more than fifty stories. On paper, that sounds impressive. In practice, it looks like structure and a very strict schedule. Deadlines must be met, the marketing never stops, and new ideas compete with ongoing projects. Most days my desk is a hot mess, much like my sewing table. Projects pile up in various stages of completion, all demanding my attention. It’s really controlled chaos at its finest.

About two years in, I made what I now think of as my “burning the boats” decision. I stepped away from the quilting business work I’d been balancing alongside writing and went all in on being a full-time author. As you can imagine, that decision felt both practical and terrifying. There was no comfortable fallback plan and no alternate source of income. If I wanted this career to work, I had to treat it like a real one.

It didn’t take long to realize that motivation was unreliable. Some days the words came easily. Many days they didn’t.

What helped me was learning to celebrate even the smallest victories. In the beginning, the goal was simple. Sell one book in a day. Later it became hitting a certain number of page reads, reaching a ranking milestone, or winning an award. Each step forward became a reason to acknowledge progress, reward myself, and keep going.

Sometimes the rewards were small. Finishing a draft might mean a trip to the quilt shop, or taking an afternoon off without (too much) guilt. Maintaining my best-seller banner could justify a favorite meal or a quiet evening with a good audio book (someone else’s). A successful book launch might call for a weekend of quilting with friends. These incremental incentives helped turn both the daily grind and long stretches of work into a series of goals, celebrations, and rewards.

Stepping back from writing this year to focus more heavily on quilting reinforced the same lesson. Creative work often moves in cycles. As I spent more time designing patterns and sewing samples for magazines, that income began to accumulate. Without intending it as a writing reward, the quilting ultimately funded an opportunity that came my way unexpectedly.

Here’s that plot twist I mentioned earlier. Next month I’ll be boarding an Alaskan author-reader cruise, something I used to joke was my “when I make it as an author” reward. Now, the cruise feels less like a prize and more like a consequence of committing fully to the path I’d chosen. Ironically, it also serves as a reminder that creative work has a way of coming full circle in unexpected ways.

Tell us, have you ever turned productivity into a personal game? Do you set goals and reward yourself for achieving them? And what’s the biggest reward you’re working toward right now?

Kathryn Mykel is a bestselling author of quilting-themed cozy mysteries and a professional quilt pattern designer whose work has appeared in national quilting publications. She lives in New England with her pup, Bentley.

Find Kathryn’s work here www.authorkathrynmykel.com

Happy Fourth of July! by Nancy L. Eady

2026-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

I was casting about for topics to write about for Monday, June 29, and thought about writing something for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday, which will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, I was trying to figure out exactly what a 250th anniversary is called. According to Google, some terms include “semiquincentennial,” “sestercentennial,” “quarter-millennium,” and “bisesquincentennial.” They all sound like a mouthful to me. Being of a precise nature (at least about some things), I wanted to know which was the “official” term, and turned to my beloved Oxford English Dictionary, only to learn that the OED does not include any of these terms among its definitions.

So now I’m stuck trying to decide what to call the upcoming anniversary. “Quarter-millennium” sounds a bit too grand for my taste, and both “semiquincentennial” and “bisesquincentennial” are too long. To be honest, “sestercentennial” isn’t much better, but it is at least a little shorter. So “sestercentennial” it is. And how will I celebrate the upcoming holiday?

My mother, sisters and I all live in different parts of Alabama. We rarely plan activities together for the Fourth of July, and the one time we did was a disaster. But every year, we all watch “A Capitol Fourth” on PBS, including the fireworks show afterward. The only time the show ever disappointed me was the year I learned that Jack Everly, the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, was not formerly a member of the Everly Brothers, a popular music group in the 50s and 60s. That’s my own fault, not the fault either of the show or Mr. Everly. If you think watching fireworks on television is tame when compared to the real thing, doing anything outdoors in Alabama in July is something that you do only from necessity, not for pleasure. Humidity down here abates for no man (or woman.)

It’s not particularly logical to feel closer to someone simply because you know that they are watching the same thing on television at the same time that you are, but that’s how it works in my family. We have a good time in the days following the show discussing it with each other over the phone. I have a similar feeling over Thanksgiving if I happen to be watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The same is NOT true for the Iron Bowl (the annual football game between Auburn University and the University of Alabama.) I feel close to those members of the family who are also Auburn fans, but not the Alabama contingent. They’re rooting against my team, after all. We make up after the game is over though, win or lose.

Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing at the time, I hope you enjoy your Fourth of July holiday as well. I’ll be thinking of you while I’m watching my show in my air-conditioned room.

When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know by Annette Dashofy

2026-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve had an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine about inaccuracies in novels. She was pointing out little things that she knows about because of her past career. I, like the author, did not know about this particular inaccuracy. While she enjoyed the book in question, the error took her out of the story.

Another book she was reading was riddled with mistakes. The kind where a reasonable person would know that wouldn’t/couldn’t happen in real life. I’ve heard authors use the excuse “It’s fiction!” Regrettably, I’ve used that one, too.

The question becomes, just because it’s “fiction,” does that give authors free rein to create the world we need in order for our story to work?

I would say, no. Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, we make sh… stuff up. But, to quote Lee Lofland, we’re creating believable make-believe. We need to do the homework and research the key topics we include in our stories.

I have a support team that I reach out to when I have questions. Experts in various fields love to talk about their work (for the most part.) There are webinars and YouTube videos on virtually every topic under the sun.

However…

We still don’t know what we don’t know. I’ve been guilty of writing scenes, which felt relatively minor, without diving into the research rabbit hole.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you start Googling a topic and spend the next eight hours reading up on something that will result in one sentence in your story.

Anyway, in this particular book, I thought I knew enough about a topic, inserted the information into the story, and then had a beta reader point out that what I’d written was wrong. It couldn’t happen.

The book was on the verge of being in print. Fixing it to meet reality would’ve meant coming up with a completely different method of murder. After gnashing my teeth for the next week, I finally came up with a believable workaround. I acknowledged the problem and gave a rational explanation for why things happened this way.

No one else has ever called me out on that error.

Readers need to trust that the author knows what they’re talking about. We have to sound authentic. That doesn’t mean writing 25 pages of detailed explanation on a topic. (We aren’t writing a term paper, after all.) The tidbit to give the reader faith in our knowledge is likely to be one sentence here, another sentence there.

When I started the Zoe Chambers series, Zoe was a paramedic. I had worked as an EMT for several years, so I had a solid background to draw from. Pete, however, was a cop. I have never been in law enforcement. Granted, all these years later, I’ve done a ton of research into police procedure and psychology. But I know I get stuff wrong.

Because I don’t know what I don’t know. If I did, I would ask!

The point I’m trying to make is this: as a writer, do your homework. Don’t guess on the stuff that you know you don’t know. ASK. As long as you can draw your reader into your world with some level of authority and believability, they are more likely to give you a pass for those little mistakes that slip by.

At least, I hope so.

Fellow Writers Who Kill, how much research do you put into your characters? Or do you rely on your own know-how? Write what you know, etc. And readers, how much leeway do you tend to give to authors when you find a mistake in a story?

DNA and Me: Solving Personal Mysteries

2026-06-27T03:00:00.000-04:00

By Kait Carson

Last December I opened my email and discovered a message with the subject line ‘cousin’ from a Gmail account I didn’t recognize. Hello, red flags. The only reason I didn’t delete it immediately was the sender included my original family surname. One I hadn’t known existed for years. Still, something about the message arriving so close to the holidays made me think of: 1) the millions of bogus AI marketing emails that clogged my inbox daily, and 2) the bogus inheritance emails seeking either a finder’s fee or bank account numbers. I left it to marinate in my inbox, unopened, for a week or more.

As a bit of background, my family history is convoluted. My mother’s maternal side is well documented. My cousin is a genealogy buff, and she’s taken the family back to the early 1800s. Not much mystery there. Her paternal side is a different story. In a ripped from the headlines moment, my grandfather was U.S. born because my French great-grandmother visited her husband’s Italian family in the states, either because of a miscalculated due date or by design. Who knows.

My paternal grandmother’s heritage is an open book. She maintained contact with her middle-European family throughout her life. My paternal grandfather, the side of the family my ‘cousin’ represented, is an entirely different story. My grandfather never spoke about his life prior to his arrival in the U.S. On census forms he variously styled himself as German, Austrian, or Czech. He spoke German, and that was my father’s cradle tongue, so German made sense, but our family name was Hoyo, and there is no ‘y’ in the German alphabet. There was no record of him coming through Ellis Island or Castle Garden, which could have offered a clue to his origins. The only tidbit he did share was that when he came to the U.S., he went to Wyoming, where he married and had a son named John. The boy was taken from him as an infant when his wife died.

The knowledge of a potential cousin with the original family surname led me to open the mysterious email. Rather than discovering a possible cousin with a connection to the American West, I discovered a possible cousin with a connection to modern Slovakia with an insatiable thirst for genealogy. He’d compiled quite a dossier of facts and newspaper clippings about his extended family, and about my more limited one. His great-grandmother, who would have been my grandfather’s niece,shared some photos she had received from family members in the U.S. before WWII. The collection included photos I had seen in my father’s personal photo collection, and newspaper clippings that were new to me. Including one of my parent’s wedding announcement, complete with a photo of my mother. Gobsmacked doesn’t describe my feelings.

All of this, and a really great sale, encouraged me to have my DNA tested. I’d been on the fence about testing, but I took the plunge. My results have come back, and while I’m still digesting them, there were some surprises right on the first page. My results returned only six regions. As it turns out, I have no German heritage on my father’s side, and no French heritage on my mother’s, but I am 1% ‘Germans in Russia’ on her side. That was a startling development. The testing also turned up a handful of cousins in the American West. Intriguing, but I’m not sure what I’ll do with the information.

The results were different to what I had been expecting, and exposed many of the stories I grew up with as false. Oddly enough, I think that’s part of the charm of being an American. When our ancestors came to this country, they had a golden opportunity to recreate themselves. Arguably, that was part and parcel of the Great American Dream, and their re-creations became intertwined in the fabric of their descendants' lives until the myths became reality.

Have you taken a DNA test, and did you find any surprises? Would you consider taking one?

Thirty-Nine Years by Nancy L. Eady

2026-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Today, my attention is on weddings, past and future. My 39th wedding anniversary is tomorrow. And my daughter got engaged Sunday night.

Since our wedding in 1987, my husband and I have survived ten presidential elections, ten moves, eight dogs (three of which are still with us), twelve-ish cars, the purchase of three houses, two hurricanes, one blizzard, three refrigerators, and three washers and dryers.

When we were first married, I would take twenty dollars from his wallet for lunch money and forget to tell him. He then would enter the grocery store to buy something and not have enough money. The time I remember him getting particularly upset was the day he made it to the cashier with about twelve items, found out he didn’t have enough money, and had about five fellow employees in the line with him offer him money to help out. We had sandwiches that night. (That was before debit cards and ATM’s were widely available, let alone ideas like Apple Pay. You had money in your wallet to pay, or you did without.)

He taught me how to change a tire that first year of marriage, as well. To be sure I could do it, he stood to the side and watched while I took a tire off the car and put it back on again. A different five employees came up to him the next day at work wanting to know why he wasn't changing the tire instead of me.

Then there was the time I agreed to let him paint our bedroom mauve. Why? We were crate training dog #2, who was still a puppy, and I was out of town visiting my grandparents with my mother. My sister stopped by to visit him while I was gone, so he took her out for supper.

Rather than crate dog #2 the way she was supposed to be crated when we weren’t home, he decided to leave her out while he was gone. In the intervening sixty minutes between Mark’s leaving and returning to the house, dog #2 got anxious and ate the recliner arm down to the wooden center. The recliner had belonged to his grandfather. My sister, who I thought loved me, looked at the chair, Mark and the dog, and announced to him, “Do what you need to do.” Then she walked outside to give him privacy. When Mark and I discussed the situation later that night, I felt it greatly increased dog #2’s chances of survival to agree to the mauve.

The first time I fixed supper for us after we returned to the apartment from our honeymoon was eye-opening for both of us. I came from a household of four women, my mom, myself and my two sisters. At my house, mac and cheese and a salad was a perfectly acceptable meal. He came from a meat/starch/vegetable house. That first night, I fixed nachos, with tortilla chips and melted cheese from the oven, topped with shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, sour cream and mild salsa. It was tasty, if I do say so myself. I went back in the kitchen to clean up. Then about a half hour later I heard, “Hon? Where’s the rest of the meal?”

This man has booked trips to Disneyworld for us just because he knows how the place makes me grin from ear-to-ear and bounce like a five year old, held my head gently through the worst stomach bug you can imagine, and kept me sane and my house clean while I survived five years of law school (I went part-time at the beginning) while working full-time. When I had my stomach blockage/cancer in 2024, he was beside me every step of the way and wild horses couldn’t have drug him away. And he can make me laugh like no-one else can.

I can’t imagine the past 39 years without this man, and I am grateful for however many more years we are gifted. And the best hope I can possibly have for my daughter is that she and my prospective son-in-law have as much fun and friendship during their marriage as we have had in ours.

Have you had any major milestones this past year?

Cinematic Writing: Seeing With Your Mind's Eye by Connie Berry

2026-06-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

What is Cinematic Writing?

I first heard the term “cinematic writing” about twenty-five years ago. The wife of a casual acquaintance had published several books, and her publisher was known for signing authors who employed what they called “cinematic technique.”

Since I hadn’t heard the term, I looked it up and found the definition—writing that unfolds like a movie in the mind’s eye of the reader. Book coach C. S. Lakin describes it this way: Rather than explaining and summarizing the action in a scene, “writers play out the action moment by moment by ‘shooting’ the scene the way a filmmaker would. The reader watches the story unfold before their mind’s eye rather than being told what is happening in exposition.”

Two Examples of Cinematic Writing

One example is the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2005). Interestingly, it was first written as a screenplay but turned into a novel when the film project failed to gain the interest of film producers. When the novel became a best-seller, it was made into a film that won four Academy Awards in 2007, including Best Picture.

Here’s an excerpt:

He lowered the binoculars and looked over the country at large. Then he raised them again. There looked to be men lying on the ground. He jacked his boots into the rocks and adjusted the focus. The vehicles were four-wheel drive trucks or Broncos with big all-terrain tires and winches and racks of roof lights. The men appeared to be dead. He lowered the glasses. Then he raised them again. Then he lowered them and just sat there. Nothing moved. He sat there for a long time.

One critic called it “essentially a script, minus the scene headers and transitions.

Another example is the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong. Written by a poet, it jumps between past and present to reveal a life told in stanzas. On critic called it “a series of Polaroid flashes in the dark, a collection of memories offered with the unease of someone else’s scrapbook.” In one scene, the narrator, a boy, watches his grandmother wake up.

The eye opened. Glazed by a milky film of sleep, it widened to hold my image. I stood against myself, pinned by the shaft of light through the window. Then the second eye opened, this one slightly pink but clearer. “You hungry, Little Dog?” she asked, her face expressionless, as if still asleep.

I nodded.

“What should we eat in a time like this?” She gestured around the room.

A rhetorical question, I decided, and bit my lip.

But I was wrong. “I said What can we eat?” She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT.

Writer and editor Constance Hale says that cinematic writing “starts with a narrator who acts like an observing camera—we see landscapes, we watch people, we are carried along with the action.” The experience is like a journalistic “ride-along.”Should mystery writers employ the cinematic technique?

Should Mystery Writers Use Cinematic Writing Techniques?

Turns out it’s a trend that some look down on. If your goal is to write a novel that could be adapted into a TV show or movie, mastering the art of cinematic writing might be exactly what you need. It’s the classic “show, don’t tell.” But not everyone agrees.

I’m told that male authors use cinematic writing more than female authors and that male readers like the style because it’s heavy on action. The technique is also used more in literary fiction than other genres. Make of that what you will.

Upside vs Downside?

Cinematic writing employs third-person narration with little (or no) internal thought and a general lack of subjectivity. The reader sees what happens but must infer how the narrator actually feels about it.

That’s the downside. Books today compete with the visual arts—TV and movies. The benefit we novel writers have over visual media is showing the inner life of the protagonist. Readers aren’t just invited to view someone’s experience from the outside. We are invited into their minds and hearts.

I like to use cinematic techniques along with internal thought. The best of both worlds?

What do you think?

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream by Susan Van Kirk

2026-06-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

“Where do you get ideas for your mysteries?” is one of the most frequent questions I hear from readers. Usually my book ideas come from real life, and then I embellish them, crossing my real life world with my fictional world. But sometimes ideas come in my sleep. Those ideas are often a strangely-knit amalgam of cultural thoughts that have been stuck somewhere in the closet of my brain.

Recently, I promised the daughter of a friend, Cindy, that I would use her name for a character in my next mystery. That must have been on my mind last night when I turned off the light.

This is how my brain kept busy during the night.

Cindy, a teenager, was swimming in a pond near her house when suddenly a large sea creature swallowed her [Note to self: Where have I heard of a whale swallowing someone?] Being a resourceful woman and knowing she must save herself, Cindy lit a candle and began to write a message to throw out of the sea creature so someone would find her. [Note to self: where will she get the candle, matches, lap top, printer, wireless connection, and bottle?] And so she did. Then she waited and read an informative book. [That, of course, was “the hook.” Capture their attention with a disaster.]

Now we get to the great middle of the book where we must keep the reader’s interest and produce all kinds of difficulties to raise the stakes.

Soon, a handsome young man showed up at the pond, and he was also swallowed by the sea creature. But he died of malaria, and Cindy had to throw him overboard. [Don’t want this to be a romance, do I?] Meanwhile, she managed to get out of the sea creature and found herself in a place she’d never seen before [note to self: figure out a way for her to get out.] While she was sitting on the shore thinking about what to do next, a horde of scary riders on horses galloped up to her, led by a handsome prince. On closer inspection, she thought the prince looked a little scary, so she used her martial arts talents to momentarily stun him, take his horse, and ride off in search of her home. [She was faster than the other riders and immediately bonded with her horse which she named … Trigger. [Note to self: see if this name has been used before. It sounds vaguely familiar.]

Pulling out her cell phone and GPS app, she discovered she was a thousand miles from her home. But Cindy was a determined and brilliant young woman. She set off to find her family.

Soon she met a pack of wolves (Cindy loves wolves), and they helped her find shelter. Then the wolves left and she sailed on [Oops. That was a line from the Golden Book I used to read my son which kept repeating “Pablo sailed on.” Scratch that.] She met a man begging on the street [note to self: create a street and town], and, because she showed him kindness, he told her of a short cut to get back home. Unfortunately, she discovered the short cut was filled with teenager-eating, scary raptors. Cindy had to fight them off, and just in time she was joined by a lion that could fly [note to self: see if this is possible.] The lion was powerful and sped away from the raptors. [Cue the song “Circle of Life” as they fly.] Checking her GPS, Cindy told him where to land. Now she was closer and closer to home [Time for the climax].

SUDDENLY, [always a good word to begin the climax], she came face- to-face with a fire-breathing dragon. A young man from her town [she had met him previously on the school bus and been inspired by his kindness, handsome looks, and ability to get to level seven in a popular video game] was fighting off the dragon. Just as he lost his flame-retardant shield, Cindy jumped in front of him and used her conflict resolution techniques to put the dragon’s fire out. Disgusted, the dragon turned and left. The young man gave Cindy a hug, and they vowed to play video games together forever.

But first Cindy had to go to college to become a veterinarian [This will lead to the second book in the series about Cindy’s adventures at vet school.]

And this is why I never use dreams to plot my books.

Susan Van Kirk is the author of six Endurance Mysteries beginning with Three May Keep a Secret. Her standalone mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, was followed by the Art Center Mysteries: Death in a Pale Hue, Death in a Bygone Hue, and Death in a Ghostly Hue from Level Best Books. Member of MWA and past president of the Guppy Chapter of SinC. Her website: susanvankirk.com

Changing Seasons, Evolving Perspectives by Martha Reed

2026-06-23T05:30:00.000-04:00

June is one of my favorite months. In Western Pennsylvania where I currently live, the April and May rainy season has moved on. The hillsides and meadows are lush with fresh greenery and wildflowers. Even the air smells green. I have a hard time keeping to my daily writing word count schedule because all I want to do is to get outside.

Full Disclosure: This is Western Pennsylvania. I didn’t have this issue in February.

June is also the month for graduations and weddings. I couldn’t be prouder of the new crop of youngsters as they settle in and start building their adult lives. Even though I was there when they came along, and I know we adults didn’t know what we were doing, it’s refreshing to see that we seem to have done alright.

It’s a circle of life moment for me in more ways than one. On the writing side, I signed up to mentor a newbie author through the Sisters in Crimes SinC Connect program. This six-month program matches the common interests of mentors and mentees who meet usually once a month via Zoom. This will be the third year I’ve participated, and I can honestly say that I think I learn more from my mentees than they learn from me.

Each mentee has brought a different writerly issue to the table for consideration. My first mentee was stuck in a Chapter One death spiral loop. She kept repeatedly rewriting the first chapter of her manuscript trying to perfect it. My tough love advice was a lesson I had learned (more than once): Jog on, because chances are you may cut the chapter out entirely down the road during the editing cycle. I’m happy to report this mentee finished her completed draft manuscript in time to pitch it to agents at SleuthFest.

My second mentee scared me a little because she hadn’t started writing yet. She came to the Zoom call with only the burning desire to “be a writer.” We spent our calls talking about identifying the requirements of her preferred genre, setting up sacred writing time and space, and the discipline of making daily writing a habit. By the end of the program she felt confident enough to sign up for and attend her very first writer’s conference.

This year’s mentee has been a real eye-opener because she’s Gen Z. I’ve written Gen Z characters before, but interacting one-on-one is a different animal. It’s more than slang usage and different grammar structure and vocabulary. Gen Z makes me feel like the last T-Rex, because they have a completely different mindset. They actively interject political activism, fluid sexual identity, profanity, and social issues into their genre writing in a way that shocks my Boomer/Gen Jones sensibility. I catch myself saying: Are we allowed to write like this?

Which in the end relights my fire because it makes me question and reexamine my personal writing constraints. Has my writing become moribund? Have I fallen victim to comfortable habit? And as I continue with my latest manuscript, what can I do to shake things up?

Interesting Words by Nancy L. Eady

2026-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Today, let’s continue our journey through interesting words, taking as our guide my new toy, an online subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary. I intended to make a list of interesting (to me) words and see how they originated, but I found a major detour with the first word, and now am just going to fly by the seat of my pants (something I rarely do for these posts), and see where we end up.

The first word I thought of for my list was the word “discombobulated.” I use it when I feel a little scatter-brained, unoriented, and jolted out of my routine. It’s always nice when the official meaning of a word matches how I use it. (Have you heard the joke about the mom who was texting people about the death of someone and ended those texts with “LOL” because she thought it meant “lots of love” rather than “laughing out loud”? That’s a spot I’d rather not be in.) The OED says “discombobulate” means “to disturb, upset, disconcert, confuse.”

My guess was that an interesting word must have an interesting origin, so I checked out the etymology page next. I was wrong; the entry simply suggested that the word was perhaps a humorous alteration of “discompose,” “discomfit,” or “discomfort.” However, the entry then continued, “compare the slightly later humorous formation absquatulate v. and the possible models cited at that entry.”

The needle on the record came to a screeching halt. What? How did I ever miss encountering such a glorious-sounding word as “absquatulate”? I clicked on the link to find out about that word. It turns out absquatulate is also a humorous form of a word, probably intended to take the word “abscond” and make it sound Latin. It means “to abscond, make off.” No less than Kurt Vonnegut used the word in his book Hocus Pocus, in the sentence “some overthrown … dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation's treasury.”

Another word I looked up was “gesticulate.” When I was a young(er) lawyer, I was taking a deposition. When you take a deposition, the attorney for the person you are deposing is supposed to let his/her client do the talking without coaching while the session is being transcribed. The attorney for the other side at this deposition was gesturing and whispering to his client for most of the first part of the deposition. I got enough of it and objected on the record to his “whispering and gesticulating to his clients.” The man stopped the deposition and asked me what gesticulating meant. (to “gesticulate” is to “make lively or energetic motions with the limbs or body; esp. as an accompaniment or in lieu of speech.” For such a full-sounding word, its etymology is, alas, not exciting either—it is a word borrowed from Latin.

“Serendipity” is a fun word. It means “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of making such a discovery.” One well-known instance of a serendipitous discovery is the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928, when, coming back from vacation, he noticed that a stray penicillium mold had contaminated a petri dish in which he was growing Staphylococcus bacteria. What intrigued him was the fact that the mold spore appeared to be excreting a substance that was destroying the bacteria that surrounded it. The origin of “serendipity” is much more interesting than the other words in this column. It was coined by Horace Walpole, in a letter to a friend, based upon a fairy-tale called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Serendip is one former name for what is now Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole was a British politician and writer, the son of Robert Walpole, who was First Lord of the Treasury under King George I and King George II.

What words do you find interesting either for their sound, meaning, or derivation?

Thanks, Dad, I’ll Be Careful: Literary Fathers and the Courage They Give Us by Sarah E. Burr

2026-06-21T00:30:00.000-04:00

Happy Father’s Day, Writers Who Kill!

Over the past few years, my June post has become something of a Father’s Day tradition. I’ve written about my own dad and the books we shared, celebrated favorite fictional fathers, explored the dads and father figures in my own mysteries, and raised a virtual glass to some underrated literary dads who deserve more love.

This year, I found myself thinking less about “great dads” in the general sense and more about the specific kind of courage fathers and father figures can pass down through stories. We live in a world that often feels loud, uncertain, and frightening. Maybe that’s why I’ve been drawn lately to characters who are brave, not because they’re fearless, but because someone once helped them believe they could face hard things.

In literature, the best fathers and father figures don’t always remove danger from the path. They can’t. Instead, they offer something more lasting: trust, steadiness, wisdom, love, and a sense of right and wrong. They don’t hand the hero a map around danger. They hand them a compass.

For mystery lovers, Carson Drew is one of the finest examples. Nancy Drew’s father could have easily been written as a stern, overprotective obstacle. After all, his teenage daughter regularly investigates dangerous people, explores hidden passageways, and asks questions that most adults would be wise to avoid. Instead, Carson trusts Nancy. He worries, of course. What good fictional father wouldn’t? But he also respects her intelligence and instincts. His frequent reminders to be careful never feel like an attempt to stop her. They feel like proof that he believes she can handle herself, even as he hopes she comes home safely. Carson Drew teaches courage through trust.

Dr. Murry from A Wrinkle in Time offers another kind of courage. His absence drives much of the story, but his love is never absent. Meg’s search for her father becomes a journey into her own strength, and one of the beautiful things about Dr. Murry is that he is not invincible. He needs rescuing, too. That matters. So often, fictional fathers are expected to be all-knowing, all-powerful protectors, but Dr. Murry reminds us that love does not require perfection. Courage can mean admitting fear, accepting help, and continuing to reach for one another even when darkness presses close.

Then there is Pa Ingalls from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, who represents courage through steadiness. The Ingalls family faces hardship after hardship: storms, hunger, illness, isolation, and uncertainty. Pa does not always have an easy solution, but he brings calm, music, work, and reassurance. His courage is not dramatic. It is practical. It’s getting up the next morning. It’s keeping the family moving. It’s playing the fiddle when spirits are low, reminding everyone that they will endure. Sometimes bravery looks less like charging into battle and more like keeping the lantern lit.

In the fantasy realm, Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander from Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series has long been one of my favorite grandfather figures. Zedd is prickly, eccentric, powerful, hilarious, and deeply devoted. He may grumble and lecture, but beneath all that wizardly bluster is fierce love. His relationship with Richard shows that courage requires more than strength. It requires judgment. It requires sacrifice. It requires the willingness to face difficult truths. Zedd teaches that bravery is not simply about having power; it is about knowing when and how to use it.

And, of course, I can’t write about literary father figures who impacted my childhood without mentioning Arthur Weasley from the Harry Potter books. Mr. Weasley's courage is gentle, but it is unwavering. He welcomes Harry into his home, stands against prejudice, protects his family, and never loses his sense of wonder. He’s not the flashiest wizard in the room, and he’s certainly not the richest, but Arthur Weasley models decency under pressure. He teaches courage through kindness, curiosity, and conviction. In a world full of fear and cruelty, he chooses warmth again and again.

What I love about all these fathers and father figures is that they don’t make the world safe by pretending danger doesn’t exist. They make their children and loved ones braver by giving them something solid to carry into that danger. Nancy has Carson’s trust. Meg has Dr. Murry’s love. Laura has Pa’s steadiness. Richard has Zedd’s wisdom. Harry has Arthur’s example of goodness in action.

As a mystery writer, I think about courage a lot. A sleuth has to knock on one more door, ask one more question, follow one more clue, and stand up when something feels wrong. That courage may come from within, but very often, it was planted there by someone who believed in them first.

So, this Father’s Day I’m grateful for the literary dads and father figures who remind us that courage doesn’t always arrive with a sword, a badge, or a grand speech. Sometimes it sounds like, “Be careful.” Sometimes it looks like a hand on your shoulder, a book placed in your lap, or someone believing you’re strong enough to face the next chapter.

Which literary father or father figure taught you something about courage?

Treasure Hunting for Fans by Judy L. Murray

2026-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

This month I’m thinking about public events and what we as authors do to reach out and touch readers. It’s a tough road but often rewarding.

For some authors it’s uncomfortable to approach bookstore owners they don’t know. If speaking with complete strangers and presenting in front of a group doesn’t come to you naturally, a signing is definitely a step outside your comfort zone. For many, the idea of ‘pitching’ your novel brings sweat to the brow and a very queasy stomach. Yet, I’ve found that public events are my most rewarding opportunity to increase my fan base and sell more copies. Readers encourage me to keep writing my series. As much as I might crash on my couch at the end of a day, I know it’s usually worthwhile. In my mind, book signings and events are like pebbles in the water, widening my scope of repeat reads.

Here are my tips that may encourage you to step away from the safety of your laptop and introduce your work to the outside world.

1. Review your back of the book blurbs or series concept and reduce them down to a short introduction of your book, your series, and yourself to make starting conversations easier. When I say short, I mean short. Rewrite your intro down to less than twenty words. Bookstores are often shorthanded. Managers don’t have time for long-winded conversations. You’ll only have a few minutes to introduce yourself and your work. If you are a local author, use that as your first phrase. That always tweaks a manager’s interest. Then concentrate on your book’s appeal. Its uniqueness. Perhaps tie it into a popular book in your genre that might help the manager picture your book on their shelf. Before you use your introduction to a stranger, practice it. Get confident. That doesn’t mean you might fumble but you’ll likely sound like you believe in the appeal of your stories.

2. If I’ve made you a bit worried about your book introductions, I’ll remind you that as important as they are, they aren’t all that matters. Professional speakers will tell you that you only have thirty seconds to capture attention of the bookseller or the reader. Words are seven percent of the message your project. Thirty-eight percent of your message depends on your voice. If you’re warm and interesting, they’ll give you their limited time. Believe it or not, your face is fifty-five percent of your message. You don’t have to have the smile of Tom Cruise or the beauty of Anne Hathaway. Let your public know you’re happy to meet them.

3. Start local. Build an Excel sheet list of area bookstores and shops in a thirty-mile radius. In the world of Google, it’s easy to find the names of shop owners and get a good idea of which businesses like to hold signings. One of my best locations is a gift shop that has a book section. Does the store hold weekly, monthly, or perhaps a group author event? Take a few notes before your call so you sound as if you’ve done your homework on their store and are aware of their stock.

4. Expand your list with those larger or more distant locations that carry novels like your own. If they specialize in gothic or fantasy, yours may not be a fit. Don’t waste your time. Move on. Sometimes stores hold a variety of events, each concentrating on a different genre. If that’s the case, contact the store owner and ask that your books be considered. They often will give you a timeline for when to contact them for an upcoming event. Some will put you on a waiting list.

5. Once you’ve introduced yourself to a store owner, get their name and email address. Send them a thank you with your bio attached and a signature with a live link to your website. Remind them of your interest in their store. Put them on a tickler file. If you are particularly interested in that location, email them quarterly and call them bi-annually. You may be the author they couldn’t fit in during the spring but would love to have next fall. They simply needed your reminder.

7. If a location matches your genre or neighborhood, go to Facebook or Instagram and join their followers. That’s an easy way to be notified when an event is upcoming. When you make a reel or post, hashtag or @ sign area businesses, business associations like their chamber of commerce, or county news. Store owners will become more aware of you before you have even introduced yourself.

8. Start to expand your horizons with area organizations. Join countywide, even statewide, organizations by following them. As you notice potential events enter them onto your Google calendar with reminders. Recently I participated in a very popular church spring market with dozens of vendors ranging from flowers to pottery, to homemade quilts. The interests were varied and it attracted thousands of visitors. Lucky me, I was one of only two authors who ran book signing tents. It was two days of standing on my feet, but I met dozens of my readers and met many new ones.

9. Consider the potential return for your investment before you agree to attend. Do you provide your own tent, table, chairs, decorations, and pay an entry fee? You may decide the event is unlikely to generate enough sales to cover your costs no less your driving time, meals, and labor.

10. Be honest with yourself as to what stores or events are a match for you. I’ve tried huge statewide author fairs. Overall, the effort and the often four- or five-hour drives outweighed the sales. I remember traveling three hours to arrive at six-thirty am to set up, pay a fee, and finally a breakdown time of six pm. Within the first hour I realized that the attendees were unlikely to be interested in traditional mysteries. I crossed that event off my list. Now I do a better job of studying the other author attendees ahead of time. Live and learn. You may find huge events work for you.

11. Try to get comfortable as you encourage strangers to stop by your table. I rarely sit. Picture yourself at a party with strangers. How would you encourage conversations? Is it the football shirt they’re wearing? Their dog? Break the ice for them. Don’t get caught scrolling through your phone instead of striking up conversations as people pass by. I’ve also gotten better at not judging a book by its cover. The young man in camouflage may actually be a cozy buyer, if not for him but his sister. I’ve held many Barnes and Noble signings. Managers are happy to hear from me from one year to the next. They remember me as someone who chats with the public. You are taking up their store real estate if you don’t make a friendly effort.

12. No matter how successful the signing is or isn’t, send the store contact a handwritten thank you note afterwards. You’ll stand out among authors that send an email or none at all. Remember you are building a relationship into the future.

13. A couple of marketing suggestions: have a pop-up banner to bring to each signing for either at your table or outside the store entrance. Bring a newsletter sign-up sheet. That is the #1 way to grow your newsletter or social media followers. Make a checklist of what you need to bring to your signing. I print one out each time. Have your own tablecloth in your book cover theme color. Dress for success. People expect to meet an author dressed appropriately. Be sure to post a signing announcement before the event on social media. A live reel is even better. Post a photo during the event or afterwards about how much you enjoyed meeting new fans. Sometimes I get more results from the posts than the actual events.

Do you have a favorite idea that helps you gain signings and sales? I’d love to hear them in your comments. If you would like my checklist to use, email me at judylmurray@gmail.com.

Best of luck! Judy L. Murray

Award-winning author of The Chesapeake Bay Mystery Series

http//:www.judylmurraymysteries.com

Agatha Christie Plotting Tricks by Judy L. Murray

2026-06-19T20:50:09.400-04:00

One of the benefits of a generous writing community is the sharing of resources we come across that can help us improve our work.

Dana Isaacson on CareerAuthors.com discussed Agatha Christie’s plotting techniques in an article entitled ‘Christie Tricks’ as part of a review of Lucy Worsley’s best-selling biography of Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman. Worsley, a popular British historian and bestselling author, covered Mrs. Christie’s life as she evolved from a young debutante, wife, and eventually brilliant mystery writer, including her infamous eleven-day disappearance before her divorce and second marriage. Worsley’s book (Pegusus Books) is now high on my pile of to be reads.

Nicknamed Christie’s Tricks for writing the perfect mystery, this checklist helped remind me of her clever style and the elements that ensured her reputation as the Queen of Mystery. If you’ve read any of my books in The Chesapeake Bay Mystery Series, you know I include an Agatha Christie quote appropriate to each novel as a dedication. I get a lot of writing joy when I try to emulate the master.

Christie’s Tricks:

#1 Hide an object in plain sight: In my Killer in the Kitchen, the murder of a celebrity chef takes place during a television cooking show. I loved working on a plot that divulged how the chef was killed yet those in the viewing audience, and including my readers, miss the how-done-it. I lost a lot of sleep while deciding how to pull this off.

#2 The Hidden Couple: In Peril in the Pool House, I created a relationship that was kept under wraps until my protagonist started to unravel truths.

#3 Authors Should Play Fair with Their Readers: When a villain is eventually revealed as a minor store clerk at the local checkout counter mentioned in chapter three paragraph six of a story, my blood boils. As I’m editing, I keep an eye on how the breadcrumbs are dropped. Sometimes it means I need to reweave those details to be sure my readers have a fair shot at discovering the villain. In all my books I try to give readers opportunity to smell a rat. Am I revealing too little or too much along the way? Occasionally, readers get it right. Often, they get it wrong. But they always know the clues are in between the pages.

#4 The omission of tiny but key facts by someone we trust: Christie definitely walked a fine line by maintaining the information given was not false just omitted. In other words, everyone is a suspect. I find it hard to make everyone a suspect, especially if I like them. Do you?

#5 Clothes Do Not Make the Man: No one does a better job at hiding wisdom and intuition better than Christie with her Jane Marple.

#6 Crime Patterns May Fool Detectives: My readers in all my books enjoy my protagonist’s ability to better understand personality traits to the consternation of the local police.

#7 Steal from the News: Christie’s stories picked up on crimes of her century. True crime is also my favorite inspiration for all my stories. A real-life fraud case involving a builder during my real estate management days was the basis of Murder in the Master. I tucked it into the back of my brain to use twenty years later. Villain in the Vineyard, my fourth, was a perfect example of a past crime coming back to haunt someone. My plots, characters, and settings are different from the true crime. But true crime got my imagination whirling in the direction of ‘what if’. What real news have you used to enhance your mysteries?

#8 Set the Crime in a Place Familiar to You: Whether it is at the top of a lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay, an Adirondack cabin, or a dusty horse stable, incorporating a setting we know well is definitely an advantage as we pull in our readers. The first time I walked out to a lighthouse just a mile from my house, I knew there was a story I had to tell.

When you look at these Christie Tricks, which ones do you think have helped you build your mysteries? I want to hear about them.

Nomenclature by Nancy L. Eady

2026-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Entering a new area of the law after 34 years in personal injury is not a task for the faint of heart. Entering a specialized area of the law, public health, with zero experience in the field of endeavor is an adventure. I am learning, essentially, a new language, or, to put it in more precise terms, a new nomenclature.

Nomenclature is an interesting word. One of the 6+ definitions listed for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “The system or set of technical terms used in a science or other discipline; a specific or specialist terminology.” (If you are an English-speaking word nerd, the definitive reference source for a word’s definition and etymology is the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, “OED”, now conveniently available on-line via subscription.)

English borrowed the word from classical Latin, in which the word “nōmenclātūra,” meant “the assigning of names to things.” It was used in 1690 as denoting a list of the commonest words in a language to help learners, and in 1798 as a word for the entire word list in a dictionary! Oxford English Dictionary, “nomenclature (n.),” June 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4212315392. (In case you can’t guess, I am playing with my new toy, a one-month subscription.)

Just like my job comes with its own nomenclature, mystery writing comes with one as well. If you are new to writing, here are some common terms and/or abbreviations.

Antagonist – The Bad Guy.

Backstory – Not the history of orthopedic medicine, but the stuff that happened to your characters before your story opens.

Cozy – Not how I feel in front of a roaring fire in my fireplace during the depths of winter, but a mystery subgenre where violence is downplayed and the crime takes place in a small, socially intimate community.

Flash Fiction – Not a photograph of a book taken in the dark but a short story that is less than 100 words long.

MC – Not the master of ceremonies at an event, but the main character in your work.

MS – Not a professional woman who wishes to remain neutral regarding her marital status, but “manuscript.”

MSS – Not a bevy of belles, but “manuscripts.”

Pantster – Not a tailor, but a free spirit who sits down at her desk and starts writing, surprised as she sees what flows forth from her word crafting.

Plotster – Not a gardener, but a frustratingly organized individual (at least to those like me born lacking the gene for organization) who plans out the plot of his novel before starting to write.

POV – Point of View. Not your opinion about politics or the chartreuse and pink dress your best friend is wearing – you might want to keep the chartreuse and pink opinion to yourself in any event - but rather the way in which you tell your story and from whose perspective.

Protagonist – The Good Guy.

Swag – Not a jaunty step nor a fancy curtain top but the promotional materials authors use to encourage the public to read their book.

Unreliable Narrator – The person telling your story is not just a liar but a dam* liar.

WIP – Not a program initiated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create jobs during the Great Depression, but “work in progress.”

What other words and acronyms might be helpful for a new writer? If you are a new writer, what words or acronyms do you have questions about?

Some Thoughts on Naming My Fictional Characters by Marilyn Levinson

2026-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

While deciding on the best names for your characters is not as critical as naming your children and your pets, it does require a considerable amount of thought. After all, you will be living with these characters for quite some time, especially if you write series. I spend the most time choosing my protagonist's name for obvious reasons. My sleuths are always female. I like to give them names I consider appealing and not very common, along with a nickname. In Giving Up the Ghost, my sleuth Gabriela Meyerson is called Gabbie. In Murder a la Christie, Lexie's official name is Alexa. My sleuth in Death on Dickens Island is Cordelia Dickens, though everyone calls her Delia.

However, not all my characters are happy with their given names. Carrie Singleton, in the Haunted Library series, officially changed her name to Carrie because she always hated Carolinda, which she was given at birth.

The names of my other characters usually come to mind as they're about to become active members of the cast. I do my best to vary them, with regard to the starting letter and number of syllables. Masculine names tend to be shorter, and so I choose names with different vowel sounds. Readers are less likely to confuse two characters named Mike and Brett, while having characters named Fred and Ted in the same book might be a problem for some. But names can get mixed up even in an author's mind. I am grateful to the editor who noticed that I'd changed the murderer's name in the middle of the novel.

Recently, I've been having fun with names in a different way entirely. In the book I'm currently writing, Delia and her son Connor adopt two kittens that are littermates. I decided to call them Romeo and Juliet after my own kitties. And when Connor and his friend Trevor acquire girlfriends, I named them after my granddaughter and her "sister." Boy, was Livvie excited when I told her about that!

We authors have total control when it comes to naming our characters. What do you take into consideration when you name yours?

Killer Questions - Favorite Places to Visit

2026-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Killer Questions - Favorite Places to Visit

With summer being here, people often begin to think of vacations. The Writers Who Kill differ on are our favorite places to visit. Are any of these a favorite for you?

Annette Dashofy - Durango, Colorado, or Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA, if I don’t have the time or money to travel.

Heather Weidner - Any beach, Hawaii, bookstores and libraries.

James M. Jackson - I love being in new places, learning about the fauna, flora, and geology, and taking pictures to capture my impressions. But my favorite place to visit is my home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Martha Reed - Italy, hands down. But I’m keeping other options open.

Sarah E. Burr - London is my absolute favorite city, so much so that I’d love to live there one day.

Kait Carson – Saba

Debra H. Goldstein – For relaxation, any place where I can look at water. For a fast paced trip, a long weekend seeing Broadway shows in New York City.

Susan Van Kirk – Boston

Elaine Douts - My sister’s house because I usually don’t have to cook and clean there.

Margaret Hamilton - Cape Cod beaches and London.

K.M. Rockwood - Mackinac Island.

Korina Moss - That’s a difficult one, since there are many favorites. If I had to pick, I’d say London. You never run out of things to do or see, the architecture is stunning, the history is palpable, and the museums and art galleries are fantastic (and most are free). There are beautiful parks, markets, rivers, and squares. There’s a great variety of ethnic food, although I also love the pubs.

Grace Topping - It's not a place that I will probably get to more than once, but Petra in Jordan has to be at the top of my list. I wish I could go often.

Shari Randall - Some place new!

Mary Dutta - New York City (with London a close second). It’s all about the theater.

The Joys of ShortCon

2026-06-16T00:30:00.000-04:00

Michael Bracken

by Paula Gail Benson

I imagine readers are going to see a lot of posts about ShortCon, the program organized by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson that has taken place for the last three years at Elaine’s Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. This was my first time attending, but many participants had been to all three.

Why would you want to go and keep returning?

1. Writing is done in isolation. When you find your tribe gathering, you want to be part of the event, to make connections, catch up with friends, and hear the news. This is difficult for short story writers, particularly those in the mystery field. Most larger conferences focus on novels and have only a few panels on short stories. Also, I don’t think readers of short stories are usually drawn to conferences, unless they read mysteries generally. ShortCon provides the concentration and more intimate setting where people can easily talk.

For instance, I belong to the Short Mystery Fiction Society (SMFS), a group that welcomes members at no cost and annually recognizes excellence in flash, short stories, longer short stories, and novelettes with the Derringer awards (usually presented at Bouchercon). Joseph S. Walker is the President of the SMFS. I’m always reading his messages, but it was a real pleasure to have dinner with him and hear about his short story collection, Crime Scenes, that has recently been published.

Stacy Woodson

A Noir at the Bar event took place at Elaine’s the night before ShortCon. Some excellent writers read their own short stories. The atmosphere was relaxed, allowing participants to get to know each other better before the full day program began.

2. ShortCon operates on a very economical basis. There is a registration fee, but it covers the breakfast and lunch for the day of the program. Also, there are raffles and giveaways throughout the meeting. I asked Michael if any books would be available for sale and he replied that people paid enough to attend, the organizers wanted to give back. They did, in information and in extras.

3. Craft and market information are important. ShortCon recognizes and supplies both. Among this year’s craft presenters were Gary Phillips (who took the group through an exercise in creating a villain) and Art Taylor (who spoke about how to structure a novel in short stories). Art invited Ashley-Ruth Bernier to talk to the group about her recently released The Bush Tea Murder, a novel told in short stories. Art’s own On the Road with Del & Louise, A Novel in Stories, has just been reissued. Michele Slung explained the reading process for selecting stories to be included in Otto Penzler’s The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and Jackie Sherbow, editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, spoke about transitions taking place at that publication.

4. Elaine’s has become well known not only for its superb Mediterranean cuisine but also as a haven for literary events. The Westin Alexandria Old Town (a fifteen-minute drive to Reagan National airport) had excellent rooms, an attentive staff, and a comfortable bar for discussions. Alexandria was a very walkable and Uber friendly city.

Are you a short story writer? Have you considered becoming one? You might want to check out ShortCon. It's a great learning and networking experience.

2026-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Good Distractions Make for Excellent Vibrations by Debra H. Goldstein

Sometimes, when good things are happening, it seems like life gets in the way of doing everything one wants to do – especially writing. But, that’s okay.

You may ask how it can be okay? You’ve always heard a writer is supposed to write. A writer is supposed to be glued to the chair, fingers on the keyboard, for certain lengths of time or until a given number of words are created. There’s a lot of truth to those ideas.

There also is truth to be found in a writer’s negative feelings of being overwhelmed, out of ideas, completely frustrated, or having trouble balancing or even finding freak out moment time (see my Hamster Wheel blog https://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/2026/04/running-aimlessly-on-hamsters-wheel.html ). Those are the lousy depressing times when one wonders if words will ever flow again. The times that hopefully will pass but seem like they won’t.

They aren’t what I’m talking about. I’m addressing not writing because of exhilarating and wonderful distractions. Reading the different posts on Facebook, Instagram, or blogs posted or written by Writers Who Kill authors, I see this past month included graduations, military commissions, Daisy to Brownie bridging, weddings, births, new homes, visiting guests, remodeling that finally finished, book launches, award ceremonies, attending conferences, traveling for fun, and planting for the new season. If you ask me, all of these were good reasons not to write.

The funny thing is that while words may not have gotten down on paper, I find that during these happy times, words keep percolating in my brain. Story ideas that have been tangled become clearer. It is the calm before the storm of words flow. Maybe it has something to do with the release of brain chemicals associated with happiness or simply relaxing, but I know that when the time presents itself to write again, I will. It’s truly okay. I can feel the good vibrations.

What about you? Do you ever find yourself so detoured by happy occasions and acts that you can’t squeeze in other things? When you can, do things work out?

HOW TO INSPIRE READER LOYALTY

2026-06-14T00:15:00.000-04:00

by Korina Moss

A photo posted by Dana, a loyal reader of mine

Reader loyalty. Every author hopes for it. Cozy mystery authors count on it for their careers. One way to foster loyal readership is through marketing, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. First, you must write a series that inspires reader loyalty.

Cozy mysteries are intended to be a standalone series. Writing a standalone means you have to focus on writing the best self-contained story you can. But writing standalones within a series means you also have to consider the books you'll be writing next. Ultimately, you want a connection among your books and a progression of your characters. These two things will help to elevate your series and inspire reader loyalty. How to do this? Here are 5 things to keep in mind that may help:

1. Give your protagonist a character arc throughout the series.

Cozy mysteries are comfort reads, so although we want to write a three-dimensional protagonist (which likely means she’ll have some flaws and challenges), you need to put a light touch on them. Your protagonist must be likable from the beginning, and therefore, her issues can’t be so heavy or need such redemption that the reader isn’t riding with her from the start. With this in mind, you can introduce an arc that gets resolved in book one and then a bigger arc that runs throughout the series, or you can introduce an arc and show your protagonist’s growth incrementally throughout each book. Either way, don’t hit the reader over the head with lessons learned. Character arcs should also apply to your core series characters (those who help your protagonist sleuth and show up in every book). Think about what changes they might go through within each book. What small differences will readers be able to see in your core characters between book 1 and your later books?

2. Keep in mind the time between when the books take place.

Does your first book take place in the spring and the second book take place the following fall? Then you need to keep in mind when you write that second book that 6 months have passed for your characters. If your protagonist has just moved into her new apartment in book 1, she’s not going to be unpacking boxes at the start of book 2 if it takes place 6 months later. (Unless she’s like me, lol.) If two characters start dating in book 1, then you have to consider that they’ve now spent six months dating at the start of book 2. If your sleuth and the detective have been awkwardly flirting in book 1, and in book 2, you have them acting exactly the same, you need to mention why their status has remained the same. Have they avoided each other since the last murder investigation? Only seen each other in passing? Are both horribly shy? There should be a reason why their relationship is in the same place. Things will have happened in those months between books that readers didn’t get to see. Make sure each book simply acknowledges that.

3. Make some community characters recurring.

If you introduce characters who play an important role in your book and they’re part of the community, readers are going to want to see them again and know what they're up to now. It’s a great way to make the town feel alive and slowly grow it. However, not every character can be in every book. They still have to serve a purpose to the mystery. You don’t want too many names and characters for your readers to have to remember. But using these recurring secondary and tertiary characters not only adds color, they help to make your characters feel like they actually live off the page.

4. Keep the relationships between characters growing and changing.

In real life, romantic relationships and friendships change and grow. Especially if your protagonist starts out in a new town (like Willa does in my Cheese Shop series), you’ll want to show the progression of her friendships and the romantic relationships from book to book. This will have to be done a bit more slowly than in real life, but there are always ways to show growth and for relationships to get tripped up. I age my characters, but not every series does. I understand why and it may not be important to readers to see them age. However, I think if my characters are going to grow and their lives are going to change, and I'm writing different seasons and holidays and shop anniversaries, then my characters should also get older.

5. Ground your setting.

You want your reader to have a good image in their head of your setting. One way to do this is to have a strong handle yourself on what your town looks like, what’s there, and where the places are located. It will keep you from making mistakes and also allow you to paint a better picture of your setting for the reader. Make note of the shops or locations that play a role in your books. You’ll want to show many of them again in future books, even if it’s just a mention of walking past them. If your protagonist has 3 places she always goes to—for example, her home, the local café, and the shop she runs—you want to describe not only these three places, but where they exist within the town. It will give your reader some idea of the size of the town, if it’s walkable, if your protagonist lives in a rural location, etc. Your setting is like those recurring characters I mentioned earlier—your readers want to be reminded that those places still exist even if they don’t play a role in that particular book.

Readers become loyal to a series when they love the characters, the town, and the cozy feel. They like to feel like they’re returning to “old friends” in a place they’d love to live (minus those pesky murders). You want to make these things as real as possible for them. A progressing arc of your protagonist and core characters and their relationships not only makes them more realistic, it also gives your readers something to be invested in and look forward to. Connecting the books with many of the same community characters and town businesses leads to a comforting familiarity for your readers. I hope these five tips will help your series become one readers will want to revisit again and again.

Readers: What makes you return to a series and become a loyal reader?

KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop Mystery series, which includes the winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel, as well as two novels short-listed for Best Contemporary Novel. Listed as one of USA Today’s “Best Cozy Mystery Series,” her books have also been featured in PARADE Magazine, Woman’s World, and Writer’s Digest. Korina is also a freelance developmental editor specializing in cozy mysteries. To learn more or subscribe to her free seasonal newsletter, visit her website korinamossauthor.com.

EXERCISE YOUR IMAGINATION: Keep It Fit and Flexible for When That Creative Spark Ignites Your Mind

2026-06-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

By Lisa Malice, Ph.D.

A Writer’s Creativity Tags Along on Vacation. That was the title of my March 14 blog post for Writers Who Kill. It recounted how wrong I was thinking my brain could take a holiday from crafting characters, settings, and plots when those storytelling elements found their way into my vacation.

This weekend, it happened again, though not on vacation, but during an event I never would have imagined could spur a creative thought—a welcome-to-your-new-home party for my 97-year-old gym buddy, Bert, after he moved to an assisted living facility.

Hanging out with Bert, a man with nearly a century of life experience to share, is always a history lesson, but as I talked with some of his new neighbors, I discovered many with interesting lives to share, too. I met psychologists, teachers, preachers, engineers, even hourly power company workers who shared fascinating life tidbits.

But one resident really sparked my thriller writer’s imagination—Charlie, an 86-year-old gentleman who spent his life in the water as a professional diver. He started out in the late 1950’s as spearfisherman, keeping local restaurants stocked with grouper, snapper, sea trout, and other sea delicacies from the Gulf. In the 1960’s, Charlie opened his own dive shop, complete with a 40-foot pool for training and certifying recreational and professional scuba divers, and boats for shuttling divers to coral reefs, shipwrecks, and other dive sites.

If that wasn’t enough, Charlie was a commercial pilot, taking to the air in his private plane to ferry fishermen, hunters, and divers across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico (as it was named back then) to the dirt airstrips dotting the backwater islands.

Sounds like a real character? You bet! Strong in mind and body with an adventurous spirit that lets nothing get past him. You know what that means? He often finds himself in tough situations, up against the roughest of characters, some who will put him and others in harm’s way. A whole host of problems he encounters in his life and work can serve as a setting for mystery, thrills, and suspense (e.g., hurricanes, mechanical problems, missing people or boats) and dark characters and their nefarious dealings (e.g., organized crime, Soviet spies, smugglers, treasure hunters).

My mind is having fun imaging all that could go wrong and how fictionalized Charlie gets out of it alive. Will I set out to write Charlie into a series? No. This is not the genre I read, nor write. But what What I’ve discovered from this experience is that such exercises of imagination are good for my writer’s mind. Pumping creativity instead of weights, running with a story idea rather than with a treadmill, keeps my mind healthy, ready to flex its cognitive muscles when faced with the spark for my next great tale.

How about you? Please share a situation that unexpectedly sparked an idea for a new character, a new plot, maybe even a series? If you are not a writer, please share how a spark of imagination helped you solve a difficult problem.