This is what it feels like to turn in your finished manuscript on deadline. The morning after turning in a manuscript looks like this You get up, get dressed, look around the house (in my case, the RV) and think… what on earth am I supposed to do with my day? The good news? With…
Category: About Writing
Topics useful to writers.
From Children’s Books to Cozy Mystery Series
I spent so many years in the children’s publishing world, I was certain I had found my niche. I wasn’t wrong. For decades, children’s publishing was the right place for me. I loved the books, the people, the conferences, the editing, teaching workshops… all of it. And then, that world shifted away from me and…
Falling Ice
This morning, I’m not in one of my usual writing haunts: Rogue Roasting Company in Ashland, Oregon; Coffee Bach in Phoenix, OR; or Lumina, on the Ashland Plaza downtown. I’m at home in my tiny RV office. My “office” consists of the passenger’s chair, turned around to face the living area. I have a small…
A Study in Settings
How do you choose a particular town for a cozy mystery setting? That’s a question many authors get from readers. For me, the answer is easy. I need to have more than a casual acquaintance with a location to use it for a book setting. In Murder at Last Chance Cove, Saffi Graywood finds a…
Merry Cover Release!
If you’re not brain-deep in publishing on a regular basis, you might not know just how little input an author has on the cover of her or his book. If you’re lucky, you get to see cover sketches. Perhaps you even get a chance to weigh in on various cover designs. For me, this was…
Cover Time!
I LOVE the cover of Death in the Haunted Wood and couldn’t wait to share it with you. Well, okay, I did have to wait, at least… until my publisher got to show it off first. The wait is over, and I hope you love this cover as much as I do. What do I…
A Matter of Taste
I’m thinking about book reviews right now as the first books in my cozy mystery series publish. Reviews are coming in for Murder in Last Chance Cove and most have enough stars to make me grin. I love finding consensus on what readers who’ve taken time to write reviews think I’ve done well. I learn…
Fixing & Fiction
Many of the things that happen to my amateur sleuth Saffi Graywood in Murder at Last Chance Cove were inspired by things that have happened in my life. If you have read the first book in my Pacific Northwest Cozy Mystery series, you may recognize the setting and which part of the plot it relates…
Raven About Series Authors
I devour series books from authors whose work I love as if they were truffles that might melt in a heatwave—like those many of us have been experiencing this summer. As I gobble up the goodness, I don’t really think about the hours and days and months and, sometimes, years that the author spent on…
Genre-Shifting Writers
When I first started writing, I wrote what I read: fantasy, for the most part, and romance. (I was 20-something, so the latter was probably a given.) I came very close to publishing a romance novel with Del Rey. An editor read the manuscript I sent and liked it. If I was willing to do…
Cozies & Kim Griswell 