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Essays

Are You Paying Attention?

By P. J. Tracy

January 11, 2021

I’m that weirdo you occasionally see at an airport gate or in a waiting room; totally anomalous because I’m not a lonely planet orbiting around my digital sun. You can’t even see evidence of a digital sun on my person, which makes me rarer than a unicorn and appreciably suspicious. Of course, you might not…

Ellie Alexander’s 12 Days of Cozy Bakes: Lime Mint Cupcakes

By Ellie Alexander

December 11, 2020

With the many challenges we have faced this year, I wanted to share something special this holiday season. After much thought and consideration as well as a fortuitous email from a reader requesting a recipe that never made it into a book, I came up with a plan to share 12 Days of Cozy Bakes.…

Writers Writing Writers

By Paige Shelton

December 8, 2020

I like it when writers write about writers—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Well, actually, it seems the best stories aren’t about the good. It’s just not as much fun to hear about those days—the days when the words flow, everyone who reads their books gushes and loves them, and nothing interrupts the creative…

Hidden Treasure: The Anatomy of Writing Antiques-Themed Mysteries

By Jane K. Cleland

December 4, 2020

As with all the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries, Hidden Treasure, the thirteenth entry in the series, uses genuine antiques to tell a fictional story. The questions that surround antiques are fraught with mysteries. Who designed it? Why? What was going on in their world that made this artifact appropriate or desired? Who produced it? Who…

Deputy Roosevelt and the Case of the Stolen Scow

By Erin Lindsey

November 13, 2020

Theodore Roosevelt is remembered for many things—so many, indeed, that periods of his life that would feature as headlines in the biographies of lesser mortals are relegated to mere footnotes in his legacy. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it; it certainly came as a surprise to me to learn that among his…

The Ultimate Villain Creates the Ultimate Hero

By Chris Mooney

November 11, 2020

I grew up on sci-fi films during the eighties and early nineties, and nine times out of ten the villains sucked. Let me be clear: I’m talking about human villains, not the iconic creatures and robots spawned during that time period like the terrifying xenomorphs from the first two Alien movies, or the T-800 and…

Murder, Incest, and Secret Lovers: A Brief History of Brontë Conspiracies

By Bella Ellis

November 10, 2020

Even if you aren’t a fan of classic English Literature, chances are that you will have heard of the Brontë family, of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their works of fiction and poetry. Of course, this is largely due to their extraordinary talents and remarkable novels that inspire and speak to generation after generation, but it…

A Hundred-Year-Old Unsolved Crime Inspires A Crime Novel and A Personal Journey

By Nev March

November 5, 2020

In the 1970s, as a teen in Mumbai I chafed against the restrictions my parents imposed: not allowed to travel alone, either walking or by public transport, nor visit new places with friends. Joining a college hiking trip, whether all girls or a mixed-gender group—was out of the question. In explanation, I was told, “Remember…

The Lost Manuscript: It Could Happen to You!

By Susan Cox

November 4, 2020

We all resent Julius Caesar for “accidentally” burning the Library at Alexandria, and we’re still pretty peeved at Robespierre and his compadres for burning millions of manuscripts, volumes, and scrolls during the French revolution. But in more recent decades manuscripts have been lost in a startling variety of ways from theft, to house fires, to…

Lady Dunbridge, The New Woman, and the Dime Novel Detective

By Shelley Noble

October 28, 2020

When I was developing ideas for writing a Gilded Age Manhattan mystery series, I knew that I wanted to set in in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. My protagonist Lady Dunbridge would be one of the “new” women. I would blend history with the popular imagination of the era. An adventure story that…

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