Friends,
People sometimes ask when I will write a serious one, meaning a bloody one. The gentle kind is not the same as the soft kind. Keeping the violence off the page and treating the dead with plain decency makes the puzzle harder to build, because the town has to matter as much as the crime does. That is the piece below, and it is the only kind I want to write.
Delilah
From the Bench
Why I Write Cozies
Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.
Also in the notebook
- Reading Wear Wear is a record of habit, not of intention. This is how I read a worn object, and how I put that reading to work in the fiction I write.
- The Shop Class and the Café A repair café is a hall, some borrowed tables, and a line of toasters waiting to be fixed for nothing. They are the most cheerful rooms I know, and I gave my fictional town one and put my sleuth behind the counter.
Once a month we clear the floor, the school sends its shop class, and Gault Mills carries in whatever has stopped working and leaves with most of it going again.
From Fixed to Death