The question writers are asked most often seems to be, “Where do you get your ideas?” Since I was blessed to have a profession (lawyer) where I helped people solve their problems, I regularly witnessed the follies of human beings. Sitting in a courtroom every day, I was never bored and kept my ears, eyes, and a separate notebook open. I have more ideas than I’ll ever be able to use, but that’s not true for everyone.
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It’s Agatha Award nominating time, which means that people in the cozy mystery community are going through the books and stories we’ve read this year and cogitating over which ones we’d like to nominate. (Ballots are due in electronically by March 6.)
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If Jed Mercurio is a pantser, I’m a red herring.
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Welcome to By the Book, Miss Demeanors’ style. In the tradition of the New York Times Sunday feature, the question of the week is: You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three authors, dead or alive, do you invite, in addition to your fellow Miss Demeanors, of course?
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There’s nothing I love more than an inspirational story, and one of my favorites involves Kent Haruf.
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You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three authors, dead or alive, do you invite, in addition to your fellow Miss Demeanors, of course?
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Today I am thrilled to introduce one of our new Miss Demeanors, Emilya Naymark.
Emilya: Years of hearing my husband’s tales of buying drugs in the city got my gears churning and instead of helping him write his memoirs, as we always joked I would, I up and made him a lady and stuck him into a crime novel.
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Yesterday, my fellow Miss Demeanor, Susan Breen, talked about buying each of the books recently nominated for the Edgar in the best novel category. She rationalized, quite reasonably in my view, that money not spent in restaurants during the pandemic could be redirected to purchasing books.
But with so many books, how do I choose which books? The reasons seem to fall into the categories of Smart, Savvy, Sentimental, and Seemingly Silly.
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The Edgar nominees for Best Novel were announced last week, and, in a moment of extravagance, I went out and bought all six. I can’t go out to dinner, I figured. Why not spend my money on books?
wanted to be able to write in them and underline favorite sentences and learn from them. I’m a writing teacher and one thing I’m always telling my students is that there’s no better teacher than a book.
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