Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
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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Latest Posts
Hide in Place
Today is the launch date for our newest Miss Demeanor’s debut book, Hide in Place.
It sounds like an incredible story: She left the NYPD in the firestorm of a high-profile case gone horribly wrong. Three years later, the ghosts of her past roar back to terrifying life.
It Was A Dark & Stormy Night: Weather in Fiction
“Weather tonight: dark. Turning partly light by morning.”
Who remembers George Carlin, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman? A whole generation of viewers in the 1970s laughed at his weather forecasts, but the silliness struck a chord. People are obsessed with the weather. Even in books.
Welcome Emilya Naymark
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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Books and Cookies–A Perfect Match
It’s cookie season! Girl Scout cookies, that is. I bought a box or four from a friend’s daughter. Cookie sales have gone high tech. I ordered online and had the sweet treats shipped to me. That’s a big change from my Scouting days, when we had to go door-to-door with a paper order form and had to hand-deliver the cookies.
Since book and booze pairings are also a thing, I decided, why not book and Girl Scout cookies?
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Books to Get Me Through
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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Edgars
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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Hope, Faith & a Corpse
Midwesterner turned Californian Laura Jensen Walker arrived on the cozy mystery scene in the middle of a pandemic with not one but two new series.
When I began writing my first cozy (A Grave Affair, featuring a recently divorced woman in her forties who moved to a small town to start over), there was a minor woman Episcopal priest character. As I continued writing, that woman priest made it quite clear to me that she was a main character deserving of her own story.
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Thought for the day.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. Ernest Hemingway.
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Whining Won’t Help: Research in the Time of the Plague
I’m thirty thousand words into my new Kate Hamilton book and feeling generally out of sorts because I should be in England right now….I feel like whining.
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