Write what you know? Not really.
- March 4, 2021
- Tracee de Hahn

I write mysteries, which means someone will die. Probably in the first 15 pages. Does that mean I know how to kill someone? Well, sort of. But ONLY on paper.
Read MoreI write mysteries, which means someone will die. Probably in the first 15 pages. Does that mean I know how to kill someone? Well, sort of. But ONLY on paper.
Read MoreIf Jed Mercurio is a pantser, I’m a red herring.
Read MoreShe 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.
When NYPD undercover cop Laney Bird’s cover is blown in a racketeering case against the Russian mob, she flees the city with her troubled son, Alfie. Now, three years later, she’s found the perfect haven in Sylvan, a charming town in upstate New York.
But then the unthinkable happens: her boy vanishes.
Read MoreHow long is a sentence? The answer I got in junior high school was “long enough to finish the thought.” Cheeky.
For years, the longest sentence ever written in English was said to be Molly Bloom’s 3,687-word soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922). However, one of the finalists for the 2019 Booker Prize was Lucy Ellman, whose 1,000-page Ducks, Newburyport consists mostly of a single sentence that runs to 426,000 words. Beat that if you can.
Read MoreI recently finished writing a historical inspired, in part, by my family’s immigration story.
After joining ancestry.com, I met cousins from that line and in 2015, and I had the chance to visit. One of my questions was why when so many Irish ended up in Canada, or Boston, or New York City, did this family end up in the Berkshires?
Read MoreToday 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.
Read MoreMidwesterner 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.
Read MoreI’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.
Read MoreYesterday a writing colleague posted a question on social media about unpublished manuscripts she had sitting in a closet. Do you keep them or toss them out, she asked. Coincidentally, I have been working on a manuscript I wrote a number of years ago, which oddly I had made no effort to publish. It’s the story about a woman named Elise who kept whispering in my ears when I was cooking in my kitchen. I was busy working on a mystery series at the time, so I kept trying to shoo her away, but Elise would not let go of me until I wrote her story. It turned out to be a romantic comedy, a genre I hadn’t attempted before. I enjoyed Elise and the cast of characters supporting her, yet the book did not fit into my plan at the time. We all know what’s happened to plans. For me, the pandemic preceded by a couple of killer hurricanes turned my life into a chopped more than a tossed salad. So be it. You land where you’re planted and try to bloom. Elise has continued to gnaw at me since I placed her in a desk drawer. “Let me […]
Read MoreI was about thirteen, an impressionable age, when among the stacks in my small hometown library, I stumbled upon the novels of P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced “Woodhouse,” by the way). For the first time in my life I realized that a story could be brilliant, not only for what was said but also for how it was said.
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