This Is Me!

Hi all, I’m Abby Vandiver, aka Abby Collette and I write cozy mysteries.

I’m new to the Writers Who Kill blog and am excited to be here. I thought my first blog was the perfect time to introduce me and my books to you.

I hadn’t always been inspired to write. As a child I wanted to be an actor and a teacher. (Yeah, because those two things go together, right?) Then I took 9^th grade biology and it made my synapses snap and excited all my neurons. I loved that class! Loved it so much that I decided it was what I had to do with the rest of my life. Yep, I was going to be a doctor.

But as happens with a lot of us, life had different plans.

Long story short I ended up getting a bachelor’s in Economics (used it to be a Economics professor), a master’s in Public Administration (became the City of Cleveland’s Registrar of Vital Statistics) and a Juris Doctor (yep, I was a lawyer, too). Becoming a doctor somehow never happened (although I have a minor in biology and worked as a dialysis technician while working on my masters, but, alas, that doesn’t even come close to being a doctor).

 Now, I bet you’re wondering how do you go from teaching supply and demand and filling my days with courtroom drama to writing cozy mysteries?

My guess? It was fate.

Back around 2012, I took sick and was mostly bedridden for more than four years. During that time, I had long hospital stays and multiple surgeries and I needed something to do to keep my mind off what I was going through, so I began writing. I started with an online magazine and then one day, my daughter called and told me she found “my book” in her garage. My book?? It took me a minute to realize what she was talking about. It was nearly fifteen years earlier, during the time I was raising two teenage children and after moving my eighty-year old mother in with me, I’d lost my job and instead of sending out resumes, I decided to write a book.

I couldn’t tell you what possessed me to do it. I had never taken a creative writing class or had imagined writing anything (other than a motion to the court), nor could I tell you where I got the idea for the story. But as I sat down to write, it just flowed out of me. That should have been a clue that it was what I was meant to do.

 But it took another fifteen years (and me being sick) for me to publish that first book, In the

Beginning. It was too long, more character driven than action packed and didn’t follow any rules of writing. (Who knew there were rules to writing?) But even though I didn’t quite know what I was doing, I sent it out into the world and it did okay (after making revisions, of course).

Although cozy mysteries are my thing now, that was not what that first series was. Self-published, one book turned into three, my Mars Origin series was a Dan Brown-ish kind of mystery. You know the kind: Hidden artifact that reveals information that if it got out could change the world as we know it; the main character is the only person who can keep the information from the bad guys and save the world. My books, though, didn’t have peril around every corner, no blood or guts and not one ounce of romance. It was more cozy than thriller/suspense.

So, I’d found my niche and my Bed & Breakfast Bedlam, a spin-off of sorts of my first series, became my first cozy mystery book. The genre fit exactly with the kind of books I wanted to write. There are six books in that series the last book written in 2017. Today, I still get readers asking will I write any more books in the series. And my answer is always yes!

I don’t know when, but I hope to write more Logan Dickerson books. Meanwhile, I have penned four other cozy series—the Normal Junction Cozy Mystery, the Tiny House Cozy Mystery, the Romaine Wilder Mystery and my new, An Ice Cream Parlor Mystery set in Chagrin Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio where I live. The first book, A Deadly Inside Scoop, is out now and sold everywhere books are sold. 

Check it out here: bit.ly/ScoopPRH

Here's how to keep in touch with me:

Website: www.authorabby.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/AbbyVandiver

Facebook: www.facebook.com/authorabbyl.vandiver

Instagram: www.instagram.com/abbylvandiver

That’s all for now. Feel free to ask me questions in the comments and tell me about you too—where you live, what kind of books you like to read, or anything else you’d like to share. I’d love to get to know you!