I've given over today's spot to a fellow cozy mystery author, Shannon Symonds. She describes her Balefire Bay series as "more than a destination; it's a state of mind, a small town that captures your heart." Enjoy her post! -- Korina
Writing a book is a solo endeavor. It’s perfect for an introvert like me whose favorite color is invisible. Talking books with serious readers and writers is a blast. I love hearing what my favorite author’s writing space is like or what readers like to read. I simply don’t know how to navigate the rest of life. I often find myself on the periphery, observing, back to the wall like a flower at gatherings, seeing new characters live the way I wish I could and tucking them away for a future book.
Explaining what I write about to non-bookish people can be a challenge. Let me give you a little sample of a typical conversation I’ve had more than once. For example, at church, when someone finds out I write books.
Church lady: You’re an author. How exciting. So, what do you write about?
Me: I write cozy mysteries and some women’s fiction.
Church Lady: You mean like murder mysteries? Are they, you know, violent? I can’t read anything that is full of death.
Me: I write about tidy murders. You know, like Miss Marple murders or British television murders. One good conk on the head or a fall down the stairs and someone dies without any blood. The carpet doesn’t even have to be cleaned.
Church Lady: So, you write about cute villages in the English countryside, priests, and all that?
Me: No. No… I write about what I know. I worked as an advocate alongside law-enforcement responding to crime scenes to support victims of interpersonal and sexual violence. Only the advocate in my books is slimmer and single; her kids are well-behaved, her house is clean, and the police officer she falls in love with is handsome.
Church Lady (Jerks her head back, her brows top her readers, and her mouth falls open for a microsecond): Oh! That all sounds so violent. How can you write about all that without getting violent?
Me: My books don’t include on-stage violence. People are already dead or die where you’re not looking. No one even swears in my books. All my books have happy endings for everyone, except for the person who dies. Your ‘tween could read them.
Church Lady: I think not. A book like that should come with a warning label.
Me: What do you read?
Church Lady: The Bible.
Me: I read the Bible every day. Wait, in 2nd Kings, didn’t Jezebel get thrown from the palace window, trampled by horses, and wasn’t her body eaten by dogs, leaving only her skull and hands?
Life. I can’t make up anything stranger.
In a plot twist, I relished a conversation I had while getting my immunizations at the Costco Pharmacy. As she injected me with my first shot, the pharmacist asked what I did. I told her I was an author. She got very excited and called all the other pharmacists over while giving me my next shot and told them I was an author. She explained that the pharmacy had a book club.
The pharmacists asked what kind of books I wrote. I said they were cozy mysteries that took place in a small town on the coast, like the one I lived in. I said I wrote about things I knew and loved, like the strength of survivors, especially when they are building a new life. You know, like that old television show, Murder, She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury?
I didn’t tell them that partway through the book I would toss the survivors into their darkest night, give them a Yoda-like friend, and create a disaster of such epic proportions that I hoped it would keep readers up all night turning pages.
Instead, I offered to bring them free books.
I’ve decided that bookish people have a language all their own. When I tell someone, my mysteries have a little romance in them, they ask me how steamy or spicy they are. I reassure them they aren’t spicy at all; they’re cozy. Then they are either at peace with reading my books, upset that I’ve infused romance into the mystery genre, or decide quietly that they aren’t spicy enough and look for something with a bare chest on the cover.
I frequently remind myself that for every book, there is a reader out there somewhere waiting for me to sign their copy. And if not, soon I’ll escape this chaotic world and go home to write about the world I wish I lived in. A place between the covers with the same drama, ocean tides, storms, tsunamis, killers, advocates, and shadows of survivors I spent years with and find comfort in somehow being able to control the violence and give my survivor the happy ending I think I’ve finally found for myself.
