This morning, thoughts flit through my mind sort of like moths around a light bulb. It’s winter. It’s cold. A possibility of freezing rain is in the forecast and I’m wondering if that forecast will become a fact. Then, thoughts of mysteries, my own and those of other people. Yesterday, I finished reading Moonlight Can […]

With Time on My Hands
Retirement–that longed-for Utopian state for which I worked for decades. Lovely, unhurried mornings, peaceful, sunny days of travel, visiting coffee shops. Plenty of time for cleaning a house and keeping it sparkling, baking cookies, taking long walks. And, oh, my goodness, all that accumulated wisdom. Just a whole headful of good advice gleaned from years of […]

Spider Webs and Spooky Noises
When you were a child, did you ever sit in the living room with your family on a dark night listening, petrified, while your dad or grandfather told a true story about a really spooky happening, something that was never explained? You wanted a rational, satisfying explanation but there was none. It was just a mystery, […]

A Mystery Writer’s 12 Days
This is Twelfth Night, the Epiphany, the impetus for the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. With my family’s help, I added words that might be appropriate for a writer of cozy mysteries. Thanks, Matt, Dawn, Sara, Nathan! A Cozy Mystery Writer’s Sizzling Twelve Days of Christmas On the first day of Christmas, Santa brought to […]

Looking Back Without Stumbling
Sometimes, when beginning a new year, I like to look back at the old one. So, yesterday, I not only looked back at 2014, I went way, way back to 1953 and a 5-year diary my mother gave me in 1952. It was full of a young girl’s thoughts and experiences. Some of them were […]

The Face Could Have Been Santa’s
As you know, while I was in Ireland, I took a bunch of pictures, 235, to be exact. One of those was of an Irishman in Dublin. As I was going through the pictures yesterday, I looked more closely at this man. If the black slouch hat were replaced by a red, furry one and the […]

