Chapter 1

Is there anything more problematic than a tearoom on the Fourth of July?

Those bold Bostonians had good reason to dump tea into the harbor back in 1773—and after my latest tax bill, I was starting to sympathize. But a tearoom that hasn’t blasted into July Fourth spirit by mid-June?

Downright treasonous.

Paper butterflies dangled from the tearoom’s ceiling. Sunny-orange table runners bisected the white-clothed tables. Daisy bouquets spilled from jam jars. The decor was summery, not patriotic. Not that anyone had complained.

“How about a red, white, and brew celebration?” Hyperion leaned against the window frame and adjusted his Uncle Sam top hat.

The blue of his three-piece suit almost perfectly matched the American flag. Tall and handsome, straight of nose and chiseled of jaw, my business partner always managed to look like he’d stepped from the pages of a men’s magazine.

It was irritating. I had to work to look reasonably put together. I’m petite—five-four if I don’t tease my hair (blond, FYI), five-four-and-a-half if I do. Wearing heels is easier.

The ladies in the tearoom—and some of the men—darted glances at Hyperion, but not because of that ridiculous hat. It was his high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and tousled shock of black hair that attracted the looks.

“The coffeehouse down the street is already using red, white and brew,” I said.

“The coffeehouse whither?” Hyperion loosened another button at his collar.

“Down the— What?” Whither? Since Hyperion had given up his Lovecraft word-of-the-day calendar, he’d been expanding his vocabulary in new and alarming ways.

Hyperion gusted an exasperated huff. “You’re overthinking this. No one’s complained about the decorations.” He paused. “I don’t think people are really into the Fourth this year.”

I’d noticed that too, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t go all in. Maybe it was a bit delusional to hope my contribution could raise people’s spirits. Except I hadn’t made any contribution yet. “I know, but...”

My boyfriend, Brik, ambled from the rear hallway. He set a cardboard box overflowing with decorations on the white-quartz counter. I straightened off the hostess stand and hoped my smile wasn’t too gooey.

POP!

I started and whirled toward the windows. Hyperion grinned, the ends of a holiday popper in his hands. “Red, white, and rooibos?”

I swallowed my annoyance. He knew my startle reflex was off the charts. “It beats red, white, and pea flower.” Butterfly pea flower was the herb of the moment when it came to brewing blue-colored tea.

“We’re trying too hard,” Hyperion said. “Beanblossom’s Tea and Tarot is America par excellence—flashy, unapologetic, and serving scones rocket hot.”

“Anything hotter than warm would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.” I smoothed my sunflower apron. “And Beanblossom’s is more elegant and genteel.”

“Is it though?”

The blue door to the tearoom swung open, the bell above it jingling. Beatrice Carson, communications consultant and PR maven, strode inside wearing a trademark vintage 1940s suit. Its lapels were wide, its skirt was tight. It was a mystery how she took a step without teetering over.

Her full lips curved in a frown. “Why aren’t the decorations up?” Beatrice was a good fifteen years older than me, with gray streaks in her coffee-colored hair. She was also a whole lot taller.

“Don’t you see the butterflies?” Hyperion motioned toward the ceiling.

Beatrice sputtered. “It’s June nineteenth. The Fourth is in two weeks. You should be done. If you’re not done, you should be decorating. Why aren’t you decorating?”

“We’ve just seated everyone,” I said. To keep things organized, we didn’t let people make reservations willy-nilly. There were strict seating times, and the first was 11:00 to 11:30 AM. It was now 11:35, and the tables were full, waitresses were bustling between them.

Hyperion’s Tarot readers hadn’t made their appearance yet. They preferred to let people settle in before making their rounds.

“I’m decorated.” Hyperion tapped his top hat. “I got the hat just for the semiquincentennial.”

“I can see that.” She scowled. “What I don’t see are your decorations for the Great San Borromeo Patriotic Porch Parade & Contest. What is wrong with everyone?”

How did she manage to squeeze capital letters into her speech? Maybe it was her communications training from when she’d worked at the White House.

“It’s important that everyone participate in a timely fashion,” she continued. “We have a memorandum of understanding. If you can’t fulfill your obligations—”

“The decorations are going up outside today.” I motioned toward Brik, pulling bunting from his box at the counter, and this time the quiver in my gut was trepidation. Our exterior wall was purple stucco. I wasn’t exactly sure how it would work with the patriotic bunting.

“You’re cutting it close,” Beatrice warned.

“The summer solstice is Sunday. A witch’s group is having a pre-solstice party Saturday. We can’t take down our Magical Summer decorations before then,” I said, because I could squeeze in capital letters too. “That gives us Monday to put up our interior decorations for Independence Day—”

“The semiquincentennial,” Hyperion interjected.

“And San Borromeo’s 150th anniversary,” Beatrice reminded me, her green eyes narrowing. “This Fourth of July is a big deal. If people like you don’t get with the program—”

“We will be rocking American independence for the rest of the summer,” I assured her. Because I love July Fourth. The history. The fireworks. The thumb-your-nose-at-the-man verve.

But the head witch was a good friend of Hyperion’s and a good client of the tearoom. We weren’t going to diss the solstice.

“Hmph.” She opened her oversized scarlet purse and retrieved a clipboard. “You’ll be selling mini-scones and iced tea at the Community Beachside Picnic & Old-Time Games Day next Saturday.”

“The twenty-seventh.” I jammed my hands in my apron pockets. “We’ve got it.”

“I’ve booked a tent for Tarot readings.” Hyperion rocked on his heels. “For the semiquincentennial.”

“Please stop saying that word.” She didn’t look up from her acrylic clipboard.

Hyperion’s dark brows pulled downward. “But—”

“It won’t fit on a t-shirt,” Beatrice said. “You’re also doing the Farmer’s Market this Tuesday. You don’t usually participate in that.” She looked up and slipped one hand into the wide pocket of her jacket.

A trio of women burst into laughter at a round table.

“I thought since the pier’s reopened…” I trailed off, my breath slowing. “It just seemed fun.”

I’d gotten my start selling tea on that pier. Now that I was part owner in a Tea and Tarot room, it seemed right to support the farmer’s market—like coming full circle.

Thanks to local support, the pier that held the farmer’s market was back in order after a storm had devastated it last year. The storm had wrecked much of Front Street, along the water.

My heart heavied, and I glanced at Brik. The community had rallied, and San Borromeo was once again shipshape. But the storm had taken some things we couldn’t replace.

Jude, an acquaintance of Brik’s, had been swept away by the waves after saving me from a killer and the storm. I still hadn’t gotten over the guilt—or the hope that she might still be alive.

It wasn’t that crazy an idea. Jude had been indigent before the storm, and came and went when she pleased. Just because we hadn’t heard from her in over a year, didn’t mean she was gone gone. Did it?

The blue front door opened behind Beatrice. My grandfather and his best friend, Tomas, ambled inside. They glanced at the PR specialist, ducked their heads, and hustled toward the counter.

The twin lines between Beatrice’s eyes deepened. “And you’ve got a booth at the Twilight Concerts Stars & Stripes Edition.” She looked up from her clipboard. “Are you prepared for all that?”

“Of course we are,” Hyperion said stoutly. “Our team is ready and revolutionary.”

Her emerald eyes narrowed. “Hm.”

My eyes narrowed too. Hyperion was the best partner a tearoom owner could hope for, but organization wasn’t his strong suit.

Hyperion cleared his throat. “Yes. Well.” Looking shifty, he edged behind the hostess stand.

Beatrice jabbed her pencil toward the windows. On the sidewalk outside, a man in board shorts carried a surfboard past. “I expect to see your exterior decorations up by close of business today. The bad news is, I seem to have run out of tickets for the fireworks on the pier.”

“What?” Hyperion howled.

My insides jumped. “Run out?” We’d been promised tickets in exchange for sponsoring the Community Beachside Picnic & Old-Time Games Day. “I thought—”

“Keep your shirt on,” she said. “I’ve got more back at the office. Come by this afternoon and get them.” She pointed at me. “You come.” She pointed at Hyperion. “Not you.” Pivoting, she strode from the tearoom.

I exhaled slowly. We’d had a rocky relationship with Beatrice in the past, but she knew her stuff. I was glad the celebrations were in her hands. She’d make sure they were memorable.

Besides, we lived in a California beach town. Surf. Sun. Bonfires on the beach. Fireworks reflecting off the Pacific. Where better to celebrate America’s big day?

I scraped my teeth over my bottom lip. But had we overextended ourselves?

After confirming with the reservation book that no more guests were expected, I turned toward the counter. The door opened behind me, paper butterflies dancing in the Pacific breeze.

Greg, the guy who owned the t-shirt shop across the street, slouched into the tearoom. He ruffled his blond hair. “Hey, Abigail. You got a minute?” He scrunched his face, brown and weathered from a lifetime of surfing.

I looked around the crowded tearoom. “Ah...”

“I’ll be quick. As you may have heard, I’m stepping down from the town council.”

I hadn’t even known he’d been on it. “Oh. Is everything okay?”

“My doctor says I need to slow down. My wife does too.”

I took a half-step closer and lowered my voice. “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Ah... We’ll see. The thing is, I was wondering if you’d run to take my place.”

I took a step back and bumped into the hostess stand. “Me? Why me?” Menus cascaded from the top of the platform, and I bent to grab them off the laminate floor.

“You started that neighborhood watch. Aside from Beatrice, you’re the most involved in the July Fourth events. You’ve helped out the police all those times. You seem pretty civic minded.”

I straightened, clutching the menus to my chest. “Yeah, but I’m not political.” My default reaction to politicians was to run. My second was to check my pockets.

“No one who’s worth a damn is political,” Greg said hotly. “That’s why we need people like you on the council.”

“No, I mean, I’m really not political. I didn’t even know you were on town council.”

He rubbed the back of his sunburnt neck. “Just think about it, will you? We need someone on the council who understands the business and the residential side of San Borromeo.”

“I really don’t...”

“Think about it. It’s for my health.” Greg walked out.

“No pressure,” I muttered, replacing the menus on the hostess stand. I walked to the counter.

“I guess it’s half of five hundred years?” my grandfather was saying doubtfully. “Quincentennial? Five hundred?”

I studied him. The buttons of his brown-checked shirt had been doing extra duty lately. He had a girlfriend now, and they’d been eating out a lot. One collar stuck up from the edge of his cognac-colored knit vest.

Resisting the urge to smooth it down, I kissed Brik lightly on the cheek. His trim blond beard tickled my lips.

“Hey,” he rumbled, looping an arm around my waist and giving it a quick squeeze. “How does this look?”

I grimaced. The bunting looked like it had been balled up wet and packed away. “It will be perfect. The colors are as good as new. I’ll need to iron this before you hang it though.”

Naturally, I didn’t have an iron in the tearoom. I’d have to run home.

“Not a problem,” Brik said. “I’ll just use Hyperion’s steamer.”

I blinked. “He has a steamer? Here?”

Brik gave me a look. “How do you think he keeps his clothes so perfect?”

“Those steamers are handy.” My honorary uncle, Tomas, peeled off his orange-and-black baseball windbreaker. Lifting off his seat, he sat on his jacket and grinned, deepening the wrinkles in his aged-leather skin.

“What’s today’s special?” Gramps asked me.

“Roast beef and your horseradish,” I said.

“I’ll take one. And speaking of horseradish…” Stooping, he picked a shopping bag off the floor and pulled out a jar. “Check out my new label.”

I squinted at the red, white and blue label. Eagles screamed from the top corners like they were defending their nest egg from an IRS audit. “Liberty’s Burn Horseradish? That’s... a name.”

“That’s nothing,” Tomas said and pulled out three jars of salsa with similarly patriotic labeling. “Liberty Bell Salsa—mild with a crack of spice. Freedom Flame Salsa—extra hot. And Patriot’s Pico. That’s medium.”

“We’ve got a new banner for the farmer’s market too.” Gramps reached into the bag again and unfurled a wide sheet of white fabric: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Heat.

“You’re going to sell out for sure,” I said.

“We’d better.” Gramps looked around.

Tomas nudged him. “Not bad for two old geezers. I told you it’s never too late.”

My grandfather frowned.

“No one thinks you’re geezers,” I said, reaching over to touch his shoulder. But I worried. Gramps didn’t take care of himself. I brought him healthy meals a couple times a week, but he wasn’t what you’d call fit.

“I thought you’d have your Independence Day stuff up by now.” Tomas jerked his thumb toward the dangling paper butterflies.

“We’re waiting until after the solstice,” I said.

“Right.” My grandfather nodded. “The witches.”

I got sandwiches and tea for Gramps and Tomas and borrowed the steamer from Hyperion. In the hallway, Brik took it from me. “Don’t worry about it. I got this.”

“But—”

The bell above the front door jangled, and I looked toward the front of the tearoom. A bulky man in a stained beige suit walked in and scanned the tables.

My stomach clenched. Baranko.

Baranko was a local detective. He never ate at Beanblossom’s, and we weren’t friends. His appearance was never good news.

Smoothing the front of my apron, I walked to the front door and pasted on a smile. “Hello, Detective. What can I do for you?”

Brik came to join me at the hostess stand. He set the steamer atop the menus there.

“Mr. Jacobs.” The detective’s lip curled. “I thought I might find you here.”

My pulse accelerated. What did he want with Brik?

Brik stood motionless. “Yeah?”

“Let’s talk privately,” the detective said.

“What about?” Brik asked.

The detective’s paleolithic brows lowered. “It’s private.”

“I don’t have secrets from Abigail,” he said, and my chest warmed a little.

Baranko shrugged. “Your funeral. Your name was on a missing person’s report for a Ms. Jude St. James.”

“You found her?” I grasped Brik’s muscular arm. “Is she alright?”

“We’ve found a body—”

“No.” My breath caught, nausea rising in my throat. No, no, no.

I knew I hadn’t been entirely realistic. But despite her problems, Jude had been tough, loyal, and weirdly ingenious. If anyone could have survived that storm, it was her.

Baranko reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled suit jacket and pulled out a phone. “We’d like you to take a look, if you wouldn’t mind.” He touched the screen, and it lit.

Brik took the phone from Baranko’s extended hand. He glanced at it, his face expressionless. “That looks like her.” He nodded. “That’s Jude.” His jaw clenched, the faint lines at the corners of his mouth whitening.

My hand found his arm before I’d realized I’d moved, my fingers closing on warm muscle, my heart folding in on itself. Jude.

Want to read more?

Pre-order on Amazon for the discounted pre-order price of $4.99 (more sellers coming available soon).

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Writing Update

Death in Red, White and Rooibos is done!

One benefit of my last-minute edits is that I was able to slide in a World Cup reference. I don’t know about you, but the videos of foreigners enjoying America has definitely boosted my Independence Day spirit.

This Tea and Tarot cozy mystery is available for pre-order on Amazon now, and will be available on other sites on a random and rolling basis.

If you pre-order (or buy) before July 5th, you can take advantage of the discounted price of $4.99!

Next week, I return to working on Refuge of the Witch and the not-so-secret project accompanying it.

Here’s the plan:

To promote Refuge of the Witch, which I’m still editing, I’ve created a novella about a minor character in the book, called Winter of the Witch.

Winter of the Witch takes place about a year before Refuge.

Winter of the Witch will be free (at least initially).

But in order to get it, you must complete an online puzzle.

The puzzle will be a mystery in and of itself.

Players will have to follow the clues across the internet, and as they play, they’ll learn more about the background of the black lodge that has been causing my witches and the world so many problems.

The reason this is so much fun for me is storytelling through a game is a different animal than storytelling in a novel.

I’m learning.

Formulaic.

It’s a word that lands like a sucker punch for any writer.

Mention beat sheets or three-act structures, and suddenly you’re staring down the barrel of the same story, book after book after book.

So when a journalist complained that the old TV show House was formulaic, actor Hugh Laurie clapped back.

Hard.

He later apologized for the snark.

But the journalist wasn’t entirely wrong.

TV scriptwriters are tightly bound by commercial breaks and beat sheets. Formula is how they get it done.

Novelists have more room to play, but beat sheets, structures, and genre conventions remain.

So how do genre writers keep themselves from writing the same story over and over and over again?

One of my favorite tools for keeping things surprising is the subplot.

Cozy mysteries live and breathe subplots.

There’s usually a B-plot and a slow-burn romantic thread weaving through the story. Sometimes more.

The murder plot? It follows a reliable groove: body drops, amateur sleuth digs in, another body is discovered (maybe), reassess, solve. Predictable on the surface.

But the subplot? That’s where anything can happen.

In my Paranormal Museum series, the B-plot often spins around some weird object Maddie’s chasing down.

In the Tea & Tarot books, it’s tied tight to the tearoom.

In Death in Red, White and Rooibos, the subplot explodes with Independence Day shenanigans.

Running gags can be subplots too. Remember the monster truck that kept tormenting Abigail in Matcha Murder? (Okay, it made me laugh).

But gags aren’t just cheap yuks. Every subplot has to earn its ink. It needs an arc that tangles with the hero’s inner and outer journey. Otherwise, it’s just filler dressed up as clever.

The main murder plot is the “necessary chaos” that kicks down the door and disrupts the hero’s life.

The subplot is where the amateur sleuth (and reader) chooses to step into their own smaller, personal chaos—like fixing the tearoom’s community event gone wrong.

Subplots turn a novel into a series of nested journeys: the crime-solving restores order, the subplot shows how the hero grows through the everyday disasters she chooses.

The subplot also needs to somehow affect the murder-plot—either hindering or helping in the solution of the crime.

In Death in Red, White and Rooibos, Abigail wrestles with her lifelong love for the Fourth of July against the new realities of her beach town—the suspicious death of a homeless woman, the crushing crowds, the mounting costs. It leaves her feeling flat about America’s big 250th anniversary bash… and guilty for feeling that way.

As Abigail unravels the murder, she’s forced to confront her doubts and make some big decisions about her role in her community.

In my cozy mysteries, the murder isn’t the heart of the story. It’s the accelerant.

The true pulse lives in the tearoom drama, the personal stakes, the daily battles that matter most. The crime just forces everyone to face them on fast-forward.

Before the sleuth can close the case, the subplot demands a shift in seeing. It pries loose old attachments—to Maddie’s museum relic, to Susan’s flawless event planning—through a series of small triumphs and gut-checks.

The subplot becomes the inner work that makes the outer resolution feel earned and fresh every time.

You can grab my cozy mystery beat sheet in my Cozy Mystery Toolkit! No formulaic BS, just solid structure to help you plot your cozy, subplots and all.

Writing Update

My second and third editors have reverted their comments on Death in Red, White and Rooibos, and I’ve processed them all.

Now, I’m doing a final final final edit of my own.

Minor tweaks. Punching up jokes. Playing with words. That sort of thing.

In short, a June 30th launch date (or even sooner) is looking good. As soon as I get the links up, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished the first draft of my secret project.

Sort of.

Like all fun projects, this one is expanding in surprising ways. I’ve gotten started on Phase II, and it’s even more entertaining (for me at least) than Phase I.

More details to follow…

People DO Judge Books by Their Covers

It was the Victorian’s who figured it out. A beautiful cover could sell a bad book—in the short-term, at least.

Before the 1820s, books wore plain leather.

The books were bound by the bookseller, not some distant publisher.

Then the machines arrived.

By the 1840s, publishers started paying designers real money to craft covers so eye-catching they could move books that otherwise wouldn’t sell on words alone.

This is where we get the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” It slipped into print around 1860 in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

But humans being humans, we still judge objects and people by their packaging.

A good cover can make us pick up a book.

A bad cover makes us wonder—did the author do the editing on their own too? Or bother with any editing at all? Bad covers raise suspicions, and that’s not a good thing—even in the mystery genre.

Today’s tech is making it more and more tempting for authors to design their own covers.

Few can pull it off.

A reader recently asked me for some book cover design tips. Here are my top 5:

1) Hire a professional cover designer. Not an artist. Not a graphic designer. Hire someone who actually knows book cover design. Just because the cover looks cool, doesn’t mean it will sell.

2) The cover should indicate what emotional experience the reader will get from the book. If this sounds weird, know this: emotional experience is the main “benefit” a fiction writer is selling. My traditional cozy mysteries provide laughs and good vibes, and the covers reflect that. The emotional experience should be a key element of any fiction author’s marketing, including the cover design.

3) The second selling point is the genre, so that should be fairly obvious from the cover as well. (This is why you’ll frequently see crime-scene tape on my book covers. It’s a genre signal).

4) Study other book covers in your genre. If your book fits neatly into the genre, using a similar design “vibe” may help sell it. If it’s not comparable, if you color outside the genre lines, your cover should indicate that as well.

5) Make sure the cover is attention-getting at thumbnail size. Today, that’s the first look most buyers will see if they’re shopping online. If fine detail is a critical part of your cover design, it will be lost at thumbnail size, or worse, look muddy.

I’m taking another poetry class.

It’s making me gnash my teeth like a discount vampire with an underbite, because I really need to improve my poetry chops.

I’m afraid it’s not happening.

But Kirsten, you write pulp fiction, cozy mysteries—why study poetry?

Why indeed?

After all, the modern world has no use for poetry.

Most people either think poetry is archaic,

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Or weird,

(Thank you, post-modernism).

But most people are wrong.

Poetry matters, whether you’re a mystic, a pulp fiction writer, or you’re just trying to cling to some meaning in the modern world.

Poetry is Conditioning

If you write fiction, poetry isn’t optional.

Poetry forces you to pick the exact right word instead of the almost-right one.

Poetry teaches you which darlings to kill on the page.

Poetry tunes your ear to rhythm like nothing else.

Poetry also expands your capability to write dramatic moments.

A poet friend once told me…

(You’ve met the guy—gaunt, with dark, soulful eyes sunk in deep sockets? Married to a leggy Eastern European? Yeah, that guy).

He told me, a poem is a single moment stretched wide open—an electric second of terror or joy, magick or awe that deserves to live on the page.

Prose poetry remains my favorite way to write about the supernatural, as well as about heart-stopping emotional moments.

Poetry is the only honest way we have left to carry the unspeakable without killing it.

It teaches the mind to hold lightning in bare hands—a sudden visitation from the other side, the whispers of a ghost, the heartbreaking weight of a single symbol—without rushing to nail it down into a neat creed or flatten it into a greeting-card bromide.

It forges the discipline of translation: of turning the raw fire of the ineffable into language that smokes and trembles.

For the writer, that means crafting prose that feels true, even when it defies logic.

Poetry as the Shamanic

In ordinary consciousness, reality only exists if we see it—and even then, we’re usually trapped in habit, boredom, or the hamster wheel of our own thoughts.

So we don’t see it—or at least, not all of it.

But the poet? He drops down into the dark waters of the subconscious and rises up somewhere higher. Through a sort of double vision, the poet doesn’t see world in separate pieces—it’s one living, breathing thing. The veil thins, and unity is revealed.

Coleridge and Blake didn’t daydream their visions. They went to them like shamans crossing into other countries. The imagination wasn’t a toy in their heads. It was a real place.

Kids visit this land naturally. Most adults have let the path become overgrown with thorns and weeds. Poetry can clear that path.

Yet even as it does so, poetry today faces its own thicket of contradictions.

Namely, post-modernism.

If there is no good or bad poetry, no truth or beauty, if reality is subjective and everything is acceptable, how do you teach good writing?

The answer is: you can’t. It’s impossible.

When everything is poetry, nothing is.

In my current class, the instructor has decided not to teach poetry—not the rhythm, not the meter, not the music. She’s teaching the politics, which is where deconstruction inevitably leads.

It is not making me a better poet—just a more frustrated one.

We need poetry, you and I—the good stuff, the stuff of mystics and shamans and soul, the stuff that carries us into those other countries on a drumbeat of words.

In an age of algorithms, soundbites, and endless distraction, good poetry demands that we slow down, pay attention, and feel deeply.

It’s a rebellion against the idea that everything must be explained, monetized, or controlled.

For prose writers, it sharpens language and emotion.

For mystics, it’s a bridge to the ineffable.

And for everyone else?

True and beautiful poetry is a reminder that there are still things—mystery, grief, and wonder—that refuse to be reduced to data or dollars.

I can’t teach you poetry (if you’re interested in learning, I suggest studying the greats — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Poe, Yeats—the list goes on and on).

But if you’d like to up your cozy mystery writing game, I’m your gal!

Check out my Cozy Mystery Toolkit and Food Writing Course.

Writing News

One of my editors has already reverted Death in Red, White and Rooibos to me, and I’ve incorporated the comments (mostly typo catches).

My second editor has promised the manuscript back with edits in the next day or two.

In short, the book looks good for a pre-July 4th release.

I have now turned to recipe testing for the scones and iced tea in the back of the book.

Some of this iced tea is good enough to be called a mocktail (see the recipe, below).

I’m also getting back to work on my not-so-secret project.

Since I’d abandoned the novella (yes, I’ve reached novella length) 3/4 of the way through so I could finish editing Red, White and Rooibos, I had to re-read what I’d written to catch myself back up.

I was surprised to discover it was actually… charming.

My first drafts don’t usually induce that reaction.

A good sign?

8-Day Solstice Challenge

The Mystery School is holding an 8-day Solstice Challenge on the UnTarot app. It starts June 15th.

You must be subscribed to notifications to access this free challenge.

The UnTarot app is free too.

Blueberry Blast Iced Tea

Serves: 6–8 (about 2 quarts)

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Steep/Chill Time* 1–2 hours (or overnight)

Total Time: ~2 hours

Ingredients

For the Blueberry Blast Base:

• ½–¾ cup fresh or frozen blueberries (plus extra for garnish; frozen works great for deeper color and natural sweetness)

• ½ cup dried hibiscus flowers (for tartness and a red-blue blend that deepens to patriotic purple-blue tones)

• 8 cups (2 quarts) water, divided (4 cups hot for steeping, 4 cups cold/ice for chilling)

• ½–¾ cup sweetener (honey, agave, simple syrup, or sugar—start low; blueberries add natural sweetness)

• Zest and juice of 1 lemon (for zing and a “blast” of citrus brightness)

For Extra Independence Day Flair (Red, White & Blue Vibes):

• ½ cup fresh blueberries (for floating “stars”)

• A handful of fresh mint leaves (for garnish and cool refreshment)

• Optional “white” swirl: A splash of coconut milk, almond milk, or a dollop of whipped topping per glass

• Optional fizz: Sparkling water to top for fireworks-like bubbles

Instructions:

1. Make the Blueberry Syrup/Base:

In a saucepan, combine 2 cups water, the blueberries, lemon zest, lemon juice, and sweetener. Bring to a gentle boil over medium heat, then reduce to simmer for 10 minutes, mashing the blueberries occasionally with a spoon to release their juices and create a vibrant purple-blue syrup.

2. Steep the Tea:

Add the hibiscus flowers to the blueberry mixture. Remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 15–30 minutes (longer for stronger tart-berry flavor and deeper color).

3. Strain and Build the Pitcher:

Strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve into a large pitcher, pressing gently on the solids to extract all the flavor (discard the solids or save for a compote). Stir in the remaining 6 cups cold water (or ice) to dilute to your preferred strength. Taste and adjust sweetness or add more lemon juice for extra “blast.”

4. Chill and Infuse:

Refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or overnight—the flavors meld beautifully, just like a good mystery plot twist). For even more intensity, add a handful of fresh blueberries to the pitcher.

5. Serve: Fill glasses with ice. Pour the blueberry blast tea over the ice. Garnish with:

• Floating fresh blueberries

• Lemon slices and mint sprigs

• For a “white” touch: Swirl in a splash of cream or milk alternative that creates creamy clouds, or top with whipped cream

• Optional sparkle: Finish with a splash of sparkling water

Here’s another recipes from one of my cozy mysteries, if you missed it:

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and share!

Cozy Mystery Writing News

I did it.

I sent Death in Red, White, and Rooibos to my editors at misterio press. (Yes, no caps—don’t ask me why).

They’ve promised to get the edits back to me in the next two weeks.

Which gives me two weeks to incorporate them.

Which means (barring some disaster) it will be available for the Fourth of July.

What kind of disaster?

If I decide it needs more editing, I’ll hold it back.

I don’t want to unleash a crap cozy mystery on the world, or worse “content.”

But I already know it’s not content.

Like Abigail, I love Independence Day.

Unlike Abigail (who’s considerably younger than me), I remember the bicentennial.

It was HUGE.

The Liberty Train. The constant TV promotions. The fireworks.

(Drone shows just don’t compare. They’re too perfect, too cold and precise).

And yes, I know the world has changed, but I wanted to help rekindle an atom of that spirit with this book.

The problem is, the world has changed, and America with it.

I confess, with some shame, to have been feeling a little dour.

I had been planning this book since I wrote Matcha Murder. It’s a natural conclusion to that story. However, when I started writing the book this year, with the 250th anniversary of America’s founding looming, I realized I had to add a July 4th subplot.

This complicated the cozy, as Death in Red, White and Rooibos, touches on the challenges arising from certain broken systems.

If you’ve read Matcha Murder, you might be able to guess which ones.

Fortunately, America isn’t its systems.

It’s the people who refuse to stay quiet—who stand up with a smile and find their own clever way to get justice.

The neighbors who lend a helping hand when they could do nothing.

The amateur sleuths who investigate the crimes when they’re told to let the cops handle it.

The small-town witches who brew justice from dandelions and moonlight when no one believes in them.

Take-charge individualism is the backbone of the cozy mystery genre.

Cozy characters don’t wait for permission or perfect systems — they roll up their sleeves and fix what’s broken.

And while cozies may have originated in England with Agatha Christie (I know, there’s some debate on that, but bear with me), their spirit is quintessentially American.

The heroes are optimistic, practical, stubbornly independent, and deeply rooted in the belief that regular people — busybodies, bakers, booksellers, and backyard witches — can still make things right.

Hopefully, I’ve captured that spirit in Death in Red, White and Rooibos. (My editors will let me know if I haven’t).

So prepare to grab your iced tea, settle into a cushy chair, and join Abigail as she solves another case.

The spirit of ’76 still flickers within us.

Let’s carry it forward, one cozy mystery at a time.

Book Review Channel

@BookReviewsByStevie is growing by leaps and bounds on YouTube.

It started out as a simple review channel, and has expanded to author interviews, focusing on indie authors.

The reason I know this is Steve was kind enough to interview me a few weeks ago.

The interview was posted last night.

You can watch it here:

An Alternate Publishing Model

I feel obliged, at this point, to thank misterio press.

As a mid-list author, no traditional publisher would have supported my sudden, mad dash to the quick publication of Death in Red, White and Rooibos.

But misterio isn’t a trad publisher. They’re an authors’ cooperative.

An authors’ cooperative is a group of writers who band together to publish each other’s works.

Each author has responsibilities.

We edit each other’s books.

We promote each other’s work.

We gripe about life and the market.

But mainly we edit and promote.

Authors who can’t contribute, go.

It’s all bound up in an LLC.

Once I get my final edits back from misterio, it’s up to me to post the book for sale.

It’s self-publishing with a safety-net and a measure of sanity.

So thank you to my fellow misterio authors, and especially to most-frequent-flying editors, mystery authors Shannon Esposito and Kassandra Lamb.

I think I have the most aggressive publishing schedule in the group, and they put up with a lot from me.

Check them out.

Other Cozy Mystery Essays You May Enjoy:

P.S. If you haven’t read Matcha Murder yet, you can check it out HERE.

I’m knee-deep in editing Death in Red, White and Rooibos, playing with motifs like some half-mad painter who can’t leave well enough alone.

And I catch myself thinking: Why the hell am I doing this?

Yes, fireworks make excellent motifs. They’re disruptive, chaotic—a call to adventure.

They also represent transformation from something small, dark, and contained to something loud and bright.

But I write cozy mysteries, for God’s sake.

Warm mugs and murder.

Most readers want the puzzle, the cat, and the cinnamon roll that’s the clue to the killer (recipe in the back of the book).

They don’t care about motifs.

But the old masters did.

They wove symbols and repeating images like golden threads so their stories would hum long after the last page.

They did it for depth. Resonance. Meaning.

For cohesion that makes the tale feel alive.

But what if the motif was something… more?

What if it pointed at something higher? Something just beyond the veil of the page?

Robert Moss writes about the symbols that stalk our ordinary days—if only we’d train our eyes to see.

Maybe it’s because I’m not only a mystery writer but also a cozy mystery reader, I love looking for clues.

Solving a literary murder, after all, is just another kind of divination—a way of reading the hidden patterns in human behavior.

Whether these symbols are whispers from the otherworld or smoke signals from our own unconscious, they hit like lightning and crack us open.

Because symbols are the native tongue of the unconscious.

It’s why the Tarot works—every card is a little altar of images.

It’s why the witch reaches for a crow’s feather to cast her spell and to focus her intent.

Symbols slip past the gatekeeper of the rational mind and speak straight to the soul.

And when we pause over a motif in a book and ask, What are you trying to tell me?—we’re practicing.

We’re building the same muscle we’ll need when the dream arrives at 3 AM offering a red necklace and release.

Or when a blue knight keeps showing up on road signs and big rigs like a spammer offering to update your auto warranty.

And if a motif is truly alive, it isn’t just story decoration.

It’s the drumbeat in the heroine’s chest.

It’s the call.

The repeating messenger.

The thing that circles back again and again until the heroine finally turns, listens, and changes.

Because that’s what good story arcs do.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s what good lives do, too.

They explode, again and again, until we see the light.

Literature is facing a crisis, and it’s not because of AI.

And I’m not talking just about “high” literature.

The Commonwealth Scandal and What it Means

This year, the Commonwealth literary prize was given to multiple authors who have been accused of writing them with AI.

I’m compelled to write about this, not because of the possible use of AI, but because the winning story I read, published in Granta magazine, was laughably terrible.

How terrible?

Here are a sampling of some of its metaphors:

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.

Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc.

Uh, whut?

Metaphors are tricky to write, but... What???

And it won a prize?

How did this happen?

How did this get past the judges?

I blame postmodernism, which leans hard into relativism.

When there is no objective truth, there is no good or bad writing.

(There’s also no reason to give out writing awards, but that sort of logic is out the window with postmodernist philosophy.)

In some respects, the recent scandal is a good thing. It exposes the fatal flaws in the literary academy, and gives them a shot at reform.

Whether they will reform is in question, but at least the problem has been identified.

But the Commonwealth scandal proves that when you strip away standards, even the “elite” end up producing nonsense.

And in genre fiction, when you strip away originality, you end up with a sea of interchangeable pulp.

The only difference is that literary fiction wears a tuxedo while stumbling drunkenly off the cliff.

Genre Fiction is at a Tipping Point Too

As a low-brow cozy mystery author, I admit there is a little schadenfreude in my critique.

But genre fiction has its own problems, and they’re not entirely the fault of AI either.

The problem is us.

The conferences, the workshops, the mastermind groups, all encourage authors to copy what’s worked in the past—chasing the same hot tropes, algorithms, and marketing techniques—because... They’ve worked in the past.

Authors made good money doing this.

But it just created a pile-up of “same but slightly different” stories, hollowed-out creators, and books that neither touch the soul nor surprise the mind.

Writers are creating carbon copies of carbon copies, and the words are getting fainter, flatter, less interesting.

AI—which can only copy, not create—is accelerating this trend.

At first glance, the literary academy’s postmodern free-fall and genre fiction’s trope-chasing factory seem like opposite problems.

But they’re not.

Both stem from the same disease: the abandonment of quality in favor of something easier.

Literary fiction replaced good writing with clever posturing.

Genre fiction replaced original stories with market-tested formulas.

In both cases, the result is the same—work that doesn’t move, surprise, or last.

Genre Fiction’s Copyist Strategy Will Ultimately Fail. It Has to.

René Girard’s mimetic theory explains why.

In crowded markets, writers (and companies) imitate each other with the same covers, pricing, style, and narratives, driving down profits in a mimetic arms race.

This herd-like imitation leads to destructive competition, conformity, and, ultimately, destroys the very thing that once made a book, genre, or product valuable.

Genre fiction—from cozy mystery to romantasy— is in the grip of the mimetic beast.

Has been for years.

And it’s eating writers alive.

The only way to beat it is to not play—to resist the crowd and to create something original.

Not every original idea will be a winner, but at least writers won’t be doomed to lose in the mimetic marketplace.

The mimetic herd’s current desire is genre fiction that’s been dumbed down and sexed up, that makes no emotional or intellectual demands on the reader.

Now, there’s always been trash in pulp fiction, but there were greats too, like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Chandler and Hammett succeeded by refusing to follow the herd.

Literary fiction, under postmodernism’s spell, has just found a fancier way to join one.

Because postmodernism isn’t just the literary academy’s philosophical dead-end—it’s a mimetic trap too.

If there’s no “good” or “bad,” then everyone’s just guessing, and the safest guess is to copy the last person who won an award.

Sound familiar?

Genre fiction’s trope-chasing is postmodernism with a spreadsheet.

Both are herds, just running in different pastures.

The literary herd chases prestige; the genre herd chases algorithms.

But the outcome is the same: a race to the bottom where the only winners are the ones who refuse to run.

AI didn’t kill writing.

We did.

Literary fiction killed itself with pretension. Genre fiction is killing itself with repetition.

The bottom of the cliff awaits.

The only question is whether we’ll roll into it or turn around and write our way out.

When the Story Becomes a Playground

I was once interviewed by a podcaster who was convinced the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum was a real place.

Guilt hit me first, followed by guilty delight.

The podcaster thought she could walk through the doors and touch the Ouija boards.

I hadn’t meant to mislead anyone.

But if readers already believed the museum was real, why not hand them the key?

Subscribe now

I’ve watched stories refuse to stay on the page the way some people refuse the life they were handed.

They push. They spill. They go looking for more room to breathe.

That’s transmedia storytelling.

The simple definition of transmedia is an extension of a story or story world across multiple platforms.

Books. Social media. Apps. Games.

It can be a slick marketing trick, another checkbox for the algorithm gods.

Or it can be something more—an extension of our stories.

If reading is an act of co-creation between author and reader, why not take that co-creation beyond the page?

The story begins when the book opens.

But the middle refuses to stay contained.

The Tarot card that lands on a reader’s app at 2 AM, the social media post from a character who shouldn’t exist outside the chapters, the skit that makes you laugh until you’re crying—that’s transmedia.

Who knows where the reader will take it?

And in refusing to stay contained, it shows the reader how it’s done.

After all, no one expects you to stay in one chapter.

Neither should your story.

It gets to grow. It gets to change form. It gets to morph into something new.

That’s not marketing.

That’s myth making.

You give readers a podcast where the characters gossip over tea like it’s Tuesday morning. A Pinterest board full of the town’s odd little shops. Each new piece cracks the door open wider.

Your protagonist gets a Twitter account and rants about small-town nonsense at midnight. She posts grainy Instagram shots of her investigation snacks—slightly burnt cookies and cold coffee.

Suddenly she’s not a character. She’s someone you’d text. Someone whose challenges feels like yours.

The deeper themes—redemption, community, navigating your way through disaster—get to stretch too. An essay that sneaks in real wisdom. A reader challenge where people share how they turned their own wreckage into something livable. The story stops performing for them and starts living with them.

I tried it with my Wits’ End series. Sent out an “Advent to Murder” mystery by email, one clue at a time through the holidays.

Readers didn’t just read about Susan Witsend’s antics.

They played along. They created murder boards for the family to discuss around the dinner table. The story transformed—and so did they.

The story quit being mine.

It became ours.

And in that strange, shared space, something alchemical happened: the tale released its old limits and came back bigger, warmer, but still unmistakably itself.

The Magic of Transmedia: Stories That Grow With Us

As much as I rail about the misuse of tech, thanks to it, today we can create transmedia stories more easily.

My UnTarot app was a heckuva lot cheaper to create than the actual physical deck (and soon people who’ve signed up to receive notifications will start receiving “challenges” from the Mystery School to extend that story as well).

We have more opportunities than ever for our stories to grow roots in new soil.

Imagine this:

You’re holding a Tarot card, the one that hinted at secrets from your past.

But this time, you’re not just reading it—you’re stepping into it.

The edges blur, the ink shimmers, and suddenly, you’re not just the reader or the writer.

You’re the sleuth, the alchemist, the one who turns the card over and finds yourself on the other side, transformed.

The story isn’t just alive; it’s yours, and you’re alive within it.

Your own story is trying to escape the page.

Will you let it?

Fairy Offering Guide from the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

And speaking of transmedia storytelling, this May, the Paranormal Museum is having its usual (fictional) Magic of Fairies exhibit.

But this year, Maddie’s giving away a guide to fairy offerings.

You can download the guide HERE.

Writing News

Somehow, last week’s writing news got cut from the newsletter.

I blame the fairies.

But here it is:

My not-so-secret project?

No surprise, it’s a book.

A small book.

A novelette, or possibly a novella. We’ll see how long it gets.

Here’s what makes this project interesting (I hope).

All you have to do to get this small book is to solve a puzzle.

Because we’re mystery readers.

Solving puzzles is what we do.

There… may be a code involved.

More info coming soon.

Reader Lauren Baker asked to hear more about the Amphicar in Matcha Murder. But first, here’s a little about the car from the cozy mystery…

I gaped at the white convertible. Duct tape striped its gray cloth top. A front bumper jutted out like Hercule Poirot’s moustache. The tailfins were ridiculous. It was ginormous, decrepit, weird. And I needed to get Hyperion’s old word-of-the-day calendar out of my head.

I winced. I couldn’t drive this, whatever this was. But Mike looked so proud of it. And he was doing me a favor. Maybe it was a joke? “Ah...”

“Oh. My. God.” Careless of the rain flattening his dark hair, Hyperion circled the battered convertible. “Is this...?”

“A 1968 Amphicar 770.” The mechanic rocked back on his bootheels.

Hyperion whistled. “Where the devil did you get it?”

“A client owed me money. He paid with this.”

“And it drives?” I rubbed the back of my neck.

Hyperion grasped my forearm. “Drives? This baby floats.”

Ah… “What?”

“It’s an Amphicar,” Hyperion said. “Amphibious car. OMG, this is perfect. I want to drive it.”

“Wait,” I said. “A what?”

“There are only 200 of these left in the world,” the mechanic said. “Lyndon B. Johnson owned one. Not that I’m a fan. He had JFK assassinated because Kennedy wanted out of ‘Nam,” he added as an aside.

“Uh, huh.” I nodded. Vietnam. Right.

“But still,” Mike said, “it was the most successful amphibious car of its time.”

I frowned at the convertible. It might be seaworthy, but I didn’t like the look of that duct tape. The top probably leaked like crazy.

“And you’re renting the car to Abigail?” Hyperion’s brows shot toward the leaden sky. “Sorry, Abs,” he said to me, “but do you know what these babies go for?”

The mechanic’s cheeks reddened. “This one’s not worth much yet. I’m in the process of restoring it. It drives. And I think it floats—”

“Think?” Not that I planned to go yachting in it, but since he’d sold it as a floating car, now I wanted one.

“I’ve got a lady in Vegas who’s going to sew me new red-leather seats,” the mechanic continued proudly. “Custom made.”

I peered inside the car. The interior was grayish. Stuffing leaked through a slash in the driver’s seat. “How much?”

He named a daily rate. It was shockingly low, and I squinted at him.

“There’s a leak in the roof,” he admitted. “But the drip’s in the back seat, so it shouldn’t bother you. And it can’t do any more damage to the interior, which I’m replacing anyway.”

“And it floats,” Hyperion said, gleeful.

“I haven’t tested that yet,” the mechanic cautioned. “Don’t take it on the water. But it would be great if you could give me some feedback on how it drives.”

“It’s a stick shift,” I said gloomily. I hated sticks, but I knew how to drive them.

“We’ll take it,” Hyperion said.

“There’s no we here.” I looked hard at my partner. “I’m the one who has to drive it.”

The Amphicar.

Mercury in metal form.

Trickster. Puzzle. Messenger between realms.

One moment it hugs the road like any classic convertible. The next it dives into a lake and becomes something else entirely.

I saw my first and only Amphicar in Florida.

I was in Orlando, land of cheerful fakery, so I figured the car zipping across the canal was just a boat designed to look like a car... until it drove up the ramp and onto the street.

I gaped, laughing with surprise and dripping with sweat like all the other tourists.

Because the Amphicar didn’t merely switch modes.

It tricked the boundary between the realms.

That day in Orlando, I realized the Amphicar wasn’t just a novelty—it was a metaphor waiting for a story.

By the time I wrote Matcha Murder, I knew: if a car could defy its own nature, so could my plot.

The moment it drove up that ramp, I saw how to let my characters do the same—how to let them, like the Amphicar, slip between the expected and the extraordinary.

Because that’s what you do:

You drive the wheels of logic and daily duty.

Then you engage the propellers of symbol and intuition.

The shift surprises you. It surprises those around you, or perhaps your readers. And in that splash of delight, meaning flows.

Free-thinkers navigate these crossings every day.

You balance the demands of family and work with fluidity. The movement between them holds the magic. You laugh at life’s absurdities. You splash forward.

And then the Amphicar roars up the ramp, water flying from its fenders like a laugh, gone but leaving you dripping, delighted, and plotting your next impossible crossing.

Writing News

This week I started writing my not-so-secret project.

P.S. If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about, let me know in the comments.

She looked like she was on her way to get her kids from school—which in Kabul, was unlikely.

But her stretchy slacks and fleece jacket hid a skill set that had nothing to do with school runs. She was a personal security consultant, hired to train up our staff.

“Personal security” was the preferred term for “bodyguard.”

I was living in a guest house packed full of them. Whenever I’d walk into the lounge, they’d be gathered around the TV, watching some cooking show.

She was the first female bodyguard I’d met though.

Ex-military (of course).

She got gigs where the men couldn’t go. She’d guarded Saudi princesses and escorted celebrities into ladies rooms.

She was a bad-ass, but not a Hollywood-style bad-ass—the kind who defies the laws of physics to kick men twice her size across the room.

Like the other protection specialists I’d met, she relied more on her brains—her situational awareness—than her fight skills.

When a guy pulled a knife on her in a bazaar in Jordan, she just handed over her purse and let him take it.

She knew when to fight, and when to let a purse go.

I took her to lunch at Kabul’s only French restaurant. Behind it’s 20-foot security wall, she told some great stories.

She’s the inspiration for Alice Sommerland in my Big Murder Mystery series.

Alice’s specialty is countersurveillance—watching for watchers—a critical component of personal protection.

The last thing she wants to do is get in a fight.

But that’s the thing about real bad-asses: they’d rather walk away, but they’ll fight if they have to.

Yesterday the fourth book in the series, BIG DEAL, launched.

THANK YOU to everyone who bought the book!

In case you haven’t, here’s what it’s about:

Big Deal

A glamorous poker tournament, buried secrets...and one very dead player.

Welcome to the glittering farce of Hot Springs, where the bluffs are epic, the tells are transparent, and murder is just another risky wager.

All Alice wants is to resurrect her bodyguarding career and stop running surveillance for a sexy Reno PI who’s one shaky hunch from early retirement. But when one of their ex-clients is murdered, Alice crashes the case—whether her boss wants her to or not.

Problem: Alice’s small-town mayor is hosting a poker game of his own. And wouldn’t you know it, an old enemy from Alice’s past has slithered into the game. The stakes are high, the alibis are low, and one bad bluff could be deadly...

BIG DEAL is book four in the Big Murder Mystery series. Get cozy with this hilarious small-town mystery today!

Buy Direct from the Author (US and Canada only) | Amazon | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo

Writing News

This week I started on a special project.

A secret project.

Okay, it’s a short book.

But the only way to get this short mystery is to solve a mystery. Or a puzzle, if you want to be pedantic about it.

Codes will be involved.

Since my pub schedule has been upended by this mad dash to get Death in Red, White and Rooibos out by July 4th, 2026, I’m not sure exactly when this will launch, but I expect late summer.

Maybe early fall.

In other writing news, for crass marketing reasons, I’ve created a catalog of my books.

I’d been putting it off, because I thought it would be drudge work.

But it turns out creating a 20+ page full-color PDF of things I’ve accomplished is a huge morale boost.

I highly recommend the exercise, whatever it is you’ve created—a garden, functioning children, baked goods…

Trust me. It works.

Here’s what my catalog is about:

The Kirsten Weiss Mystery Map — your personal, printable guide to all 70+ books and 10 series. Inside you’ll find:

• Complete checklists with every title;
• Recommended reading orders (including the perfect way to enjoy the shared Doyle universe);
• Crossover character notes so you spot all the fun connections;
• Quick-start tips for new readers.

Whether you’re new or a longtime sleuth, this guide turns your next read into an even more delightful adventure. Download your free Mystery Map today and start checking off those books!

P.S. I wasn’t kidding about the bodyguards sitting around watching cooking shows. Food porn is a thing and not just in cozy mysteries. Want to write it better? Grab my Mini Food Writing Course HERE.

It’s only five bucks.

Chapter 1

I hate casinos.

I hate the noise. I hate the smell. I hate watching people gamble who can’t afford to lose.

But a job was a job.

“Got anything?” Fitch’s voice squawked in my earpiece.

I winced and adjusted the receiver. “Two. Hours. We’ve only been here two hours.”

“And Reyes is getting antsy.”

I grimaced. The casino’s head of security was always antsy.

Cigarette smoke clotted the air. Slots chimed, table watchers cheered. The doors to the event center opened, and the last strains of a Prince tribute band flowed out.

I adjusted the beach tote over my shoulder, weighed down with what was left of my micro-cams, plus an RF scanner, and a mini-drone. Because I’m all about preparedness.

It was the largest bag I could get away with and still look like a California gal on a Reno vacation, even if it didn’t quite match my pink cotton button-up and navy running shoes. The collar on the former hid my lapel mic.

It was peak casino chaos—a perfect time for our stress test and for petty opportunists. Recently, the casino had seen an uptick in complaints of thefts. Reyes, the casino’s head of security, had hired Fitch Rhodes, PI, for an independent eye and to plug any security holes.

Discreetly.

Which is where I came in. I’m not a PI, but I am a specialist in security and surveillance. For now, at least.

Stooping, I placed a micro-cam, angled to catch the redemption kiosk, behind a decorative planter. I checked my tablet. It pinged—feed live. I glanced up. The placement would overlap well with the cameras in the ceiling domes above.

“I’m almost done placing the micro-cams.” I strode toward a cluster of gold-trimmed columns dividing slot rows from table games. The casino’s dome cameras on the columns were mounted about ten-feet up—high enough to deter tampering, low enough for maintenance.

“Almost? You’re not finished?”

“Keep your pants on,” I grumbled.

“Am I going to have to call HR?”

I snorted a laugh. Fitch was a one-man show, when he didn’t bring me in for odd jobs.

“There’s nothing funny about HR,” he said.

“No kidding. Have you been…?” I slowed, frowning.

One of the casino’s overhead domes looked slightly tilted. I scrolled through the walkthrough map on my tablet, confirming yes, I had checked these cameras earlier. I would have noticed if one had been off-kilter. “Hold on.”

I knelt, returning the tablet to my messenger bag, and placed another mini-cam low on a pillar’s base, partially hidden in a seam. My tablet pinged. The feed was live.

I rose and walked down the aisle. The crowds were thickening, aging Prince fans exiting the event center.

That’s when I spotted him.

A maintenance worker—mid-thirties, fit, just under six feet—pushing a rolling cart with a short ladder attached. He stopped beneath another dome camera near the cash-out kiosk and lifted his ladder off the cart.

The worker glanced around and climbed the ladder. I pulled out my phone and pretended to check my texts.

He reached up and fiddled with the mount. Not cleaning. Adjusting. He angled the dome slightly left—away from the aisle, toward a less-trafficked slot bank.

My brow creased. Had he just created or just fixed a blind spot?

I wandered behind a slot machine and pulled out my tablet, checking my baseline map and the dome’s original angle in my notes. If I was right, he’d created a blind spot.

“Five grand, man,” a frat boy strode past me, his baseball hat on backwards. His buddy slapped his back. “Dinner’s on me.”

The rolling cart rattled past me. I didn’t look up, but I clocked the maintenance man’s name tag. Harlan.

“I may have something,” I pretended to say into my cellphone.

“What?” Fitch said.

“Check out the dome camera at pillar nine.”

“On it,” he said.

The frat boys got in line behind a woman inserting her ticket into the kiosk. The machine hummed. She reached in and took her cash.

“What am I looking at?” Fitch asked.

“The dome should cover the aisle fully to the kiosk, including the line. There should be a one-eighty overlap with adjacent domes.”

“I’m not seeing the kiosk,” Fitch said. “Or the line.”

Three men in chinos and button-down shirts drifted past me.

One bumped into the frat boy. “Whoa. Sorry, sorry. You okay?”

“I’m better than okay,” the kid said.

“Cool, cool.”

I opened the feed from my micro-cam and backed it up. One of the guys in chinos had lifted the frat boy’s wallet from his back pocket. They could have been brothers, smooth-faced and slim. Or maybe they were just trying to look alike to confuse identification.

“Check mini-cam twenty-two,” I said to Fitch, “ten-thirty-three PM mark.”

I wandered after the three men. They bumped into a woman, distracted by her phone. She tumbled to the thin carpet. Apologizing, grinning, the men helped her up, dusted her off, lifted her wallet from her purse.

They were good. Coordinated.

“Reyes is sending in security,” Fitch said. “You can hang back.”

“And check on a Harlan from maintenance—or someone wearing Harlan from maintenance’s uniform,” I said.

An older man leaning heavily on a walker moved shakily down the aisle away from us. His threadbare gray sweater bagged around his narrow frame. A thick wallet stuck from his back pocket.

The three men glanced at each other and moved toward him.

Oh, hell no. A bump and lift could cause a man in his condition serious damage. Also, these jerks were pissing me off. I hated pickpockets.

I hurried toward the man with the walker. I couldn’t be obvious. I’d no authority to stop the pickpockets. But I could cause a delay until casino security arrived.

“Dad? What are you doing here?” I said loudly and trotted toward him, knocking into the shoulder of one of the pickpockets. “Whoops! Sorry!”

The pickpocket glanced up at me. Yes, I am that tall. And that blond.

I slowed beside the silver-haired man. “Oh my gosh,” I gushed. “I’m sorry. I thought you were my father.” I pressed a hand to my chest and laughed. “You look just like him from behind.”

He blinked up at me and stopped. His legs trembled. “Well, that’s strange. Because you look like one of those Wagnerian broads that come out at the opera.”

“Really?” I looked around brightly.

The three men closed on us. They weren’t giving up. This was happening. I exhaled slowly, relaxing, expanding my awareness.

“You tell me you haven’t noticed?” the older man asked. “Look in the mirror. You look like a damned Valkyrie looking for someone to bench press.”

The taller pickpocket, a blond, faked a stumble, his shoulder driving toward the older man’s back. I pivoted, raising one knee. It connected, slamming into his jaw. He grunted and tumbled into a slot machine.

“Hey!” One of the pickpockets grabbed my arm.

I’ve been told I’m a master of the RBF. I turned it on now, letting my anger show. “I think you should go,” I said in a low, hard voice. “Now.”

He glanced down at his fallen comrade. The third pickpocket nudged his arm. The two hurried toward the exit, abandoning their buddy.

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“He don’t look so good.” The older man adjusted his glasses and peered at the pickpocket, sprawled unconscious.

“Probably too much to drink.”

“Really? Because it looked to me like you kneed him in the jaw.”

He’d seen that? “Ah…”

“Alice?” Fitch jogged toward me, two security guards in gray behind him, and I relaxed.

Fitch is only attractive if you like the whole Greek god of War look, and what red-blooded American woman doesn’t? He had dark curly hair, just the right amount of muscles, and green eyes.

As an added bonus, at six-foot-two, he was slightly taller than me. He was exactly the kind of guy you wanted in a fight—cool-headed enough to avoid one, devastating when in one.

“We got the maintenance guy.” Fitch glanced down at the unconscious man. “What happened?”

“Three punks tried to finger my chips,” the older man wheezed. He pulled back his sweater, revealing the front pocket of his stained shirt, bulging with chips. “I used to run with crews that’d eat these boys for breakfast. The nerve of ‘em, coming at me.”

Ex-mobster, I thought. So much for innocent old man. I shivered and shook it off. “There are two others—”

“Yeah,” Fitch said. “Security’s picking them up. What did you do to the guy?”

“Kneed him right in the jaw,” the older man said. “She’s been practicing. I can tell. Madonna santa, what a specimen.” He kissed his fingertips. “She’s not half as sweet as she looks, is she?”

Fitch’s gaze slid to me. One corner of his mouth lifted. “No, she’s not.”

“Good thing for both of us,” I shot back.

Nearby, a slot machine dinged—a winner’s frantic chime. But the adrenaline still roaring in my ears kept me from clocking what it really was: an omen.

A countdown.

Buy Direct from Kirsten (North America only) | Amazon | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo

BIG DEAL

A glamorous poker tournament, buried secrets...and one very dead player.

Welcome to the glittering farce of Hot Springs, where the bluffs are epic, the tells are transparent, and murder is just another risky wager.

All Alice wants is to resurrect her bodyguarding career and stop running surveillance for a sexy Reno PI who’s one shaky hunch from early retirement. But when one of their ex-clients is murdered, Alice crashes the case—whether her boss wants her to or not.

Problem: Alice’s small-town mayor is hosting a poker game of his own. And wouldn’t you know it, an old enemy from Alice’s past has slithered into the game. The stakes are high, the alibis are low, and one bad bluff could be deadly...

BIG DEAL is book four in the Big Murder Mystery series. Get cozy and pre-order this hilarious small-town mystery today!

Pre-order Direct from Kirsten (North America only) | Amazon | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo

They warned me he was a psychic vampire, and he stalked the streets of New Orleans.

I’d know him by his walking stick—topped by a silver skull—and by his black boots and cloak.

Pacts with the Devil, people whispered.

They may have been right.

Occultists who take themselves too seriously often go off the rails.

This guy was so far off the rails even the local ghosts gave him the side-eye.

I saw him only once, striding down the middle of a cobbled road, his jaw thrust pugnaciously forward, his stringy black hair cascading over the top of his cloak.

He turned to glare at me, because that was his shtick, and hell, maybe he really believed he was a psychic vampire too.

But in that instant the veil thinned—not because he was siphoning off my energy, but because the moment forced me to ask: What part of me still believed in pacts with dark forces?

And I guess a part of me did, because the old folkloric “pact with the Devil” is apparently a warning about harnessing the unconscious for all the wrong reasons.

Confession: I was so used to looking at what the Devil symbolized in Tarot—lies, self-deception, material desire, the dark side of human nature—that I hadn’t made the devil as the repressed unconscious connection.

“Repressed” is an important caveat. The Devil doesn’t symbolize the entire unconscious, just the shadow—that dark part you reject and repress.

But this isn’t only symbolism.

Modern witches intentionally work with their unconscious to master their powers and themselves.

They know that the unconscious can undermine or empower us, and they (quite naturally) prefer the latter.

Without the unconscious, magick goes nowhere, or worse, goes awry.

Magick, in a sense, rides on the unconscious.

By ensuring the unconscious and the shadow are on board with the witch’s spells and desires, the odds of successful spellwork increase.

While working with the shadow and unconscious can be healthy and useful—and not just for witches—it can also go very badly, especially when the motivations are power instead of personal transformation.

The Faustian Vending Machine

When we treat magick like a vending machine—punching in our desire for power, status, revenge, or the quickest shortcut—we step straight into the Faustian trap:

• Burnout and backlash: the spell “worked” and you got what you wanted (that new job, new lover, or more money), but not what you needed, and now you’re left with emptiness. This is the classic inner conflict in fiction—the hero knows what she wants but not what she really needs.

• The shame cycle: the shadow work, tarot pulls, or meditation practice turn into performance art—“Look how deep I am”— or a diversion from the parts of us we’d rather not face and heal. I’ve watched talented witches turn a perfectly good Tarot spread into self-soothing fluff, telling themselves what they wanted to hear instead of facing the hard work of forgiving their mother or admitting they’re terrified of being ordinary.

• Not to mention the cultural confusion: “witch” now means both “badass empowered woman” and “manipulative energy vampire,” so the whole path feels tainted and untrustworthy.

Mystics and magicians understand that they must see the world through magical eyes. Once they do this, the world changes in response.

That new way of seeing comes through clarity with the unconscious forces.

This is where the paths diverge—between the magician who tries to bend the unconscious, and the mystic who works with it to reshape her identity.

The magician does a prosperity working and scans the mailbox for the check. The mystic does the inner work, suddenly notices the way the light hits the cracked sidewalk, the birdsong, the fog hovering above the hills like something alive, and her heart expands with gratitude. Then the unexpected opportunities start appearing, because she’s no longer armored against them.

So the question isn’t whether you’re working with the unconscious to make magick. It’s whether you’re trying to bend those forces to your will or working with them to reshape you.

Because for a witch to make magick, she has to be magickal.

Without inner transformation, every challenging transition hardens into a dead-end. You stay trapped in the old stories, chasing external proof, or sliding into nihilism.

With it, the same setbacks and chaos become a call that’s impossible to ignore.

This is the engine that makes witches such delicious vehicles for character arcs in cozy mysteries and real life.

Why Witches Are Perfect for Cozy Arcs

The power of the witch comes from within.

If she can face her lies, her hidden desires, and the shames she dare not reveal, she unlocks that power.

If she can’t, she fails.

It’s a classic character arc with magick baked in — and it’s packed with internal tension.

A story without that tension feels flat. We might root for the hero to save the world, but we only truly care when we see the struggle. From struggle comes meaning, both on and off the page.

The witch who chases quick wins and makes the devilish pact for the wrong reasons is doomed to fail — or to become the villain.

(We’ve all had that Tuesday when we lit the candle not for clarity, but for a surprise tax refund.

No? Just me?)

Only when the witch stops trying to bend the unconscious to her will and instead faces it — loving it, laughing at it, working with it — does the mystery resolve and her life reorder itself with more lightness and less armor.

Done right, the cozy witch mystery becomes a modern hero’s journey and a guide through the psyche.

OK, but what does it actually mean?

Today’s society is facing a crisis of meaning.

Part of the problem is we’ve come to expect meaning to be handed to us like all the other little luxuries we’ve come to take for granted.

But meaning isn’t granted.

It’s earned.

It’s created through the struggles we voluntarily choose—such as the amateur detective finally deciding to stick her neck out to solve the case.

The first struggle is with herself.

My intentions are pure, but how do I actually see magically?

Here are three techniques you can try right now to get started, but these aren’t vending-machine-style rituals.

They’re invitations.

Do them with curiosity instead of expectation, and watch how the world starts answering.

Go for a walk and treat every crack in the sidewalk, every animal you encounter, as a symbol with a message just for you.

Whisper a single made-up word to the wind or passing traffic and listen carefully for its reply.

Breathe in slowly and imagine you’re inhaling the hidden colors of the energies around you.

Both in cozy mysteries and real life, those who choose the mystic path don’t just survive the chaos—they rediscover the magic that makes the world worth restoring.

That’s when chaos stops feeling like an ending and starts tasting like the beginning of a better chapter—one with more joy, more meaning, and if you’re lucky, a few ghosts who’ve stopped side-eyeing you and started laughing along.

Writing News…

BIG DEAL launches May 1st, but you can pre-order it now!

(Unless you’re a paid subscriber - I’ll be sending out an ebook to you next week).

Buy Direct from Kirsten | Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Google Play | Kobo

But wait, there’s more!

I just finished the first draft of Death in Red, White, and Rooibos, the next book in my Tea & Tarot cozy mystery series.

I’m still tentatively shooting for a July 4th launch, but this is a stretch-goal: theoretically doable but slightly insane.

Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I’m having fun with new scone and iced tea recipes (iced tea, because tea on Independence Day is somewhat problematic, even if you run a Tea and Tarot room. But iced tea is thoroughly American and not British At All).

And yes, I have research to back that up.

A Short History of Iced Tea

Americans cannot claim to have invented or even evolved iced tea.

In the U.S., it started showing up in the 1860s, first as a novelty, then spreading in the 1870s. Early versions were often boozy green tea punches.

But there are mentions of iced tea from Naples, Italy as far back as 1823. That said, I’m pretty sure we’re the biggest fans of the drink.

Iced tea became an American summer staple during the sweltering 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The heat wave made hot tea a non-starter, so an enterprising salesman poured it over ice.

The crowds went wild, history was made, and iced tea remains ubiquitous in American restaurants today.

I’m not sure how many of those details to include in Red, White, and Rooibos, but I’ll be including some of them.

Here’s why.

Cozy mysteries are pulp fiction.

And pulp fiction readers enjoy learning new things. This goes double for cozy mystery readers. We’re curious. We find these little details fun.

The writer just needs to take care not to bog the story down with paragraphs of exposition.

It’s all about balance.

If you enjoyed this Substack, you might like these on similar topics:

On Witches in Literature—the good, the bad, and the ugly

Jung, the shadow, and the hero’s journey:

On wants vs. needs in story structure:

When the otherworld kick-starts your hero’s journey:

You’re jogging through the woods, hoping to escape yourself (impossible, of course), and you stumble across a dying man in a stone circle.

A plot device?

Well, yes, it is. (And if the above sounds familiar, it’s hopefully because you’ve read my mystery Legacy of the Witch.)

But this fictional moment isn’t only a plot device.

It’s also what’s called a daimonic (vs. demonic—more on that later) intrusion.

It’s the moment the otherworld raps its knuckles on the door of ordinary life and says, “Time to see the world differently.”

You’ve probably had one of these moments yourself.

The weird synchronicity right after a divorce.

The sign riddled with hearts that appears in your neighbor’s window the week you decide to start over.

The sudden, ridiculous absurdity that forces you to laugh—or cry—or finally ask the deeper question you’ve been avoiding.

They aren’t random.

They aren’t interruptions.

They’re invitations.

These strange intrusions—whether straight-up paranormal or just plain everyday weirdness—are calls that crack open our old illusions and invite us into deeper seeing.

If we dare.

But Why Should I Listen to a Daimonic (not Demonic) Call?

To answer that, it’s important to understand exactly what a daimon is.

Unlike demons — which are typically portrayed as malevolent servants of darkness — daimons are more ambiguous and unpredictable.

Daimons come from an in-between realm that is neither heaven nor earth.

For example, C.S. Lewis pointed out that in the medieval cosmology, fairies fall into this unclassifiable category.

Daimons are not fully “real” in the solid, measurable sense we’re used to. But they’re not purely imaginary either.

They exist in a flickering middle realm where the ordinary world and the otherworld brush up against each other.

In his book Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur suggests something both unsettling and oddly comforting: the human psyche doesn’t stop at the edge of our skin.

It may actually extend outward, mingling with the world around us in ways we rarely notice.

He points out that for most of human history, people lived with a kind of “shadow reality”—a rich layer of folklore, spirits, fairies, and otherworldly intrusions that walked alongside everyday life.

Only our modern, materialist age has tried to wall that layer off, insisting that what we can measure and touch is the whole story.

Shamans have long known how to slip into that in-between place and see with a kind of double vision — holding both the ordinary and the extraordinary at the same time.

The rest of us usually catch only fleeting glimpses. And because we’re not used to it, those glimpses can feel confusing, disorienting… or like the universe just dropped a cryptic message in our lap.

That’s exactly the kind of moment I love writing about.

In my books — whether it’s a hex sign appearing on a barn at the precise moment a character needs to start over, a murdered man whispering something impossible in the woods, or the appearance of an UnTarot card — the otherworld doesn’t barge in with thunder and lightning.

It slips in sideways and invites the heroine to see her life with fresh eyes.

Because when the daimonic breaks into ordinary life, it’s rarely random.

It’s usually an invitation.

Three Ways the Otherworld Shows Up in Real Life (and in My Books)

The experience of the daimonic seems to be a spectrum, of:

• Literal intrusions (an UnTarot reading, ghosts). Once when I was hunting for hex signs in Pennsylvania, my sister and I found ourselves on the corner of Witch Road. The GPS went crazy. It told us to turn right. We started to turn, and it told us to go left. We started to turn left, and it told us to go right. Finally, it calmed down and picked a direction. As we continued down the road, a tiny figure appeared on the yellow divider—a black cat. It sat, staring at our pickup as we approached, and refused to budge. There was something so eerie about it, that I asked my sister to stop the truck. We waited until the cat moved before driving on. (I used this scene in Legacy of the Witch—let no weird moment go to waste).

• Metaphorical / absurd intrusions (small-town weirdness, odd coincidences). When I lived in California, every summer I’d spend a day in a charming small town in the Sierra foothills. I used it as the basis for my imaginary town of Doyle in my Doyle Witch series. One summer, I was shocked to discover a new restaurant on its main drag named Ground, the name of my fictional coffee shop from the same series. It felt like my book was starting to manifest.

• Personal thresholds (sudden loss, “is this all?” moments, life-ruining mistakes that turn out to be plot twists). After one of my sisters was killed in a car accident, I asked her to send me a robin as a symbol she was somehow around. The next morning, a robin appeared at my bedroom window, tapping on the glass. I didn’t trust the sign, so I asked again. The next morning, a robin tapped on my front door. I still didn’t trust it, so I asked for the sign again. The next morning, an entire flock of robins appeared in my yard. Message received.

Why We Miss the Invitation (and What Happens When You Accept It)

It’s easy to dismiss all of the above as coincidence, imagination, or error.

And maybe it is some or all of those things.

We can also take these intrusions in the opposite direction, overdramatizing them until they become frightening.

Or we can take the middle path and just… get curious. We can treat them as cozy-style mysteries to solve and stay open-minded, grounded, and lighthearted.

Because when we accept the call, intrusions and transitions stop feeling like endings and start feeling like new beginnings.

How to Recognize and Respond to Your Own Daimonic Moments

First, don’t panic.

Find your curiosity instead. Is this odd incident giving you an opportunity to see something new or to see something in a new way?

Next, look for patterns. Are symbols repeating themselves? Are you experiencing recurring dreams?

Finally, take a single action—the smaller the better. Taking action grounds you, gives you confidence, and gets you moving again. It could be as small as noting the incident in your journal or laughing at the absurdity. Or it could be as big as dropping an old story. Your choice.

Mystics and magicians know the trick. Once you change the way you perceive the world, you start to behave differently. The world changes in response to your altered actions.

That’s magick, and anyone can do it.

It’s the kind of magick I prefer to write about in my witch mysteries—no talking cats or flying brooms. The way magick like alchemy and braucherei and luck really work (though admittedly, with a results-not-typical caveat).

Because the world is broken and magical at the same time.

Sometimes the magic shows up wearing a ghostly top hat, sometimes it shows up as a ridiculous coincidence, and sometimes it shows up as the very event you thought would ruin you.

Our job isn’t to control it.

Our job is to notice, laugh when we can, and keep turning the page.

Writing News

One of my favorite ways to create my own daimonic moment is to get a Tarot reading.

When we sit down and ask someone to read our cards, it takes us out of ordinary world.

We’re doing something strange, unusual.

And we’re ready to see things differently.

So on the Tarot theme, I’m happy to report that work continues apace on the next book in my Tea & Tarot series, Death in Red, White, and Rooibos. I expect to complete the first draft next week.

I’m still tentatively shooting for a July 4th launch, but this is a stretch-goal: theoretically doable but slightly insane.

Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I’m having fun creating new scone and iced tea recipes for the back of the book (or in the downloadable PDF, available when you buy the books through my online store, which is still… kind of a mess. But I’m making progress there, too).

The latest cozy mystery in the series is all about iced tea, because tea on Independence Day is somewhat problematic, even if you run a Tea and Tarot room.

(Remember the Boston Tea Party?)

However, iced tea is thoroughly American and not British At All.

And yes, I have the research to back that up.

Americans cannot claim to have invented or even evolved iced tea. There are mentions of iced tea from Naples, Italy in 1823. But I’d be willing to bet we’re now the biggest consumers of it.

In the U.S., iced tea started showing up in the 1860s, first as a novelty, then gaining traction and appearing in recipe books in the 1870s. Early versions were often boozy tea punches.

Iced tea didn’t become an American summer staple until the sweltering 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The heat wave made hot tea a non-starter, so an enterprising salesman poured it over ice. The crowds went wild, history was made, and today iced tea is ubiquitous in American dining establishments.

I’m not sure how many of those details to include in Red, White, and Rooibos, but I need to mention at least a few.

Here’s why: cozy mysteries are pulp fiction.

And pulp fiction readers enjoy learning new things, even more so when they’re cozy mystery readers. We’re curious. We find these little details fun. (Hey, you’re still reading).

The writer just needs to be careful not to bog the story down with paragraphs of exposition, which I’m now in danger of doing. But that’s what editing and editors are for.

It’s all about balance.

I have a new book cover for my upcoming Tea & Tarot cozy mystery!

It’s those little touches, like the skull floating in the tea, that make me love my cover designer.

No pre-order link yet.

Normally, I’m a Mon-Fri writer, but I’m writing on weekends in an attempt to get this book out by July 4th.

Until I’m certain I can nail that date, I’m holding off on putting it up for sale.

Why I Write Cozy Mysteries

This week a colleague ran me through a “know your why” session.

It’s a marketing exercise, digging into why you do what you do in order to do a better job talking about it.

In two minutes (because that’s all I had), here’s what I came up with:

Because I want to tell stories that others aren’t writing.

Because I dislike our nihilist, post-modern culture and want to offer the opposite.

Because I want to write about a world where truth and beauty wins (for the time, at least).

So we can find joy in an imperfect world.

After I wrote the last line, I realized that a cozy mystery is a blueprint for that joy.

For all their amateur sleuthing, ridiculous situations, and quirky characters, cozies are a practical map for navigating life’s thresholds.

Here’s how:

At the beginning of a cozy, chaos crashes in.

A crime, usually a murder, is the exterior “break” that spins the heroine’s ordinary world off its axis.

This call to adventure is accompanied by a parallel crack in reality—a daimonic intrusion (whether a ghost or just an absurd rupture of small-town life) that smashes the heroine’s illusions.

Old patterns, old stories, old wounds get exposed.

The heroine doesn’t charge out to fix the whole broken world or chase some utopia.

She starts with inner alchemy: facing her shadow, releasing old delusions, cultivating presence and gratitude.

Only when she has changed can see clearly enough to solve the puzzle, catch the killer, restore a measure of order.

There are moments of darkness and defeat, yes. But the tone in cozies stays upbeat. Laughter threads through the tears.

And in the final chapter, the criminal is brought to justice.

Order and hope are restored.

Justice’s arrival isn’t cosmic perfection. That doesn’t exist (not in this world, at least).

It’s a small, human redemption.

The community gathers.

Hope returns.

And we’re reminded we’re never truly “done.”

How unrealistic are cozies?

In the real world, crimes go unsolved. In the real world, cops can be corrupt. The real world can feel more noir than cozy.

But the tragic side of life isn’t all there is. There’s comedy too.

And there’s truth in the comedy cozy mystery.

These stories aren’t about attempts to change the world, to achieve Utopia.

They’re about individual repairs—the power of changing the inner world, of becoming a stronger, better person, and only then being able to solve the crime, catch the killer, right the wrong.

Cozies aren’t escapist fluff or naive denial.

They’re modern myths showing how real change works, that greatness and goodness, corruption and calumny, all begin with individual choices.

That’s why I write and read them.

In a time when so many feel trapped in old stories of nihilism or endless external chasing, these tales model the opposite: how to meet disruption with responsibility and lightness, how to heed the call and open to deeper seeing, and how to emerge on the other side of the threshold with more joy, more meaning, and a community worth belonging to.

Even when the world remains imperfect.

Especially then.

Creativity Protocol Update

I’m five days in on Dan Koe’s 7-day creativity protocol, and it’s already had an impact.

First, I discovered I don’t miss social media.

At all.

Second, I realized I’ve been spending a shocking amount of time unintentionally faffing around.

Now, I’ve got nothing against faffing around.

Done intentionally, it’s a key part of my creative process.

I just haven’t been doing it intentionally for a while.

Now that I’m forced to focus my work in the mornings, my days have expanded.

And finally, it’s been a reminder that inspiration doesn’t strike when our brains are over stimulated. Inspiration needs space to enter. It comes in the quiet moments, the empty moments.

How can you find more of those?

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it hits all the right notes. Now I can ask my cover designer to get started!

Second, speaking of new covers…

A glamorous poker tournament, buried secrets...and one very dead player.

Welcome to the glittering farce of Hot Springs, where the bluffs are epic, the tells are transparent, and murder is just another risky wager.

All Alice wants is to resurrect her bodyguarding career and stop running surveillance for a sexy Reno PI who’s one shaky hunch from early retirement. But when one of their ex-clients is murdered, Alice crashes the case—whether her boss wants her to or not.

Problem: Alice’s small-town mayor is hosting a poker game of his own. And wouldn’t you know it, an old enemy from Alice’s past has slithered into the game. The stakes are high, the alibis are low, and one bad bluff could be deadly...

BIG DEAL is book four in the Big Murder Mystery series. Get cozy and pre-order this hilarious small-town mystery today!

Pre-order Direct from the Author | Amazon | Apple Books | Barnes & Noble | Google Play | Kobo

(The book launches May 1st unless you buy direct, in which case you’ll get it a few days earlier.)

And Now the Scandal

I have a 48-hour rule when it comes to scandals and outrages.

Namely, I keep my mouth shut until I have a better sense of whether I should open it or not.

I’m still not sure if I should, but I’ve been turning this one through my head all week, so here goes.

Another author has been accused of using AI… for pretty much her entire book.

Oddly enough, that’s not the scandal.

Or at least, it’s not what I think is the scandal.

This book, Shy Girl, was originally self-published. It did so well, a major publisher, Hachette, picked it up, despite the fact that readers, bloggers, and podcasters were raising questions about whether or not it was AI.

It wasn’t until the New York Times ran with the accusations that Hachette dropped the book like a hot potato with an Acme detonator attached.

I have not read the book.

I did watch half of a three-hour (!) video analyzing it, and the argument that it was AI-created is strong. For example, the word “sharp” is used around 150 times in a 250 page-ish book.

That’s the sort of thing a human editor should have caught.

But no one did, because…

IT’S ALL JUST CONTENT.

Or at least that seems to have been the attitude of the publisher.

And that’s the scandal.

A book is just a product.

This one was “hot.”

Why shouldn’t a big publisher profit off it?

There’s always been a gray area between art and fiction.

My personal hero, Charles Dickens, wasn’t only interested in writing great books. He was also interested in selling them (and feeding his ten kids).

When you’re going to take the trouble to mass produce anything, you must consider whether it can sell.

But lately, the marketability of a book seems to be the only consideration, which is a challenge, since publishers have only a limited idea of what book will “hit.”

Why is a genre fiction writer like me griping about this?

After all, genre fiction is all about the mass market, the sales, the movie deals.

Right?

Maybe.

Raymond Chandler was a genre fiction writer, and while I’m not comparing myself to that master, writers like him show you can do both—write good (possibly great) books and sell them too.

But there’s something else that’s been bothering me.

I’m not 100% convinced the book in question was AI-written.

Don’t laugh.

All signs are pointing to AI, and the author’s explanation (namely, my editor may have rewritten it with AI) seems frankly weak.

But then there’s this:

All these AI “tells,” the use of em dashes, the sentence structures, and the software that supposedly analyzes whether something’s AI, aren’t reliable.

Shy Girl was written in a breathless, first-person present-tense style which I believe comes out of fan-fiction and remains popular. (I don’t like it, but to each their own).

The sentence structures, the word usage, the mistakes, all scream AI though.

Was the author, who’s fairly young, actually mimicking AI style?

Was that what she trained on?

Is that now… the norm?

My sense is that was not the case here, but I have no evidence either way.

However, so many people are using AI to write their letters, their papers, their content, that AI writing may soon become the baseline.

Heck, I used AI last week to dash off a letter to my city council, and I had to make very few edits.

AI is, at heart, a shortcut.

It can come in handy, e.g. when you’re mouthing off to city council members who want to raise your utility rates on the power you’re generating with your own *&^%ing solar panels.

Sometimes, it just makes us all dumber.

At heart, I don’t think the problem is the AI.

The problem is how we choose use it.

(Unless the AI goes Skynet and kills us all, which remains a distinct possibility).

But AI is here, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

So is it possible to use AI to make us more creative, to improve our skills rather than degrade them?

I think so.

Last week at the range, I uploaded a photo of my target to Grok to analyze my shots. It told me what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.

My next ten shots hit the target dead center.

Also last week, I created an AI command to generate cozy mystery writing prompts, like:

Incident: Sabotaged Mixer
Person: Obsessive Knitter
Situation: Midnight Swim (unauthorized)

I was careful with this prompt to ensure the AI wasn’t writing things for me—just spitting out ideas to help me break through the occasional block.

I want to do the creative writing.

It’s sort of the point.

AI can be a terrific time saver, and that makes it tempting as hell to cut corners.

But what are we racing past when we chase that speed?

We skip the slow hours that stretch our minds, the stubborn work that births writing with soul, the ordinary minutes that build a life worth living.

Shortcuts rarely deepen our external or internal worlds.

Sometimes the wisest move is to ditch the screen and go slow.

P.S. In order to slow down my own hamster-in-a-wheel pace, I’m going to try the Dan Koe 7-day creativity protocol starting Monday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

P.P.S. You can snag my cozy mystery prompts prompt (heh) free HERE. There are a million cozy combinations inside for you to play with. The prompt for prompts which are slightly less random than the above can be downloaded HERE.

On Tuesday I started writing my next cozy mystery!

Spoiler: it’s a Tea and Tarot full-length novel.

Since this year is the semiquincentennial (a word Hyperion will be using ad nauseam), I couldn’t resist giving my next Tea & Tarot mystery an Independence Day theme.

But I’m stuck on the title…

If you have a better idea or prefer a different combination of the above, please leave a suggestion in the comments!

What’s Your Next Act?

Yes, it’s March, but I’m going to talk about the holidays anyway, because I’ve got a confession.

Yuletide cheer sometimes evades me.

I sink into holidays past, haunted by people no longer here to share them.

I bristle at the blaring Christmas ads, the shopping frenzy, and that relentless Mariah Carey carol-that-may-not-be-named lest it burrow into my brain forever.

But when I open A Christmas Carol, the spirit of the season comes together like the final chapter of a cozy mystery.

If there’s a perfect book, A Christmas Carol is it.

The prose.

The heart.

The transformation.

But there’s a secret ingredient behind all of that.

Structure.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in five acts. He called them “staves”—a musical term for the five lines of a staff—tying the acts to the book’s musical title.

He didn’t invent the five-act form, of course. It’s an old, old structure.

How old?

Horace advocated it around 19 BC for pacing and attention.

Later, Elizabethan playwrights embraced it for scene changes and intermissions.

20th century screenwriters streamlined this convention to three acts for visual speed and ad breaks.

But should novels and shorter stories use the same structure as film or stage?

Not necessarily.

Screen structures chase visual momentum and hooky rhythms.

Cozies thrive on lingering in the sleuth’s inner world, sipping tea between clues, savoring slow-burn transformations.

There are plenty of thriller and suspense that snaps with the pacing of an action movie, but books are different.

Just ask any author who’s had one adapted to the screen.

Authors can learn much from screenwriters, and the three-act beat sheet is a marvel.

But it’s not the only option. It’s just the most widely used.

For now.

My early books leaned on four acts—the only structure I knew as a newbie writer. At the time, I felt smart having any structure at all.

Now I’m more mindful.

I used five acts only once, in my experimental novel/Tarot guidebook The Mysteries of Tarot.

Each act aligned with one of Tarot’s five “suits” (I’m calling the Major Arcana a suit):

• The Major Arcana sparked archetypal awakening.

• Pentacles were rooted in material struggle.

• Swords cut through illusions with intellect.

• Cups opened the heart to connection.

• Wands blazed into creative action.

The individual card meanings even mirrored scene beats. (In my head, it made sense. In practice, it was like channeling an over-caffeinated occult librarian, and not for the last time. 😈)

Story structure is the invisible backbone that delivers emotional satisfaction and cohesion.

Without it, narratives can meander, sag, and fumble the payoff.

With it, the heroine’s arc sharpens. Her growth emerges through struggle.

This is the emotional journey that cozy readers crave in every Agatha Raisin, Thursday Murder Club, or Tea & Tarot book.

It echoes life: we hit walls, we try to logic our way out, then we open our hearts to our flaws, to our values, to what truly matters—and we finally blaze forward.

Structures like these retrace ancient patterns that lift us from isolation to connection and re-enchant the world, much like Scrooge’s arc toward redemption.

Scrooge also points us to a deeper truth.

We can start our next act whenever we choose.

So keep going.

Keep dreaming.

Keep trying.

Keep failing.

Keep searching, questing, laughing, hoping.

Your next act waits just around the corner.

If you’d like to grab my favorite cozy mystery structure, check out my Cozy Mystery Toolkit! It’s only 18 bucks and includes character and scene creators, my 30-chapter beat sheet, and more.

Video: Did 4 Million New Books Drop in 2025?

Eh, not exactly.

This stat references the issuance of new ISBN numbers, not new titles. Still, that’s a lot of new books in the USA, and the vast majority were indie fiction.

What does this flood of books (and dare I say “content?”) mean for writers?

I’m curious about your take. Let me know in the comments.

Of all the life-ruining mistakes I’d ever made, being late was not going to be one of them.

I double checked the campus map. My advisor’s office should have been directly ahead of me. Instead, there was a wide swathe of grass dotted with crimson leaves and way-too-young students.

At least they seemed too young to me. They had to be too young, because the alternative was that at forty-seven, I was too old. Too old to start over. Too old to rid myself of my growing collection of ghosts. Too old to get a degree. Too old to use that degree as a springboard for my dream business and dream life and dream whatever the hell I was doing.

But I couldn’t think that way. I had to have hope or I’d be stuck in the purgatory of widowhood.

I crumpled the campus map in my gloved hand. What was I doing? Everything was shifting—inside and out, above and below, and—

—Legacy of the Witch

What if the real villain of a story is the poison we carry inside?

Jung, the Shadow, and the Hero’s Journey

Jung’s concept of the shadow—the parts of ourselves we hide because they feel ugly, weak, or shameful—is gathering steam in pop culture.

Shadow work coaches guide people through it.

Witches clear its blocks to strengthen their spells.

YouTube and Instagram creators share shadow work prompts, journal exercises, meditations, and rituals encouraging followers to confront jealousy, shame, anger, or self-sabotage.

It can all get a little overblown, but the foundations to this work are sound.

Ignoring the shadow makes its fangs grow sharper.

If you’re running into the same problem over and over again—it’s probably the shadow at work.

Recently I caught myself grinding my teeth, furious, and realized I was battling the shadow itself—hating my anger because I “should” feel elevated, kinder, more enlightened.

(The moment I named my anger, felt it in my body, and accepted it, the storm dissipated. Poof.)

This shadow dynamic can fuel powerful stories.

In Legacy of the Witch, April, driven by insecurity, chases a degree she doesn’t truly need. She craves society’s stamp of approval, an authority figure’s nod, before she dares act. The villain embodies the shadow of authority: credentialed, yet convinced ordinary people lack the sense to govern themselves—they require control “for their own good.”

Only when April confronts her shadow, drags it into the light, and integrates it does she transform—and claim victory.

You cannot defeat the shadow.

That’s one of the lessons of the Strength card in Tarot: the lady doesn’t slay the lion.

She tames it through gentle presence and inner fortitude.

True re-enchantment demands integrating the darkness, not banishing it .

The first step is for the hero to recognize there problem isn’t solely external—it’s internal as well.

In classic story structure, this usually occurs about mid-way through the book.

Knowing what to do about this and choosing to take on the inner challenge comes later, and may require some insight from a helpful ally along the way (or an antagonist who demonstrates what not to do).

How to Apply This to the Writing Craft

There are many ways to highlight this shadow conflict in story.

For example, the antagonist can be a reflection of the hero’s shadow.

Or setting or events can provoke the hero’s shadow reactions.

But you can also think of the hero’s shadow in terms of theme. Other characters may have different approaches or takes on the shadow issue—not just the villain. Some will embrace it, some project it, some flee it.

Ask yourself: what opposing views/reactions about the hero’s particular shadow do other characters in your story hold?

Writing Exercise:

Identify one “shadow quirk” your current protagonist (or you) tries to hide .

Consider:

• What small, embarrassing fear sabotages your character most?

• How would your antagonist weaponize that fear?

• What happens when the character finally owns it?

Your character can only climb the ladder of transformation when she stops pretending the lower rungs don’t exist.

Every cozy mystery solves two crimes—the murder and the protagonist’s inner denial

Want to watch this shadow integration unfold in a witchy, metaphysical mystery? Grab Legacy of the Witch and see April’s journey firsthand.

(In the MS I’m working on now, Refuge of the Witch, my heroine has been in a lifetime of denial about her feelings—about her past, her present, her future. She’s ashamed to feel the way she does, but she’ll have to face that shame if she’s ever going to move forward.)

What shadow quirk hides in your own story—or life? Drop it in the comments, or share how a character’s denial cracked open. I read every one.

The Fisher King theme is the root challenge for every one of my heroines in my Mystery School series. They get stuck—in grief, in the past, in self-doubt—and can’t do what they’re supposed to be doing, which is engaging with the world in a positive way.

In this Substack Live, I talk a bit about the Fisher King myth and what (I think) it means.

Get more from Kirsten Weiss in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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The water in the boathouse lay motionless as the dark glass of a scrying mirror. I realized the rubber boat was still as well, as if anchored in obsidian. The slap, slap, slap of water had ceased. Fear fluttered in my chest, and my breath stopped.

I wanted to run.

I couldn’t.

I wanted to scream, but I’d forgotten how. The silence grew oppressive, heavy against my eardrums.

My knees ached, my thighs trembled, but I continued to kneel, unable to move, unable to breathe. Cold sweat slicked my skin. I waited, listening to that terrible, cold silence.

If I moved, it might see me.

“Stop it,” I croaked and gulped a breath. The terror that had gripped me fled, and I lurched sideways as if a weight had been lifted, unbalancing me. I pressed my hands to the rough, damp floor and breathed slowly.

--Whispers of the Witch, Kirsten Weiss

In Whispers of the Witch, I leaned hard into mirrors.

Not just the literal ones—though they multiply like secrets.

Reflective surfaces haunt every corner of the book: the glassy lagoon at dusk, the secretive mirror garden behind the island hotel.

Mirrors are brutally honest portals.

Gaze in, and your curated persona stares back—or your hidden doubts do.

The face you show the world clashes with the one you barely admit.

In fiction, these moments can ripen into revelation.

A character glimpses a startling truth—the good kind of self-discovery.

Or twists the reflection into comfortable deception.

The mirror never lies.

We do.

And then, of course, there’s the ancient literary rite from chapter one (which I try to avoid): the heroine peering in for that obligatory description.

Auburn curls, heart-shaped face, green eyes flashing determination…

Mirrors have never been vanity toys.

They’ve been doorways, light tricks, magical hardware for millennia.

Scryers stare into obsidian disks, into still water, into black mirrors.

The veil thins.

Queen Elizabeth the First’s magical advisor, Dr. John Dee, used a shew-stone—a polished obsidian disk used for summoned spirits and supposedly created by the Aztecs. (The Aztecs named their god Tezcatlipoca “Smoking Mirror.”)

Medieval European minds turned mirrors allegorical.

The world itself was imagined as a reflecting glass held up to divine truth.

The soul was a window, or better yet, a mirror meant to polish itself until it caught the pure light of God without distortion.

It’s a beautiful, hopeful idea: look deeply enough, and your inner mess might start to resemble something holy.

Then there’s the Neoplatonic spin, courtesy of Plotinus and his intellectual descendants.

Reality cascades downward from the ineffable One like light from the sun, each level a dimmer, hazier reflection of the one above.

The material world? Just the lowest rung on this ladder of reflection—a murky mirror of the divine Forms.

Climb back up through contemplation, virtue, and purification, and you polish the glass until the higher realities shine through clearer.

It’s less about smashing the illusion and more about refining the reflection until you glimpse the original brilliance behind it.

Layer on Carl Jung, and the mirror gets psychological—and honestly, a little cheeky.

For Jung, the looking glass is the threshold where the persona (that polished social mask we all wear) meets the deeper Self.

Stare too long without flinching, and you might catch sight of the shadow—the rejected bits, the “not-me” qualities we shove into the dark.

Shadow work isn’t about exorcising monsters; it’s more like inviting your awkward, grumpy, creative, or wildly passionate understudy onto the stage for a bow.

And then there’s that quiet C.S. Lewis whisper running through it all.

Both pagan and Christian imaginations loved reflective surfaces to re-enchant the ordinary.

For pagans, a still pool or polished shield might capture nymphs or divine flickers; for Christians, the world becomes a mirror of God’s glory, every created thing echoing the Creator like moonlight borrowing from the sun.

Lewis saw pagan myths not as rivals to be debunked but as echoes—beautiful, incomplete pointers toward the “true myth” of incarnation.

Mirrors, in that sense, don’t just reflect; they remind us the everyday is laced with wonder, whether through a woodland spring or a stained-glass window.

Here’s a simple, cozy Tarot ritual tailored for those quiet evenings when the house is settling and the world feels soft around the edges.

This one is built around the question: “What is my reflection trying to tell me?” — that gentle (or sometimes sharp) whisper from the mirror, the still water, the silvered glass in your dreams.

It draws on the ancient idea of mirrors as thresholds: not just showing what’s on the surface, but inviting you to peer past the persona toward the deeper Self.

The 3-Card Spread: Reflection’s Whisper

Lay three cards out in a gentle arc, like moonlight on water—left to right.

1. The Surface I Show (Card 1) This is the persona staring back—the polished mask, the “I’m fine” smile, the version you present to the world (and often to yourself). What does this card reveal about how you’re appearing right now? What strengths or defenses are front and center? Sometimes it’s surprisingly tender; sometimes it’s a little armored.

2. The Shadow Beneath (Card 2) Here’s what the reflection is hiding—or gently pointing toward. The unacknowledged bits: the quiet doubts, the buried longings, the parts of the shadow we usually sidestep. This isn’t about judgment; it’s an invitation. What’s lurking just under the shine? What might it want you to see, accept, or integrate with a kind nod rather than a fight?

3. The Deeper Truth Emerging (Card 3) This is the gift, the nudge toward wholeness. What wisdom or next small step is rising up through the reflection? How can embracing both the surface and the shadow help you step closer to your authentic Self? It might be gentle encouragement, a call to rest, or a spark of creative fire.

Next time you catch your own eye in the mirror, ask: Am I seeing my persona… or my path?

Substack Live!

Next Wednesday at 10 PST, 11 MNT, 12 Central, and 1 EST, I’ll be doing a Substack live to go more in depth on the Fisher King, draw an UnTarot card, and talk a bit about where I am in my writing.

Here’s the link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/125015?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

Character Arcs in Writing and Life

Last week mystery author and Tarot maven Diane Wing interviewed me on her YouTube channel! We talked Tarot and character arcs and personal transformation. You can watch the interview here:

Values sound nice…

…on a wall, framed and forgotten.

Until life demands we apply them.

What Are Values and Why Do They Matter in Real Life and Fiction?

Values are non-negotiable priorities that guide choices and make trade-offs feel worthwhile.

In A Deathly Display, Maddie learns what it took me way too long to discover.

A values exercise isn’t therapy.

It isn’t a bucket list.

It isn’t magical thinking.

It’s a luminous compass in a storm.

In my Paranormal Museum cozy mystery series, my amateur detective/museum owner, Maddie, has some very clear values.

Family.

Community.

Creativity.

But her love life has always floundered.

It’s classic hero structure: she wants something, but she doesn’t understand what she needs.

Clear values start Maddie’s ascent—lifting her from scattered desires toward choices that feel right.

The gap between wants and needs often (but not always) stems from murky values.

I struggled with this personally, with sharp clarity in some areas and fog in romance.

Finally, I broke down and hired a dating coach, who led me on a simple values exercise.

All I had to do was choose five must-haves in a partner.

Five.

To tighten up the list even more, one of those five must-haves had to be that he was madly in love with me without actually being… you know… mad.

If the values matched, I had to give him a chance.

If not, walk away.

At my age, finding Mr. Right seemed impossible.

But that list changed everything.

(A Divine nudge might have been involved too, but that’s another story.)

What Do the Stoics and Tarot Teach Us About Core Values?

The ancients knew the value of, well, values.

The Stoics distilled them down to four cardinal virtues:

• Prudence,

• Courage,

• Temperance, and

• Justice.

We find these in Tarot decks as Strength (Courage), Temperance and Justice. Academics argue that prudence is either the High Priestess or the World. (I think the former.)

In my UnTarot, I name them all directly—making the upward steps clearer.

Here’s the thing.

Core values act as a practical compass for decisions in life and fiction.

Every choice we make is a tradeoff.

But when we choose based on our values, that tradeoff becomes more acceptable.

Neoplatonists saw a ladder: lower attachments below, the Good above.

True values emerge as we ascend that ladder, our growing self-knowledge revealing what the soul already knows.

How Do Values Show Up in Cozy Mystery Characters Like Maddie in A Deathly Display?

Defined values give characters clear motivation, sharpen conflict, and make arcs feel inevitable and relatable.

The list of values Maddie creates in A Deathly Display echoes this.

In fiction, knowing your characters’ values is essential.

They define the rungs they’ll climb—what they’ll fight for and what they won’t.

Without them, characters drift.

With them, readers care.

A lot.

Try it.

Five must-haves.

Rank them ruthlessly and watch what shifts in your story.

There’s a paradox to making art.

The more restrictions you place on yourself, the more creative it forces you to be.

Take the cozy mystery.

It arrives with rules stacked like musty library books:

Amateur sleuth.

No blood on the page.

No swearing, no sex.

Scenes that ooze charm.

A cat with opinions.

There’s a whole manifesto of “don’t do this, must do that.”

How do you write something new inside that box?

With all those rules, how can genre fiction be anything but paint-by-numbers slop?

Easy.

You take a cue from Godzilla.

Not the rubber-suit monster from the 50s.

The one from 2023—Godzilla Minus One.

A monster movie that somehow forgot to be about the monster.

It retains every sacred Godzilla ritual:

• Cities flattened like paper.

• Atomic breath painting the sky with blue fire.

• Awkward dubbing that feels like home.

But the movie’s real story isn’t kaiju and radiation.

It’s one broken man.

A kamikaze pilot who couldn’t pull the trigger.

A young man who flew home instead of into eternity.

Now shame is his shadow and guilt the air he breathes.

Post-war Japan is rebuilding, but he’s still rubble inside—only half-alive, unable to touch another human without burning.

His fear: death.

It froze him once and freezes him still.

His want: to live.

But living? He’s only surviving.

His need: to die for something worth dying for. To finally choose life by choosing to risk all.

That collision—fear versus want versus need—is where the story magic ignites.

It births a conflict so deep the reader feels it in their chest.

Man against himself.

It’s the war we all fight, and it forces the choices that matter.

Chasing the want is safe, comfortable.

Slow poison.

Facing the fear?

Terrifying.

But it’s the only door to transformation.

This internal conflict carves character arcs that feel real.

Early in the story, the hero dodges, clinging to the want.

The midpoint of the story cracks the illusion wide open.

But he’s not ready to change yet.

Fear roars louder.

The story’s climax demands the sacrifice:

• Let go of the want.

• Embrace the need.

Resolution: the hero walks out changed.

Not perfect1.

But whole.

The payoff? Throat-tightening emotion.

(I cried both times I watched Godzilla Minus One.)

Thematically, this internal conflict forces the questions we prefer to avoid:

What price are we willing to pay for safety?

Can shallow wants ever bring true happiness?

What if our freedom only lives on the far side of our deepest terror?

Above all, we crave heroes who feel real.

Who hurt like we hurt. Who are flawed like we are flawed. Who make us root for them, weep for them, cheer for them.

That’s the pulse of art and literature.

Humanity.

Soul.

Love.

In cozy mysteries, the murder is your Godzilla.

It’s an unstoppable force crashing through your heroine’s tidy life, exposing every fear she’s buried under scones and family drama, blocking the path to what she thinks she wants.

Only when she stops running, when she turns and faces the monster inside, solves the crime, stops the killer, can she claim what she truly needs.

This is why I (usually) start every mystery by considering the subplot.

What dream is the murder about to torch?

Why will the heroine keep chasing the wrong goal, tripping over her own fear?

What finally forces her to stare down that fear, crack the case, and step into the life she was meant to live?

And if that sounds like more rules, more chains…

Remember the paradox.

The more restrictions you place on yourself, the more creative it forces you to be.

Within structure hides an infinity of opportunities.

You just have to stretch a little.

Genre fiction isn’t a prison.

It isn’t a “lesser than.”

It’s a form.

And a freedom.

Want to learn more about the cozy mystery form? Check out my cozy mystery writing toolkit HERE.

Cozy Mystery Writing Toolkit