Making Changes, Julia Fairchild Inspiration, and a Flower Shoppe Update 🔎📚🔪

Beautiful Endings

There’s nothing prettier than a sunset at the ocean after a day of nasty weather. It’s a reminder that even events or days that we don’t enjoy can have a nice ending—like a reward for patience or getting an ice cream cone after going to the dentist. As an adult, I’m not sure I can condone this practice but, as a child, knowing that my dentist would give me a dime to get an ice cream cone if I sat still was enough for me to be very, very good.

It’s a little bit like mastering the writing of the perfect blurb for my books on Amazon—sort of. There is an art to weaving just enough intrigue and detail without giving away any of the spoilers in a 130-150 word description of a book. Lately, I’ve been thinking about updating those descriptions for my original amateur sleuth series, the Julia Fairchild Mysteries.

Julia is a young internist based loosely on a younger, braver version of myself. She seems to find trouble and gets into the middle of interesting situations whenever she travels. I refer to Blind Fish Don’t Talk as a “starter” novel because I wrote it many years ago before I ever thought about being a real author. It’s actually a fun story that began as a journal entry and morphed into a full murder mystery! The first chapter is a true account of my arrival in St. Maarten and there are a number of scenes that really happened such as the limbo contest. Should I do a full rewrite? Or just let it be and hope my readers will read the second book, Rembrandt Rides a Bike, anyway. That one also contains a few real incidents with a lot of fiction in between.

In the meantime, I’m busy writing the fourth book in my Christie’s Flower Shoppe cozy mystery series. Do you believe in ghosts? Christie’s not sure, but might change her mind after a wedding in a haunted mansion. That’s all I’m going to tell you for now.

Until next time, happy reading!