Embracing the Unexpected Path to Writing a Cozy Mystery Novel

Since I am also embracing bullet points in this blog post, I thought I would try that approach to give you some brief insight into my latest writing journey:

• In graduate school, besides writing the collection that eventually became my book Break in the Field, I also began a totally different collection based on my great-great-grandfather’s book The Thrilling Adventures of Daniel Ellis, pub 1867. He was a “pilot” in the Civil War, guiding men through the mountains and over Union lines. Starting over many times, it finally became a story in poems told by three different women: his wife, daughter, and grandmother.
  
  Fun Side Note: Charles Frazier references this book in the Acknowledgements for his book Cold Mountain.

• I did a lot of research for that book and became intrigued by the idea of the “Appalachian Granny Woman”. These were women who served as a midwife and healers, as well as preparing the dead for burial, in isolated mountain communities one hundred years ago.

• I spent every summer growing up visiting both sets of grandparents, one in the mountains of East Tennessee and the other on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. By far the most unique relative in my eyes back then was my grandmother’s sister, Hazel in TN. She lived alone in the same house in the mountains that she, and generations before her, had been born in. The house was on the side of a mountain just down the hill from the Ellis Family Cemetery. She was a Granny Woman.

• My favorite form of “escape reading” is a good mystery. If I really don’t want to have to think too hard, I’ll read a “cozy” mystery, meaning it will probably contain: a picturesque little town, an amateur sleuth with a pet that may or may not talk, some kind of idealized business like a bakery or coffee shop, and, of course, a murder. Sort of an Agatha Christie/Murder She Wrote kind of thing.

• After Break in the Field, which felt like gutting a fish, except the fish was me, I really wanted to come up for air. I wanted to make up stuff. Enough reality, already.

• I started the mystery book two years ago, published the poetry collection, and then proceeded to write nothing/nada/zero for almost a full year. About four months ago, I picked the novel back up, rewrote what I had, and am now almost finished with the first draft.

• The Granny Witch Chronicles (working title) is about a small town in east Tennessee and a family lineage of “granny women”, the youngest of whom is discovering her unique intuitive talents might best be suited for solving murders. Think “Southern Gothic meets Cozy Mystery”.