I don’t own a cellphone.

I’m too cheap. A long time ago, I realized that if I wanted to write full time, I had to slash expenses. No travelling. No haircuts and no cellphones. The habit stuck.  

I was born in Comox, British Columbia, Canada where I did not learn to speak French. I now live in Quebec where it’s incredibly important to speak the language. My choices don’t always make sense.

Crime fiction is comfort food for the brain.

I’m not much of a genre fiction reader but I started reading Nancy Drew as a kid and never looked back. I love mysteries. I love reading them. I love writing them. They are intellectually and emotionally satisfying. The sleuth gets the bad guy and the world is set to right. When I started writing, I gravitated toward mystery almost instantly. (I say almost. There was a misguided attempt to write romantic suspense that haunts me still on my page at Amazon.)

Now I’m into traditional murder.

Also known as Cosy Mystery, Whodunits, Golden Age Mystery. Basically the sub-genre of crime fiction that Dame Agatha Christie nailed down for all time. The idea of a group of retirees who join a murder mystery book club and begin to solve cold cases came to me while sitting in a fishing boat a few years ago, wondering what happened to my life.

I draw on real life.

In my domestic thrillers as well as my cosy mysteries, I draw on real life to drive the story. When I hear of a missing person or an odd death or something equally morbid and grisly, I ask “what if?” Then I let the idea marinate until a plot emerges. The trickiest bit in writing a mystery series is not giving away whodunit in subsequent books. Seriously, that is tough.