March News for A Cozy Death Book Club
We have a very exciting meeting planned for March 23rd. Heather Weidner, the author of many cozy mystery books will be attending our meeting by Zoom. Our meeting starts at 2:00 pm Pacific time (5:00pm Eastern time). I’m including a list of Heather’s novels towards the bottom of the page as well as some sample questions that might spur some questions of your own for our guest author. Please pick one of the books to read; you can always read some of the short stories if you’re strapped for time (or bake something from the cookbook!!!)..
Last month we had a lovely time talking about our Alan Bradley novel: The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. We played the Story Cube game and 4 people won because we had a tie for third place. Some of the sentences were serious while others were rich in fantasy. All of them used the three icons from the randomly chosen dice. If you haven’t attended one of our game playing meetings, you must. It makes Sundays very lighthearted, a feeling most of us can use during these times!
Speaking of images on dice, the image at the top of our page is of New York City’s Mayor LaGuardia reading the funnies from the newspapers over the radio during a newspaper strike during WWII. He didn’t want the children of New York to miss out on the daily comics. I remember my father telling the story while he read the funnies to us at breakfast before some of us could read. After we learned how to read a bit, the prize was that he shared the funnies pages with the child in the family who had learned to read. I remember poring over the funnies page and reading Blondie, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, and Li’l Abner.
Question Ideas for our author:
What made you start writing?
Why did you choose to write cozy mysteries?
One of your series takes place in a beach city -- did you live in a beach city?
How do you get your ideas for plots?
Do you base your characters on people that you know?
Are you friends with other writers and do you share writing tips and strategies?
Who do you like to read and why.
Do you write most days? Early morning or afternoons?
For the Mermaid Beach Town mysteries you write about a retail store that sells holiday decorations. Have you ever worked in a store like that? Where did that idea come from?
10. And for the Jules Keene in the Fern Valley Glamping Resort books, have you worked in that type of resort before?
11. You write about Cassidy Jamison having to be the boss of women much older than she, have you ever had to do that? What did you learn from
that? How did you learn about event planning?
12. You’ve edited some books, how did you get selected to do that? Is it the publisher or is it writer friends, and what do you have to do as an
editor?
I’m sure that you have questions of your own. Please feel free to ask them of our author.
List of Heather Weidner’s books:
The Delainie Fitzgerald Mysteries:
Glitter, Glam, and Contraband
Secret Lives and Private Eyes
The Tulip Shirt Murders
Male Revues and Subterfuge
A Mermaid Bay Christmas Shoppe Mystery
Twinkle, Twinkle Au Revoir
A Tisket, a Tasket, Not Another Casket
Sticks and Stones and a Bag of Bones
A Jules Keene Glamping Mystery
Deadlines and Valentines
Film Crews and Rendezvous
Christmas Lights and Cat Fights
Vintage Trailers and Blackmailers
The Pearly Girls mysteries
Murder Strikes a Chord
Murder Plays Second Fiddle (not released yet)
Others (edited, short story collections, recipes)
The Secret Ingredient (recipes)
First Comes Love Then Comes Murder
Murder by the Glass
Deadly Southern Charm
50 Shades of Cabernet
Virginia is for Mysteries Volumes 1 - 3
To Fetch A Thief
To Fetch a Scoundrel
To Fetch a Villain
To Fetch a Killer
If you haven’t RSVP’d yet, there’s still time. Please remember that we plan for you if you’ve RSVP’d. Obviously things come up and family concerns happen, but be courteous and change your RSVP. It’s reflected on the system.
With my nose in a book and fondly,
Karin Diskin