I love fall! The colder weather wakes up my partly-dormant body and enables me to get things done. I’m able to accomplish more home tasks, more writing, more walking of the dog, and generally more fun when I have that autumn energy. Other things I love about fall: baking breads and pies, drinking tea and hot chocolate, wearing sweaters and hoodies and jeans, taking brisk walks in the chilly air, inhaling the distinct scent of leaves.
I also love books set in fall–reading them and writing them. When I wrote my first cozy mystery for Penguin/Random House, (The Big Chili), I set it in the fall. I wanted to incorporate all those fun images like leaves and wood smoke and pumpkins and long walks. And, of course, delicious food made by the talented Lilah Drake. The sequel was set at Christmas, which offered me a whole new set of images to explore.
While I was still writing the Lilah Drake Undercover Dish series, Penguin purchased my Writer’s Apprentice series, and book one, A Dark and Stormy Murder, was set–you guessed it–in fall. The series has a Gothic feel, in homage to those lovely romantic suspense novels of the 20th Century, and I couldn’t imagine a season to fit that vibe better than autumn. When Lena London drives into Blue Lake for the first time, the weather is chilly and the clouds are grey and ominous. Everyone likes a touch of suspense in the atmosphere when they sit down to read a mystery, right? 🙂
I have set several other books in fall: Castle Deadly, Castle Deep (the second in the Veronica Bond castle series), Death of a Wandering Wolf (the second in the Hungarian Tea House mysteries), and Death with a Dark Red Rose (the fourth of the Writer’s Apprentice mysteries). I’m currently just working on additional series titles, but if I were to start a new series (which I hope to do at some point), I would set the first book in fall–not just for the reasons above, but because, as a fan of fall, I can elicit better writing from myself when I set my cozy-warm stories in the chill of autumn.
(Photo: I took this shot last year during an autumn walk).
