Starting ...

Six months into the global pandemic, I had an epiphany.

By then I’d already painted my dining room, completely Marie Kondo’d the house, mastered No Knead Bread, watched every episode of Barefoot Contessa and made her buffalo butter fettuccine with freshly made noodles, and cooked homemade ramen with chashu.

A notorious black thumb, I’d even taken up gardening. I spent all summer nurturing tomato, Japanese eggplant and herbs from seeds with limited success.

In September - when horned worms decimated the last of my cherry tomatoes - two things happened. 1) A friend published her first cozy mystery about a breast cancer survivor who quits her boring desk job to be a full-time writer, and 2) I learned Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose efforts to register voters turned her state blue, had published eight romance books with African American heroines.

I realized I was wasting the pandemic.

I opened my laptop and began to write.

The mystery floating around in my head for years took me a month to outline. Fourteen weeks later, I’d written 85,000 words and 16 chapters. I’d finished my first mystery book. Now, I just have to figure out how to get it published.