All the chapters of 2025 have closed and The End has been typed on the year, but you know what that means? It means we have a new year filled with mystery in front of us. What will it bring? I know it will bring a new adventure for private investigator Pat because I have an outline ready to be brought to the pages of the next book in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series, but that’s the only thing I know about 2026. The rest of the year is a mystery.

   Oh, there is some foreshadowing I can see already and some clues, too …unless they turn out to be red herrings placed in my mind to make me think I know what’s happening when I really don’t. I’ve been promising myself and others to record books in audio form and 2026 is the year it’s going to happen. I told myself I was going to do this in 2025, but managed to find a million excuses not to, which is why I’m putting audio books in the foreshadowing category.

   I certainly hope 2026 progresses like a good cozy mystery which, of course, means there has to be a murder by the end of chapter two, aka February, but I hope it will simply be the murder of crows noisily taking over the trees by my house and not a real one. Unfortunately, 2025 resulted in the loss of a couple of friends; I hope 2026 doesn’t.

   There will need to be an amateur sleuth to investigate the happenings. I guess that would be me, finding my way through the new year one day at a time without any idea what the next day will bring.

   There will need to be sidekicks, interesting characters who pop into the year to add humor and intrigue and to share the adventures the year will bring. I have many of those characters around me. They turn up with snacks to share at my house on Mondays, weather permitting, to sit outside snacking and sipping margaritas. On Thursdays, I meet others for coffee in the kirk house of the sole church in the community where I live. It’s not a church sponsored event so local gossip, politics, and costumes near Halloween are all encouraged. Some of the people who turn up there are so quirky that they have been known to inspire characters in my books.

    And of course there will be recipes shared in 2026. Like in so many cozy mysteries, food is a big deal in my years. I still love the cookbook I edited where 128 cozy mystery writers shared recipes from their books.

   So happy New Year to all of you. I hope your year is a cozy delight and ends with a great resolution where all mysteries and problems are favorably resolved.

This is a question I ask myself every time I start a new novel. Giving reasons to a character for their behavior can be complicated. As the author, I need to justify why any of them do the things they do. But when they’re a louse, it needs to be double-justified. “Just because” doesn’t cut it. So bad guys can be tough.

And then there’s the fact that usually in each book the villain is new. It’s not a familiar character. Arriving at the who, what, and why often takes time and can be a problem. So I try to be methodical and logical. First I start with the dastardly thing I need them to do for the story. Kidnapping? Extortion? Theft? Murder? All of the above? When they are rotten to the core, I have them extend their evil intent to an animal. I DO NOT, however, allow any negative actions done to any animal in my books. It is intent only. I write Cozies. And this is one of the reasons why.

In Death Runs in the Family, Book 3 of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, I have the villain catnap Baba and Tugger (the two cats belonging to Lee, the protagonist), with the threat of harming them if Lee doesn’t stop her investigation. This may have worked well for the book, but it did not work well for me.

I was interrupted by an urgent family matter and had to stop writing for three days directly after the villain put the cats in the back of a station wagon and started her journey to Las Vegas. I woke up in the middle of the night several days later distraught about these cats having no food or water for all that time. It didn’t matter they were fictional. It didn’t matter I was dog-tired. Excuse me, cat-tired. I leapt out of bed with a “No, no, no, no, no. I can’t stand it!” A shocked husband demanded to know what was wrong. I told him I had to rescue the cats NOW or I would never get back to sleep. Knowing me after decades of marriage, he merely nodded, rolled over, and started snoring again.

I sat down at the keyboard and for the next seven hours typed my heart out, only stopping now and then to stretch my legs and have more coffee. The storyline continued with Lee finding out where the station wagon was going by the microchips embedded in the cats (modern science can be a glorious thing). Lee then flew to Las Vegas to coincide with the arrival of the station wagon. Once there, she was joined by a fellow investigator. Together they rescued the cats from the back of the parked wagon while said villain was in a casino whooping it up. By now I hated this scumbag.

As it had only been a matter of hours in fictional time and not an actual three days, the cats were not starving or dying of thirst, but merely scared half to death. Thus, once Lee and the cats were reunited, there was a lot of hugging and purring. Then food and water for the felines and pizza for the protagonist. Peperoni. As Tugger and Baba were alright, Lee could concentrate on capturing this monster who not only catnapped her pets but, coincidentally, murdered somebody.

Did I forget to mention that? Anyway, by now this had become a very personal issue for Lee. Steal and threaten to hurt my cats, will ya? There is nothing like a hopping mad protagonist determined to bring a villain to justice to move a story along.

Back to me and that event. Late that morning, after I was satisfied that everyone in the story (except the villain) were happy, I went back to sleep. But I learned a valuable lesson. All my characters live in my head 24/7. I need to remember that. I need to be careful. I can only have my villains do so much before I start paying for it. They are part of my being. And for the record, this villain, a young woman in her mid-twenties, had all kinds of reasons for behaving the way she did. I wound up feeling sorry for her. But that didn’t stop me from putting her in prison for a very long time. After all, murder is murder.

A Pause

This Saturday straddles the holidays Christmas and New Year’s, a time washed with good will and optimism. Each holiday alone offers a topic relevant and pertinent in today’s world. I could talk about my gratitude for having close friends, or I could focus on the excitement of going into the year ahead. But I have nothing new to say about either one. Instead a friend and I talked this week about the word pause, and that’s the subject that feels most appropriate for me at this time.

We rush headlong from one activity to the next, some of us weary and some of us energized by how much we can get accomplish and what the season holds. I could do that but instead I want to take this time of being neither here nor there to step back and pause, to take a break thoughtfully, not because I feel I need it or want it. I’m taking a break, pausing, because this is something to treasure—a moment when I don’t have to move forward or back, rush ahead or finish up something left behind me, to clear my desk before covering it with the next task.

This isn’t as far removed from a writing life as one might think. Whenever I finish a story or novel I set it aside and stop thinking about it. This gives us as writers distance on our work, so we can come to it with a fresh pair of eyes after three or four weeks (or even a year). But it can do more than that. 

A pause in the work of creating something, a season, or any time of year, gives me an opportunity to come back to myself, to step away from the person whom I created in order to write the story, call her the narrator or protagonist or something else. Or in my day to day life, the person who gets things done, checking each item off on a real or imagined to-do list. 

A pause allows, even encourages me to step into another space, one that is walled off from the world in motion and complete in itself. This is not a moment of purpose, to wind down, lower my blood pressure or find the time to assess my upcoming tasks. The pause is its own purpose, to listen to random thought, to discover once again what it is to just be, to exist, to watch the world go by, to slow down enough to notice the world is going by, ever moving around us.

Perhaps this pause is a meditation without the Buddhist directive to “empty the mind,” ignore thoughts or feelings and keep the mind blank. My pause is a long moment to heighten the awareness that I exist. I am here in this place, touching the fabric of the seat of my desk chair, studying the color of the dyed leather desk top, hearing the occasional car pass my window.

When my mind tells me this moment has passed I know the lights will be brighter, the music will be sweeter, and I will enjoy them all more deeply. But I will also linger in the moment more often, knowing that life is truer when savored than gulped greedily. This weekend I straddle the holidays that define our year, and find a moment that is more, that is all of life held lightly in the palm, awakening me to all that is beyond accomplishment, goals, appearances, rushing thoughts. My moment as me entirely with the Universe sitting within my half-curled fingers.