Years ago, and I mean years ago, when I was a teen, Nancy Drew Mysteries were my favorite pastime. I had a difficult time making friends, struggled in school, and even (dare I say it) had some pretty common struggles with various members of my family.
What worked for me, and still does, especially when under stress, is reading, and a good mystery takes me back in time to those earlier days when I first discovered it.
But a good mystery helps me to do something else: Get excited about trying to figure out the mystery.
A reader can't just read a mystery, they must be constantly plotting out who done it; they must keep the reel running if you will.
And I like the idea of not reading sleepy. I like to keep my wheels turning and that's probably also the reason I read and write Christian fiction. In my mind, there's no going to sleep there either.
A cozy mystery is a special breed, and though I'll frankly admit that my mysteries take on a sort of cozy/suspense flavor (the main characters don't typically inhabit small towns) there is something to be said for an amateur sleuth such as Susan Cramer, who is thrown into a mystery without searching it out.
She's not a cop. She's not a professional detective. If she's anything, she's a regular sort of woman who has the same sort of gripes we all do, who is suddenly brought into another scene with a dead man.
Who would have thought?
And maybe that's the reason I love a good mystery most of all. A regular woman like myself meeting a not so regular situation and finding her way through it.
How about you?
What do you write and why do you write it?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
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