The Estate Sale Mysteries, a cozy series published by Fawkes Press:
Up the Creek, an eco-mystery published by Sibylline Press, coming October 2026
Newsletter subscribers receive a free copy of The Case of the Disappearing Heirlooms, a logic puzzle based on The Estate Sale Mysteries (February 2026, Fawkes Press).
Emma Stewart and Laura Benton arrive at the site of their next estate sale only to find that overlooked heirs have hidden some of the good stuff.
Solve the logic puzzle to track down the heirlooms!
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Subscribers receive a free copy of The Case of the Disappearing Heirlooms, a logic puzzle based on The Estate Sale Mysteries, coming February 2026.
I live in coastal North Florida, and when I want to boost the atmosphere in one of my scenes, I take a walk.
While writing my novel set in a nature preserve threatened by big development, I often wrote outside or on location. I set up my laptop on a picnic table at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve and let my surroundings flow directly into the story.
Sometimes, I’ll take a notebook and pen to the beach and do my writing from a beach chair.
Even staying home and writing on the patio, I often see waterfowl landing in the pond behind my house.
We have many tropical birds here, including Roseate Spoonbills (pictured), egrets, herons, and storks. The sight of these never ceases to amaze me, as I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic region and moved to Florida as an adult. I haven’t lost my sense of wonder for my surroundings. They always inspire me.
Shelley Marsh writes contemporary fiction and mystery with lots of humor and a dash of romance. Her work is designed to entertain and transport readers to lush Florida settings.
Shelley lives in coastal North Florida with her spouse and two sons. When she’s not snooping in other people’s houses at estate sales, she’s scavenging the beaches near her coastal home for shark teeth and sea glass. Before becoming a novelist, Shelley served as a staff writer for Void, a North Florida lifestyle magazine, for five years, as well as a contributing writer for The Florida Times-Union, Shorelines, and the Ponte Vedra Recorder.
I’ve been meeting with a small group of writer friends for four years now. Actually, we refer to each other as “writer fam.” There are so many benefits to forming relationships with other writers, and the best (in my opinion) is the emotional support they can provide. Other writers understand the process of writing and submitting your work in a way that non-writer friends cannot. My writer fam is so supportive, always cheering me on and urging me to persevere when things get challenging.
The members of my writing friends group are also my critique partners. We exchange work, then meet in person to discuss it bi-weekly. Maintaining this schedule encourages us to keep churning out pages.
Critique partners can provide insight into big picture things like character arc as well as details like punctuation and grammar. Ideally, they offer the kind of non-biased feedback that you can’t get from a friend or relative. However, my writer friends have become more biased over the years and are now more likely to give feedback like “I love this!”
I met the members of my critique group when I attended a writing class. The class was a continuing education course offered by a local university. This is a great way to connect with other writers who are serious about improving their craft.
There are also critique group matching services available online. Look for writing organizations that are specific to your genre. I write mystery and women’s fiction, so I am a member of Sisters in Crime and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Both of these offer routes to find critique groups. Non-genre specific options include Manuscript Academy, Jerico Writers, and Savvy Authors
My manuscript, “Dying to Live Here,” made the top twenty for the Claymore Award for the first fifty pages of an unpublished manuscript.
Killer Nashville announced the top 20 finalists for the Claymore Award, a prize for emerging authors, on July 29, 2021.
The winner of the Claymore Award is announced at the Killer Nashville conference in August.
Amateur sleuths are a core feature of cozy mysteries. This poses a huge hurdle for the writer (and the suspension of disbelief for a reader). Why the heck do all these average folks decide to solve a murder?
Murder, She Wrote is the epitome of this. How many murders did that one woman stumble upon? And why did people ever invite her anywhere? Everywhere she went, someone got murdered! (“RSVP: Did you invite Jessica? If so, I can’t make it.”)
Coming up with a very good reason for an average person to solve a crime can pose a quandary for even the most creative mystery writer.
When writing a series, the issue becomes even more challenging. One murder solved by your hometown baker, florist, innkeeper, or librarian is hard enough to explain. When it happens repeatedly during the course of a series, writers face an extreme challenge. Why does this keep happening to the same person? And how do you explain all these bodies in one small town?
Some writers combat this by expanding the settings. A character might take a trip to another location where–surprise!–she finds a body.
As a reader as well as a writer of such books, I believe that the best way to deal with the issue is head-on. Make a tongue-in-cheek reference to the high body count in the cozy setting. After all, the reader is going to be thinking it, so the writer might as well be in on the joke.
Apart from the issue of body count, there is a problem of motivation. There has to be a very good reason why an amateur sleuth must solve the case. These often include:
You might think that once a writer has exhausted all of those reasons, it’s time to move on to a new series. That would be logical.
However, so many of these series have characters that we as readers grow to love and settings we hate to leave. That’s something readers expect from cozy mysteries: a cast of quirky, lovable characters in an enticing setting. Many are set in places we as readers would like to visit (aside from the aforementioned troubling body count). The opportunity to get away from our everyday existence and take an imaginary vacation to a fictional town is one of the reasons we read.
Readers will continue to love cozy mysteries, and writers will keep creating these comforting, funny, lovable stories for our readers. After all, creative thinking is what writers do.
Snowflake Pro is a writing tool that was created by Randy Ingermanson, author of How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method. It is free to download with the purchase of his book. I’ve been using this tool for my latest project, and I like it so much I thought I’d take the time to review it for other writers.
The snowflake method is a story planning tool for gradually building on the basic premise of your book. You start with one sentence that summarizes your storyline. In the next step, you expand this into a paragraph. From there, you take each sentence in your one-paragraph summary and expand each sentence into a paragraph until you have a one page summary–a short synopsis. You’ll expand this further until you have a detailed, multi-page synopsis.
I found the software to be useful for brainstorming. When you’re creating characters, it asks questions about their motivations, conflicts, backstory, characteristic traits, etc until you really get a handle on that character. You do all of this brainstorming before you start writing. That way, you don’t have to go back and make up a reason why your character acts the way he does. The character development informs the writing, not the other way around.
The software comes with a tutorial that I found to be quite helpful. So helpful, in fact, that you can use this method without reading the book if you follow the tutorial. It was like taking a class in the Snowflake Method. Each step has an audio lecture you can listen to on your computer, lecture notes, and help notes at the bottom of the page. You can listen to Randy Ingermanson himself explain the method step by step. He also provides examples drawn from familiar books and movies that you can review to see how the completed project should look.
When you complete all the steps, there is an option to print the entire thing out as a proposal, all formatted in a professional style.
If you’re a pantser, this will not be your jam. I get that. You can still use some of the technique when your first draft is written. In the past, I have relied on beat sheets to inform my writing, but I’ve become a detailed outliner after having to do multiple revisions on my past work.
I actually enjoyed planning out my story with Snowflake Pro. I felt good about the story I was building. It got me excited about writing it.
Like all writing tools, it is possible to fritter away time thinking about what the contents of your character’s purse would be, so I’d advise you don’t go to that level of detail unless you need to in order to know what to write. Don’t let the tool keep you from writing the actual book.
However, I recommend giving Snowflake Pro a try. It is a low-cost (or free*) tool that can be helpful when brainstorming the premise, underlying structure and characters for any novel.
*Randy Ingermanson is no longer selling the software but you can still download it for free at https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/contact/download-again/snowflake-pro-download-page/ The password is snowflake.
