Oh, absolutely! Because I hadn’t been in Louisiana around the holidays since I was a Tulane student, my husband, daughter, and I spent Christmas week there in 2015. We experienced the celebratory atmosphere in New Orleans and Cajun Country firsthand. And best of all, we got to watch the Bonfires on the Levees from a private party in Gramercy, Louisiana. Everything I write about those bonfires is based on my own personal experience from that trip. As are the decorations in NOLA.

I’ve been lucky. Either my books have been generally well received or my publisher is hiding the bad reviews from me! But every so often, a one-star review pops up on Amazon or Goodreads. Again, I’ve lucky, they’re rare. And once someone sent me an email through my website titled “I hated your book.” I was like, OMG, who DOES that? But when I calmed down and read her email thoroughly, I was impressed by the effort she made to like my books. They just weren’t her thing. I actually wrote a whole blog post about my exchange with the reader for the multi-author blog I belong to, chicksonthecase.com. Here’s the link to the post:https://chicksonthecase.com/2017/01/23/i-hated-your-book/

The first thing I do is decorate the outdoors – or rather, have my husband decorate the outdoors! We have three moving deer and a tree that we put out among the drought-resistant plants and cactus that make up our front yard, and a big, twinkling snowflake we put in the courtyard. We sometimes put one of the deer on the roof. We debated skipping the outdoor decorating one year, but neighbors kept asking when our decorations were going up. When we told them, maybe not at all, they were so disappointed that we went ahead and did it. The deer are so old that they’re barely working. Not sure what we’ll do once they cross the rainbow bridge for pretend animals!

I just turned in the ms for the fourth book, MARDI GRAS MURDER, and am waiting to hear about future additions to the series. I love moving my characters’ lives forward. I want real challenges to face my characters; i.e., in MGM, Maggie , my protagonist, and her boyfriend Bo discover they’re in different spaces when it comes to have children. So they have to sort that out. I want the lives of all my regular characters to progress in real, relatable ways – in addition to the murders they must constantly solve, of course.

I’ve been making and collecting Christmas ornaments since I was a kid. I used to have two dozen boxes of them, but my husband encouraged me to pare my collection down, so now I have a dozen. I love trimming the tree, especially with ornaments that mean a lot to me because they’re from our travels, from our family’s history – we have one from my husband’s family that’s almost a hundred years old – or they’re handmade by myself or my kid, who’s now a senior in high school. I also have photo frames filled with her class pictures from preschool until now.

I generally create what I call a “fluid outline” before I start writing. These can run to 35 pages and are chapter-by-chapter. They include plot beats, possible dialogue, etc. I call them fluid because I always find new chapter breaks and even new subplots. But I’ve found the general structure – including the victims and murderer (or murderers) – stays the same.

I just finished Louise Penny’s GLASS HOUSES, which was spectacular as usual. I can’t wait to tuck into Anne Cleeland’s latest Acton & Doyle, MURDER IN SHADOW. I love Jacqueline Winspear, Rhys Bowen, Alyssa Maxwell, and Leslie Karst’s series. I’m also incredibly lucky to blog on chicksonthecase.com with authors whose work I adore: Lisa Q. Mathews, Marla Cooper, Kellye Garrett, Vickie Fee, and Cynthia Kuhn. I always do a happy dance when any of them release a new book.

Deadly Louisiana Christmas.