Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today with follow ups on some of the blogs I’ve posted during the past few months at Maine Crime Writers.

First, though, a reminder that the drawing for one of nine advance reading copies of the next Liss MacCrimmon Mystery, Overkilt, remains open until Thursday afternoon. When it gets to be 5 PM here in Maine, I will toss crumpled slips of paper with numbers on them to Bala the cat. Each entry will have been assigned a number. The nine she chooses to play with will be the nine who win copies of the ARC. If you haven’t entered yet, you can do so by sending an email to me at kaitlyndunnett@gmail.com with the subject line “giveaway” before 5 PM on September 20.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program, updates on some of the things I was writing about in various blogs. In Books Looking for a Good Home back on March 1, I wrote about weeding out specialized reference books and hoping to find people who’d appreciate them. There were actually a couple of weedings, and the addition of some titles my husband owned, amounting to over 250 titles in all. By posting about the first two collections (177 titles) on social media, offering the books free if the recipient would pay for the postage, I found homes for sixty two of them. In August, fellow Maine Crime Writer John Clark picked up the rest, and a good-size stack of jigsaw puzzles. A retired librarian long involved in raising money for Maine libraries, John will now be the one finding them good homes.

In April, I wrote about Mom’s Good China and the problem many people in my generation face. No matter how pretty the heirlooms are, no one in the family of the original owner wants to inherit them. In this case, I lucked out. The china had been hand painted by a well-known artist in my old home town. Someone in the Facebook group for people who come from there knew the artist’s granddaughter and put us in touch with each other. Last month, she drove here to Maine to pick up the china and take it home with her. Instead of sitting, unloved, in a spare cabinet in my kitchen, it is now with the artist’s family, where it will be appreciated and passed on to others who have a connection to it.

First in the series and the ebook is still on sale for $1.99

The topic for August 1 was Those Pesky Details. I was in the process of rereading my own books, all twelve of them in the Liss MacCrimmon series, to try and prevent myself from including bloopers in the current work in progress. I’m pleased to report that I finished the project and now have extensive notes on all the major characters and settings. To my great relief, I haven’t contradicted myself on too many occasions. If the police station goes back and forth, several times, between having one desk and several file cabinets and two desks and one file cabinet, and the fire department loses a truck between Scone Cold Dead and Scotched, perhaps no one will notice. Ditto the fact that Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium is air conditioned in Kilt at the Highland Games and, in X Marks the Scot, the very next book, there’s “no air conditioning and never has been.” Even more mysterious, there is no mention of Dan and Liss’s house having a garage until the twelfth book, Overkilt, when I needed one. On the other hand, nowhere in the earlier books did I say there wasn’t one. I did contradict myself by giving Liss and Dan a dishwasher in the early books. In Book Twelve, Liss says she’s never felt the need to own one. Maybe her memory’s going. Or mine is. Anyway, all in all, not too many “oops” moments.

Finally, in the middle of last month, I wrote Too Darn Hot about the fact that this past summer was a brutal one for Maine people used to cooler, less humid days and nights. It did, in fact, set records, especially the one for number of days with a dew point of seventy or above. We’re still having a few hot, humid days, but at least now the temperature drops at night and we’re able to enjoy sleeping with the windows open.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of nearly sixty traditionally published books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries (Overkilt—November 2018) and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at www.TudorWomen.com