As a follow-up to my post yesterday, here are some of the covers I’ve done using Copilot for the background and ezcovermaker to create the cover.
The new cover for Ripped Off
The 3rd Houston & Bouchard
My current work in progress
New Cover for The Exchange
Vaughn C. Hardacker
I have recently taken a big step forward and dipped my toes into the waters of Self-Publishing. One of my publishers, whom I won’t mention, has released the rights to two of my books, and there is no way in hell I am going through the query process again! I have learned a few things about the release of rights. One, when the publisher releases the book rights back to the author, it might not include the cover rights. So, even though Amazon and other booksellers still list your book online, they may not have the updated cover. The novels that were released had not been published as ebooks, so I decided to publish them myself. I have sent the three manuscripts to Draft2Digital.com and have had to design new covers. I decided to try D2D because they do not charge you up front. They take 10% of the price you decide to sell at, and you get the 90% (try and get that from a traditional publisher!). They will also offer print-on-demand paperback, and they do not require the writer to share in the production costs (they will pay for printing and shipping the book, and you will get a percentage of the price — again, if they sell no books, you don’t incur any cost). There is a hitch, though, you have to adhere to their eBook format requirements. They want the book to be single-spaced and recommend you include a linked table of contents. It took me a couple of days per manuscript to convert each book from manuscript to eBook.
When everything meets their requirements, they send the ebook (and POD if ordered) to a wide list of booksellers (B&N and a wide array of eBook publishers), and within a day or so. I got contacted by quite a few that the books were available through them. One of my books has already shown up on Amazon (B&N had it within an hour). There is one problem with POD, though. One of my book covers had the author’s name two spaces too wide, and they rejected it. If you are planning on POD, be careful with margins. On one of my covers, the author’s name was too close to the guide, and they were afraid the last letter would be cut off. Then I encountered AI.
I decided to use Microsoft Copilot to do a cover. What I thought would be a quick deal turned into a four-day marathon! By the time I was finished, any reservations I had about AI were diminished. I worked in the computer world for most of my adult life and knew one basic fact about them. There is no reason to fear a computer … they are nothing more than a fast idiot. If you ask a computer, “What is 2 times 2? It only performs a few functions: it adds, subtracts, and compares. Computers multiply using repeated addition and divide using repeated subtraction. The process is that the computer goes through every possibility before it answers. It asks: Is it 0 plus 0? No. Is it 1 plus 0? No. Is it 0 plus 1? Finally, it will come across the correct answer. It’s only advantage is that it does it at 600 million miles per hour (the speed of light). Have you ever played chess against a computer? Early on, the computer makes its move instantaneously. Before it moves, it tries every possible move against every possible countermove. As the game progresses, the computer slows down as it checks every possible move until it decides which one to make. Thus, it’s a fast idiot. Getting back to my experience with Copilot (AI), I followed the idiot’s instructions, and at the very end, it blew my mind. I was under the impression that after I completed the entire process, it would spit out a single file I could upload to the publisher. WRONG! When you are dealing with a computer always remember GIGO! If you put garbage in, you get garbage out. In this case, garbage in is what question you ask the fast idiot. It took multiple attempts before I finally asked THE right question. The program took all the inputs I gave it and returned a list of what I had told it. The purpose of the program is not to give you a single file. It gives you all the parameters you need to provide to either D2D’s support team, so they can create the cover, or to whoever is designing the cover! DUH?
I spent four days repeating the same questions and getting the same answers (what was it Einstein said about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? I believe he said it was the definition of insanity.) For many years, I taught at technical schools and junior colleges, and I always told students to RTFQ when taking a test. Read The Full Question. I had a test. I gave them it consisted of ten absolutely ridiculous questions, such as: If you built a house and all four sides had a southern exposure. Where is the house? The instructions for the test said: Before answering any questions, READ THE ENTIRE TEST. At the very end of the test, it said: Now that you have read the entire test, put your name in the date line and the date in the name line and turn the test in.
The moral of the story? Read what the AI is asking. As human beings, we all have a tendency to let experience guide us. We ASSUME. We all know that there are three words in assume.
In closing. In 1989, I was battling major personal and professional issues. To be blunt, I was being a major asshole. I later learned it was something called PTSD. If you spent as much time with me as I do, you’d have it too! I wrote a book entitled: The War Within. It dealt with an angry, confused kid who was always in one sort of trouble or another. He dropped out of school and became involved with a South Boston gang. He learns that the mob is going to turn him in for doing a job they gave him to do, and runs. To hide, he joins the USMC and is sent to Vietnam, where he wins the Medal of Honor. He now believes his life will be better, only to learn that he still has little education, no skills, and still carries a lot of anger. Nothing happens as he hopes. I entered the novel in the International Literary Awards and won a $1300.00 second prize. Many people read it and said it was great. Unfortunately, none of them were agents, editors, or publishers. I knew it would be controversial as it dealt with an unpopular war, and an unlikable (but realistic) protagonist. I have just recently published it myself and am getting requests for it. I decided that if nobody else would take a chance on it, that I WOULD!
I don’t doubt you’ve had enough of my knee adventure this winter but it was, as you can imagine, a major change to the body and one that echoes out into the future as the healing continues. It was not, I admit, so much as the surgery and the immediate aftermath that interested me—the painkillers 
took care of that—but what went on in the slow regaining of function and movement until the joint could move more or less normally.
The standard advice is that it can take a year or more for a knee surgery victim—er, patient—to feel “normal.” So, in essence, the real healing taking place is not so much the closing of the incision, the massage of the scar, the exercises and physical therapy 
designed to break up scar tissue but the long slow almost imperceptible improvements: walking up and down stairs, the absence of pain, swimming, lifting weights. And finding the balance between doing enough to improve without exhausting the knee and the body is a challenge.
Because I’m always thinking about writing, I realize how much this process reminds me of writing a novel. It’s way too dramatic to talk about cutting yourself open to find the beginning of a book, but in essence, you are opening yourself up, exposing something: a can of worms, a belief, an idea, a character, a setting. At the beginning, a novel can feel vulnerable, too open an incision.
As you write forward and you start to see what you’re writing about, how the book is going to look, that openness tends to close up. You have a better idea what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it. You don’t know everything about it but it feels wholer. And then, after your first draft is done comes the slogging: revision, rerevision, restructuring, editing, copyediting, and so on. The physical therapy, the repetitive exercises, the near-boredom of daily introspection, i.e., how am I doing?
And because you’re never satisfied, every improvement in the book is incremental and feels gained by great effort and attention, like being able to bend your knee 10 degrees more than you could the day before.
And this is the gift of long-term attention, the opportunity to make your book (and your knee) as healthy as it can be, through repetitive and sometimes boring effort. It’s not about the milestones any more—being able to go 
upstairs, walk out to the mailbox, survive a long PT session—but the minute ongoing efforts that improve things. And it’s this labor that separates the serious work from the trivial.
OK, done with knee. But talk to me in a year. I may have another idea.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Vaughn Hardacker (Tuesday), Matt Cost (Thursday), and Rob Kelley (Friday).
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:
Today, Saturday, May 23, Matt Cost will be participating in MYSTERY MAKING MAYHEM with fellow crime writers Kate Flora and Dick Cass at the Gray Public Library at 1 PM. Come visit with us! More Info HERE.
On Sunday, Matt Cost will be participating in the Mid-Maine Book Bazaar in Fairfield, along with 40-plus other amazing authors. This will be at the community center in Fairfield and will have food trucks, books, sunshine, and authors!
Next Friday, May 29th, Matt Cost will host, along with fellow Maine Crime Writer Jule Selbo, Noir at the Belleflower (Brewery) in Portland at 7 PM. There will be readings by Tess Gerritsen, Travis Kennedy, Joanna Shaffhausen, James Ziskin, Zakariah Johnson, Mo Drammeh, and Rebecca Turkewitz, as well as fellow Maine Crime Writers Allison Keeton, Rob Kelley, and Gabi Stiteler. More Info HERE.
Matt Cost will be at the Crime Wave Conference in Portland on Saturday, May 30th. If you are a writer or a reader wondering about the inner minds of writers, come check this thing out. More Info HERE.
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora
The Accidental Crime Writer
By Elizabeth DeWolfe
I hadn’t intended to write about crime. A graduate school class on Women and the Law was as close as I got to nineteenth-century disorder. And while the subject of my first book, an anti-Shaker activist, had her day in court, nobody committed a crime, or at least, no violent ones. Women’s history, cozy-style.
And then I found Mary Bean.
I was hunting around for a new project, and at my antiquarian bookseller husband’s store, I stumbled on The Narrative of the Life of George Hamilton, a rotter of a criminal who plied his trade in Saco. Counterfeiting! Thievery! MURDER!
Rulison Cover
The 1850 novella read like overwrought fiction, one of many mid-nineteenth-century works that popularized murder, lust, kidnapping, and other crimes, and offered the reading public trashy, ephemeral reads. The opening scene hooks the reader: evil George Hamilton dumps mill girl Mary Bean’s body in a brook and pins the crime on his brother, and “Hamilton,” that cad, “felt relieved of a burden.”
“Mary Bean” Ad
I used to live in Saco, and as I read, I recognized street names and landmarks, and while the characters were larger than life, the setting rang a bit too familiar. Was this story true? My project radar pinging, I went to the Dyer Library and from the vault, pulled out the 1840s and 1850s Saco newspaper, the Maine Democrat. It didn’t take long: “Dead Body Found!”
I had my next project. The story unfolded in newspapers and court records, payroll registers, and medical texts. Mary Bean – Berengera Caswell (1826-1849) – worked in the textile mills. In New Hampshire, she met a Biddeford boy, William Long, and in the summer of 1849, they engaged in “criminal relations.” Six months later, Berengera died in Saco from septicemia following a legal abortion at the hands of a botanic physician. The doctor panicked and attempted to dispose of her body. He tied it to a board and placed her in a stream that emptied into the Saco River. But the board got hung up in a culvert and buried by snow; Berengera was discovered four months later, ironically, where the Saco police station sits today.
Newspaper Headline about the trial
I had become a crime writer, writing of cases not very cozy. And the reason is simple: in writing women’s history, crime is where you find the women. As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously quipped, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” But the ill-behaved leave trails. And it’s those trails I followed.
The discovery of Caswell’s body set off a media frenzy with newspapers across New England reporting the news. One newspaper was blasé, headlining a short piece on the death of “yet another mill girl.” But in Saco-Biddeford, there were fears to calm and money to be made; editors published daily “extras,” single newsprint sheets carrying the latest intel and authors-for-hire churned out at least eight short stories featuring Saco-Biddeford factory girls who ignored parental warnings and met unsavory ends—cautionary tales designed to instruct young women on how to be safe, with an overlay of forbidden topics: lust, seduction, and the specter of unwed pregnancy.
Image from “The Murder of Mary Bean”
As a historian, my goal is to recover forgotten lives – to document the twists and turns that led to my subjects’ ultimate fate. So, I work backward to make the dead come alive, pulling out details from available documents, chasing down each name, parsing the fact from the fiction, making timelines, exploring medical procedures that could cure you, or kill you.
History relies on written documents, and in women’s history, we see the noisy women, the women who transgress boundaries, the women who sought more than their prescribed role allowed. The women who make great protagonists in writing, factual or fictional.
History is storytelling – and it’s all about choices of whose story we tell and whose story gets left out. As writers, we have options for our tales: historical fiction, contemporary fiction that borrows from history, or my genre, narrative nonfiction – deeply researched but written like a novel. The writing paths are many: the past is fair game for inspiration. How will you use history in your work?
If you’d like to explore how historical archives can provide story ideas, obscure murder weapons, or colorful characters, join Professor DeWolfe and Maine Historical Society staff for Crimes in the Archives, a pre-Crime Wave tour and mini-workshop at the Maine Historical Society in Portland on Friday, May 29, at 1 p.m. Uncover history’s mysteries and incorporate the past in your writing. REGISTER HERE: https://www.mainewriters.org/events/maine-crime-wave-in-the-archives
Historian and Crime Writer Elizabeth DeWolfe
Elizabeth DeWolfe is the award-winning author of The Murder of Mary Bean, recipient of a 2008 IPPY Award in true crime, as well as awards from ForeWord magazine, the New England Historical Association, and the Northeast Popular Culture Association. Her recent book, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, is a finalist for the 2026 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Recently retired from a thirty-year career teaching history and archival research methods at the University of New England, she is hard at work on her next book. Mum’s the word, but when this criminal died, thousands came to the funeral. Read more about her work at http://www.elizabethdewolfe.com and follow her on Facebook.
Maine Literary Award Nominee, 2026
Kent State (murder of Mary Bean) https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2010/the-murder-of-mary-bean-and-other-stories/
UPKY (Alias Agnes) https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781985902244/alias-agnes/
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Don’t forget! Leave a comment on any May blog post to be entered into a drawing for free books!
Spring in Maine! One day it’s in the 80s, the next frost kills the forsythia. After the bugless joy of winter, it’s ants in the mailbox and ticks on your pants and the brown-tailed moth microscopic poison in the air. After the dead quiet of winter, it’s early-bird summer people walking down my lane talking on their phones on speaker and lawn-care companies revving up half a dozen leaf blowers and lawn mowers at once across the street.
I don’t say all this to sound like some grumpy old boomer, but more to point out to any aspiring writers that it’s easy to wax poetic about the change of seasons in Maine, but if you don’t want your book to be like thousands of others, get out there and find out what spring in Maine is really like. It’s more than just cute jokes about mud season.
So, that’s my writing tip for the day.
Just so I don’t leave you bumming out about ticks or leaf blowers, I’ll share some photos of my recent forays into Maine spring, which don’t have either. I normally would shut myself into the house, because of the ticks, the ants, the brown tail moth and all that other stuff, but my dog Willow doesn’t care about those things. She wants her walks. [An apology to anyone reading this on their phone. I know the mobile app squeezes photos into a funhouse abstract, but that’s technology for you.]
What the hell? I know! The photo doesn’t do this — whatever it is — justice. Made of wooden slats and patched with a variety of materials, this thing — whatever it is — is a good 15 or so feet high and several hundred yards long. Leaking all the way. The sound was spectacular. Kind of like a powerful waterfall combined with heavy rain. My first and continuing thought was “Is this supposed to be doing this?” Some how, some way, it’ll go in a book. But even if it weren’t useful, it was the highlight of our walk. And our day. It’s along Messalonskee Stream in Oakland.
Also along Messalonskee Stream, in another part of Oakland, we caught this old skeleton of a mill. Hard to get a good photo with a dog pulling on the leash and a steep dropoff down to the water. On the other hand, the fact it’s hidden in the trees makes it more interesting.
Willow, for whatever reason. loves loves loves Capitol Park in Augusta. Maybe it’s that 199 years of stuff in the ground for her to sniff and dig at. I love Capitol Park, too. I have a great affection and pride for our State House and the park. The fact that I grew up blocks away and it was part of our childhood playground is only part of it.
One of the walking paths at Capitol Park, early spring before the leaves started coming out. Even so, it may be hard to see the State House dome through the branches.
Capitol Park was established in 1827, the same year it was decided Augusta would be the capital. Take THAT, Portland. It’s Maine’s first planned public space, and the Legislature coughed up $373.13 for the initial work. It shrunk from 34 to 20 acres after it was determined the State House would occupy the high ground at the west end of the park. At the end of a straight line down the middle of the park from the State House is an obelisk dedicated to Gov. Enoch Lincoln, who died in office in 1829. It’s not really clear what the monument is and when we were kids we called it “the four dead guys obelisk,” because it has the names of four guys we’d never heard of on it and it’s on top of a mausoleum.
The park was used as an encampment and parade grounds for troops during the civil war, then cattle were allowed to graze there for much of the rest of that century.
The Olmstead plan for the park had more trees and paths that what the legislature would fund, The State House is across the street from the top. This is from the state’s application for the National Register.
In 1920, the park was more formally laid out when Gov. Carl Milliken (no relation) commissioned the Olmstead Brothers (yes, THAT Olmstead) for a formal design. Top Portland landscape architect Carl Rust Parker was hired to carry it out. He had some more big ideas to enhance the Olmstead plan, but the Legislature didn’t want to pony up the money. The Olmsteads liked a lot of trees, twisty paths, natural features, and more. That was a lot to ask I guess, of a Maine Legislature that was probably grumbling about how it’d been just fine the way it was and why pay money to change it?
Parker had to pare things down (goodyby zoo! so long pond with native fish!) but he still managed a nice facelift.
One of his elements, a stone speaker’s rostrum toward the back of the park, still exists. It directly faces the State House and is in excellent condition. I’ve never seen any speakers there. I’m not sure if anyone even knows what it is anymore.
The Olmstead, and Parker’s, plans for native trees also was pared down. That said, Parker still managed to get his way on some of it, including a nice grove of native pines that Willow finds particuarly exciting. The stately decidious trees that today line the paths that cirecle the park’s perimeter and cut through it vertically are thanks to Parker and his vision.
Willow likes the grove of twisty little pines near the back of the park.
Many of the original trees were elms. They were killed off by Dutch elm disease last century, but by 1983 had been replaced by red oaks, which now tower over the paths as though they’d been there all along.
One of Willow’s favorite spots is a grove of pines, one of Parker’s additions, at the back end of the park, where things get a little wild because of the geography most notably a ravine that would likely be favorite place if I would ever let her go in it. Access to the river was cut off in the mid-1800s when railroad tracks cut through, and now there’s a road there was well.
Capitol Park remains remarkably unchanged from what it was 199 years ago. It’s not fancy. It’s a long swath of green from the State House down to the Kennebec River, with symmetrical paths, some benches and trees. When you’re in the center and look west toward the state house, the trees frame the view. It works the way stuff like that is supposed to work — simple, yet effective, dignified and welcoming at the same time.
Trees frame the State House, looking west from the cente rof Capitol Park.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. One thing that really burns my butt is when the local newspaper misspells the name as Capital Park, with an “a.” Just an editor’s note: Capitol is the building, capital is the city or place of government. You’re welcome. I expect papers from places like Portland not to get the name right — after all, even though it’s the capital, Augusta is considered some exotic backwater that only exists as a euphimism for state government. But in reality, whether the city and suburb folk like it or not, it’s the heart of Maine’s history as a state.
If you live in Maine and have never checked it out, you should. Despite any bells and whistles, it’s a really pleasant place to walk and hang out. An underappreciated piece of Maine history, as well as our lives now.
Screenshot
And our final spring photo of the day. A couple of weeks ago, on our nightly walk around the block, Willow stopped to smell the roses. Literally, of course.
It was the night before Mother’s Day, and the church had put out a bucket of roses for passers-by to take home for their mom’s for Mother’s Day.
Nothing grumpy about that!
Moe Claire is the author of the Pyke Island Mysteries in Downeast Maine published by 12 Willows Press with three titles (A Fickle Tide, Granite and Bones, Black Veil, White Rose) and a fourth (A Blind Spider) due later this year. Her non-murderous alter-writing-ego, Moe Moeller, has published award-winning short fiction and community theater plays. Recently, her short play “Remembering June” was selected for performance by the 2025 Maine Playwrights Festival and performed at Portland Stage. Her short story “The Last Stone from the House of Usher” was selected for Snakeberry: 2025 Best New England Crime Stories anthology by Crime Spell Books. Two of her short plays were selected by Lamoine Community Arts for a spring 2026 play festival. Find out more at www.moeclairemystery.com. Find Moe on Substack as “Bookish in Maine with Moe” or Instagram @moemoellerisbookish.
I was thrilled when Moe offered up her insight about the relationship between writing plays and writing mysteries.
Lessons I’m learning by writing plays
I write the Pyke Island mysteries as Moe Claire. A couple of years ago during my journey as a mystery writer, I recognized the impact live theater has had on my creative style. Before moving to Maine, I was fortunate to be able to sit in the audience at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI and many Boston area theatrical performances. It began purely as entertainment. Then much like I learned about the patterns in fiction by reading a lot of fiction, ranging from the good to the bad to the ho-hum, just by being in the audience, I began to understand how plays work.
A stage play (even a full-length one) is not a novel. It’s like a blueprint. The playwright creates the premise, the roles, the act and scene structure, the dialog and action that drive the narrative, but it’s the director who brings the story to life by casting and staging. In comparison, the novelist is both the playwright and the director. After I became involved with community theater, I could see many parallels in what I wanted to create in a novel. Really, we are all story tellers. Here are some lessons from the theater that I believe give fiction writers something to ponder.
#1: A compelling playscript is tight and spare. For one thing, the playwright has generally less than two hours to tell the story. More than novels or movies, in a stage play each scene is laser-focused on moving the story forward with the least number of characters, staging, and special effects. Why? Lack of funding! Aside from a handful of lavish productions, stage plays are performed in theaters where time and money are precious.
#2: Speaking of special effects, in a novel, words must do all the work that a stage play can do with lighting, sound and music, and spatial organization. In fiction this would be called “atmosphere”, but like a play, it’s added to where it has the greatest impact.
#3: Plays are a series of scenes strung together to tell a story. Scenes have their own beginning and ending and purpose in the plot. I know most fiction writers don’t think of it this way, but whether a short story, novel or play, we are all writing scenes.
#4: Playwrights seek to minimize set changes such as backdrops, landscapes, rooms, and furniture. Too many set changes will slow down the pace. During a set change on stage, the audience is sitting there waiting for the crew to finish their work and get back into the play’s action. There are parallels in fiction when a story takes the reader to many different locations, side actions, or subplots, and each must be adequately described (exposition) so the reader can visualize the scene. In both, the risk is that the audience loses interest, visits the concession stand, and never returns to their seat.
#5: The goal of every play is to draw the audience into the theater and keep new audiences coming. Compared to the novelist, the playwright can easily see when there’s something seriously wrong with the play. For one thing, count the empty seats! The playwright can sit in on performances to gauge audience reaction. Reader connection is much harder for the novelist, but don’t give up trying.
#6: Playwrights have been known to rewrite and test their revisions before audiences for years before they finally become successful. Theater history is filled with examples of plays being revised and evolving over time. Revision is progress not failure. It took Lin-Manuel Miranda over six years to develop Hamilton. Just don’t tell your publisher you heard that from me.
#7: The 3-act play structure—setup (25%), inciting incident with rising action (50%), and resolution (25%)—is as old as Aristotle and has been used in plays, novels, and movies with reliable success since the beginning of writing. There are lots of good books that cover this subject, and I suggest reading one on classic play structure.
#8: BUT! Form should never upstage (forgive me) the key elements of character, plot, setting, and narration. Form is a scaffold for writing not the goal of the writing.
Finally: Every rule, every precedent is made to be broken by the right author who brilliantly shatters it while holding the reader spellbound.
Keep your hands moving. And your eyes and ears wide open. – moe
Kate Flora: Since the years are slipping away ever faster and travel is wearing, my husband and I declared that 2026 would be the year of travel. While I hate the term “bucket list,” we do have places we want to visit, and so the travel has begun.
For the past two weeks, we’ve been traveling around merry old England. First staying at our favorite hotel in London, The Chesterfield in Mayfair. Then we took a train up to Oxford to join a friend for a little jaunt through some charming Cotswold villages. For me, an avid (if not particularly skilled) gardener, part of the trip involved a visit to Hidcote gardens, which are lovely.
As we moved from what felt like little garden rooms created by tall, groomed hedges, I was constantly thinking about what ideas for plant arrangements I might bring home and include in my own gardens. The trouble is, as was very obvious, I don’t have a large staff of gardeners or a generous budget for plants. Still, I was reminded that my habit of buying single plants doesn’t work as well as when plants are massed. I particularly like plants with distinctive foliage. Bright yellow greens. Variegated leaves of cream and green, or deep purple foliage. I also love flowers, lots and lots of flowers. It would be fair to say that my gardening style is somewhat controlled chaos.
We then returned to London to see a play, dine at a private club, and then we and two friends piled into a car and drove to another part of the Cotswolds. We visited more gardens. Ate two tasting menus, one from a Michelin-starred chef, (three-hour dinners, anyone?) and stayed at elegant country houses.
For our last two days, one of the party wanted to see Dartmoor, so we did that. The route to our fancy inn was terrifying…down those barely one-lane roads bounded by hedgerows that concealed menacing stone walls. Not the sort of place you’d want to drive at night. Of course, being a crime writer, I pictured wild chases on those narrow, twisty roads. It’s natural, I think, when a place has grounds, to imagine where one might place a body. And who, among the very formal staff, has dark secrets. Who will be the victim and who will be the killer? Will I place the body in the bluebell wood?
You can take the writer out of the country and expose her to another culture, but the imagination never stays home.
We flew home on Sunday, a journey that, by itself, has left us both in need of a few days to recover. We always travel with carryon suitcases, which means, for two weeks, that they are heavy. When we went to board the plane, instead of a jetway, there were three flights of stairs down to a bus waiting on the tarmac, and then a very long, scary flight of stairs from the bus to the plane. Never mind how difficult it is to reach the overhead bins to stow the darned suitcase. Ready to depart, we were delayed when they discovered that the stairs refused to detach from the plane. As the pilot said, “We’ve got a bunch of engineers down there trying to figure out what to do.”
Reentry meant coming home to gardens that have tripled in size, and weeds that are lush and healthy. It also means the perpetual dilemma: garden or write? For the next few weeks, between library gigs, I’ll be trying to balance the two.
A reminder, someone who leaves a comment on a post this month will win a bundle of books.
We had a lot of good luck on our recent two-week visit to Ireland.
The weather was sunny and warm almost every day.
A lamb with its mother, minutes after being born.
We were able to spend a good deal of time with my wonderful Irish cousins, who have become so dear to us though we only met in person two years ago. It was a joy to be at their farm in Ventry again, sharing meals, meeting their newest grandchild and watching a lamb being born.
For four days we were able to take in Feile na Bealtaine, a volunteer-organized art festival in the seaside town of Dingle. A highlight of Feile na Bealtaine was the standing room only launch by local historian Pat Neligan of a collection of stories called The Spy In The Snug.
Pat Neligan
The book features “tales of courage, resilience and hope” on the Dingle Peninsula, and features “explorers and spies, soldiers and sailors, murderers, pirates, heroes and heroines.”
For those unfamiliar with Irish pubs, a snug is a tiny private space with direct access to the bar, historically used by women (for whom it was unseemly to enjoy a pint in the public part of the pub) and anyone else who wants to drink or have a meeting safe from prying eyes.
The title of Neligan’s book is taken from one of the 14 stories within, a tale of a Nazi spy sneaking into Dingle during World War Two.
Neligan’s Bar on Main Street in Dingle
The hotel in Dingle where the launch was held is a stone’s throw from his family’s pub. Neligan is a well known gatherer of stories and interpreter of folklore, and copies of the book flew out the door. Clearly, when Pat Neligan speaks and writes, Dingle listens and reads.
We also attended a book launch for a gorgeous ornithology/art book called Birdstyle by Gordon D’Arcy, whose illustrations of the birds of Ireland and prose describing them is stunning.
The audience was filled with accomplished birders, and it was a pleasure to listen in on their spirited conversation with D’Arcy about favorite birding spots and memories.
Gordon D’Arcy’s painting of a Gray Heron graced the cover of the Feile na Bealtaine program.
One evening we attended a concert by a terrific local concertina player named Caroline Keane. She’ll be performing in Farmington on July 16 and Belfast on July 17, so MCW readers interested in some high energy Irish music should take note.
We took a lot of photos, as we always do, and I’ll close this post with a sampling of those, because you never can fill your brain with enough images of beautiful places, can you?
Sheep and sea in Co. Mayo.
The sea off Slieve League in Co. Donegal, the second highest sea cliffs in Ireland. Spectacular!
Dunes on the Ventry Strand, site of one of our many beach walks.
The beach at Achill Island in Co. Mayo. The fog bank rolled in off the sea on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and cleared as quickly as it appeared.
Brenda Buchanan sets her novels and short stories in Maine. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. Brenda’s short story, “Means, Motive, and Opportunity,” was included in the anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021 and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. A short story called “Cape Jewell,” was published in Snakeberry: Best New England Crime Stories 2025, and another short story “Crime of Devotion” was published this spring in Murder Most Senior, an anthology presented by Jacqueline Winspear in association with the Malice Domestic conference.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), Maureen Milliken (Thursday), and special guest Elizabeth DeWolfe (Friday).
In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:
An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.
And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora
