In my last post, I talked about the possibility of self-publishing a collection of my essays, to be made up of some of the 249 blogs I’ve posted at Maine Crime Writers since the summer of 2011. The response to this idea was very encouraging and one lucky person who commented now owns an autographed copy of Crime & Punctuation. I picked the winner at random, but all the suggestions were very helpful in planning out what I wanted to do next. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who posted a comment.

To my delight, it took me less than a week to pull together a rough draft of the proposed collection and to figure out how to improve upon my original concept. For one thing, there will be fewer sections. While it’s still necessary to organize the essays into topics, rather than just throw them out there willy-nilly, a nine-part structure seem to cover all the bases. They are:

Cozy Mysteries
Historical Novels
My Life in Books
Climbing the Family Tree
People, Real and Fictional
Places
Miscellaneous Tips for Writers
Cats
Odds and Ends

I have a tentative title, too, from the very first blog I wrote for Maine Crime Writers: I Kill People for A Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Murder Mysteries. I know it’s long, but without the subtitle potential readers might get the wrong impression!

Although I’ve now chosen which blogs to include, I’m still fiddling with details. In some cases, an essay could be placed in more than one section. There’s also the problem of repetition. I told some of the same stories, both writing and personal, in more than one blog over the years, but since the context is different, I have to decide whether or not to eliminate all but one instance.

The other decision I have to make is whether or not to include the original date of each essay. I’m editing them, so I can insert updates on information where required, and I’m not putting them in the order they were written.

Decisions. Decisions. All thoughts and suggestions are welcome!

And, of course, before anything is made available to the public, I’ll need to have the whole thing professionally copy edited and get the wonderful cover designer I used for my children’s books to come up with something that will catch the eye of potential buyers.

One more thing I have to share—for the first time in ages, I’m having fun working on a book. That’s worth its weight in gold.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-three books traditionally published and has self published several children’s books. 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 “Deadly Edits” series (A Fatal Fiction) as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.