Mysterious Saturday Spotlight: Lucy Burdette

This past week, I hosted an awesome event at the library: Cookies and Crime -with author Lucy Burdette. A group of teens and adults sat around in a circle and talked about writing, crime, and of course food. I had been to one of her release day parties at R.J. Julia's and it was fabulous - so I knew it was going to be a great night.

Lucy introduced her book series - including those under her real name: Roberta Isleib. She got started writing golf mysteries and she started playing golf because her husband liked the game. Her next series starred a clinical psychologist who wrote an advice column. As a psychologist  herself, Dr. Rebecca Butterman was closer in character to herself. Her current series features a young woman who makes her living as a food critic in Key West.

Writing about a food critic means that Roberta and her husband have try the local cuisine in Key West. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it!  Roberta adds the flavor of Key West into her books. She told us about several entertainers in Key West.

She also talked about how her pets made it into her books, how she raffles off names of characters for charity, and how she makes Pinterest boards for the feel of the book, which sometimes helps the cover designers.

Because her books come out every 9 months, her writing process changes daily in terms of word count. She divides the time she has with a rough estimate of 70,000 words. Then she creates a weekly word count. Writing also happens on the two blogs:  http://www.mysteryloverskitchen.com/ and http://www.jungleredwriters.com/
And or course there's time for cooking and baking for the recipes included in her books.

Then we talked food and cookies!

Some photos:

Once Lucy started talking, I forget to take more pictures. I really wanted one together...next time!

The Book Table: if you haven't picked up one of these, they're great books!

The Cookie Table

Close Up of the Cookies