Color me, color us, color you...?

 

HALLIE EPHRON: The other day here on Jungle Red, Debs was talking about the cobalt blue bulb-forcing vases she passed up at the spring antiques show in Round Top, Texas.

Cobalt blue is my color, too. I’m a sucker for any not-terribly-antique cobalt glass or stoneware.

My closet is a different story entirely. My color? Well, once upon a time it was hot pink. Then, for a while, red.

But taking a realistic look at what’s in my closet, I’d have to say currently it’s black. Why oh why do I keep buying the same black top. Over and over.

What’s your color in your kitchen? What about in your closet?? Are you in a rut or happily at home on your color wheel?

LUCY BURDETTE: My color in my home is green–all kinds of forest-y shades, rather than kelly.

I’m afraid that like you Hallie, my clothes tend to black, black and black. I am looking for some red and peach-colored things this spring, but those don’t seem to be popular right now.

I had a color wheel done years ago, but my hair color has changed drastically so I’m not sure the recommended colors still hold:).

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Lucy, I suspect once you go full silver with your hair, intense colors work best.

I used to have a wardrobe full of autumn colors that looked great with my (maintained with a lot of effort) red hair.

Now, the only things from that era that don’t make me look jaundiced are dark chocolate brown. When I put on one of those lovely sweaters in sand, or buff, or khaki I used to look like a Victorian archeologist. Now I look like the Mummy.

The colors in my kitchen reflect the brights I wear now - white everything with cabinet doors trimmed in a minty green/blue and the woodwork in Carribbean green. Refreshing in the summer and cheerful in the winter.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: My clothes are black, no matter what I do, or how I experiment, they are black. And I’m sticking with it.

 Our house is truly multi-colored–the dining room is tuscan yellow and dark green, the living room is taupe/latte with a navy leather couch and the library is cobalt blue. My office is painted “Tawny Antler” which is meaningless, but I think it’s the color of a lion. 🦁

Upstairs, the hallway is forest green, and the main bedroom is pale pale lavender with a very pale blue ceiling.The first guest bedroom is hot pink with white trim. The second guest bedroom is baby lettuce green.

I know you're laughing, but it all works and I love it. I know if someone did my color wheel, the poor defeated colorist would just say–stick with black.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm laughing here, Hallie. I swear every single pair of pants (except for a couple of pairs of jeans) in my closet are black. And with the jeans I'm just as likely to wear black tops.

I do love intense colors, though, especially in the hot pink/magenta/raspberry range, and jewel colors. I'm finding that the lighter my hair gets, the worse I look in pastels. I had my colors done decades ago and I was (then) supposedly a Summer, but most of those colors always seemed washed out to me.

My house, in comparison to my black overloaded closet, is a riot of color; gold in the main hall, powder room and guest room, terracotta in the guest bath, apple green with cobalt accents in the kitchen, two different blues in the upstairs bedroom and office. No grays and neutrals for me!

RHYS BOWEN: I do wear black pants in winter, but no black tops. I look awful in black, as if I’m the walking dead.  It’s funny about colors. I’ll suddenly get an urge to buy turquoise or royal blue or beige or even pink and I tend to go for that color all year. If you look at my wardrobe you can see my light blue year and my green year and my yellow year. And I wonder how a therapist would interpret this urge for a particular color? A year I felt happy/confident/depressed? (recently has been silver/gray. Accepting old age?)

My house in Arizona was completely made over before we bought it recently. So it is southwestern colors outside and inside all fashionable gray and white. White quartz counters. White walls, gray flooring, white cabinets. It is very peaceful, especially in a hot climate. 

My furniture is also gray and white with a patterned carpet. My walls in California are all a very light yellow-ivory color. Happy and sunny. My floors all light carpet or wood.

So I guess I’m either a very simple person or a very boring one!

JENN McKINLAY: Blue and green - all different shades - in both my wardrobe and my house. I like light colors - bright and happy - with one accent wall in a different but complementary color to break things up a bit.

I do wear a lot of pink for the same reason - it’s cheerful.

HALLIE: So have we spotted a trend?? A riot of color in our surrounds but black on our backs as some of us go grey?

What do your household/clothing colors reveal about your sense of self these days??

Blogging again! Jeri Westerson is back at it and invites you...

Congratulations to Deb Romano and Alicia Kullas, winners of Edith Maxwell's SCONE COLD DEAD. Deb and Alicia, please contact edith@edithmaxwell.com.

HALLIE EPHRON: I still remember my first "encounter" with Jeri Westerson. She'd come out with her first (hilarious and mystifying) medieval mystery and was showing up at talks in full knight's regalia.

Since then, having written a myriad of mystery subgenres (Medieval, Tudor, Sherlockian, LGBTQ, Historical, and Paranormal!), she's checking in with us today with a look back and a look ahead...  where old is new again.

JERI WESTERSON: Many years ago in the early 2000s, before social media became the behemoth it is today—for better or worse—I, like many other authors were told to have a blog.

Agents and editors wanted authors and would-be authors to get an online presence. No longer could authors dwell in the shadows to sell their books. They had to be a “personality”. A commodity that the reading public could get to know. No more J.D. Salingers.

I thought about what I could do. I wasn’t yet published as a book author, though I was a freelance journalist for two local dailies and several weeklies in southern California. I didn’t want to write another “my journey to publication” blog. Those were a dime a dozen. I wanted something more interesting, something that could possibly raise my profile, so when the time came that I did get published, I might just have a ready-made audience.

So I got myself a domain name of “Getting Medieval” and decided it would be, more or less, a magazine of history and mystery.

And I’d throw in some interviews, not just of authors, but of swordsmiths, people competing as knights (yes, it’s a sport), and historians who would talk about their various subjects of expertise.

It was, of course, the interviews that put me on the map. And I would advertise those in particular to the bigger blogs out there that posted about crime writing and writers.

In fact, this strategy proved so successful, that when I went to my first Bouchercon with my agent who took me under his wing and introduced me to various Important People in the biz, that a lot of people recognized my name from my blog.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. That’s paying your dues and nose to the grindstone and a bunch of other metaphors.

As a matter of fact, the formula worked so well, I even had a blog for my LGBTQ mystery series, the Skyler Foxe Mysteries

And another one for my character Crispin Guest in the medieval mystery genre, done in first person as my character.

And then I was invited to be a part of the group blog Poe’s Deadly Daughters (now defunct) with several other female mystery writers, each taking our own week.

So that was FOUR blogs I was writing.

I was younger then. Had more energy.

After some years of success with my Crispin Guest Medieval Noir mysteries getting published and nominated for awards, it seemed to me that social media was the way to go to promote myself, and I decided to stop blogging and give up that domain name. I slowly weened myself from all those other blogs since I simply did not have the time to do it anymore.

Fast forward to today. Facebook was my biggest media platform. It was even paying me for “engagement”. I never got into Twitter, and I used Instagram and TikTok sporadically. Then with the most recent election, fascism came to corporate America, and Facebook was no longer a safe place to be, what with the rules of civility gone out the window, a directive from the top of that corporation.

That meant bye-bye any Meta products like Facebook and Instagram (and bye-bye engagement money).

TikTok and Twitter were never my jam so they were easy to dump. I migrated to Bluesky which is a much healthier place to be, but it’s not the same kind of engagement one used to have on Facebook.

And then it occurred to me. It worked once. Why not try blogging again?

So here I am. Back to the old formula of interviews, and I started with longtime friend and colleague Gary Phillips. Who doesn’t like Gary Phillips? He and I had both served terms as president of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America, I have done several stories for the wide variety of anthologies he has edited, and we’re both from the same part of L.A.

Next I asked James R. Benn , the bestselling author of the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series. And then it will be my narrator for my audiobooks (still to post). And who knows where it will go from there?

Sprinkled in between are articles on history from the two genres of historical mystery I currently write, the Tudor era and the late Victorian era (for my Sherlockian pastiche series An Irregular Detective Mystery where a former Baker Street Irregular takes up the mantle of detective).

There will be author guest blog posts coming up as well, and I’m looking forward to that from my author friends out there.

It’s a case of everything old is new again. But hey, here on Jungle Red Writers, they’ve been going strong for years. It’s a good idea to take a leaf from their book and squeeze myself back into the blogosphere. Why not? The water’s fine. Come to http://jeriwesterson.com/blog/ to get started.

HALLIE EPHRON: We're thrilled to welcome Jeri (back? back again??) and boy we so agree: that "old interview" formula still works for us.

Today's question: When you hop over and check out a new-to-you blogger, what are you looking for?

Welcoming back Edith Maxwell/Maddie Day and Scone Cold Dead

 HALLIE EPHRON: Once again it's our pleasure to host Edith Maxwell/Maddie Day and celebrate the release of Scone Cold Dead, her thirteenth Country Store Mystery.  

Welcome back, Edith! What a great cover! Seems like only yesterday...

EDITH MAXWELL: Thank you, Hallie. I’ve made appearances here at Jungle Reds from the start. Hallie also hosted me back in 2015 for the release of book #1, Flipped for Murder. In “How the Heck Did we get to Indiana?”, I explained how I arrived at the perfect setting for my first series written as Maddie Day.

I was honored to have Hank endorse the book, and I helped launch it at that year’s Magna Cum Murder conference in Indianapolis, birthplace of many a Maxwell including my father. 

For those readers who haven’t been with me for the whole journey, I thought I might recap the series for you.

• Flipped for Murder #1 October 2015
• Grilled for Murder #2 May 2016
• When the Grits Hit the Fan #3 March 2017
• Biscuits and Slashed Browns #4 January 2018
• Death Over Easy #5 July 2018
• Strangled Eggs and Ham #6 July 2019
• Christmas Cocoa Murder #6.5 Sept 2019
• Nacho Average Murder #7 July 2020
• Candy Slain Murder #8 Oct 2020
• No Grater Crime #9 Sept 2021
• Batter Off Dead #10 March 2022
• Christmas Scarf Murder #10.5 September 2022
• Four Leaf Cleaver #11 January 2023
• Deep Fried Death #12 December 2023
• Scone Cold Dead #13 April 2025

In the first book, Robbie Jordan has finished fixing up the rundown country store she bought in Brown County Indiana, and she’s opening the doors to Pans ’N Pancakes, her breakfast-and-lunch restaurant in the store, for the first time. A couple of days later a murder victim is found with one of Robbie’s cheesy biscuits stuffed in her mouth, and Robbie’s future is suddenly in peril.

Leapfrog to Book #3, When the Grits Hit the Fan, takes place during a snowy winter while Robbie is working on renovations upstairs to make a few bed and breakfast rooms. A man found dead in an ice fishing hole is Robbie’s next case, and later in the book Robbie and her new boyfriend Abe are attacked during an ice storm in a remote cottage in the woods.

For that release, which coincided with the release of one of my Quaker Midwife Mysteries, Julia and Hank did a fun interview with Edith and Maddie, and for my launch party, Maddie and I interviewed each other.

Four Leaf Cleaver features a St. Patrick’s Day competition in Robbie’s store – and murder. When I crowd-sourced a title and Grace Koshida suggested Four Leaf Cleaver, I knew I had a winner. I promptly wrote a cleaver into the story.

Jenn hosted me for the release of Biscuits and Slashed Browns.

Debs hosted me for a joint celebration when No Grater Crime released, along with Alyssa Maxwell and her new book – even though we’re not related! Robbie has the first death from poisoned food in her restaurant and gets to work fast to find out who is trying to sabotage her business. The book ends happily with her marriage to Abe O’Neill.

In Batter Off Dead, the murder of a senior citizen eerily echoes one in the past, and both are linked to police Lieutenant Buck Bird, now a good friend of Robbie’s. Julia was sweet enough to host me but horrified to hear that I write into the headlights without benefit of a plot!

Fast forward: And now #13, Scone Cold Dead. A man’s body is found dead on Aunt Adele’s sheep farm, and it turns out to be someone she knew long ago. But was he murdered? Another mysterious stranger shows up in town. The bank manager has a history with the corpse, as well.

Robbie spies a face looking out from the second floor of an abandoned brick farmhouse. Adele becomes oddly tight-lipped about everything, even when the police want her to talk. In this book, Robbie is weeks away from giving birth. She tries not to put herself and her baby in danger – but she has to clear Adele’s name and get to the bottom of the mystery.

I’m grateful to have shared so many releases here. Thirteen books in ten years is a good long run for a series, and Robbie and Abe now have a newborn. I’ve made the decision to let her go on out top. Yes, I’m ending the Country Store Mysteries. You’re hearing it here first.

My deep apologies to ardent fans of the series (sorry, Jay!), but I’m at the stage of my life when I don’t want to work quite as hard. My publisher wanted to continue the Country Store Mysteries, which made the decision even more difficult.

Still, I have shifting personal priorities (one of whom is named Ida Rose), and they’re important to me. Also, nobody wants a series to go stale for readers or author. I wanted to end it while I still loved creating the stories.

I’ll still be writing the Cozy Capers Book Group series and the Cece Barton Mysteries, plus short stories and possibly a new project or two, and I hope you’ll check out my other series if you haven’t already.

Thank you to all my followers who fell in love with Robbie and the South Lick gang. I often receive messages or comments asking for the next book and saying they miss their favorite characters. I know I’ll miss Adele and Samuel, Buck and Corrine, Danna and Turner, Abe and Sean and Freddie, not to mention Birdy, Maceo, and Cocoa – and Robbie. Who knows, maybe a few of them will pop up in a short story somewhere.

Readers: Do you have a favorite book or character in the Country Store series? Or tell us about a series whose ending made you sad.

BOOK GIVEAWAY! Edith is giving away a signed copy of SCONE COLD DEAD to two luck commenters.

In Scone Cold Dead, country store and café owner Robbie Jordan is just weeks away from giving birth, and it seems Robbie and her husband, dad-to-be Abe, aren’t the only ones grappling with anxiety. A stranger is causing a stir in town and Robbie’s Aunt Adele appears unusually preoccupied at the baby shower. But when someone finds a body in the ram field on Adele’s sheep farm, it’s Robbie’s turn to be worried. Especially after Chief Buck Bird uncovers a troubling link between Adele and the possible murder victim. Robbie has no choice but to knit the clues together and solve this mystery before anything else gets flocked up . . .