Guest blogger Blaize Clement

RO: In one of the first reviews for Pushing Up Daisies, some delightful person wrote in Library Journal that .."writers like Rosemary Harris and Blaize Clement were redefining cozy..."

Well call me happy. I realize I'm a newcomer, but how that four letter C word is still in use is a little beyond me..but that's another blog...

Anyway, I had read one Dixie Hemingway book (Blaize's series) and despite the appearance of the word catsitter in the title, Even Catsitters Get the Blues, the b0ok - and the author - are more edgy, quirky, a little naughty, and laugh out loud funny than you might think!
I was lucky enough to meet Blaize at Sleuthfest last month and asked her to come visit us at Jungle Red.

Here's Blaize's take on Inner Critics....something I know I can identify with and I bet you can, too.

Maybe mystery writers are harder on themselves than other people, or maybe we're just more willing to admit it. Whatever, it seems like any time I talk to another mystery writer, we end up laughing and/or groaning about our inner critics. Mine not only wakes me in the middle of the night to tell me I've given a singular verb to a plural noun, it also condemns my work habits. If I sleep late one morning and slog around all day in a ratty robe and slippers and don't write a lick but eat potato chips and watch some sappy tear-jerker on TV, my inner critic immediately scorns me for being a loser who sleeps late and slogs around in her robe and eats potato chips. It doesn't stop there, either. It goes on to say I'll always be a loser and there's nothing I or anybody else in the whole friggin' universe can do about it.

On other days, even if I set my alarm for an ungodly hour when birds aren't awake yet, my inner critic continues to sneer at my slothfulness. So I eat oatmeal for penance and work nonstop to demonstrate that while I may be a potato-chip-eating slob, I am valiantly trying to become disciplined, not to mention shampooed and flat-ironed. I'm perfumed too, because my inner critic says I should use up all those free cosmetic-counter samples before they evaporate. Not that they have anything to do with writing, but because scent evaporation would be wasteful and therefore further proof of my slothfulness. Besides, if I don't try them I'll never know how they smelled, which would be some kind of loss of an opportunity for research, and God knows being a writer carries with it a mandate for research.

There's also the matter of dress. My inner critic would prefer me to be the kind of writer who wears floaty hand-painted silk dresses with vague ruffles falling from them. That will never happen, of course, no matter how good I smell, but if a movie is ever done of my life I hope the actress playing me will wear things like that. That's one place where my inner critic and I are in agreement, although I doubt I'd be a better writer if my jeans didn't have shaggy edges.

The only good thing about my inner critic is that she's been around as long as I have, and both of us have become a bit less tyrannical. Sometimes I catch her shrugging her shoulders and rolling her eyes in a who-the-blip-cares way, pretty much like I do about a lot of stuff that used to make me rabid. My hope is that the next time I sleep late and slog around all day in my pj's and watch dumb movies and eat potato chips, she'll approve it as research.

Visit Blaize at http://dixiehemingway.wordpress.com/about/
Rosemary