How to Write a Cozy Mystery (the rules are changing): Episode 314 with Mia Manansala
Episode 314, May 06, 2022, 04:01 AM
Shownotes up front—but scroll down, there’s an announcement!
Mia P. Manansala (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the author of 2 books so far in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series: Arsenic and Adobo and Homicide and Halo-Halo.
I was excited to talk to Mia because I read my way through hundreds of cozies well into my early adulthood, and I thought I knew the genre pretty well—but in coming back to it recently, I could see that things have changed. Just like in romance, there’s far more of an effort to balance reality with the deeply unlikely yet also deeply satisfying elements of the genre that are the reasons we come: Protagonists we love, puzzles to solve and justice to serve and peace to restore—until the next book!
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HEY! We’re gonna do a BIG DEAL SPECIAL THING THIS SUMMER: The #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge. 10 episodes, 10 weeks, 10 assignments—Fiction, Memoir and Non-fiction. Play along all summer, put in a few hours every week and you’ll be ready to take your book to the next level by fall, whether it’s a little baby idea or a big unwieldy draft that’s keeping you up nights. Details TK—sign up HERE to join in.
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