A couple of nights ago, I heard a friend – author Leslie Budewitz – read from her new book, BUTTER OFF DEAD.
It’s the third in her Food Lovers’ Village cozy mystery series, set in the fictional town of Jewel Bay, Mont., which oh-so-coincidentally resembles Budewitz’s home of Bigfork, Mont., at the north end of Flathead Lake. Budewitz also writes the Spice Shop mystery series, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Her second book in that series, GUILTY AS CINNAMON, comes out in December.
Every time I think about juggling two different series simultaneously, my head hurts. These last few weeks, I’ve had the tiniest taste of Budewitz’s reality as I finish the final edits on my next book, DISGRACED, coming out in March, while rewriting the first draft of the still-unnamed novel to follow.
DISGRACED is set in Wyoming, and the next book is set in Arizona. A few times each day, I have to make the mental shift from sagebrush to redrock. Then, when I’m done, I look out the window and see forested hills. Huhhhhh? It’s all very disorienting.
I tell myself that the mental tap-dance keeps me nimble, yet another good exercise to stave off Alzheimer’s in my dotage. But mostly, it just makes me feel like I’m in that scary, head-exploding scene from Scrubs. Only in my version, Dr. Cox intones, “You’ll never make it as a writer.”
Time to, a la Budewitz, tap-dance faster.
Oh, what a great clip! Not coincidentally, that’s how my head feels sometimes — and how my office looks all the time! But no matter where are stories take us, both of us have the great good fortune to live and work in paradise!