. 
There’s something laugh out loud ironic about creating a competant fictional amateur sleuth named Rae Kennedy while simultaneously losing my own reading glasses every fourteen minutes.
As I wrote Rae’s world in this prequel, it became less about solving the murder and more about investigating myself. Somewhere between draft twelve and forty-seven, I realized I wasn’t actually editing sentences. I was interrogating lifestyles and inherited beliefs like a detective with too much caffeine and unresolved childhood people-pleasing tendencies. Every cliché I deleted felt like removing wallpaper from a house I’d been told to live in. “Women should sit cross legged.” Delete. “Success must make the parents proud and look polished.” Delete. “My voice shouldn’t offend anyone.” Absolutely delete.
Writing forced me to slow down enough to hear my own thoughts underneath the static hum of cultural expectations and conditioned actions.
Turns out my nervous system had been speed-walking through life like someone late to a gate at the airport.
Rae’s camera became my excuse to study ordinary moments with unreasonable intensity. A pastry detail. Fog rolling through pine trees. A woman laughing while simultaneously grieving something unexplainable. Cozy mysteries are secretly about this, by the way…not murder. Murder is the glitter bomb that goes off at the craft fair. Cozy mysteries are about people trying to belong to themselves again.
And then there’s Pixel with her tiny camera collar and tortitude, hovering somewhere between “retired sea captain” and “witch with strong opinions about salmon.” She lurks through scenes reminding me that curiosity is healthier than perfection. Also that sometimes the correct response to life is knocking an object off a shelf and walking away dramatically.
The strangest part of writing my first book in the series is that slowing down to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite did not make me less myself. It made me more obvious to myself. I noticed how often I edited my real personality in conversations. How often I caught myself adjusting to fit in to places. How deeply I wanted approval from people, and how I wondered who found Rae “a little too much”… my dentist once told me I was intense as I thought the only side of me I revealed was “chill” as I laid flat out relaxed in the dental chair.
Meanwhile Rae would absolutely have solved the murder while photographing coastal wildflowers and accidentally healing three emotionally constipated townspeople along the way.
Pixel still thinks she deserves co-author credit. Negotiations are ongoing.