Why I Kept This Book a Secret for 3 Years…

For three years I kept a secret from almost everyone in my life. My friends, family, my writing community, even my agent. (Only my husband knew what I was up to.)

Why all the secrecy? Well, I wanted to try an experiment and I wanted to do it just for me. Without any pressure or expectation.

You see, after nearly 20 years of being on deadline, and writing 3-4 books per year, I needed a break. It had been so long since I’d written anything just “for fun.”

So, I asked myself: “What would you write if there was no pressure of selling it? If it was just for you?”

The answer was: A murder mystery.

But I’d never written one before. So I spent 3 years secretly teaching myself how. And remembering what it felt like to write for the pure enjoyment of writing.

Releasing that pressure made all the difference. Not only did I wake up every single morning excited to write it (which made it so much easier to finish!), more importantly, I fell back in love with writing again.

Of course I wanted to sell it (eventually). But I didn’t make that the immediate goal. I kept that goal far on the sidelines. Instead, I focused on the discovery process, the fun plot puzzles to solve, the joyful challenge of writing in a new genre.

When I finally sent the book to my agent, his feedback made me cry.

He said: “I can tell how much fun you had writing this.”

And he was right. It was the most fun I’d ever had writing anything.

Eventually we did sell it to Bantam Books (Random House) and it just released on September 22 2026.

How to Write a Murder is about a group of mystery writers who get stranded at a remote mystery-writing conference and when one turns up dead, they realize the events are unfolding like the pages of a well-plotted mystery novel…

This book is a culmination of everything I’ve learned over the past 20 years of writing novels and teaching others how to write theirs.

I wanted to write something that combined my two loves—writing and writing about writing. (And I’d always loved reading mystery novels.)

And then one day I thought:

Plotting the perfect story is a lot of work. So is plotting the perfect murder. What if someone did both?

The answer turned out to be this metafictional twist on the classic mystery novel where writers are both the suspects and the sleuths—and they all know how to get away with murder.

This book is my ode to writing and the mystery genre itself. A love letter to mystery writers and readers alike that both celebrates and exposes the power of storytelling and proves that the pen is always mightier than the sword…and the knife, and the gun, and the bottle of poison…

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

September 22nd, 2026