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My Myrtle Clover series is set in a small, Southern town. My Memphis Barbeque series is set in a larger city.

There’s a certain gossipy element that small-town settings provide. People in small towns may know more about you than you wish they did. Not only that, they may compare your behavior to other members of your family from generations back–favorably or non.

Larger cities, on the other hand, can provide an exciting backdrop for your story. At night in Memphis, you never know who you might run into on Beale street. The city is faster-paced and music, food, and the Mississippi River are threads that run through everything.

I’m having a good time writing both settings. I grew up in a small town, but I’ve since lived in larger cities. I love the sense of community I get in a town, and the cultural/entertainment opportunities available in larger ones. The suburbs get a bad rap, but I think I’ve gotten a little taste of both worlds there.

Are you pulled toward small towns or larger cities for your settings?

And today I’m making a guest appearance at Marybeth Geer-Smith’s blog, Desperately Searching for My Inner Mary Poppins.

It’s a Gnome-Approved interview. :)

Hope y’all will pop over and visit me there.

Book Release Parties:

I know plenty of authors who have awesome book release parties. My friends Jim and Joyce Lavene recently had one at their son’s restaurant with a band and everything.

I decided not to do anything, myself. Parties where I or my book are the center of attention should be something fun, but I’m just too introverted to have a good time. Instead, I’m looking forward to a pretty busy promotional schedule–I’m going to be giving interviews, doing guest posts, and generally hanging out a lot online. This is perfect for me. Besides, I’m in the middle of polishing up my manuscript for my next deadline.

One thing I am interested in is a Twitter party. I keep hearing about them, know you text back and forth using the # key, but I don’t totally understand. Maybe for my next release?

It’s Thursday, so that means I’m cooking up trouble at the Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.

On the menu today is Frogmore Stew. No, I’m not kidding—it’s a Deep South specialty. If you want to know what it is, you’ll just have to click over.

Interestingly enough, I’m writing two series with two completely different protagonists. Well, duh, you’re saying. They’d better be different, since they’re different books for different publishers.

But the biggest thing that’s so different about them is that Myrtle (the Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink) is a horrible cook. Her cookbook’s pages get stuck together and she blithely continues cooking—not knowledgeable enough in the kitchen to realize the ingredients couldn’t possibly work well together. She sets off the smoke detector during a dinner party.

Lulu Taylor is totally different. In fact, she owns her own barbeque restaurant in Memphis. Her son mans the pit there and cooks up the best ribs in the South. Not only does she know how to cook, she’s renowned for it.

My cooking skills are somewhere in the middle. Let’s put it this way—what I know how to cook, I cook well.

Luckily for my family, I’m learning to cook wonderful recipes at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen.

And…bonus for foodie folks: The site is currently running a contest. Visit Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen to enter to win the weekly drawing. The prize is a $25 gift certificate to the Williams-Sonoma kitchenware and gourmet food store.

Good luck!

As a homemaker/household engineer/WHATever, sometimes it can be challenging to channel a sinister mood. Communion with the dark side is important if you’re creating murder. But it can be especially hard to channel if you’re in between laundry loads and oven timers and looking to write for 15 minutes. Nothing very foreboding about the house…well, except for the spider that sneaked under the hutch in the dining room. Or maybe that stain on the 7 year old’s cute new Kelly’s Kids skort that you have a sinking feeling won’t be coming out. You KNEW you shouldn’t have let her wear it to Bible School. They used paint there and it WASN’T the washable kind.

This is when it’s useful for me to close my eyes and conjure up something scary. It’s build-a-mood. Things like the Anderson County Fair–the 1970s version of it, anyway. Oh my. There were some scary looking folks that both attended and worked there…especially the fellow who wouldn’t stop the double Farris wheel ride, even though my little sister was about to puke. I mean, come on–we were the only kids on the ride, anyway…would it have killed him to have stopped it? He grinned a gap-toothed grin and ROUND we went again a few more times. Terrifying.

Fairs still scare me. They’re loud and I’m a quiet person. The flashing lights are alarming if you’re prone to migraines. The huge stuffed animals you win are frighteningly hefty if you lug them around for a couple of hours before you leave. The amount of money you pay to ride the rides, eat the greasy food, and park is also scary. There are hordes of people there and I’m an introvert. The nausea-inducing rides are absolutely diabolical (paired with tortuous shrieks). I used to run for the animal/agricultural areas to detox from the overstimulation. This blog has become a tribute to a phobia, but point being, the memory of the fair can transport me to a menacing place that sets the mood for murder.

Other genres also require various moods. Would it have been hard to write a chick-lit book like The Devil Wears Prada if you were slopping around the house in sweatpants? What about romance writers? They have to set an amorous mood in their books—maybe that’s hard to conjure if you’re miffed at your significant other.

So, I’m curious. How does everyone gear themselves up to write emotional scenes—whatever the genre? Inquiring minds want to know. :)

Unfortunately for him, my son came into my room a few minutes ago, flopped on my bed and said he was bored. He quickly revised that statement when he saw the gleam in my eye. “Wait. No, I’m not bored! Mommmm!”

I gave him my list of things to do. He picked ‘write blog.’

Here’s the post he wrote for my blog. It’s entitled “Wassup, People of the World?” :

Yo! Watz up, Diggy Dogs? Elizabeth Craig is in the house. Who wants to chitty chat with moi? Cmon…somebody HAS to want to chit chat with me?!?!?!?!?!?! :) Cmon, ask me a question about my book….whatever it is called, anyway. Let’s make the roof explode with questions!

Okay, Elizabeth is back now. Yes, the texting culture has definitely affected the next generation, if anyone wondered. And, no, my son isn’t a gangsta: he’s a 12 year old blond suburbanite.

But still, there are some things that Generation Next knows instinctively that took some learning on my part:

Adapt quickly. Media and applications are changing all the time.

Short and to-the-point updates. I’m thinking that William Faulkner and Henry James would have a hard time editing for the length and attention spans of 2009. But Ernest Hemingway? Maybe not so much. The point is, it’s not a good idea to ramble these days—not with blogs. And you couldn’t ramble with Twitter or Facebook status updates, even if you wanted to.

Have an appealing heading. If you want your post to stand out on Twitter or Networked Blogs, practice writing your headlines. Teasers seem to work best on Twitter.

Encourage a response. Maybe not so much of an appeal for response as my son penned in his blog post for me, but it’s good to encourage dialogue and a sharing of ideas. That’s the best part of social media, after all.

Have fun. That’s one of the hardest things for me to remember. I tend to look at nearly everything in terms of work and minutes used to complete a task. But to Gen Next, this is fun….all they want to do is to network with other people. And they’re very good at it.

For us to compete in their world and stay relevant, we’re going to need to find the fun in social media. Because it’s going to be around, in some form or fashion, from here on out.

This is Elizabeth Diggy Dog, signing out, yo.