Marilyn's Musings

            A couple of weekends ago, I was on a panel at Malice Domestic, the mystery conference. Our moderator asked me and the other panelists about setting. How and why did we choose the places where we set our books? I said briefly that I had set my books in places that I know well – a fictional version of my hometown, Danville, Virginia, and a near-future version of Albany, New York, where I live and work. But it is more complicated than knowing these places well. The places I have set my books and short stories have been reshaped by my imagination.             In fact, the first book in my Lizzie Stuart series was set in London and Cornwall, England. Both I and my sleuth had been on vacation there. In the second book, Lizzie moved from her hometown in Kentucky to “Gallagher, Virginia”. She works at a fictional university and is now director of the fictional In...

            Last week, I attended a presentation and discovered that without thinking I had headed to the same seat in the auditorium that I’d occupied the week before. I sat down and realized that my seatmates were the same two people I’d sat beside a week earlier. I pointed that out to them and we had a lively exchange about how we – and our students – tend to claim a seat on the first day and automatically return to it.  We humans are creatures of habit. Whether it’s the seat we sit in, the side of the bed that we sleep on, or whether we have mayo or mustard on our sandwich, we tend to make a choice and stick with it. We are offended and annoyed when someone fails to acknowledge our choices – especially when they ignore our claims to ownership. How dare they sit in our chair? Well-developed characters also are creatures of habit. A character’s habits may provide information about his preferences, his attitudes, and/or his belief system. A cha...