A friend asked that question and found herself in the midst of a brainstorming session around the random title that we had made of the word we’d just been discussing – canolli (don’t ask)! By the end of the conversation I had the makings of a series of cozy mysteries featuring an amateur sleuth, a former Mob hitman running the local Italian eatery, and the potential for romance between the detective’s daughter and the Marshall watching over our mobster. She looked at me at the end and said – “It’s stone soup, isn’t it?”
It is, it so totally is. Keep throwing ideas in the pot and some mesh and some boil out until the full structure of a story is visible. In some ways this is the most fun part of what I do.