Miranda MacLeod's Blog

And why in the world did Miranda and TB decide to write it?

If you haven't heard of it before, Paranormal Women's Fiction is a term that was coined in 2020 when 13 authors of mainstream cozy mystery, urban fantasy, and paranormal romance decided to team up and create a unique genre for readers who craved kick-ass heroines who were in the middle of their lives.

Around 2018, I was experiencing burnout writing sapphic romance and needed something different to spark my creativity again. I had an idea for a mystery series with a young witch turned amateur sleuth. I knew it wouldn't fit my usual audience of readers, so I decided to launch a new pen name, Nicole St Claire, and give paranormal cozy mysteries a try.

Unfortunately, shortly after the first two books were released, I had a series of personal life issues that nearly derailed the series completely, and could have sunk my writing career. Instead of fixing the burnout, it got to the point where the trauma I associated with these books made it impossible to write them. Ironically, this turned out to be a good thing on the sapphic fiction side of things. Around this time, TB and I teamed up on our first co-write, Holly and Ivy, and the rest is history.

However, just because I was struggling writing them didn't mean I didn't want to complete the cozy story in a satisfying way for my new readers. I've told my sapphic readers about this series before, but what I didn't mention then (because she said not to) was that by the time I got to book 4 in the series, the only way I could finish them was to have TB cowrite them with me.

Fast forward to this past fall. With the launch of the new I Heart SapphFic website and several writing projects with grueling deadlines, we were both mentally fried. We needed something totally new to bring the fun back into writing. That's when I remembered the cozy series.

Being in midlife ourselves (TB and I both will turn 49 this year), and having seen some shit over the past few years, we've both become fans of Paranormal Women's Fiction. What's not to love about scrappy divorced women the world wants to dismiss as irrelevant totally kicking butt and beating the bad guys, am I right? We started talking, and we wondered if it would be possible to completely rewrite the old cozy series as PWF, and this time, let's make it sapphic!

So that is what we are doing. If you've read the cozies, many elements will feel familiar. There's a lot of new stuff, too. In fact, Midlife is the Cat's Meow, which is our first book that will be released in the My So-called Hexed Midlife series, isn't simply a rewriting of Spirits, Pies and Alibis. It's actually a mashup of the first two books of the old series. There are several new characters, big changes in the mystery itself, and of course, a sapphic love interest for our recently divorced heroine, Tallulah Shipton.

What you will get in this series is awesome sapphic representation in a genre that currently has little to none. We would be delighted if readers of K.F. Breene, Deanna Chase, Robyn Peterman, and the rest of the Fab 13 authors who started the PWF phenomenon would read and fall in love with our books, too. We're doing our best to deliver characters and stories that are authentic to the PWF experience, just with 100% more sapphic content.

And of course, you will get our usual buffet of quirky characters, snarky humor, and witty banter. There is a main sapphic romance, (and a few for side characters, too), but it will take multiple books to unfold. We hope the excitement of solving murders and battling evil will help you be patient on that front.

TB and I will continue to publish traditional sapphic romance. That's our bread and butter, and we're both full time authors who support ourselves with our writing. How frequently we are able to publish new books in this series will depend a lot on how successful they are, but we do promise you will get a complete and satisfying story over time. We will keep writing them until the series is complete. If you're not sure what you think of this whole PWF thing, we hope you'll give them a try!

We can hardly wait to go on this new adventure with you! More details and a release date for Midlife is the Cat's Meow will be coming soon.

I’m an all-or-nothing person by nature. I rarely dabble. If I take an interest in something new, by week’s end I’ll be boring everyone I know with my newly acquired encyclopedic knowledge of the topic. It’s a trait that has gotten in my way more than once when making life changes.

The trouble is, I know what I’m supposed to do. Whether it’s nutrition, sleep, exercise, organization, or insert healthy life habit here, I’ve read the articles. All of them (see boring encyclopedic knowledge comment above). So in the past, when I’ve set out to make changes at the start of the new year, I’ve gone all in. I would decide to make ALL the changes. Effective immediately. I will walk 10k steps a day! And eat three Mediterranean diet meals! And only buy organic! And make all my closets Instagram worthy! On January 1!

The year I started publishing, I wrote 5 books. The final one, Holme for the Holidays, was supposed to be ready to release on December 1. The week before Thanksgiving, I caught what I thought was a cold, which ended up being the flu, which turned into pneumonia. I was sick for weeks. The book did get released, but not until Christmas Eve. After that, I was barely functional until mid-January.

But here’s the funny thing. Every year prior, I had sworn on January 1 that this was the year I would lose weight, exercise more, etc. And every year by mid-January, I’d already given up because I tried to do all the things at once and couldn’t keep it up. But in 2017 when I went to the doctor for a follow up to the pneumonia, I’d lost 10 lbs! I mean, of course I had. I’d been sick for almost two months and had barely eaten (not recommended). But still! In a weird way, I felt motivated.

After that, I slowly introduced better habits. I refilled the empty fridge with healthier options, but nothing that was too tiring to make because I was still exhausted. I started walking more, but only what I could manage. And I actually saw results. Who knew that slow and steady was better than an all-or-nothing race right out of the gate?

Okay, I guess Aesop, now that I think about it. That whole tortoise and the hare thing. Apparently, it’s taken me nearly five decades to understand the lesson.

The point is, on January 1, I wake up groggy after a poor night’s sleep and staying up too late. There’s still half a bottle of champagne in the fridge, and a shocking amount of ham, cheese, and left-over appetizers. And don’t get me started on the Christmas candy. My tree will still be up for at least another week, and I’ll be lucky if I can fit all the recycling in the bin, let alone clean a whole closet. So instead of running full speed on January 1, I like to take the first couple weeks of the year to think and plan.

Next Monday, January will be half over. By then, I will have worn my Fitbit every day even if I haven’t hit 10k steps a single time. I’ll have written a daily schedule each morning, even if I have to carry half of it over to the next day. There will be no fancy cheese in my fridge. Slow and steady. I’ve got 353 days left in 2023 and there’s no need to wear myself out.

Back in February, 2020, right before the world came to a screeching halt, I saw an ad on my FaceBook page for a local business called Pinot's Palette. It's the type of art studio known as a paint and sip, which means you go there to drink wine and learn how to paint. The wine is important, because the more wine you consume, the better your painting will be.

I decided to go, and it was so much fun that I was determined to sign up for a class each month. But then, pandemic. Luckily, after several weeks, the studio figured out how to offer kits for pick up, which you could do from the comfort of home while watching a live video class. I was thrilled, both because it meant I had an excuse to leave my house long enough to drive to the studio to get my kit, which was possibly the most excitement I had all week, and also because I didn't have to worry about driving home after the "sipping" portion of the evening.

So, I did a few of these classes, and then the studio came up with a truly brilliant idea. They started offering the classes super cheap if you had your own supplies and only wanted to access their pre-recorded video. At this point in the pandemic, I may have been going a little loopy, because the next thing I knew, I had signed up for fifteen classes. Just in the month of June. A few days later, the Amazon guy was on my doorstep with an easel, an assortment of paint brushes, twelve jars of acrylic paint, and two dozen canvases.

For about four weeks, all I did was paint. It was actually a lot of fun, although I did miss the camaraderie of strangers who were also drinking wine and struggling to make something remotely similar to the example painting. While I was doing this, I started thinking about the story that would eventually become Hearts in Motion. I knew that one of the main characters would be a doctor, and that her love interest would need to be very different from her in every way. In short, this is how the character of Tyne Briggs became the owner of a paint and sip studio.

Check out the gallery below for photos of some of my pandemic paint and sip creations!

When creating The Love Project, TB and I began with the concept of a romance where an advice columnist would fall in love with the letter writer she was supposed to be helping to find love. I'll start by saying I'm an avid reader of Dear Abby, and also of a local Boston Globe columnist named Meredith Goldstein who writes Love Letters, and whose memoir, Can't Help Myself, was one of the early starting points in creating the character of Joni Fisher.

Right away we sensed this book would be different from our previous two collaborations, where instant attraction led our main characters into the bedroom fairly early in the story and deeper emotions built over time. The Love Project would be a slow burn romance, one where our characters would become friends first before developing romantic feelings or attraction.

Believe it or not, the first thing we established about Hope was her name. We needed her to be able to call herself something clever when she wrote her letter, and we loved being able to play with Hope/Hopeless. But if Joni's project was going to be able to help her, we knew we needed a really good reason why Hope was hopeless about love.

As the story took shape, it became very clear to us that the cause for Hope's distress was that she fell on the asexual spectrum, in her case demisexual, and did not have the knowledge or awareness about this type of sexuality to understand and express why she felt so different from most of the people she knew.

Both TB and I have written characters in the past that are not "typical" stars of a romance, including a character with OCD and a character with autism. One of the joys of these projects is affirming that love is for everyone. The challenge is getting it right while making the character feel real. Research is a necessity.

For The Love Project, I read multiple articles about demisexuality, blogs written by people who identify as demisexual, as well as visiting several message boards and social media groups. What I found is there are as many ways of being demisexual as there are people who identify as such. Demisexuality does not involve a diagnosis. There's not really a list where if you check five or more items a doctor will tell you that you're demisexual.

Although, like all really important things in life, there is a Buzzfeed quiz to help you decide if this identity might be right for you.

It's never easy to bring a fictional character to life in a convincing way, but I find it even harder when I'm trying to balance the "textbook definition" of a character's condition or identity with the reality that there is no such thing as a "textbook definition" person.

We didn't want Hope to feel like a checklist. On the other hand, there were a few things that stood out in my research. One was the feeling of being "broken" before they found out demisexuality was something real that other people experienced. Another was the sense of utter amazement expressed by some demisexual people who may never have truly believed sexual attraction existed in the way friends or movies claimed, and then suddenly experienced sexual attraction for the first time, sometimes well into their 30s, when the circumstances were right for them. Both of these elements became important parts of Hope's journey throughout the story.

One last thing to say is that while Hope represents one possible expression of demisexuality, she is by no means meant to be the definitive example. She has her own quirks. Not recognizing when people flirt with her, for example, is a quality some demisexual people share, but certainly not all. Similarly, being bi- or pan-sexual is possible for demisexual people, but many identify as straight, too. Every person is unique. But what TB and I "hope" is that getting to know Hope will broaden and enhance the way you think about love.

When TB and I were creating the character of Hope in The Love Project, we knew we needed to give her an awkward and embarrassing dating history. Between the two of us, this turned out to be absolutely no problem at all because as soon as we started reminiscing about our own experiences in bygone days, we knew we had enough material to last a lifetime. (You can read about TB’s experiences here).

For example, when I was in college, I agreed to go on a blind double date to an opera because my roommate’s date that night had a buddy pop into town at the last minute, and he didn’t want to leave him all alone. So, I got all dressed up. I mean, it was an opera, and I’d seen Richard Gere take Julia Roberts to an opera in Pretty Woman, so I was basically an expert on how these things were supposed to go, right? Dress, high heels, curling iron, and even makeup. No elbow-length white gloves but, otherwise, I went all out.

Then the gentlemen arrived at our dorm, and my escort for the evening was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, a pair of cowboy boots, and a belt buckle the size of Texas (which, incidentally, is where I went to college, in case you hadn’t guessed). Apparently, when his friend had told him they were “going out,” he’d simply filled in the blank and assumed his friend meant line dancing.

Have you heard the joke about the Texan who listens to both types of music: country and western? I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story and also that this guy hadn’t actually known opera existed prior to this night. He suggested, twice, that maybe we could skip the opera and go line dancing instead.

Well, being new to Texas, I innocently asked, “What is line dancing?” I believe that was the precise moment his brain shut down, and he withdrew into an invisible protective cocoon for the rest of the night. And I’m just going to put it out there right now that this was probably my most successful college dating experience.

While I was never insane enough to agree to speed dating, I did do a bit of online dating in my twenties, and all I can say is “Caveat Emptor” should have been the official slogan of Match.com. There was the lunch date with a photographer who only spoke in one-word answers and never asked a follow-up question. There was the philosophy PhD student who confessed at the end of an otherwise nice meetup at Boston’s Quincy Market to never having finished college, let alone a doctoral program, and actually working in a print shop. And who could forget the bona fide philosophy PhD who had recently gone through a nasty breakup and spent a full evening using my good listening skills as a free therapy session? I say free because, of course, I ended up paying for both our meals.

Yeah. Good times.

To all the wonderful readers who have emailed in the past few weeks to say how much they identify with the character of Hope, all I can say is so do I.

So do I.

One of the best parts of being a writer is that I get to create characters with lives I can only dream of. Frequently this means I will give a character an occupation or experience that I really know nothing about, like running a vineyard and making wine. This is where good research makes all the difference.

To figure out what challenges Ray and Monica would face in getting their vineyard up and running in Accidental Honeymoon, I started by visiting several local New England wineries. (You can read about my experience harvesting grapes here). Some were very large, super professional operations. My favorite, though, was a tiny vineyard just over the border in New Hampshire. It's called Averill House and it's a family run operation based in a restored 1830s barn. The story goes that after a trip to Italy, the dad really wanted to learn how to make wine, so one year his kids found a few grape vines on sale at Home Depot and brought them home. The vines took off, and pretty soon they had planted over 500 cold weather varieties and were importing grapes and juice from all over the world to fuel their passion for winemaking.

I headed up that way on a particularly beautiful summer day. This was when the pandemic had waned a bit in this region, and we were allowed to travel to New Hampshire without restrictions. The wine tasting was all done outside, and it was really just glorious to be out of the house and doing something fun. And I have to say, the woman who gave me a private tour of the wine making facilities was so knowledgeable that I pretty much learned everything I needed to know on this trip when it came to the process of going from vine to bottle.

I sampled several wines, but my favorite was the blueberry. It was so refreshing, and it had a little sparkle to it. It wasn't quite as bubbly as champagne, but it had a definite zip when it hit the tongue. I expressed my surprise at this and my tour guide kind of laughed and said, "Yeah, we've had an interesting time with that wine. Last year, the bottles exploded."

Apparently, the bubbles weren't exactly intentional. It was something that happened with that particular wine during the fermentation process, and they had been working on the formula to minimize it because once the wine was in the bottle and a cork put in place, if it got too many bubbles, the pressure would pop the cork out and wine would go everywhere. Picture shaking up a champagne bottle and then popping the cork (which, funny story, is one of my most vivid memories from the backyard reception we hosted after my mom and stepdad got married, when my grandfather and step grandfather, who were longtime friends from the Marines, spent the evening seeing who could pop the champagne corks farthest into the field behind our house. Yes, they also drank a whole lot of the champagne, hence the contest.).

But back to New Hampshire...

After being assured that the new formula had definitely solved the problem, I bought a bottle of the blueberry wine and stored it in a cupboard in my dining room. I had just moved into my new house a few weeks before, so I was still getting a feel for where I was going to put everything, and I hadn't bought wine racks yet. Well, weeks passed. I got to work writing the first draft of Accidental Honeymoon. I kind of forgot about the wine. And then one day, I was sitting in my office and I heard what sounded like a bomb exploding in the other room. I raced in and for a minute, I seriously couldn't figure it out. But then, a cascade of pink, blueberry scented liquid came pouring out from under the cupboard door, running all down the wall and pooling on the floor. Apparently, the new formulation wasn't quite the fix for that peky explosion problem after all.

I was so sad about my lost bottle, not to mention by brand new cupboard smelling like I was starting my own winery, (which, fun fact, it still does almost 6 months later, but I have loaded the space up with all my containers of scented wax melts to disguise it). But the good news was, it inspired a pretty hilarious scene in Accidental Honeymoon, so I guess it was worth it.

The moral of this story? Drink your wine right away.

Here are some photos of my visit to Averill House. Note the tasting flight. Glass #8 was the culprit.

You may have heard that recently, my co-author and good friend, TB Markinson, questioned my honesty when I included a certain Massachusetts location in our most recent collaboration The Love Project.

First, I should tell you I have lived in central Massachusetts for close to 20 years. This is important to remember, because it’s given me a lot of time to come across some of the stranger sights in our state that Boston folks just don’t know about.

For example, we have an actual Money Tree in the city of Greenfield. And while you’re out that way, it’s a short hop to check out a fish made entirely out of cutlery, as well as the world’s largest candle. There is also a mysterious stone circle, but I do not recommend trying to find it in the snow, because if TB thought the highway to Hell was bad, it’s nothing compared to driving the roads of Heath, MA in the winter.

While Massachusetts is currently tied with New Hampshire for the distinction of “least religious state in America,” we were once the home of the Puritans, an impressive number of Great Awakening religious revivals, as well as several utopian societies, like the one started by Louisa May Alcott’s father just a few miles from my house. So it’s no wonder that when a parishioner walked out of church after a particularly fierce “fire and brimstone” sermon in the 1930s and found a section of nearby forest on fire, he thought “Satan’s Kingdom” was a fitting name for the place.

In case you’re hoping for a better fate in the afterlife, not to worry. My state does offer a small reprieve from everlasting damnation in the form of Purgatory Chasm. Please do not tell TB about this one, as I’m planning to use it to my advantage sometime in the future. She is never going to believe me when I tell her, especially the part about it having something called “The Devil’s Corn Crib.”

I’m pretty sure I can get a second spa day out of it. I have my eye on one in Northampton, MA, called, appropriately enough, East Heaven.

To read about the startling accusation that started it all, click here.

Google photos reminded me today that three years ago I was on a tour of Kensington Palace. I'd recently reconnected with my childhood classmate, TB Markinson, who was living in the UK at the time, and the upcoming royal wedding of Harry and Meghan had prompted a vague idea of wanting to retell one of my favorite movies, Roman Holiday, as a modern lesfic romance set in the best city in the world, London. With a $290 round trip ticket from Boston, (which I was convinced at that price would probably put me in the belly of the plane with the dogs and cats), and the promise of a spot to sleep on TB's couch for a week, I set off.

I'd watched Roman Holiday twice through before leaving, so I had a checklist of important scenes that I would need to reinterpret in my as yet not outlined book, and which would need their settings translated from Rome to a suitable location in London. TB and I spent much of my first day in a pub, (actually more like ten pubs, but who's counting?), brainstorming possible places for each scene and creating an admittedly ambitious itinerary for visiting them all in seven days.

At this point I knew I would have a runaway princess, and that she would be escaping from Kensington Palace to begin her adventure. This is how TB and I came to be wandering through the palace three years ago, cameras at the ready. Most people probably go on the tour for the art displays, which were lovely, or to hear gossip about the royal family from a cheeky security guard, (which also happened, and for the record, I think he was making a lot of things up), but I would bet we were the only two people that day taking pictures of random draperies and service doors and asking, "Could an average size woman hide behind that?" and, "Do you think someone could sneak from this door and all the way through the gift shop without being seen?"

I also had a chance to go shopping at the Portobello Road market, something I wanted to do since hearing the song about it while watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks as a kid. While there I bought an Edwardian mother of pearl handled fruit knife and fork set. As one does. And then I remembered I couldn't take knives on the plane, so TB had to mail them back to my when I got home. They did, however, make us feel so much safer to be armed with fruit knives when walking along a sketchy section of the canals before ending up at a great restaurant inside a canal boat for lunch.

It's hard to believe this trip was real when for the past year I've pretty much gone nowhere. With the pandemic raging, a thirty minute drive across the New Hampshire border to Nashua feels like an impossibly exotic trip, something I dream of when things are maybe, finally, better this summer. So these pictures of my trip bring a big smile to my face, just like it does to remember the crazy adventures Jordan and Abby had in London Holiday.

By the way, the burlesque club in the book where Abby and Jordan first meet is a real place, (but no, I didn't get to go to a show).

If you turn down a side road a few miles from my house, you’ll find a hillside with grape vines growing in neat rows. At the top of the hill is a rustic farmhouse that has been there for a hundred years (almost new by Massachusetts standards), and behind that is a huge barn-like building, picnic grounds, an orchard, and a picture postcard view that includes a white New England church steeple. It’s called Nashoba Valley Winery, and the location was a big inspiration for Ray and Monica’s vineyard in Accidental Honeymoon.

When you’re writing about vineyards, it is, if course, necessary to do a lot of research to provide an authentic reading experience. By research, I mean drinking wine. And touring wineries. And buying bottles of wine to take home. But one of the most interesting experiences I had was participating in a harvest day and gourmet lunch at Nashoba Valley winery.

I showed up in the morning and was immediately offered coffee and homemade cider donuts, making it one of the best days ever. I was directed to find a pair of clippers, and to grab some bandages, presumably because they didn’t expect me to be good at handling those clippers.

I won’t lie. Snipping grapes off the vine is hard, and sticky. I have never seen so many grapes, and after a quick chat with the owner, it was clear that no matter how hard I thought I was working, I would never come close to hitting the pace of a professional harvester. The good news was I didn’t end up needing any bandages. What a relief!

After a couple hours among the grapes, all of us workers were invited back to the winery’s gorgeous garden for a socially distanced lunch. Given that the vineyard is known for their gourmet restaurant, it was no surprise the food was absolutely fantastic. Also, they were super generous when pouring the wine. Plus, there was dessert. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Sadly, the tasting room at Nashoba Valley Winery is currently closed because of pandemic restrictions, but when life gets back to normal, you can bet I will be back. If you find yourself in central MA, I highly recommend stopping in.

How did you get the idea for Stockholm Syndrome?

This book started out as a relatively short, flirty romance that would fit in nicely with the other books in the Americans Abroad series. I wanted to set a story in Stockholm because I have friends there and have some great vacation memories of places that I just felt were perfect for a book.

Then I was listening to NPR, as I often do, and I realized that my local radio station phone number is literally the only phone number I know by heart anymore, and I thought wouldn’t it be funny if two characters met because one of them dialed the station number by accident and the other one picked up? And of course, it could’ve been anyone doing that—local bakery owner, a teacher, a plumber—but for some reason, I became convinced it should be a spy. Of course, they say ‘write what you know’, so I made Amanda an office temp.

Okay, but really…Russians and spies? How 1980.

I know, right? A book with Russian spies in 2017? Come on.

When I got the idea, it was in early 2016, and I thought it was a little far-fetched, too. I was like, no, it can’t be Russians. This isn’t the Cold War anymore. I figured I’d have to come up with a story that involved terrorists or something. Then we had an election, and the Russia investigation, and OMG, ya’ll—Russian spies are everywhere!

In that case, how much of this story is real?

I could tell you, but then I’d have to…no, seriously, it’s fiction. But actually, the sad thing is that, while the specifics of this story are made up, the alt-right focus and activity in Sweden is very real. Sometimes the plot ideas I had felt a little too plausible. And for various reasons, Sweden is a favorite target for these folks, especially when it comes to their immigration and refugee policies, for making an example out of about how Sweden’s liberal policies are ‘wrong’. So Sweden is definitely the right setting for this type of book. Oh, and all the locations are real, and so very much worth visiting if you get a chance. Sweden is a great country, and the food is excellent, in case you couldn’t tell by reading the book.

What’s next for Leigh and Amanda?

Well, they are going to have to save the world. I mean, obviously. In the next book, they head to Moscow. Will that be the end of the Russia stuff? I’m not sure. I know they will be taking Aunt Millie to Monte Carlo in the third book, tailing a sneaky con-woman. Is she connected to Russia? Maybe…There are so many possibilities for where this series might go, and part of it depends what crazy stuff is in the news between now and then, and how much more of it readers want to see.

Those names, Leigh and Amanda. They feel familiar.

My favorite show when I was a kid was Scarecrow and Mrs. King. The main characters were Lee and Amanda, and I loved the idea of a civilian and a spy, and all the witty and flirty banter between the leads. That was my inspiration, without a doubt, when writing this book.