Happy Holidays to All! What a strange year 2020 has been! And there’s good news-we’ve all survived the pandemic thus far. Keep up the great work of protecting yourself and your family by wearing masks and social distancing until we get through the vaccination process. Meanwhile, your friends at Booklover’s Bench want to help shine […]
Holiday Upheaval By Lois Winston Undoubtedly, 2020 is a year we’d all like to forget. The upcoming holidays, or more likely the lack of them, will be yet another reminder of just how completely un-normal this year has been for everyone. Say good-bye to so many of those wonderful traditions we look forward to each […]
It’s a Book! By Lois Winston I recently gave birth to a book, A Sew Deadly Cruise, the ninth in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Better a book than a baby. I can’t imagine going through childbirth nine times! However, it’s amazing how much childbirth and books have in common. First, the gestation period […]
The Whodunit Gene By Lois Winston I have a knack for figuring out whodunit within the first fifteen minutes of most movies, five for hour-long TV shows. I consider it my superpower. However, I never blurt out the suspected perpetrator because I don’t want to ruin the show for my husband. Although, that doesn’t keep […]
In Celebration of International Friendship Day By Lois Winston Today is International Friendship Day, so I’ve decided to devote my post to my oldest friend and tell why she meant so much to me. I grew up in the early years of television, but my home life was nothing like what I saw portrayed on […]
LEGO: A Family Tradition By Lois Winston One day in 1979 my next-door neighbor Charlie asked if I’d like some LEGO for my sons. He was downsizing into an apartment in the city now that his kids were grown. Tiny plastic bricks weren’t exactly suitable for a toddler and preschooler, but I figured I could […]
Guilt in the Time of Covid-19 By Lois Winston As many of you know by now, I spent most of my professional life as a crafts designer, which explains Anastasia Pollack, the eponymous amateur sleuth of my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries. Write what you know, right? For several decades I designed fabric crafts for the […]
Two Roads Diverged & I Took Both (With apologies to Robert Frost!) By Lois Winston March is National Crafts Month. I write a crafting cozy series. So I thought I’d talk today about how two conversations—one about crafts and one about mysteries—changed the trajectory of my life. When I was in college, I taught myself […]
On Birthdays and Bucket Lists By Lois Winston Have you ever noticed the older we get, the swifter the years go by? I can remember walking home from school and bemoaning the fact that summer vacation was still six weeks away. Six weeks seemed like an eternity to eight-year-old me. Now six weeks often flies […]
Stress By Lois Winston We all have stress, some of us more than others, and we all deal with it in different ways—or not. Authors seem particularly susceptible to stress, especially those who don’t have an income from a day job because money is one of the major stressors in most people’s lives. We have […]
