Perked Up (coming in Irish Coffee Murderon January 24).Logged On (Should have been the reverse, Nogged On and Logged Off, since the second one includes a theme of unplugging.Mine is always the third story in the book, and the title isn’t on the cover. I’ve been less concerned about repeating the prepositions in the titles of the novellas. And so it was that a reader, Lorna Doran, titled Muddled Through.

Some people really didn’t get the convention, but others were terrific. So I put out a call in my newsletter for suggestions. I would have have happily called the next one Simmered Down, which has a foodie association, and the book was full of soups, but we decided we had to cut it out with the Ss.

Then came a series of S books– Stowed Away, Steamed Open, Sealed Off, and Shucked Apart. Or Snowed Under, which has a better ring to it, but the book was about the historic ice business, so there you are. I would have preferred Iced Over, a more common expression, but I’d already used Over in Boiled Over. The next book, set in February, became Iced Under. At the eleventh hour, I proposed adding the second N, and Fogged Inn was born. Kensington thought I was writing food books. My editor didn’t love it, and it was only then that I realized we might have a fundamental misunderstanding of what I was doing. It was my first book set outside of tourist season, in the last week of November, and I thought the title was atmospheric and Maine-y. (You can click on each to make them bigger.)įor the next book I proposed Fogged In.

Clammed Up by Barbara Ross