What Lucy Burdette is Writing!

 LUCY BURDETTE: The very biggest news for me was turning in my draft of Key West book number 16 last week! As you can imagine, my favorite words written were these:

I wrote about the opening of the story back in December. I’m having trouble figuring out what else I could share that wouldn’t result in unwelcome spoilers. So I’ll skip that snippet for the moment and tell you what I’m working on now. (I know I will see book 16 circle back to me for edits, but I’m not worrying about that until it hits my inbox.) I have four projects on my to do list, a murder mystery event for the Key West library, a possible murder mystery dinner for Williams Hall, a Key West noir short story, and my Paris novel. Yikes! What was I thinking? 

Feb 2025, Ann Cleeves's Shetland murder mystery in Key West

The second annual murder mystery for the Key West Friends, taking place February 7, 2026, will be something like the one we performed with Ann Cleeves last winter. This time, the reading will be based on a fictional contest between pastry chefs, who’ve all been asked to prepare desserts from the Key West Woman’s Club Cookbook. (The Friends of the Key West Library and the Key West Woman’s Club are co-sponsoring this event along with our wonderful library staff.) I’m the playwright (ulp) and it will begin with a moderator and four or five baker suspects. I’m imagining the event will open with something like this:

Moderator: Imagine that you are sitting in an auditorium at the Key West library, a room very much like this one. You see the pea green walls and old-fashioned photos of the island, and you can almost smell the beguiling scent of new books and imagine the hum of voices as clever librarians answer the challenging questions of their patrons. This time, you are not here for the books or the librarians or even the computers. You have paid good money to hear from bakers who have entered a contest to find the best pastry chef on the island. Their challenge has been to prepare amazing delicacies from the Key West Woman’s Club Cookbook. 

But things have gone perilously wrong, and the front runner has been found poisoned to death. All the chefs who entered the contest are now murder suspects instead of prize winners. Your job will be to identify the real murderer. You will hear the protestations and confessions of the suspects, and then we’ll break for tea and voting. Once we re-convene to hear the true story, five winners will be awarded prizes.

There you go! A beginning and a long to-do list. When you have a list of projects, how do you choose where to start? Do you hop around from project to project, or power through one before tackling another?