Two and half years ago, on October 1, 2020, I began outlining Death Due, a library cozy mystery that took place in 1985, at the fictional Fir Grove Library, featuring a hero para-librarian named Meg Booker. I finished the first draft around Valentine’s Day, 2021, and immediately dove into rewriting it. Two months later, I realized it didn’t work. After a four-month break over that summer, I came back to it in the fall and by early 2022 knew what I had do in terms of writing a cozy mystery that worked. Back early 2023 I had a new, much longer draft for the novel, now titled A Shush Before…