u/Tex_Non_Scripta

r/CozyMysteryWriters We are AI friendly writers and our "cup of tea" ☕ is the cozy mystery genre! 👋🏻🙂

Are you a foodie cozy like me? One of my favorite things about any cozy, whether it's cozy fantasy or cozy mystery or cozy scifi, is plots or subplots or scenes relating to food. Or characters who cook. Or characters who are hungry. Or are enjoying yummy food. Kitchens, hearths, restaurants, diners, picnics, futuristic food replicators, whatever. Amateur chefs, professional chefs, waiters, or just any character cooking. BBQ of course! lol I think it's probably because we associate cozy with comfort, so, hey, comfort food is a natural.

I'd love to know what are some of your favorite foodie cozies. Bonus points if there's a magical twist to the food!

Magical Texas BBQ? I will for sure add that to my TBR! 😍

🖖🏻 EDITED to make it clear that I don't think I have an original idea. It's just an idea that worked out nicely and I'm happy with it, so I thought maybe it might be helpful to some of my fellow writers here.

Hi my fellow writers. I’m a newbie novelist (cozy mystery is my absolute fave) and I wanted to share a trick that has really helped me figure out how to write scenes for my characters.

This started because I love movies as much as I love books. A lot of us are very visual people I guess. I was trying to figure out a sidekick for my main character and I was having a lot of trouble figuring it out. And I started thinking about how fun it would be if my cozy mystery could be a movie. And then I thought about one of my all time favorite British actors, Alan Rickman, who was so fun as the Sheriff of Nottingham. How fun it would be if he were alive and was the co-star in my movie! 😍

That idea turned out to be the key to writing some scenes for my character. And that idea gave me the idea to cast some of my other characters this way, using real-life actors and actresses in specific roles.

Having specific faces and voices, their personalities, in mind helps me a lot.

If you think you might like to try this trick next time you’re stuck not knowing what to do with a character, or how to write a scene for that character, if you can’t think of a specific actor or actress, what I do is go to IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) website and start searching.

A lot of times even just clicking through the photos turns up an actor or actress that’s perfect. Sometimes it might be an actor or actress I’m unfamiliar with, or a role I haven’t seen. That’s given me several ideas too.

I think it helps because I can hear their specific voice and accent, and get ideas for dialogue and things they might do in a scene. It helps me write the character descriptions, and it’s like they’re “concrete” enough that I can keep them consistent throughout the writing. Sometime just remembering their performance in the movie or tv series can inspire new ideas too.

Does anyone else here cast their characters this way? If you know of some other ways to come up with your characters I’d love to hear your ideas!

Many writers come to AI with a premise and ask it to help them write.

That works fine — until you're 30,000 words in and realize your amateur sleuth has no business being involved in the mystery, your suspects are thin, and the community you built in chapter one has no real bearing on the plot.

The lack of structure is the problem.

Here's what I've noticed after building 200+ novel packages: cozy mystery is one of the most structurally demanding genres to write with AI assistance, because the genre has rules that aren't about prose — they're about architecture.

The amateur investigator needs a credible reason to investigate. The community needs to generate suspects naturally, not feel stapled on. The red herrings need to be plausible given what the reader knows about the world. The resolution needs to feel earned, not handed down.

If you don't give AI those structural parameters upfront, it'll give you scenes that don't add up to a cozy mystery.

The fix is boring but it works: before you write a single scene, define the trope combination that's doing your structural work. Not just "amateur sleuth" — but amateur sleuth + what setting, what community dynamic, what built-in reason to investigate.

That combination is where the architecture lives. Once it's locked, AI assistance gets dramatically more useful because every prompt has a framework to land in.

(by request, I put together a free one-pager on cozy mystery trope combos that do this kind of structural work — happy to drop the link in the comments or via DM if anyone wants it.)

Gorgeously gorgeous stuff! If you're writing film with AI or if you simply enjoy the fascinating creativity of AI film writers, you want to check out this community!

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideos/

Disclaimer: I'm not associated, simply a fan. A sister community to r/aivideos is is https://www.reddit.com/r/aiArt/ Great place to hang out and find inspiration or just something creative to do while you're procrastinating about "actually" writing. But then again, so many things contribute to the creative writing process! 👍🏻

😂

Ignore the NSFW: No flair is applicable so I decided why not lol

Chatting with a fellow writer earlier today, I think a lot about how many books there are in the world, how many writers. 

And we all love to read. And there's no way we can afford to purchase all the books we want nor is there in any stretch of the imagination nearly enough years in one lifetime to read all the books we want to read.

I'm sooooo greedy about books and want to buy all of them, and I want to read all of them! I love this writer's comment about wanting to do all the things! omg so true!

Me, personally, as a totally newbie first-time novelist, still trying to finish my very first one, I really have considered the possibility, maybe even probability, that all books need to be free.

Here we are in the 21st century, billions of people on this dear little planet, all of  us striving, struggling, dealing with "life, the universe and everything". And billions of books. And AI.

Maybe it's time for this paradigm shift. Is it time for books to be free, for all creativity to be free?

The only way I know of for any writer to make seriously life-altering sums of money is Hollywood. Major motion picture studios or big things like Netflix actually purchasing the rights to  one's book or series. And how rarely does that happen!

Other than that, I really do think and wonder if maybe it's time that all books need to be free and all writers are going to have to set aside the dream of earning a living wage, let alone minimum wage, from our writing. 

I don't know. I just keep thinking about all this all the time. 

Anyway, sending warm wishes to you all for a good luck and good creativity day.

Mimi