Why do you write the genre that you write?
I think most of us write what we read. I grew up reading a whole lot of fantasy, along with some mystery and science fiction—Freddy the Detective, Sherlock Holmes, the Hardy Boys, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators were my favorite juvenile mystery reads. But two things happened about the time I started writing seriously, in college. One was that the fantasy genre seemed to have been going through a bad patch, where most of the books I could find seemed to be Tolkien clones of some kind, and rarely good ones. I’ve since discovered that there were lovely works of fantasy being written then, but they didn’t get the same visibility as the Tolkien clones and I didn’t find them. The other thing was that the mystery world, by contrast, seemed to be going through an enormous explosion of creativity, with many of the writers we now consider giants of the field starting their careers or hitting their stride. And my college roommate was a big mystery reader and shared her favorites with me. So I began inhaling mystery books, and eventually ended up writing in the field.

Tell us how you got into writing?
They taught us how to print in first and second grade, and it never occurred to me that writing books wasn’t a perfectly normal thing to do once I’d mastered the basics. In second or third grade—I can’t be sure which, because I had the same teacher for both—one of several wonderful teachers in my small-town elementary school—my father, a marine biologist, set up a salt-water aquarium for our classroom. When one of the clams died, my teacher cleaned out the shell and gave it to me. I think the idea was for me to take it home as a subtle hint to Dad that he should replace the deceased clam. Instead, I attached the two sides of the shell together with white first aid tape, painted eyes on the outside, named the resulting creature Winifred H. Clam, and began writing a series of comic adventures about the adventures he had while walking around the world underwater. My teacher showed some of these pages to a writer friend, who was so impressed that she sent me a small gold-colored clam charm—thereby creating, at an early age, the unrealistic expectation that if I wrote something I’d be generously compensated.

What jobs have you held before, during and/or after you’ve became a writer?
When I got out of college, I came to the D.C. area and got a job as a secretary at a large charity. The idea was that I’d take a menial job and focus my energy on writing. But the charity had two modes—campaign mode, when the main fundraising happened and we all worked such long days that I’d come home and fall right into bed, followed by a slow period when we wrapped up everything that hadn’t gotten done during the campaign and prepared for next year’s campaign. The slow period was great, since my boss didn’t care if I typed up one of my own manuscripts during working hours—in fact, he encouraged me to do so, because that made it look as if we were being productive! But I knew I didn’t want to go through another campaign season, so I found another secretarial job at a small corporation. After six months there I applied for and got a writing job, and I stayed there in various positions for over two decades while it turned into a very large corporation. I did writing, editing, managing print projects, and then during my last five years helping create the company’s first website and then managing it. I quit my day job in 2001 and have been writing full time ever since.

Where do you write?
At the moment, on my dining room table. I had damage to the ceiling of my office at the end of the summer from a plumbing disaster, and had to get the ceiling repaired and repainted. Since I was in the middle of writing Round Up the Usual Peacocks when that happened, I moved my computers and printer and, well, the whole office setup to my dining room. So, since the ground floor of my house has a fairly open plan, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen flowing into each other in a big circle, this means that right now if you walk into my house, you see my messy office setup. (Luckily at the moment very few people walk in!) I’m still on the dining room table because I vowed that instead of just hauling everything back into my office after the repairs, I would completely clean and declutter and reorganize it, and I’m still working on that. But I’m hoping by the first of the year I’ll be back to working in my office, which is a long, narrow room on the garage level of my split-level house, with sliding glass doors leading out into the back yard so I can walk out and think it the garden if I get stumped. And by the time I move back into it, I’m hoping it will be a serene and uncluttered work space!

What is your favorite deadline snack?
I rarely have one favorite of anything! So if I’m on a tight deadline, you’ll see me swilling down gallons of Diet Coke and Arnold Palmers, and I might be munching on . . . well . . . a lot of things. Utz potato chips. Pepperidge Farm Parmesan Goldfish. A baked potato. A Caesar salad. Watermelon. Cherries. An all-beef hotdog. Sharp cheddar cheese. French fries. Cherry tomatoes. I need to stop now before I make myself hungry!

What is next for you?
At the moment, I’m working on revisions to Round Up the Usual Peacocks, which should come out in July 2022. A couple of people have asked if the return to peacocks means that I’m wrapping up the series—definitely not! But this book features the wedding of Meg’s brother and his fiancée—readers will remember that Rob’s unfortunate first attempt at a wedding was part of the plot of Murder with Peacocks, so I thought echoing the peacocks was appropriate. Luckily this time Meg’s mother is organizing the wedding directly, leaving Meg free to help her nephew figure out if someone involved in one of the cold cases featured on his true-crime podcast has it in for him.

And I’m also in the planning stages of my 2022 Christmas book, which will be called Dashing Through the Snowbirds.

What are you reading now?
At the moment I’m reading the advanced reading copy of a friend’s nonfiction book, and it’s very good but I’m not yet allowed to reveal what it is. I suppose it doesn’t count that I’m proofreading Magic Is Murder, the tenth volume of the Chesapeake Crimes short story anthology that Barb Goffman, Marcia Talley, and I shepherd into production every two years, since I’ve already read all the stories more than once. Since I’m currently revising one book and planning another, I’m doing a lot of nonfiction—at the moment, listening to Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire and reading a biography of Raymond Chandler. Looking forward to the next between-books hiatus when I can catch up on some fiction reading.

Where can we find you?
These days, mostly at home. Online, I do Facebook more than Twitter or Instagram.

Now to have some fun . . .

Vanilla or chocolate
Chocolate

Pizza or burgers
Hmm. It’s close to a toss-up. Sometimes a burger if it’s a nice, juicy one, or maybe
a pair of Five Guys patties. More often a pizza, especially if it’s got both pepperoni
AND sausage.

Broccoli or squash
Broccoli. Not even close. Squash is one of the foods I only eat to be polite.
And that goes for zucchini, too. Not a fan of any of the Cucurbita family.

Breakfast, lunch, or dinner
Yes. Also second breakfast, elevenses, afternoon tea, and supper.

Mountain or beach
Hmm. Beach, but only by a hair. And if you’re offering a picturesque mountain where I
could have fun taking pictures and a drab, overly commercialized beach, then mountain.

Introvert or Extrovert
Noisy introvert

And even more fun . . .

You are stranded on a deserted island. What are your three must-haves?
Okay, I guess an ocean-worthy sailing vessel, a skilled captain, and a compass are out of
bounds? How about 1) enough Diet Coke to last me until I’m rescued, 2) my phone, with
enough of an Internet connection to download ebooks, and c) a comfy reading chair.

My bio:
Donna Andrews was born in Yorktown, Virginia and now lives in Reston, Virginia. Murder Most Fowl (August 2021) and The Twelve Jays of Christmas (October 2021) are the 29th and 30th books in her Agatha-, Anthony-, and Lefty-winning Meg Langslow series, to be followed in 2022 by Round Up the Usual Peacocks and Dashing Through the Snowbirds. She is also one of the coordinating editors of the Chesapeake Crimes short story anthology series, whose tenth volume, Magic is Murder, will be released in 2022. She is longtime member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and served as MWA’s Executive Vice President from 2014 through 2019. When not writing she neglects her garden, stays up late playing computer games, and serves as official paparazzi for her twin nephews. For more information: donnaandrews.com.