This week I’ve welcomed my brainstorming buddies to our Chautauqua hideaway to spend four days tossing around ideas about upcoming novels, everything from entire plots to key ideas we need help with.

If you missed my previous posts about previous brainstorming sessions and the way we conduct them, you can find them here and here and even here.

My brainstorming group has changed as people’s careers and needs changed, but this year I’m meeting again with the group I first met with last year. We got along so well that I’m delighted to invite them here to spend most of this week together. Let me introduce you to the gang.

First, you’ve already met Casey Daniels (aka Kylie Logan). Casey/Kylie write several cozy mystery series, including the Pepper Martin series as Casey, the League of Literary Ladies series as Kylie, the Button Box mysteries as Kylie, and the soon to be released Chili Cookoff Mystery series beginning with Chili Con Carnage. Casey (I know her best as Connie) has had a full and varied career. There’s not a genre she can’t write in and she has the books to prove it. She was a member of my first brainstorming group, too, and a pal from my Cleveland days.

Second, you’ve met Serena B. Miller on these pages, too. Serena writes inspirational fiction, with many of her books set in Amish communities in Ohio as well as historicals set in Michigan. She and I share a common bond since we’re both the wives of minister’s. We learned long ago that we share the same joys and sorrows despite being from different denominations–she relates to my Aggie books, too. Serena recently learned one of her books, Love Finds You in Sugar Creek, is being filmed as a television movie. Her newest novel, Under A Blackberry Moon, comes out in October.

Shelley Costa writes the Miracolo mysteries, about life at a Northern Italian restaurant outside Philly, and her first novel You Cannoli Die Once was released in May. But Shelley has always been a writer with lots of published short stories, and she’s also a faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Art where she teaches writing. I didn’t know Shelley until last year, but I’m so happy I know her now.

So there you have our merry band. Hoping to take lots of walks and talk lots about publishing in between our brainstorming sessions. Maybe I’ll report back and tell you all the good gossip I hear.

Or maybe. . . not.