Jill Blake

It's been years (okay, decades) since I read Agatha Christie, but I still remember St. Mary Mead, where Miss Marple solved murders by paying close attention to the behavior of her friends and neighbors. What made the town so memorable? The people. Quirky characters are essential to a giving the fictional town in a cozy mystery that "cozy" feel--especially important for those cozy mystery towns that have a higher-than-average death rate. So if you're reading (or writing) a

In my twenty-plus years working as a doctor, I got used to having my patients come in wanting to tell me things. What hurts and where, when it started, what makes it better or worse. Family members often add helpful details like "She's already tried heat and massage and acupuncture, which helps for like an hour, but then it comes right back." We're all on the same team, working together to solve the puzzle. Mystery writing flips that whole paradigm. People on the page of a co

Doctor by day, writer by night. For years, that was me. I published my 1st contemporary romance novel in 2013, and by 2019 I had 11 books out there. Mostly medical romance, with a few other tropes thrown in. My colleagues and patients had no idea I was leading a double life (Jill Blake is a pseudonym, under which I continue to write). My family and a few close friends were in on the secret—and were often gracious enough to be my sounding board, beta-readers, and all-around ch

When my daughter—an incoming ninth grader—showed me her school’s summer reading list, I was appalled. There were short films, poems, short stories, and essays—but no actual books. Then we started working through the list. We watched a TED Talk about social contagion. We saw The Last Repair Shop, a documentary about LAUSD’s musical-instrument repair program and the way music connects the people who restore the instruments with the students who play them. We read the poems, sto

Interiority is what your characters are thinking and feeling. It's that inside peek into their psyche--how they react to the dead body in the parlor, not just that they found it.

When it comes to writing, I'm inevitably drawn to cozies. I like the lighter tone of cozy mysteries, infused with humor and romance and quirky characters. That's what I tried to write. What came out was...a little bit different.

From a doctor, mom, and would-be writer May 2021 Fourteen months into the Covid pandemic, I am finally returning to writing. Why so long?...

Is work-life balance really a myth? Well...yes, and no. Here's what I've learned from my years as a physician, mom, and writer...

I'm in the process of doing edits for my latest book, Oh, Baby!--yes, that's the title, peeps, not just my enthusiasm bursting through....

By nature, humans are competitive creatures. Think about sports, politics, awards shows. We try to impress upon our children that it’s...

Readers always ask where I get my ideas. With my latest book, The Burnout Cure, I didn’t have far to look. While Wolf, Lily, and the characters who inhabit their world are fictional, the issues of physician burnout, depression, and suicide are very real—as are the sobering statistics that Lily quotes about how many physicians are affected. The first seeds of this story were planted back when I was a young doctor-in-training. As Lily, the heroine of The Burnout Cure descri

For older posts, please visit Jill's blog The Heart of It: Contemporary Romance in a Digital Age on Blogspot.