The Case for Cozy

I’ve been a long-time reader of all things sci-fi/fantasy, but it wasn’t until recently (within the last three years or so), that I started to see “cozy” as a subgenre. And I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical at first.

I love a good battle scene, whether it features traditional weapons, magic, or super futuristic technology. I like action in my stories, political intrigue, danger… Cozy doesn’t usually incorporate stuff like that, so I didn’t know if I’d even like reading anything from that subgenre.

But I decided to give it a shot for the first time about two years ago, and my first foray into cozy fantasy came in the form of Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. The basic premise is the main character (an orc warrior) decides to retire from soldiering to open a coffee shop.

And you know what? That book was a lot of fun. And I’ve read a few more cozies since then too. Sometimes a departure from the high-stakes storylines I usually read is a nice break, and even though there isn’t much danger or suspense in the cozy subgenre, there are some really great stories and a lot of imagination.

Here are a few cozy SF/F books I can recommend:

• A Recipe for Disaster by Chris Durston
• Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
• Light My Pyre by Kat Kinney
• The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August (or Riley August, depending on when and where you see the book. There has been a recent name change by the author.)

Personally, I never thought I’d write anything cozy myself. It was never on my radar, and most of the storylines I come up with are by no means cozy. But then some weird inspiration struck last fall.

My husband was scrolling through TV shows and wound up watching a ghost-hunting type show (I say type, because it wasn’t part of the Ghost Hunters franchise and all I can remember now is that it was based in Ireland.) I’ve always been a pretty big skeptic of those shows—every time they claim to see something and redirect the camera, nothing is there by the time the camera moves (if anything was ever there to begin with.) I’ve always considered that sort of stuff to belong to the realm of fantasy, and I said as much.

And then I thought, “What if I wrote a ghost-hunting story set in a fantasy world? What sorts of characters would become involved, and why would they be hunting spirits?” Things sort of spiraled from there, and by the end of the year I had an outline, a cast of characters, and was itching to write this silly thing.

Not only did it turn out to be a cozy, but it also has a romantic subplot that I wasn’t originally planning to add. (Sometimes my characters make decisions that I’m not expecting.) It was planned as a standalone, but as the story progressed, I realized it had the makings for a really good book 1 in a new series.

So now I’ll be working on that in between my other projects, most notably The Mage War Chronicles. And as unusual as it was for me, I really enjoyed working on this crazy, cozy, cute story that was inspired by a random episode of a questionable paranormal investigation show.

For those interested, I’ll be sharing the book title and series title with my newsletter at the end of this month (July 27.) You can sign up to my newsletter here: Sign up to newsletter.