Thirty-seven years ago, I married a Swiss, and we moved to his hometown of Bern in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Bern is a city surrounded by a river, the Aare, with a cobblestoned medieval core, the Altstadt or Old Town.

I’ve written entire drafts in hotel lobbies or on the bare floor of a storage room, anywhere I could find a quiet moment. After every writing session, any notebooks, research books, painstakingly arranged notecards, etc. would all have to be bundled up, and hauled out again next session.

For most of my decade-plus career as a published mystery novelist, I’ve worked in what I call my “accidental office,” a converted breakfast nook that sits off the kitchen in our 1930 house in Columbus, Ohio.

With a four-year-old daughter and a full-time day job, I’ve resigned myself to writing on the go a great deal of the time: perched atop a barn rail while my daughter trots her horse around the ring for her weekly lesson, on my lunchbreak, in various waiting rooms, airports, or train stations, or at the coffee shop down the street from my daughter’s school.

On May 1, 2020, in the middle of the COVID lockdown, I purchased an 1865 Second Empire Victorian. Evidently, pestilence, death, and possible unemployment wasn’t enough stress for me.