Since For Better Or Hearse, the second book in the Annabelle Archer mystery series, hit the stands, people want to know if I've really served a dog-shaped wedding cake (yep) or had a bride who made her bridesmaids carry floral tambourines (no, thank God) or had a bride order a limo just to transport her wedding dress (scary, but true). But the oddest question has to be "Why would a real-life wedding planner want to write murder?" Clearly, these people have never planned a wedding. Anyone who's been involved in the intricacies of wedding planning knows that by the end of it there are at least a dozen people you'd like to see dead.

For me, it seemed a perfectly natural segue from being a professional wedding planner in Washington, D.C. to writing mysteries about one. In For Better Or Hearse, the temperamental chef that wedding planner extraordinaire Annabelle Archer is working with meets a cold death impaled on an ice sculpture. Over the past ten years, I've run into my share of moody chefs and it was fun finally putting one on ice. Revenge is, after all, a dish best served cold.

Revenge is also the reason I started writing mysteries. One of my real-life MOBs (wedding planner lingo for Mother of the Bride) was so awful that imagining ways to kill her inspired me to write the first book in the series, Better Off Wed. Now don't get me wrong. Most of my brides are delightful, charming girls with lovely mothers to match. Only rarely have I had a bride-to-be or MOB who's lost her grip on sanity. But they are always the most memorable.

So how do I manage to lampoon and murder the very people who pay me so handsomely to plan their weddings? We all know that you should never bite the hand that feeds you, so I plotted how to get away with murderous parody as carefully as I'd plotted the book.

At first I tried to keep my new career as a mystery writer hush-hush from my brides. That lasted about all of two seconds. Once word got out, I had brides rushing out to bookstores to buy Better Off Wed. They claimed that they were being supportive, but I knew that they really wanted to see if any of the nutty brides in the book resembled them too closely.

A happy by-product of my clients discovering my writing life was that they suddenly became much more easy-going. Even my most high-maintenance brides began tip-toeing around me out of fear that bad behavior would land them in the pages of the next book. Demands turned into pleasantly worded requests and late night calls to my cell phone became a thing of the past. If I'd known that killing off a few clients in a book was all it took to rein in problem brides, I'd have started writing mysteries years ago.

Despite all my efforts to keep my author identity and my wedding planner identity separate, the lines have blurred. I have a hard time attending a meeting with a bride without jotting down bits of dialogue for an upcoming book (although I'm sure they think I'm taking copious notes about their big day). Oddly enough, this murderous outlet has kept me from getting irritated at many a bride. Knowing that I can simply kill someone in the pages of a book allows me to let bridal antics roll off my back. And for anyone who hasn't encountered a true bridezilla, that's really saying something.

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