Hi, I’m Falisa Beffa — a full-time 7th grade English teacher writing a twelve-book cozy mystery series, one school year at a time.
By day, I teach middle schoolers how stories work. By night (and every summer), I’m building the Hollow Creek Farm Mysteries — a cozy mystery series set on a goat farm in the small town of Thistledown, where the coffee shop is called Grounds for Suspicion and the most reliable witness has four legs and terrible manners.
This site is the honest, unfiltered record of how it’s going.
The Hollow Creek Farm Mysteries
The series begins with Milk & Murder, currently in progress. Two estranged cousins — Wren, a burned-out yoga instructor, and Sebastian, a brand strategist whose last venture failed spectacularly — inherit their late aunt Betsy’s working goat farm and attempt to turn it into a wellness retreat. When Betsy’s death turns out to be something other than natural, the cousins find themselves running a farm, dodging a skeptical sheriff, and following clues no one else takes seriously. Including the ones from a goat named Waldo.
Every book in the series follows the same naming pattern — there’s an ampersand in every title, because some commitments you just make early and live with. All twelve books are planned. Yes, twelve. I have a spreadsheet.
A Teacher Writing a Mystery Series in Public
Most author websites appear after the book exists. This one started before — on purpose.
Mysteries & Manuscripts documents the entire journey from blank page to first sale: the drafting, the revision, the cover decisions, the marketing experiments, and the real numbers behind all of it. Not the highlight reel — the actual ledger. When something costs money, I tell you what it cost. When something flops, I tell you it flopped.
I made three promises when I started, and they hold for everything you’ll find here:
No spoilers. I talk craft openly — plotting, clues, red herrings, structure — but never the secrets of my own books. You’ll learn how a fair-play mystery works without learning who did it.
No invented milestones. If I haven’t done it yet, I won’t imply I have. The book isn’t out yet. That’s not a secret; it’s the whole point of documenting this from the beginning.
Full transparency. Real word counts, real costs, real royalty numbers when they exist — including the ones that don’t go my way.
What You’ll Find Here
Every week I publish one new post (and its matching YouTube video) in one of five recurring segments:
Words & Whodunits — mystery writing craft: plotting, clues, structure, and character. How a whodunit actually gets built.
Plot & Prosper — the indie publishing business side, with real numbers: what self-publishing costs, what works, what doesn’t.
Coffee & Clues — cozy mystery reading life, genre talk, and the characters of Thistledown.
Chalk & Chapters — what it actually looks like to write a novel around a full-time teaching schedule.
Recipes & Reveals — recipes from the world of Hollow Creek Farm, cooked on camera. Aunt Betsy kept recipe cards, and they’re too good to leave fictional.
New posts land every Sunday morning.
Come Read Along
Milk & Murder is being written right now, which means you can be here before page one reaches anyone else. The best way to follow along is the newsletter — a short weekly note with that week’s post, behind-the-scenes progress, and first access to everything as the book moves toward publication.
You can also find my socials at https://linktr.ee/falisabeffa
Thanks for being here at the beginning. It matters more than you know.
— Falisa