Forty years of finding other people's books

I was a school librarian for forty years, the last twenty-three at the same school in the Adelaide Hills, and in that time I recommended thousands of books to students and parents and teachers. I knew every book in the collection. I knew which ones the quiet year-eight girls would return in a week and which ones the reluctant reader year-ten boys would finish. I retired in 2021 and I have been writing a cozy crime novel ever since, which is not a genre I'm embarrassed about and which I wish people in literary circles would take more seriously as a form. The pleasure of the cozy is structural: a community, a disruption, a resolution through close attention. It is not accidental that I was a librarian. My protagonist is a retired music teacher in a fictional coastal town south of Adelaide, and she notices things that other people miss, and the mystery she's solving in the current draft involves a contested will and a collection of rare sheet music. I write in the mornings, which I have always had opinions about as the best time. I am slower than I expected to be. I thought the story was fully formed. It turned out to be a draft of a story. There is apparently quite a gap between those two things.