Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”

People who ask such questions are not writers. For real writers, ideas are not the problem. Writers are like a seething cauldron bubbling over with ideas, more ideas than they can ever write in a lifetime.

Where do we writers get our ideas? From everywhere. From every person, place, and thing we see and everything we experience. Writers are inveterate people watchers. In shopping malls and airport terminals and restaurants and street corners and churches, we are constantly watching people to see what they look like and how they walk and talk and act and react and interact. “Writer” sounds so much more respectable than “stalker” or “busybody.”

Here is a case in point. For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, my wife and I booked passage on a cruise ship from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Alaska and back. It was a wonderful and memorable experience.

That experience percolated for several more years and finally emerged as “Anniversary Cruise,” the third of three novellas published together in my most recent book, Too Many Deaths.

Because we had taken this cruise, I could authentically recreate the sights and sounds and feel of being on a cruise ship to Alaska. I could remember details and peculiar observations, such as how an Alaskan fishing village of a few thousand people could support dozens of jewelry stores. You can’t make this stuff up.

For dinner every night, we were seated at a table with the same group of people and got to know them quite well. I immediately recognized this as an ideal place to people watch. I also recognized it as an ideal setting for a “cozy,” a murder mystery with a limited number of suspects all gathered in one place. In “Anniversary Cruise,” I recreated that table setting. Sort of. I am a short, bald, bearded editor; the hero of the novella is John Smyth, a short, bald, bearded editor who was on the cruise to celebrate his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with his wife. One of the couples at our table was rich; in the novella, one of the couples was rich, but from a different country and with different personal traits. Two of the men at the table had just lost their jobs; in the novella, one man had just lost his job.

There are some differences, of course. None of the people at the table on our anniversary cruise was murdered during the trip. But that happened in the novella.