The WD Interview: Mia P. Manansala

[This interview originally appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

Much like Lila Macapagal, protagonist of the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series, author Mia P. Manansala has had a very busy few years. Since her first novel (and first book in the series), Arsenic and Adobo, was published in 2021, Manansala has written and published five additional books in the series, released her first YA novel, and written a second, forthcoming YA novel. And like her protagonist, whose life changes dramatically over the course of the cozy mysteries, Manansala’s own life has changed significantly. 

Before she was published, Manansala says, “I was an English language instructor, so I taught English as a foreign language at a for-profit language school. I got laid off in 2020 for obvious reasons. I found out I was getting laid off the same day I signed my first book contract.” Because publishing can be so unpredictable and success isn’t guaranteed, Manansala got a part-time job at her local library, which she says, “gave me routine. It gave me the feeling of stability. I still got to work with literacy, the thing that I loved.”  

Now, Manansala, who has won numerous awards for her cozies, including the 2022 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, the 2022 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, and the 2021 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, is a full-time writer, which brings its own set of joys and challenges. She says, “There is a lot to be said by taking this thing that you love and making it your job. Again, I’m speaking with a lot of privilege. I get to do the thing that I love, this thing that I never could have even imagined when I was a kid, because I didn’t think it was a real thing. But it doesn’t really help people if we pretend that there are no difficulties and struggles to this kind of life, you know?” 

After switching to writing full-time, Manansala’s day-to-day changed, and with that came a mindset shift. She was no longer fitting in writing after a full day of teaching. She says, “It was realizing, This is your job now. These are the things you need to do to show up, even though it’s not the job the way you think. You don’t have to sit there 9–5 Monday to Friday. That’s not how this works anymore. But you also cannot just wait for inspiration either. There’s that balance of what a workday looks like is not how [I] usually think of it, but also, writing is no longer the way that [I] think of it. Having those two things coexist in your mind takes a while. At least, it took a while for me to truly sink in that these two things could be true simultaneously, and I had to make them work.” 

Likewise, when the series opens, it’s with Lila making a huge life change, moving back to Shady Palms from Chicago after a bad breakup and a tough career situation. She finds herself trying to make peace with working in her aunt’s restaurant while dreaming of a bakery of her own and trying to clear her name of murdering an ex-boyfriend. Without giving too much away, over the course of the next five books in the series, in true cozy fashion, Lila finds ways to be happy in Shady Palms and to build a community that loves and supports her. Now, the series comes to a close with Death and Dinuguan, and we began our conversation with the idea for this chapter of Lila’s story. 

What gave you the idea for this sixth and final book in the series? 

I didn’t know it was going to be the last book in the series when I started it. But I was very lucky in that my editor, partway, before she gave me her initial edit notes, let me know, “We think this is going to be the last book. Is that OK? If you need one more book to really wrap it up, I can argue”—because this is the last of my contract—“I can argue that with sales and push for you to get one more. But if not, I want you to edit with the idea that this is the end.” That’s actually really nice because most of my author friends didn’t get that kind of advanced notice, and their series end on a cliffhanger. So, the feeling of building towards an end is something that came during editing.  

But the general idea itself takes place during Valentine’s Day. It has my main character, Lila, and her boyfriend’s cousin comes to town and gets involved. I usually choose, if not a holiday, a particular season, or setting, or a festival because I feel like something has to be happening. One, it helps me create a kind of vibe and a setting. It helps me choose the food, which a lot of people like to ask me, “Oh, how do you know what recipes to include?” If I make it seasonal or holiday-based or festival-themed, that kind of guides the things that I want. … 

With Valentine’s Day in particular, I tried to wrap up more because one of the things I’ve said throughout the series is that a lot of the books will often—maybe not overtly, but I try to slip in—different ways of showing love and the different kinds of love there is. Obviously, Valentine’s Day we think of romantic love, but throughout the series, if you really read into it, yes, she does have a romantic partner, but the familial bonds, the community bonds, her friendships, those are just as important to her as a person and within the investigations as well. So, a celebration of love of all kinds was something I knew I wanted to play with as well. It worked really well as an ending to celebrate all the different kinds of love for the people in her life.  

I did really enjoy how the books are all framed around a town event or a holiday. How does the framing of the holidays or the events work in terms of plot and moving your characters? 

I like to do it because, as I said, the framing of the setting, but it also gives me a time frame. Not quite a ticking time bomb. It’s not like, Oh, if she doesn’t solve it by Valentine’s Day, things are gonna … [laughs]. But because we know there’s this big thing we’re working toward, and because these things, realistically, don’t usually move this fast necessarily, in a cozy, we’re willing to suspend that disbelief. And because I put so much cozy stuff in—the community stuff, the friendship stuff, the food—I want the mystery itself at least to move at a faster pace with all the slow things around it.  

Making it seasonal/holiday event-based actually works in both ways. It can give you that feeling of we’re slowing down, we’re enjoying the planning for this thing, or we’re visiting the booths for this thing. But Oh, no! This is a huge thing for our business, and if we don’t have it wrapped up by this time, this really negatively affects quite a few people. These are small businesses. …  

I think it helps bring you into the real lives of these people, while also being a murder mystery. We’re in their real lives, but by living through their real lives, we can investigate in different ways, because that’s the point of an amateur sleuth. They’re not going to have the resources that a professional has. All they have are their connections, the places that they have access to, their resources. So [my characters] move through that way. 

You said you learned that this would be the last book in the series partway through the process. When you figured that out, were there certain scenes or storylines you knew you wanted to include in the story? 

I already knew it was the last book in my current contract. It was two, three-book contracts. Every time you come to the end as a writer, there’s no guarantee of it being picked up again. So, I write what I tend to think of as little mini arcs. So, if books 1, 2, and 3 were the only three books that existed, I wanted that third book to feel a satisfying end, but open for more possibilities. I was lucky that I had other possibilities. I did the same with six, anyway. It wasn’t like, Oh no, I included this cliffhanger, and I have to change everything. I did give that arc of the writing’s on the wall, let me see what I can do to hopefully convince them that there are more adventures in the future, but still give my readers a satisfying ending. 

Then, when I found out this was the end, I just tightened and hit on that feeling more. There were no huge things that I necessarily had to wrap up, because again, I try not to do too much, because technically, readers should be able to pick up anywhere in the series and start. But I did want to reiterate these bonds that my character made through all the ridiculous adventures she’s gone through along the way. I wanted to home in on that while at the same time trying something slightly different in the approach that I took to the crime itself.  

Every book is me doing the same thing, but trying to push myself in a different direction, if that makes sense. Everyone knows the framework that’s expected, but I always want to stretch at least a little bit within those bounds. 

In books five and six, you introduce a new town, and I always think the town, the setting, is such an important part of the cozy because it’s got to be small enough that people know each other, but then big enough that it’s conceivable for many murders to happen over the course of the series. There’s a delicate balancing act. What did bringing in this neighboring town allow you to do as you progressed in the series? 

When I was planning Shady Palms, I specifically chose a town—it’s very vague geographically—based on this town called Ottawa, Illinois, which is almost two hours outside of Chicago. I think the population is just under 20,000. I’m like, Oh, that sounds right, you’re not going to know 20,000 people. But it is just small enough, you’ll know a good chunk of them. So, it fit into that small-feeling, but believably large enough to allow these things to happen.  

When I introduced Shelbyville, part of that was just me being a ridiculous geek. Shelbyville is the rival town in “The Simpsons.” There’s Springfield and Shelbyville. Then also, when I was playing up the dynamics, I was also thinking of the TV show, “Parks and Recreation,” where the town is Pawnee and their rival is Eagleton. It’s almost absurd, but at the same time, those kinds of rivals are very real. And both with “The Simpsons” and “Parks and Recreation,” they operate within their own rules, and within the world itself, everything that happens makes sense. To the outside world, no, but within the world itself, it all makes sense. The same thing in cozies. Again, suspension of disbelief.  

I want my worlds not to be necessarily super realistic, but I want them to feel real. So, I was trying to play with it: Its own time, its own space, its own world. Let’s bring in these fun elements. Shady Palms is technically big enough that I could have kept pulling in other Shady Palms citizens, but I thought by expanding it, I could play on the fun of rivalries, petty jealousies, and small-town politics. … 

We were talking about cozy expectations and suspending disbelief, and of course, you do adhere to that, but you also include these more intense topics, like attacks on woman-owned businesses in this new book, or predatory behavior and PTSD in the second book. What’s your approach for including these topics in a way that keeps to cozy expectations? 

People like to look down on cozies, but we are still part of crime fiction, which means that we still help you to examine what that means—social justice issues. Murder is a social justice issue—there is no keeping politics out of murder mysteries. People who are like, “Oh, I just wanted a fun read, but these dead bodies are fine.” I can kill all these people, but suddenly, me taking a stand on certain things …  

I didn’t want the grittiness. I wanted them to still be—because that’s why I read cozy mysteries—I wanted them to be fun and fluffy. But I found them actually to be the perfect place to discuss these things I care about, because it is a way to touch on things without being too—hopefully, I guess it’s for the reader to decide—heavy handed, in an entertaining and easily digestible way. Rather than being something that’s super hard-hitting, these are people who are being affected by these issues. I had to think of, as a woman of color, as a queer woman of color, what would that mean? How does that make my stories different? How does that make my character different in the way that she has to move through that world? What kind of issues will she be coming up against that maybe other cozy protagonists would not be coming up against?  

The fact that she has this woman of color entrepreneur group—she makes a joke earlier, and she’s like, “Wow, all the friends I have in my life now, except for Adina, are all women I accused of murder, basically.” But it’s also, they are their support group. They are all women of color. They all run their own businesses, and so they are looking to each other for support, and that’s just meant to be the friendship/community thing. But when this book came around, I was like, what would realistically be a problem? Are these businesses being targeted because they’re women-owned? Or, is it just because these are the most successful businesses that happen to be women-owned? These things that you have to ask yourself. Are these attacks personal? Is there an agenda behind them? Is it really just about money?  

Even though I touched on some possibly heavier stuff, particularly in the second book, as you mentioned, with this book—I feel like every writer’s going to say this: What was in our head and what we’re trying to accomplish is never quite what’s on the page. Hopefully, I got close to it, because that was something I grappled with: How did I want to handle the topic of these burglaries and who is committing them, and what does it mean that these are the targets? I don’t know how successful I was in doing it, but it was an interesting thing for me to grapple with as I was writing it.  

So, I feel like shying away from these very real topics means you are not thinking about your protagonist or your victims fully, because you are not examining the way that these things are affecting them, and what led to these possible tragedies. 

Let’s talk about your path to publication a little bit. I picked up parts of it from the acknowledgments in your books: You had Kellye Garrett as a mentor, and you did Pitch Wars. You’ve mentioned that the books in this series were acquiredin two three-book deals. Could you talk a little bit about how the first deal came about and how much of the second two books you knew going into that?  

My path to publishing was not exactly a straight one. Before Arsenic and Adobo was picked up, I had another book before it. In my acknowledgments, I always shout out another mystery writer, Lori Rader-Day; she’s a local Chicagoan. She was my very first writing teacher. She’s the one who told me, “You are a mystery writer. Keep going.” That would become my first finished book, the one I started in her class. That’s the book that got me into Pitch Wars and got me my mentor, Kellye Garrett. It’s what got me my first literary agent.  

For a year and a half, it was on submission, and it never sold. It got to acquisitions, so it was very close to being picked up. Acquisitions is where the editor wants to take it on, but they have to convince the sales team that you’re a good investment. Three times it got to that final stage, three times it didn’t make it through. The feedback was always the same when I reached that stage, which was, “She has a great voice, but no audience. Nobody’s going to read these books.” One of them said that “Traditional mystery is for older white women, and she should write YA instead because that’s where diversity is.” And this was 2018, 2019. It was not that long ago. … 

So, while that year and a half of rejection was happening, I was writing the book that would become Arsenic and Adobo. When I finished it, my first literary agent, she read it, and she said, “I loved your first book, which I couldn’t sell. This book, objectively speaking, is better written and more marketable, but I don’t love it, and you deserve someone who does.” She was very real. She was really looking out for me. I’ll always speak fondly of her because that was a really great thing for her to do, honestly, for me and my career. So, we split up, and I found a new agent, and that agent, Jill Marsal, whom I’m still with, sold the book in two weeks at auction. I was gearing up for a year and a half of rejection when she sent it out, and I started revising the one that never sold, because I had an R & R—revise and resubmit—from one editor whom I liked. I was like, Well, this submission’s going to take forever. I can work on this one and polish. No, it happened so, so quickly. It was like whiplash.  

When I was talking to the editors who were interested—I read so many cozies, I’ve read dozens of series, and so I knew cozy mysteries are always a series. Maybe it’s only two books, but there’s always at least a sequel of some kind. So, going in, I knew they were going to ask, “What else have you got? How do you picture the series? What else do you have planned?” So I had jotted down several ideas that I thought could potentially be future books in the series. They were not as well thought out and planned. I didn’t have a full proposal or pitch ready yet. It was literally just bullet point ideas, because I didn’t expect it to happen so fast, but I did think about it … 

Do you know what’s next since this series is wrapped up?  

I don’t have any adult contracts. My YA debut came out in May, Death in the Cards, and the sequel was supposed to come out next fall, but it got pushed back. I don’t have any books coming out next year. My YA sequel, Murder Under the Full Moon, comes out Spring 2027. So, I have something, but I mean technically, that’s already done. I don’t have any forthcoming from that. That’s a weird limbo to be in. 

What last advice do you have for the readers of Writer’s Digest that we haven’t talked about yet? 

We didn’t say it explicitly, but this is the advice I always give to all up and coming writers: Build your community, and build it early. They are what got me through those really, really hard times. Just last week on Friday, I gave a keynote speech to the library, which was entitled “Community and Spite: The Two Things That Got Me Through Publishing.” Because I feel like those two things—I need a support network and then also the “I’ll show you” kind of energy—is what I need to get through publishing. It’s about perseverance. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.