First, thank you to the Blood Red Pencil for hosting me for this stop on my two-week-long virtual tour for Mercury’s Rise , the latest book in my Silver Rush historical mystery series. Truly, I have to thank BRP for more than that, because it was BRP’s Dani Greer who helped me out of a tight spot regarding word usage in Mercury’s Rise . It all began with whiskey. And whisky. I had taken great pains to determine under what circumstances my protagonist Inez Stannert would use which term. After all, Inez runs a high-class saloon in 1880s Leadville, Colorado, so she would certainly know the difference. My conundrum began when the line editor at my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, noted that some places in the manuscript were “whiskey” and others read “whisky.” Which is correct? she asked. I sent her a long reply (with links!) noting that they weren’t the same. (New York Times weighed in here and The Boozin’ Blog had a discussion here .) But I began to worry that switching between the...