Welcome to my blog!

Here you’ll find progress on current books, behind-the-scenes insight and story inspiration, as well peeks at my life on rural, (usually) rainy East Hawaii Island.

The Blog Menu Dropdown highlights three categories, Hawaii Life (pretty self-explanatory), Stories I Love (also pretty self-explanatory, but includes books, movies, and TV), and Magpie Moments (bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction).

Interested in something else? You can also Search for something specific—the little icon is at the end of the header—or just dive in and start scrolling.

 

 

Thank You! And Last Chance for a Buck Box Set

Didn’t I just post something last week? Why, yes, I did. But I have something to share that can’t wait. Thank you. Thank you, Reader Peeps (and BookBub and other awesome advertisers) for helping make the first Sydney Brennan Box Set an Amazon Bestseller in PI Mysteries this week. 😱 I know! I didn’t expect it, either. But I am very grateful. And if you need to add any of the first three Sydney Brennan books to your ereader (Back to Lazarus, Secrets in Stockbridge, and The Perils of Panacea), you can still grab the Box Set for a buck today. It goes Read more…


How is Your Covid Roller Coaster? Trying to Level out the Track

A few days ago, my husband came in from checking the rain gauge to report, “It’s raining lizards. What’s the next sign of the apocalypse?” To clarify, our moldy, plastic rain gauge is on its last legs. The sun has done its best to break down the structure on a molecular level, including the screen that keeps the floaty disc from flying out the top when you empty the water. That morning, an anole had crawled/fallen into the long, clear tube and had to be poured out. Fortunately it hadn’t rained the night before, since I doubt treading water was Read more…


How to Get Your Reading Fix During the Covid Crazy and Other Lean Times

There are a lot of health care and essential workers out there in the world right now who—let’s be blunt—are risking their lives and saving our asses on a daily basis. As for those quarantined at home, some are making sourdough bread and TikTok videos, while others—let’s be equally blunt—are just curled in a ball trying their very best not to lose their shit. [Potty-mouth done for those who are sensitive right now; and if you are, you might want to hold off on reading my books. 😉] Whichever camp you’re in, when the world is crazy many of us Read more…


Writer’s Little Dino Helper, or When “The Outside” Comes to You

Happy Good Friday, Christian folks! And happy end-of-another-week-you-survived to everyone else! I know many of you haven’t left the house in a VERY. LONG. TIME. I feel you. Quarantine sucks. But it beats the alternative. As I mentioned to my newsletter folks, I’ve been fighting a little something for a while. (Something flu-like, not grizzly-like.) That’s means, in an abundance of caution, the only time I’ve seen paved road in weeks is when we took our poor dog Travis for The Final Vet Visit. (He passed in the car on the way, so I barely set foot in the parking Read more…


It’s Time for a Quick Covid Check-in

How’s everyone doing? I’ll try to keep this relatively short and… well, I’m afraid I don’t have “sweet” in me under the best of circumstances, but would you settle for not too morose? In case some AI bot or Generation AA wunderkind stumbles across this blog post decades from now without context, the world is currently in the midst of the Covid-19 crazy (or more popularly, The Great Toilet Paper Run of 2020), with many saying the United States is now the epicenter. Here in the state of Hawaii, we’re under a “stay at home” order for all but essential workers. Read more…