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.
I had intended to do something fun this week to celebrate the release of the Heir audiobook—woo hoo! Except Heir isn’t actually showing up on most stores yet, so less woo and more boo. 😢 Retailers are being slow as pahoehoe. (A 5.5 Kilauea-adjacent earthquake woke us a few nights ago, so lava flows are on my mind.) That leaves me scrambling at the last minute for a blog post, which means it’s time for a Story I Love I could write in my (non-earthquake-interrupted) sleep. Another dead body. Every year it is the same. Every year, another dead body…” Read more…
Last blog post, I confessed that I have no future in professional landscaping. Well, I have a confession of a different sort today. I know — all writers with blogs know — that our readers don’t care how we write. Much like a gemstone or a perfect meal, you/we (because writers are also readers) don’t want to hear about the millions of years of pressure, the raw ingredients (especially if they’re eggs), or the hours of staring at the screen. We just want the dazzling results on our finger, our plate, or our #TBR (To Be Read list). And yet, Read more…
Thank you to everyone for the warm wishes on the passing of poor Fritz. It’s an experience many of us have shared, so the Humans get hugs (virtual or otherwise), but we tend to forget about the effects on the rest of the pack. I’m certain animals have their own grieving processes. Ninja Kitty has been ridiculously affectionate, always wanting love, but is beginning to transition back toward his default state of obnoxiousness. Travis and Fred seem more subdued generally, especially Fred. Of course, it’s easy to project our own feelings onto our pets, so I try not to read Read more…
I missed the blog post last week—for reasons I’ll share below—and I’ve been mostly off email and social media lately, so I wanted to at least do a quick check-in today. How is everybody? Between the ridiculous cold in the United States and the ridiculous heat in Australia, I’m guessing a decent number of responses would be, “Fairly shitty, but thanks for asking.” Or at least, fairly uncomfortable. I can’t complain about comfort. Here in East Hawaii, we’ve had nothing extraordinary temperature- or precipitation-wise (although we could use some rain as our roads and catchment tanks are feeling parched). But Read more…
I mentioned last week that I’ve been swamped by a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff. Pssstt… guess who’ll be featured by BookBub tomorrow. 😳 Scary cool, huh? Cross your fingers that I have a good run. And if you have not yet picked up the first Sydney Brennan Mystery Back to Lazarus for free, do so now because I will be making it a paid (albeit modestly so) book soon after the BookBub runs. I’ll share more on that and some other changes in a future blog post. But today, I have something fun! Speaking of free things, let me spin Read more…
