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).
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Aloha! Being Friday and all, I thought I’d take a break from my week of soul-sucking, admin-type things (the next “dashboard” I see better have a V8 engine attached) to give you a quick Magpie Moment, one perfectly themed for your upcoming weekend. “I’ll have the margaritas waiting,” Lisa called out. Our mother had always preferred drinking margaritas to hurricanes at a Hurricane Party. (She’d said it would take more than seventy-five mile-per-hour winds to make her drink anything so vile.) Chapter Thirteen, No Safe Winterport Having lived in New Orleans, I’d have to agree with Syd’s mom. Hurricanes are Read more…
This is a brief blog post, for reasons you’ll soon understand. It’s been an experimental week here in the Myth Lab. (I borrowed that title from Chuck Wendig until I can think of something better; he’d decided not to use it anyway for obvious pronunciation/law enforcement reasons.) I got my Prodigal manuscript off to the copy editor successfully over the weekend – woo hoo! This week, I’ve been doing a lot of work on my writing business infrastructure. I’m tweaking my website, upgrading my email function, learning a new book formatting program (which I LOVE—Vellum rocks!), updating old book files and links, etc. Read more…
Happy Writer News: the Prodigal manuscript goes to the copy editor this weekend. Woo hoo! I finished my own last pass yesterday, and I’m just wrapping up beta reader feedback. I’ll be interested to see if my editor finds any continuity issues. Continuity is always a bugaboo for me. For example. during Prodigal’s rough draft, I once started the day by writing a chapter in a different house. Let me be clear: I was still in the same house. My characters changed houses from the scene I’d drafted the day before. 😜 I’ve also joked about devoting a single massive Read more…
After high school, I went to a small, liberal arts college in Massachusetts (go Ephs!) that prided itself on diversity of every kind. This included geographic diversity, with students hailing from every state and a butt-load of countries. (A butt-load is a lot, by the way.) I always joked that I was the token West Virginian, but there was one other person from West Virginia in my class. We never actually met, so I don’t know if we were related. See, that’s the kind of joke you can make if you’re from West Virginia. (Or Kentucky; the token Kentuckian and I Read more…
Another New Year, another binge-watching opportunity to discover. 😉 There is undoubtedly an abundance of crap on television, but “network” innovation in recent years (is Netflix a network? is Amazon?) has also given us some excellent shows. With limited viewing hours in a day, I often don’t find those shows until they’ve already come and gone. I’m glad to report this one [knocking on desk] is still around. Longmire is the story of a Wyoming sheriff who’s struggling with his grief over the loss of his wife. As the one-year anniversary of her death nears, Walt Longmire (who doesn’t love Read more…
