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, my daydreaming snowbound friends! Last post, I shared a bit of the reality of living in East Hawaii with you, specifically that we received (there’s that deceptively grateful word again) 17.5 FEET of rain last year. Seriously. Well, in true contrarian fashion, our normally rainy January has been quite dry. So dry that I’ve started regularly (dysfunctionally?) laying a hand against our catchment tank to check the water level when I feed the fish in the evening. (Don’t worry—we still have plenty of water; I just like to be reassured that we still have plenty of water.) It has Read more…
Happy New Year, everyone! I can still say that in the first week of January, right? It is so fricking beautiful now, sunny and breezy and the perfect temperature. Check out the anole sunning himself among the avocado tree blossoms. And boy, do they smell good. All in all, it’s the kind of day that would make you step off the plane from Iowa and exclaim, Wow, this really IS Hawaii! At this precise moment, anyway, so hurry and step off that plane because there’s a cloud bank on the horizon. 😉 Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly grateful. We’ve Read more…
Good news—I have finally finished a rough draft of the eighth Sydney Brennan book… Memory Road! It has been a hard slog during the Panda Bear Times, but I am cautiously optimistic that things have taken a turn for my writing brain. I’ve also been working on some Sydney Brennan short stories of late, enough for a mini anthology. (“Shorts” in the post title = short stories, not garments; if it were down to my seamstress skills, Syd’s bum would go naked.) Both of these projects will need editing, covers, sacrifices to the retailer gods, etc., before I can put Read more…
Happy Saturday! I’m just popping in to share something with my audiobook peeps and anyone else who needs something engrossing to listen to while pretending to listen to something or someone else. Remember those holidays coming up… 🥂 🎧 Prodigal is a featured deal in Chirp’s newsletter this month—woo hoo! 🎧 🥂 Okay, now that I’ve stopped happy-dancing, let’s take a step back and unpack that announcement. First, what is Prodigal? Most of you are fans of my Sydney Brennan PI Mysteries, but I’ve also written an Appalachian crime thriller series, the Dead Hollow trilogy. Mwah-ha-hah! The obligatory mwah-ha is Read more…
Hey, um… is it Friday again? [scrambles to blog] I’m in the midst of some good stuff here, including trying to wrap up the rough draft of Sydney Brennan Adventure #8—has anyone seen a title lying around?—so I’ll keep this brief-ish, but I did want to share a little something cool that might make you smile. Here in the tropics, you probably think we’re wading through fields of… well, just fill your favorite fruit or vegetable that comes in fields. But, as I noted last blog post (Changing Seasons, Hawaii Style) common expectations and on-the-ground reality don’t always align in Read more…
