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.
The Blog turns One Hundred today—woo hoo! Well, at least this is one hundredth entry posted, so I thought I’d share something special. Today’s Stories I Love features the book that got me (for good or ill—depends on who you ask) to finally jump into the world of indie publishing. Nope, it’s not nonfiction. It’s a mystery. And a sci fi. A mysti-fi? Imagine that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth. We don’t know exactly where, but we do know when—six months from now—and we know it will be catastrophic. What do you do with your remaining days, and Read more…
Today I thought it was time for another Magpie Moment. These are bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction. We haven’t talked about food for a while, so we’re due, right? Or maybe I’m just hungry, like my fictional private investigator Sydney Brennan in this scene (and, honestly, most of the time). I took a wary bite. The last dish my sister prepared for me was probably a bowl of cereal, so I was pleasantly surprised. “I’m usually not a fan of chilled quiche, but this …” “I know,” Lisa said, smiling. “It doesn’t just Read more…
Raise your hand if you remember the 1990s. (Unless you’re wearing a T-shirt you bought at a Nirvana concert; then you can keep it down.) Bill Pullman is one of those actors that I don’t initially remember being in things (my sleeping brain thanks me for blocking out The Serpent and the Rainbow, and all other Wes Craven movies), but he was in a lot of movies in the 1990s. They ranged across multiple genres, from the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping to David Lynch’s Lost Highway (yes, I consider Lynch to be his own genre) to the blockbuster Independence Read more…
“I’m a taxpayer. I paid for it, so I’m using the whole road.” Who hasn’t made (or cringed as the driver made) similar remarks after drifting across the highway’s center line or onto the shoulder, or going the wrong way down a one-way street. A couple of weeks ago, a woman in a coffee shop parking lot heading straight for me veered at the last moment, leaned out the driver’s window and yelled, “Watch where you’re going!” Apparently she’d had too much caffeine and didn’t notice the painted arrows going both ways. I remember traveling with our band director and a few other Read more…
This week, I’m making a shameful confession of a different kind. (Last week’s was word count-related.) We’re going back to the third Sydney Brennan book, The Perils of Panacea, for a Magpie Moments post today, and back into the recesses of time and memory to find the real world source material that acted as inspiration. A little context with as little spoiling as possible: in the following excerpt from the book, Sydney is driving a car with … let’s just say, someone with whom she’d rather not be driving. I started the engine and shifted the gear on the steering column, Read more…
