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 a video call with someone this week who, wearing a cozy sweater, told me she’d gotten out her desk foot warmer (a gift created by her engineer husband to warm her feet, not the desk’s.) I think the shirt I was wearing had sleeves. Thanks to climate change, seasonal transitions are getting to be slippery buggers, with seasons slowly creeping into USSC Justice Potter Stewart’s hard-core pornography territory: “I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis vs. Ohio) But seasons have always been tricky here in East Hawaii, at least for someone used to a temperate climate framework. Read more…
Looking to try a new mystery series but don’t know where to start? Don’t worry—we’ve save you the hard work. Check out these forty or so ebook First in Series Mysteries and Thrillers, all gathered in one spot for the month of October. Most of the books are on sale for the occasion, too. In fact, if you haven’t read it already, the first book in my Sydney Brennan PI mysteries, Back to Lazarus, is just 99¢ this month (regular $3.99). And she’s sporting a shiny new cover… 😉 📚 Let the weekend reading begin! 📚
Dad, I used your joke. That dedication to my late father starts the third Sydney Brennan PI Mystery, The Perils of Panacea. It’s a hard one to live up to. Not because of any emotional baggage or anything like that on my part. Some might suggest it’s because our digital reading tech (e-readers and reading apps) is so close to where it needs to be, but not quite there… I write fiction, so I prefer to think someone somewhere is an evil math joke hater. [Mike] came out in jeans and a T-shirt that read, “π r squared, π r round.” Read more…
It’s time for another installment in my recurring series of Magpie Moments. These are bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction. Literary Easter eggs, if you will. How many of us—show of hands—have never ignored a car dashboard warning light? Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. A lot of sitting on hands. There is admittedly a hierarchy among the insistent little buggers. I have a TPMS light that’s been glaring at me for about a year now. I refuse to pay that much money to replace a sensor whose sole purpose is to tell me, you Read more…
I’ve written here before about the challenges of series continuity, by which I mean maintaining consistent details from scene to scene and book to book. In my Sydney Brennan PI Mysteries, remembering Syd is a redhead and drives a VW Cabrio named Cecil is pretty easy. Beyond that, it can get tricky. Does she wear a watch? Like chunky or creamy peanut butter? Shower daily, and morning or night? Even the “gimmes” I noted can cause me headaches, say when she’s wearing a baseball cap or driving a rental car. One way to try to get around this: use my Read more…
