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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I almost skipped the blog post tonight because… well, because it would be easier to skip it. Instead I decided to keep it brief and Public Service Announcement-like. I feel like if I plotted my stress levels lately, it would look like those graphs of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past thousand or so years, with the past month or two being the onset of the Industrial Age. Too science geeky? Okay, how about this… When I was in college, and for whatever reason started running around like a crazy person, there was a guy who would, in Lloyd fashion (John Cusack in Read more…
Time for another Magpie Moments post, peeks behind the scenes where I’ve scavenged bits of real life for my fiction. Continuing with the theme of names, this time I thought I’d share the origins of one of Sydney’s nicknames. “If trouble starts, it’s usually because she brought it with her,” [Richard] said, pointing at me. “Little Miss Tempest in a Teapot.” Back to Lazarus, Chapter 39 My first job as a licensed attorney was for a Legal Aid office in Lafayette, LA. It was relatively small—just a few each of attorneys, paralegals, secretaries and admin-type people—considering it provided services to Read more…
I’m breaking the mold a bit (if I’ve written enough of these to have a mold; maybe just a slight impression) on my Stories I Love series. Usually these are recommendations for mystery shows long past that you may have missed and are my perennial favorites. This time I’ve chosen a show that is (gasp!) still being broadcast, that I haven’t finished and could possibly go south on me before the end of the first season. Why? Because it’s really good, and I wanted to share just in case, for once, I’m not the last person on the planet to Read more…
We’ve been exploring names lately on the weekly Magpie Moments Post, most recently that of my protagonist Sydney Brennan. Last week, we established that “Sydney” came from my childhood pen name. Congratulations to Lissa Weddington for deducing the origins of “Brennan” and winning a signed paperback of BTL! For lawyers that spend much time thinking about constitutional law, handicapping a Supreme Court case is a lot like handicapping a sporting event. Each justice has his or her strengths and weaknesses, pet issues and hot buttons. There are some swing voters (though not so much lately) that can go either way, Read more…
Things have settled down a bit here in lower Puna. We still have the 6:30 a.m. low-flying helicopter wake-up call, but, for the moment at least, Pele has paused in her advance toward Pahoa, or anywhere else. In other words, there’s not much happening at the surface. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not much happening. But for some people, it’s a bit of a respite and more time to make plans (or at least plan to make them). On the other hand, it’s been very hot this week (our 75-pound dog spends the afternoons hiding in a cool Read more…
