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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David Sedaris is one of those people who could make a to-do list funny, interesting, and sometimes even insightful and transformative. I am definitely a fan. He often talks about cannibalizing his own life for his writing. For example, one essay in the fabulous Me Talk Pretty One Day centers around his compulsion to share a personal story that his sister forbids him from telling. (As he points out, it’s not like she’s doing anything with it.) I doubt that fiction authors are any different from essayists. I’m always incorporating bits of my life or the lives of others into my writing, sometimes Read more…
I don’t know about you, but my week has seen a fair number of distractions. Many, like the current political situation in—oh, let’s just say everywhere—are of immense scope and importance, and yet have no immediate and discernible direct effect on me on any given day. (Is that enough qualifiers? Sorry—lawyer flashback.) Others, like the beetley roach (that’s what I call the smaller non-palmetto bug roaches because it decreases my likelihood of shrieking) making his sporadic journey around the room right now, have a small scope and very little Importance, but a direct effect on me. (And once on our Read more…
If you’ve signed up for my newsletter (hint, hint), you’ll know that I have a Sydney Brennan novella in the edits stage now. Yay, beta readers! I started working on the second full-length novel this week, gathering notes and bits I’d written previously into a Scrivener file and getting grounded. I’ve also been using Scapple. Not to be confused with a nasty southern meat product made up leftover butchered bits, Scapple is a software program by the Scrivener people that I’m finding really useful for mapping out the story, seeing connections, and keeping track of timelines. (I wish I could Read more…
Everyone is familiar with the magic of comfort food. Over the weekend, my husband and I felt the need for comfort entertainment, which of course made me think of another installment of Stories I Love. This time, the Nero Wolfe edition. If you read my blog regularly, you’re probably not surprised by the choice. A while back I wrote a post about Book Chi, the idea that years of reader experiences can attach to the physical books you find in libraries and used book stores. The book that prompted this was a library copy of Rex Stout’s, Please Pass the Read more…
Much writing advice can be boiled down to, “Write every day.” There may or may not be word counts attached, but in essence it’s that simple. Create a little something every day, and you’ll see multiple benefits. Keep at it, and with a page a day you’ve got the rough draft of a novel in a year. You also make changes in your mind, training yourself to produce words by habit the way you would learn a fancy toss-the-ball-in-the-air tennis serve day by day. (If the preponderance of hyphens make you think said tossed ball would likely land back on Read more…
