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’m just starting to feel my way around Goodreads Author Land. They have an “Ask the Author” section where readers can submit specific questions to authors, but there’s also a rotation of commonly asked questions. One of these caught my eye and my imagination more than I would have expected, so I thought I would share it here as well… Where did you get the idea for your most recent book? The seeds of Back to Lazarus were planted so long ago that I’d forgotten them, until I read this question and started digging in my brain and my notebooks. Read more…
Between my husband and me, there’s not a whole lot we won’t try to do ourselves. We’re (slowly) building our own house, so he’s done electrical and framing (a friend who shall remain nameless once framed himself into our house while working on a flare-topped ladder) and everything in between, with limited tools and limited electricity. I don’t think I’ve broken anything with a hammer or sliced anything unintended with a saw, and I’ve done a fair amount of sheetrock fairly poorly (my corners aren’t too bad but all of our walls have a lump in the middle). I’ve also Read more…
July 24th is Private Investigator’s Day. The date was chosen to celebrate the birth of Eugene Francois Vidocq in 1775. Apparently a master of disguise, Vidocq was a criminal who escaped from custody and spent years on the run, only to eventually turn informant and secret police agent. Vidocq founded the French state security police force Sûreté Nationale, and in 1833 he started the first known detective agency. Many consider him to be the father of modern criminology. But there’s another reason today is the perfect day to celebrate private investigators. On July 24, 1916, a man was born who Read more…
As a completely new author with no fan base, no one on my newsletter but my mom, and a brand spanking new website but no real platform or brand or other fancy marketing words yet, I knew that I wouldn’t exactly be rocketing to the top of the charts. I’m in it for the long haul, which translates to, “I never really thought about the first week except as something I had to pass through on the way to the first year(s).” Here’s some of what I learned, living through the first week without having bothered to think about it Read more…
When I first downloaded Goodreads on my (long lost and lamented) iPhone years ago, I thought it was the best app ever. The bar code scanner almost made my head explode. It is a great resource for a lot of people, but I’ve never used it consistently, and it turns out it wasn’t right for me at the time. As I said in my last post, I’m not a big reviewer, and I wasn’t looking for a community. I just wanted something to help me track what books I’d already read and which ones I wanted to read. But if Read more…
