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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As a reader, I rarely review books, unless they are very good (Ben Winters’ The Last Policeman, anyone?) or very bad (an unnamed author whose female characters are less realistic than blow-up dolls, but he’s mega-popular so my review doesn’t matter anyway). There are two reasons. First, the practical: I live in a place where internet isn’t easily accessible, and even getting a cell phone signal involves Cirque du Soleil-esque contortions perched on the highest object in your line of sight. I think of advanced communications on a triage basis: these are the 7 things that must be done in the Read more…
Just a quick update for those of you (all three) who have been watching and waiting–my mystery novel Back to Lazarus is now live on Amazon for Kindle. Yay! (In my best Dancing Kermit voice.) I have to say, the technology hasn’t been as painful as I feared it would be. The novel was originally written in Microsoft Word, but when I decided to self-publish, I imported it into Scrivener. I cannot say enough good things about Scrivener, although I did have a few heart-stopping moments when I was afraid my Bad Tech Vibes had managed to overcome even its resilient functionality. The Read more…
I’m about to wrap up the rough draft of a novella, so of course I’m writing a blog entry instead. But, as I like to preface many of the things I tell my closest friends, “This [blog entry] is not a total non sequitur.” (Which implies that it is at least a partial one.) I was prompted to try a novella that follows my private investigator Sydney Brennan by two things: resistance in writing the second Sydney Brennan novel, and the Black Orchid novella award, a contest put on by the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for unpublished Read more…
I’m old enough that web design was not part of my primary education. I did some basic programming as a kid. You know, the kind of thing where you spend a couple of hours writing a “program” to do something that takes four seconds on a calculator. We had a computer class in high school using some now-defunct word processing program, but we also had a mandatory typing class. It was taught by a large elderly woman with a broken arm who meandered around the room yelling “KEY!!” whenever someone goofed off. Somehow I landed in the “bad boy” section Read more…
I love Game of Thrones, but Season 3 has been staring at me from its box set for weeks, calling me names, daring me to lose several days of my life to its narrative of bloody vengefulness. I’ve sidestepped any real spoilers, but it’s impossible to avoid the pervasive sense of “bad shit’s gonna happen” that permeates the Internets. And I’m just not quite ready for that right now. I need to build up my reserves before I watch them impale a kitten on a baby unicorn, or whatever it is they have in store. In the meantime, there are Read more…
