Magpie Moments: That Warning Light Isn’t Important…
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…
Magpie Moments: A Beer by Any Other Name
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…
Thank You! And Last Chance for a Buck Box Set
Didn’t I just post something last week? Why, yes, I did. But I have something to share that can’t wait. Thank you. Thank you, Reader Peeps (and BookBub and other awesome advertisers) for helping make the first Sydney Brennan Box Set an Amazon Bestseller in PI Mysteries this week. 😱 I know! I didn’t expect it, either. But I am very grateful. And if you need to add any of the first three Sydney Brennan books to your ereader (Back to Lazarus, Secrets in Stockbridge, and The Perils of Panacea), you can still grab the Box Set for a buck today. It goes Read more…
Friday Five: Things I Learned Writing my Tenth Book, Including the Dangers of Schrödinger’s Objects
Hello out there, and happy Friday! (For me in Hawaii Time, anyway.) Hope you’re recovering from your holiday festivities. Remember, New Year’s Eve is still on the horizon, so pace yourselves. And don’t forget to visit the vet, as we did today, to refill that prescription of Special New Year’s Treats for the scaredy—I mean, sensitive—dogs. 😜 Good news for Sydney Brennan fans: her latest adventure, Grave Truth, is alive! Woo-hoo! I was doing the math, and with six previous Syd books, plus the Dead Hollow trilogy… Yes, I’m pausing to help you assess the state of your holiday recovery Read more…
Why I Didn’t Wake When Feral Pigs Ate our Trash (And a Weekend Ebook Sale for Syd Fans)
Hey, stranger—remember me? There’s a reason I’ve been incommunicado. And it’s not just to give you a Jimmy Buffett earworm. The title kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Yes, I’m sleeping like a mostly dead person (time to watch The Princess Bride again?) when I get around to sleeping. And yes, a few nights ago a feral pig and her ridiculously cute piglet woke my husband—but not me—rooting around in our trash like a slightly shorter, more casually dressed Yogi Bear with Boo-Boo in tow. Last night, they were snore-chuffing under our house almost directly under our bed. After one Read more…
^