Cover Reveal for No Safe Winterport, The Fourth Sydney Brennan Mystery
It’s been raining here a lot lately. I’m not complaining—my whiteboard has fallen off the wall (with 15 pieces of “permanent” mounting tape) and my dog-walking sneakers haven’t dried in about five days, but the daily drenching has definitely provided a welcome relief from the heat. (Okay, maybe I’m complaining a little.) Last night, we had occasional thunder between waves of rain that pounded the metal roof hard enough to loosen your fillings, which is unusual for Hawaii. (The thunder, that is—rumbling in the distance here is more likely to mean the military is playing with its boom-boom toys in Read more…
Does my Female PI Have to Wear a Pink Fedora and Carry a Cupcake?
A couple of weeks ago, I used an aggregator (a company like Smashwords or Draft to Digital that acts as a sort of middleman) to add my books to some of the lesser-known ebook retailer and subscription services. Of course, then I had to check my books on each of the sites and see what had gone wrong, because something invariably goes wrong. Some sites don’t support any description formatting, or they support html but not that kind of html. Then there are the I-know-I-proofread-seventeen-times moments, when you discover that you can’t even spell your own name. (Hasn’t actually happened Read more…
Happy International PI Day! And Random Thoughts on Writing Different Genres…
My thoughts are a little muddled today. I know, I know—pipe down there in the Peanut Gallery. On the one hand, it’s International Private Investigators Day. Yay! July 24th was chosen because Eugene Francois Vidocq, arguably the father of the modern private investigator, was born on this day in 1775. (Read more about him, and about how John D. MacDonald broke me for other genres, in last year’s PI Day blog post.) Good reason, but late July doesn’t exactly encourage you to celebrate by dressing as a classic noir PI. Here in Hawaii, the humidity would bead on a decent Read more…
Excavating for Trees, and for Story Structure
My husband and I had a bunch of holes dug a few months ago while we were getting some other things done on our property. “Dug” isn’t really the right verb, though. Not quite blasted—pile-driven? Our whole neighborhood rests on relatively recent lava flow with a thin veneer of cinder, the perfect habitat for native ohia trees and lots of non-native, invasive green crap. In other words, we don’t do a lot of “digging” around here. We’d already transplanted two trees we’ve had for several years—a bonsai (not intentionally, just stunted) avocado and an unidentified citrus (it’s never fruited and Read more…
Sydney Brennan’s Summer Vacation… Not!
It’s Friday, and that means it’s Blog Post Day! Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Well, that’s just one of the status-type things I’m going to share on my two-days-early Summer Schedule Post. (Please–no songs from musicals; I am so not a musicals person.) Until recently, I’d been writing a couple of blog posts a week, but with no set schedule, just posting one every four or five days. That meant within a couple of days of posting, I was thinking, Is it time yet? When did I post? What am I going to write about this time? Not that Read more…
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