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…
Spicy or Bland: The Challenge of Applying Humor with a Judicious Hand
When my husband (always my first reader) reads something I’ve written, whether it’s a blog post or a novel, part of me doesn’t want to be in the same room. There’s a certain sense of self-consciousness, not just that what you’ve written might not be that good (after all, if it’s a draft you can always revise), but also that the reader will see something of you in there that you didn’t intend to share, something you didn’t even see yourself. But there’s another part of me that wants to sit right next to him, looking over his shoulder. If he Read more…
Learning to Be A Master of the Universe
Sometime over the next month, I’ll post about where things are now and where they’re headed, with Sydney and my writing generally. In the meantime, I mentioned over the weekend to my Newsletter folks that I’m hard at work on the fourth Sydney Brennan book. In fact, I should have a rough draft finished within a week (emphasis on rough—there are a lot of yellow comments with things like “IS THIS RIGHT?,” “CHECK THIS,” or “FILL IN”). If you’ve read the most recent Sydney Brennan novel, The Perils of Panacea, the current novella takes place a short time after that Read more…
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