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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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…
Time for another installment of Magpie Moments, posts about shiny bits I snatched from real life and twisted into a fictionalized shape in my Sydney Brennan mysteries! Today, we’ll continue with one from my latest novel, The Perils of Panacea. I’m omitting some of the plot stuff in this selection, but here’s the context: my PI Sydney Brennan and attorney Richard Frey have just finished visiting an inmate in a Florida jail in connection with a case (or two) they’re working. They’re waiting in an area in view of the inmates. Richard is not in his happy place (gotta read Read more…
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…
Consider this a mini-post, something I ran across in my tippy-tapping way and just had to share. I do all of my fiction writing in Scrivener. The program doesn’t have the greatest spell-check, but it does have the requisite handy-dandy, built-in dictionary/thesaurus. Some entries have extra features, like a Word Spectrum to help you distinguish where your word falls in meaning relative to similar words. Others have a Choose the Right Word discussion box to help you–shockingly–choose the right word among a group of synonyms, or an Origins box discussing … well, it’s not super hero stories. You might recall that Read more…
I may have mentioned this before, but I am a sucker for office supplies. I walk into an office supply store, and I feel almost giddy with the possibilities. It’s a combination of 1) looking for the perfect product that will finally fix my organizational impairments and make me the efficient, fully optimized human I always knew I could be, and 2) making sure I have enough of anything I might need in case of office supply emergency. (Oddly enough, now that I live in Hawaii, when the boats get off schedule I see empty office supply shelves far less Read more…
