Magpie Moments: Caught Between the Moon and Pensacola (Flashed in a Florida Jail)
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…
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…
Even Dictionaries Love the South
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…
Peeking at Process: The Mad Writer’s Laptop Exterior
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…
The Joys of Discovering a New Series: Joe R. Lansdale Edition
I haven’t been reading a lot lately. The evening hours when I could do so are quickly lost to blogging and social media and website and retailer admin and all of the other writing-related activities that are not actually writing. Funny how that happens. You can hear me laughing, right? I swear that’s what that jagged sound is. When I do read, like many people, I am a creature of habit. I recently read Patricia Briggs’ latest because she has two series that I (and my husband, who’d had a birthday) don’t miss. A few months back I read Michael Read more…
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