Magpie Moments: Who Doesn’t Have a Soft Spot for Pretty Boats?
Today’s post is another installment of Magpie Moments, snippets I snatched from real life and incorporated into my Sydney Brennan Mysteries. I’m continuing with one from my most recent novel, The Perils of Panacea. I was reasonably sure the first boat I’d passed after jumping down was JD’s. I have a soft spot for pretty boats with lots of exotic hardwoods and long bowsprits. In other words, ones that are a pain in the ass to maintain. His was not a pretty boat, but it did look like it would still be afloat tomorrow, which was more than I could say 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…
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…
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