Welcome to my blog!

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).

Interested in something else? You can also Search for something specific—the little icon is at the end of the header—or just dive in and start scrolling.

 

 

Why I Didn’t Wake When Feral Pigs Ate our Trash (And a Weekend Ebook Sale for Syd Fans)

Hey, stranger—remember me? There’s a reason I’ve been incommunicado. And it’s not just to give you a Jimmy Buffett earworm. The title kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Yes, I’m sleeping like a mostly dead person (time to watch The Princess Bride again?) when I get around to sleeping. And yes, a few nights ago a feral pig and her ridiculously cute piglet woke my husband—but not me—rooting around in our trash like a slightly shorter, more casually dressed Yogi Bear with Boo-Boo in tow. Last night, they were snore-chuffing under our house almost directly under our bed. After one Read more…


Getting Ready for Grave Truth, and an Appreciation for Quiet Skies and Running Water

I’m about to share something that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever lived with me, met me, or perhaps even read my blog posts. Shh… Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not very organized. Yeah, I know, big shocker. I don’t consider it a character flaw exactly, but it is something I need to work on. And yet, I can’t help feeling that sometimes the universe doesn’t help. Case in point: the release of the next Sydney Brennan novel, Grave Truth. This is where I gratuitously whip out my new cover again and do a happy writer dance. Read more…


Friday Five: The I Told You I Wasn’t Exaggerating Edition

Happy Friday, y’all! How’s it going in your neck of the woods? I should be water-loading (is that a thing?) because I’m heading to Las Vegas for a conference next week and I know my East Hawaii body will dry up and blow away like a tumbleweed. Except I’ll probably never leave the hotel, so I’ll just drift from floor to floor, getting caught up in the one-armed bandits and unoccupied stools. I was planning to do a Pack Update (I haven’t done one of those in quite a while), but for some reason the post was really fighting me. Read more…


Happy News, about the Next Sydney Brennan Book and (Maybe) My Sanity

So I hear it’s Friday again. Huh. How about that? 😳 At the risk of sounding like a broken record, apologies for being somewhat digitally absent. Our internet has been down A LOT lately (still waiting for a service call after six days) and I can’t easily tuck my desktop under my arm and head to a coffee shop. But I do have good news to share… The next Sydney Brennan adventure, Grave Truth, has been through its beta read (be thankful my blog post isn’t about that whole world of tech horror). Not only that, after positive feedback and Read more…


A Sydney Brennan Cover Reveal (or Two), with a Tangent (or Two)

I’m dog-wrangling (the basics: poo, pee, and food), dodging internet-killing heavy bands of rain, and up to my eyeballs in edits (eyeball height is about 60K words, but I’ve cut a couple K), so I’m going to keep this post short and sweet. Like me. Fine. Sweet-ish. Tangent for Writer’s PSA/Confession: I am currently a Lousy Correspondent. Apologies to everyone who has emailed/FBed me lately. Thanks to unreliable evening internet and MY LIFE I am so far behind. But I will get to you. Because I am sweet-ish. Back to our regularly scheduled program… The Cover Reveal. I made a Read more…