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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Good news—I have finally finished a rough draft of the eighth Sydney Brennan book… Memory Road! It has been a hard slog during the Panda Bear Times, but I am cautiously optimistic that things have taken a turn for my writing brain. I’ve also been working on some Sydney Brennan short stories of late, enough for a mini anthology. (“Shorts” in the post title = short stories, not garments; if it were down to my seamstress skills, Syd’s bum would go naked.) Both of these projects will need editing, covers, sacrifices to the retailer gods, etc., before I can put Read more…
Happy Saturday! I’m just popping in to share something with my audiobook peeps and anyone else who needs something engrossing to listen to while pretending to listen to something or someone else. Remember those holidays coming up… 🥂 🎧 Prodigal is a featured deal in Chirp’s newsletter this month—woo hoo! 🎧 🥂 Okay, now that I’ve stopped happy-dancing, let’s take a step back and unpack that announcement. First, what is Prodigal? Most of you are fans of my Sydney Brennan PI Mysteries, but I’ve also written an Appalachian crime thriller series, the Dead Hollow trilogy. Mwah-ha-hah! The obligatory mwah-ha is Read more…
Hey, um… is it Friday again? [scrambles to blog] I’m in the midst of some good stuff here, including trying to wrap up the rough draft of Sydney Brennan Adventure #8—has anyone seen a title lying around?—so I’ll keep this brief-ish, but I did want to share a little something cool that might make you smile. Here in the tropics, you probably think we’re wading through fields of… well, just fill your favorite fruit or vegetable that comes in fields. But, as I noted last blog post (Changing Seasons, Hawaii Style) common expectations and on-the-ground reality don’t always align in Read more…
I had a video call with someone this week who, wearing a cozy sweater, told me she’d gotten out her desk foot warmer (a gift created by her engineer husband to warm her feet, not the desk’s.) I think the shirt I was wearing had sleeves. Thanks to climate change, seasonal transitions are getting to be slippery buggers, with seasons slowly creeping into USSC Justice Potter Stewart’s hard-core pornography territory: “I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis vs. Ohio) But seasons have always been tricky here in East Hawaii, at least for someone used to a temperate climate framework. Read more…
Looking to try a new mystery series but don’t know where to start? Don’t worry—we’ve save you the hard work. Check out these forty or so ebook First in Series Mysteries and Thrillers, all gathered in one spot for the month of October. Most of the books are on sale for the occasion, too. In fact, if you haven’t read it already, the first book in my Sydney Brennan PI mysteries, Back to Lazarus, is just 99¢ this month (regular $3.99). And she’s sporting a shiny new cover… 😉 📚 Let the weekend reading begin! 📚
