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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Raise your hand if you remember the 1990s. (Unless you’re wearing a T-shirt you bought at a Nirvana concert; then you can keep it down.) Bill Pullman is one of those actors that I don’t initially remember being in things (my sleeping brain thanks me for blocking out The Serpent and the Rainbow, and all other Wes Craven movies), but he was in a lot of movies in the 1990s. They ranged across multiple genres, from the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping to David Lynch’s Lost Highway (yes, I consider Lynch to be his own genre) to the blockbuster Independence Read more…
“I’m a taxpayer. I paid for it, so I’m using the whole road.” Who hasn’t made (or cringed as the driver made) similar remarks after drifting across the highway’s center line or onto the shoulder, or going the wrong way down a one-way street. A couple of weeks ago, a woman in a coffee shop parking lot heading straight for me veered at the last moment, leaned out the driver’s window and yelled, “Watch where you’re going!” Apparently she’d had too much caffeine and didn’t notice the painted arrows going both ways. I remember traveling with our band director and a few other Read more…
This week, I’m making a shameful confession of a different kind. (Last week’s was word count-related.) We’re going back to the third Sydney Brennan book, The Perils of Panacea, for a Magpie Moments post today, and back into the recesses of time and memory to find the real world source material that acted as inspiration. A little context with as little spoiling as possible: in the following excerpt from the book, Sydney is driving a car with … let’s just say, someone with whom she’d rather not be driving. I started the engine and shifted the gear on the steering column, Read more…
This week, I’m sharing a shameful confession and some book news, both in a rather scattered fashion. First, the confession: I’ve fallen way behind lately on my word count. Prepare yourselves for the justification/excuses section, without which no confession of underachieving would be complete. Our household menagerie has gotten complicated lately, what with two stray dogs with health issues and a resident perfect dog that we’re suddenly realizing is not quite so perfect. I suspect single dogs are like only children this way; you don’t realize the level of their dysfunction until they have another dog/sibling to bump up against. Read more…
A few weeks ago, I wrote a Magpie Moments post (bits of real life, incorporated into Sydney’s adventures) about the Delta Orlando Resort. This week, I thought I’d write about less luxurious accommodations. “… I travel a lot, and I always feel funny about using the hotel phone. Like I can feel the last person’s face there.” Lisa looked at me as if I were wearing my underwear on the outside of my clothes. “It’s no worse than the bed, or—” she almost couldn’t bring herself to finish, “—the toilet.” “True,” I said. “And, unlike me, Graeme probably never stays in Read more…
