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.
I’m constantly realizing things about my viewing and reading habits while writing this series. This week’s revelation: the Stories I Love are all about character. That makes sense. You can definitely enjoy a story that’s plot-driven, and there are some plot-driven stories I’d like to watch or read again, just to see how they made it work, sort of like a mechanic looking under the hood of a fast car. But how many of those stories do you return to time after time after time? The Thin Man movies stay near the top of our DVD rotation not because of Read more…
Last time, I talked a little about the file frustrations in moving beyond Amazon to add my ebooks to Kobo, Nook and iTunes. In addition to a properly formatted book and cover file (which I believe for one of those retailers requires the sacrifice of a purple baby unicorn on the equinox), you also have to complete meta-data (book details) sections for each retailer. You’d think these would be straightforward, but if you’re not careful your answers can come back to bite you in the ‘ōkole. (See—we aim to improve your high-brow Hawaiian vocabulary on this blog.) When I put Back Read more…
Barring any earthquakes or tsunamis or such-like, the next Sydney Brennan novel, The Perils of Panacea, will be released March 27, 2015. (At around 700 feet elevation a few miles inland, any tsunamis would have to be metaphorical or cataclysmic to directly affect our home; let’s hope for metaphorical.) Yay—happy writer dance! With the big date approaching, it seemed like a good time to get my website house in order, so I’ve made a few changes, and I’ll be doing a little more tweaking in the coming weeks. Take a look around and let me know what you think and Read more…
“Look to the right of you and look to the left of you,” the man from Hawaii Public Radio said. I had a flashback to law school orientation and the ethics professor (insert lawyer joke here) who said we would sleep with one of those people. Fortunately, in this Hilo auditorium, my husband was sitting next to me. Instead, the HPR man continued, “This is your tribe.” I’d had an inkling of that fact when we’d found ourselves competing with a pack of other hybrid cars for spots in the parking lot. Apparently our tribe includes the 23 openly gay Read more…
If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll know I’m very excited about our late Valentine’s outing this week. First of all, outing! That doesn’t happen much here on the east side of the Big Island, unless you want to sneak out for an illegal lava viewing. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Second, we’re seeing David Sedaris. Happy dance! (I’m still thinking someone is diverting his plane without his knowledge, and he’ll be halfway through the show before he realizes he’s not in Honolulu or Tokyo.) If you’re not familiar with David Sedaris, why aren’t you? I mean, let me Read more…
