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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“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…
I felt we were due for another Magpie Moments today, my occasional series sharing bits of real life that I’ve hoarded, magpie-like, for use in my fiction. I have a few things in mind from the upcoming The Perils of Panacea, but it seems unfair to share something from a novel you haven’t read yet, especially when these little bits are often much more than background or window dressing. (The Panacea release is March of 2015; I’ll announce the date shortly.) But since this sort of falls in the background category, and is found in both novels… I’d rather drive Read more…
A couple of weekends ago I found myself between edits and decided, well, gee, now I could try making a book trailer for Back to Lazarus. Because I have nothing else to do on a Saturday. Sort of like when I spent a day sewing a pleather vest and holster—literally by hand with a needle and thread—for a Halloween trunk-or-treat instead of finishing my master’s thesis or preparing for my upcoming thesis defense. The sewing put a crimp in my typing the next day, but I did have an hour or so of living the Serenity dream (Firefly—cowboys in space), so Read more…
My previous blog post, Writing Stories in a Version of the Real World, covered why I set the first Sydney Brennan novel in 2004. But what does it mean to set something in a particular time, especially one that’s not quite historical (despite what your teenagers may say)? Is the author bound to the fashions of the time? (For the record, I feel like we’ve endured the skinny, yet somehow saggy-assed, jeans for far too long; let’s move on, people!) Does it mean you’re bound to the particular news events of the time? That you have to make contemporaneous entertainment references Read more…
