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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[Am I the only one who feels like An-Editing would make my brain feel less ‘splodey? I’ll leave it that way to find out.] Sydney’s next novel, The Perils of Panacea is in the final stretch! Okay, maybe not the final stretch, but at least the penultimate stretch. I had hoped to finish the edits by Monday, but I got sidetracked and lost a day Friday, so we shall see. Then out to beta readers and proofreading (that one is still up in the air), and the formatting scramble. I do my own formatting, and the ebook usually isn’t too Read more…
So the New Year’s Baby Monster Thing didn’t bring me a title after all, but I did finally make a decision. The next Sydney Brennan novel will be: The Perils of Panacea. You may remember I ran a reader poll to get some feedback. This final title is a slight tweak on something someone suggested in that poll, but… being my first poll, I was a doofus and failed to put something in there to ensure participant identification. So, if you were the one who made the poll suggestion, please drop me an email with your name and mailing address Read more…
For the first post of the New Year (Happy 2015!), I thought I’d bring back Magpie Moments, my occasional series sharing bits of real life that I hoarded and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction. [T]here’s very little I won’t do to go to a game on the rare occasion I’m within a couple hundred miles of Fenway. Make it a Dugout Box and the list gets even smaller. Chapter One, Secrets in Stockbridge In Secrets in Stockbridge, Sydney Brennan’s ex-boyfriend uses her love of the Red Sox to bribe her into traveling to his home in upstate New York. If Read more…
As frenetic as the energy can be leading up to the Christmas holiday, I love the days afterward when everything seems to slow down. (Except the hopping party at a neighbor’s house last night; the cops silenced their thumping bass just before 3 a.m.) I was apparently a very good girl this year because various Santas gave me a stack of yummy books I can’t wait to devour. I haven’t started them yet. First, because a library book demanded my attention, and second, because… I don’t know why. I’m a doofus. Or because I have a big editing itch now, Read more…
I may have mentioned I’m working on edits for the Panacea novel now (still untitled, but I’m deciding this week—I swear!). I’ve always goggled at the writers who say they love revising, that it’s the reward they get for slogging through the first draft. Nothing could be farther from my own (admittedly limited) experience. There are certainly challenging moments, times when I’m not sure how to move forward, but overall the first draft is what I live for—that feeling of discovery, the moment a character or plot twist surprises even me, the elation when I’m in the flow and my Read more…
