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.
Everyone is familiar with the magic of comfort food. Over the weekend, my husband and I felt the need for comfort entertainment, which of course made me think of another installment of Stories I Love. This time, the Nero Wolfe edition. If you read my blog regularly, you’re probably not surprised by the choice. A while back I wrote a post about Book Chi, the idea that years of reader experiences can attach to the physical books you find in libraries and used book stores. The book that prompted this was a library copy of Rex Stout’s, Please Pass the Read more…
Much writing advice can be boiled down to, “Write every day.” There may or may not be word counts attached, but in essence it’s that simple. Create a little something every day, and you’ll see multiple benefits. Keep at it, and with a page a day you’ve got the rough draft of a novel in a year. You also make changes in your mind, training yourself to produce words by habit the way you would learn a fancy toss-the-ball-in-the-air tennis serve day by day. (If the preponderance of hyphens make you think said tossed ball would likely land back on Read more…
I’m just starting to feel my way around Goodreads Author Land. They have an “Ask the Author” section where readers can submit specific questions to authors, but there’s also a rotation of commonly asked questions. One of these caught my eye and my imagination more than I would have expected, so I thought I would share it here as well… Where did you get the idea for your most recent book? The seeds of Back to Lazarus were planted so long ago that I’d forgotten them, until I read this question and started digging in my brain and my notebooks. Read more…
Between my husband and me, there’s not a whole lot we won’t try to do ourselves. We’re (slowly) building our own house, so he’s done electrical and framing (a friend who shall remain nameless once framed himself into our house while working on a flare-topped ladder) and everything in between, with limited tools and limited electricity. I don’t think I’ve broken anything with a hammer or sliced anything unintended with a saw, and I’ve done a fair amount of sheetrock fairly poorly (my corners aren’t too bad but all of our walls have a lump in the middle). I’ve also Read more…
July 24th is Private Investigator’s Day. The date was chosen to celebrate the birth of Eugene Francois Vidocq in 1775. Apparently a master of disguise, Vidocq was a criminal who escaped from custody and spent years on the run, only to eventually turn informant and secret police agent. Vidocq founded the French state security police force Sûreté Nationale, and in 1833 he started the first known detective agency. Many consider him to be the father of modern criminology. But there’s another reason today is the perfect day to celebrate private investigators. On July 24, 1916, a man was born who Read more…
