Fried Corn Nuggets (Welcome Back to the South) and Book Signing
As you’ve probably noticed, I live in Hawaii, but I’ve been traveling on the mainland lately. I was recently lucky enough to revisit some of my (i.e. Sydney’s fictionalized) old Tallahassee haunts. I was surprised by the usual—how much some places changed, and how much others stayed the same—and also by my reactions to those changes and resilient bits. I’ll be writing about it soon, but I want to give my observations and reactions time to ferment into something beyond blathering, like sharing kombucha instead of stale tea. (Okay, I should have warned you, I’m still pretty time zone-addled, and Read more…
Magpie Moments: The Lost Art of Hand-Kissing
Rudy took my right hand gently in both of his and raised it to his lips. His eyes flicked to mine for my reaction. I don’t know what he saw. For him it was an effortless gesture, over before my brain could engage. My whole hand tingled, and I wasn’t sure if he’d kissed the fingers, the back of my hand, or both. I’d never had a man kiss my hand before—not seriously anyway—and I found the sensation both thrilling and repulsive. Back to Lazarus, Chapter 27 Rudy Nagroski isn’t based on any particular person, but his penchant for hand-kissing Read more…
Birthing a Paperback (You Might Want an Epidural)
My first novel Back to Lazarus came into being on Kindle a couple of months ago. It was a relatively painless birth, from formatting to exporting and uploading. (I guess in this analogy the months of writing the novel was sex, much better than the pregnant years between writing and publishing.) I’m thrilled to say Back to Lazarus is now available in paperback on Amazon—woo hoo! Check out the full cover. The paperback birth was not so painless. It wasn’t one of those “I must forget the pain of delivery or I’ll never have sex again (that is, write another Read more…
Magpie Moments: Care for Some Sulfur with Your Tea?
This is the fourth in a series of what I’m calling Magpie Moments, things that I snagged from real life and repurposed into fiction. I’ll add something new to this series every week until the next Sydney Brennan release. And SPOILER ALERT: you may not want to read these if you haven’t read Back to Lazarus yet. We ate at a Mexican place where everything was drenched with cheese and the iced tea tasted slightly of sulfur. It was no Rosalia’s by any means, but when I switched my beverage to a Corona, the taste of the food improved dramatically. Back to Lazarus Chapter 26, Read more…
Where do you Get Your Ideas? The Inspiration for Back to Lazarus
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…
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