Watch Out! I’m About to Get Grounded (With a Different Kind of Release Date)
I mentioned last month that the Birthday Crab (sort of like Santa Claus in Bermuda shorts) came to visit me, but not how many times he has done so. It doesn’t matter. I’m old. And I have been for a while. How do I know? Because getting grounded sounds like a good thing. Obviously not everyone on the InterWebs is American, and sometimes things get lost in translation, so let’s make sure we’re on the same page. (Just an Americanism, or an expression with a global pedigree?) I love the versatility of language, and it turns out “grounded” is quite Read more…
Does my Female PI Have to Wear a Pink Fedora and Carry a Cupcake?
A couple of weeks ago, I used an aggregator (a company like Smashwords or Draft to Digital that acts as a sort of middleman) to add my books to some of the lesser-known ebook retailer and subscription services. Of course, then I had to check my books on each of the sites and see what had gone wrong, because something invariably goes wrong. Some sites don’t support any description formatting, or they support html but not that kind of html. Then there are the I-know-I-proofread-seventeen-times moments, when you discover that you can’t even spell your own name. (Hasn’t actually happened Read more…
Happy International PI Day! And Random Thoughts on Writing Different Genres…
My thoughts are a little muddled today. I know, I know—pipe down there in the Peanut Gallery. On the one hand, it’s International Private Investigators Day. Yay! July 24th was chosen because Eugene Francois Vidocq, arguably the father of the modern private investigator, was born on this day in 1775. (Read more about him, and about how John D. MacDonald broke me for other genres, in last year’s PI Day blog post.) Good reason, but late July doesn’t exactly encourage you to celebrate by dressing as a classic noir PI. Here in Hawaii, the humidity would bead on a decent Read more…
Summer Days Make Me Feel Stupid
I used too much shampoo in the shower this morning. And then I had that moment in front of the mirror when I wondered, comb? Brush? Fingers? What is the appropriate hair-wrangling tool for this sudden lack of hair? Ahh, the summer haircut… one of the best parts of summer. (Very short is my preferred year-round haircut in Hawaii, but the last few times I’ve succumbed to, “But what if we tried a little longer?”) It felt so good being shorn! The cold water shampoo/head massage in the middle of the day didn’t hurt. Of course, I’ll let it go uncut Read more…
New Big Island Visitor’s Bureau Pitch: Visit Mordor While You Can
I’d planned something else for the blog today, but let’s try something different… lots of pictures! Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Yes–thank you, thank you, it is astonishing that my husband could put up with me for this long. In honor of the occasion, we thought we’d have dinner at the Volcano House and check out the lava while we were there. The Kilauea lava lake is visible from the Jaggar Museum for the first time since 2008, and the front page of the local paper has had fantastic pictures of it rising to just a few feet below the vent’s rim. So, Read more…
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