Postcards from the Punatic Edge
Okay, so this is the part of the blog where I share the trials and tribulations of living in Hawaii so you don’t spend your wintry days pining for far, exotic shores and feeling resentment toward the people who live there. Our challenges admittedly do not include snow flurries, but we do have flurries of white stuff. (Not sand; we don’t have white sand in east Hawaii.) I live in lower Puna on the Big Island, the home of the active lava flow. Kilauea has been continuously erupting since 1983, but a particular portion of the June 27, 2014, flow Read more…
Sydney Brennan Title Announcement (Finally) and General Meanderings
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…
![Puuhonua o Hanaunau by OldPine at wts wikivoyage (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.judykwalker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Puuhonua.jpg)
Peeking Warily Out of the Writer’s Cave: Confessions of a Curmudgeon
I’m a big fan of the Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie version of PG Wodehouses’s Jeeves and Wooster. In Season 3, they travel to the United States, and there’s an episode where Bertie’s poet friend Rocky is in crisis. (Bertie always has a friend in some uniquely upper-crust crisis.) Rocky happily lives in the then-relative-wilds of Long Island, but a moneyed relative is forcing him to move to New York City. Rocky says, “Good Lord, l’d have to dress for dinner every night. l won’t do it, l can’t do it. l don’t get out of my pajamas ’til five in the Read more…
Southern Charm, In Translation: What People Really Mean When They Say Bless Your Heart
A month or so ago, I gave a British friend a copy of my novel Back to Lazarus. The next day, having read a couple of chapters, he remarked that there were expressions he was unfamiliar with. I wondered if they were Americanisms or Southernisms, but he couldn’t recall any examples. When I recently received a very sweet email from my West Virginia hometown that began, “God bless your heart,” it reminded me of my British friend, and also of another cross-cultural conversation several years ago. I was on a month-long summer research cruise in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands at Read more…
The Second Portion of our Odyssey, with an Ode to the Library
[This post is a continuation, sharing Part Two of our recent journey from East Hawaii Island to the continental U.S. to visit family.] Living on the east side of an island with a honking big mountain in the middle, you get to appreciate sunsets. If the Gulf Coast didn’t disappoint us on that count, neither did the Mid-Atlantic. No, that fleur de-lis-esque shot (I think I just made spell check explode) isn’t from New Orleans, it’s from the car window driving through Winchester, Virginia. By the time we made it to West Virginia (the home of my kin-folk), changing time Read more…
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