Shameful Confessions and Permafree Book News
This week, I’m sharing a shameful confession and some book news, both in a rather scattered fashion. First, the confession: I’ve fallen way behind lately on my word count. Prepare yourselves for the justification/excuses section, without which no confession of underachieving would be complete. Our household menagerie has gotten complicated lately, what with two stray dogs with health issues and a resident perfect dog that we’re suddenly realizing is not quite so perfect. I suspect single dogs are like only children this way; you don’t realize the level of their dysfunction until they have another dog/sibling to bump up against. Read more…
Just When You Think You Have It All Figured Out (In Life and In Writing)
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving toward downtown Hilo, glancing at Hilo Bay. After checking the traffic, I merged automatically into the right lane as I’ve done during months (years?) of road work. Only to feel like a doofus. There was no merge. Holy crap! The road suddenly felt so expansive, minus the cones and construction detritus in the middle two lanes, that I felt like meandering from lane to lane just because I could. I didn’t, because—most of the time—I’m not actually a doofus. On a slightly grander scale, two weeks ago we were a one-dog, one-cat household. Now Read more…
How Factual Do You Want Your Fiction?
On some level, I always associate suicides with Superman. Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Wasn’t that the opening of the old Superman series, the one in black and white? My brother and I used to watch the reruns on TV when we were children. We’d lie flat out on our bellies, propped up on our elbows, dead to the world until the end of the episode. By then the loops of my grandmother’s cheap red-orange carpet would have carved deep grooves in our arm and elbow skin that tingled as they plumped and came back to life. It was Read more…
Writers: Beware the Bardo (Getting Lost in the In-Between Times)
You may recall (unless your mind is like mine) that I’ve been feeling a little scattered lately. It’s partly the dreaded, double-barreled heat and humidity (Summer Days Make Me Feel Stupid), although in recent days east Hawaii has been mostly dumped on by another weather system in need of some serious Prozac. In fact, my primary productivity culprit is more existential. I sailed through my editor’s feedback from her first pass on No Safe Winterport earlier this week, which was an awesome feeling. (It is funny though, how I seem to develop different weird spelling/typo/punctuation tics for each project; this time Read more…
Cover Reveal for No Safe Winterport, The Fourth Sydney Brennan Mystery
It’s been raining here a lot lately. I’m not complaining—my whiteboard has fallen off the wall (with 15 pieces of “permanent” mounting tape) and my dog-walking sneakers haven’t dried in about five days, but the daily drenching has definitely provided a welcome relief from the heat. (Okay, maybe I’m complaining a little.) Last night, we had occasional thunder between waves of rain that pounded the metal roof hard enough to loosen your fillings, which is unusual for Hawaii. (The thunder, that is—rumbling in the distance here is more likely to mean the military is playing with its boom-boom toys in Read more…
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