Category: Uncategorized
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I Don’t Know How The DMV Puts Up With Us
Recently I paid a visit to my local DMV to renew my license. Back in 1986, when we first arrived in California from New York, I took a written test for the privilege of driving a car in the Golden State. Now I had to do it again. I guess every thirty-two years they want…
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Gobble, Gobble
Which do you like better, cats or dogs? Cats are phenomenal animals. They have surpassed dogs in popularity, but I suspect this is because we have a lot of city dwellers in apartments where space is at a premium. We could never short-shrift our canine buddies; dogs are pretty terrific, too. Most people I know…
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Down But Not Out
There is a part of me that hates the Fall. October and November seem to be the two months when I’m going to catch any germ running around. Fall is also social catch-up time, when everybody revs up for the holidays. As an example, just this week, due to a head cold that morphed into a…
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A Little Chit-chat With Cindy Sample And Me
Cindy Sample, the talented writer of the humorous Laurel McKay Mystery Series, and I had a wonderful time on Sept. 9th, talking to the Norcal Sisters in Crime about Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Self-Publishing (but were afraid to ask). Cindy is the taller, elegant one on the left. For…
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I followed Walter Mosley!
No, not as a stalker but as a fellow author, and I am still jazzed about it. As part of Mystery Writers of America, I was one of eight authors doing a reading for Noir at the Bar for the Bay Area Book Festival on June 3rd. The other authors were (reading from right to left): moderator…
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I Hold Charles Dickens Responsible
Decided to share this again. Since I was a child, I would watch countless adaptations of A Christmas Carol on TV and in the movies. I’ve seen variations of the character of Scrooge played by the likes of Alec Guinness, Susan Lucci, Jim Carrey, Vanessa Williams, and Scrooge McDuck. I even read the novel way back, when I…
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Sisters in Crime, My Kinda Gals
Yesterday I attended the Sisters in Crime Northern California Chapter’s Annual Showcase. Authors of newly published books – one of which was me – were offered the opportunity of either reading an excerpt from the book, or in Camille Minichino‘s case, reading an essay one of her character’s had ‘written’ for the occasion. It was all…
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Naming A Book Is Almost As Important As Naming A Child
If you are less well known than Stephen King, your book titles (and covers) are of paramount importance in attracting new readers. Allowing for a slight exaggeration, each week about a million new books are published, glutting the market. Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, and so forth make it easy to publish a book. It’s pretty…
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Halloween is Coming! And It’s Double Double Toil and Trouble!
It’s odd what can give birth to a series. The Persephone Cole Vintage Mysteries happened after years of research for my stand-alone circus noir mystery, Death of a Clown. I didn’t want all of the knowledge I’d gleaned of the nineteen-forties to go to waste! In addition, I had been challenged to write a mystery with a protagonist who wasn’t an ideal…
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Am I Emotionally Involved In Some Scenes I Write? Nooooo, Never!
Pretty much everyone knows the phrase ‘4th wall’ refers to that make-believe wall which separates those onstage from the audience in a theater. Theoretical, the ‘4th wall’ has been removed so the audience can vicariously experience whatever is happening onstage from a safe and neutral distance. But pish-tosh. Vicarious is not a part of my working…
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Sleuthing Women: 10 First-in-Series Mysteries
For the past two weeks, nine authors and I have been either posting or commenting on posts regarding our newly released set of 10 books, Sleuthing Women: 10 First-in-Series Mysteries. Boosting over 3,000 pages of fine reading at $2.99, I had to buy a copy for myself. I just couldn’t pass it up. During the past…