Spring is time to make things new, yes? I’ve put up a bluebird house in hopes that one of the bluebirds I saw at the feeder this past week will make a home in it. I have new hair, too! Of course, now I look nothing like my author’s pic, so I can go to …Read More

Tonight I’ll be reading at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, with a hands-on writing workshop to follow. In the workshop we’ll be exploring how to turn the ones you love (or hate) into fodder for writing fiction. Technically, I guess everyone in a writer’s life is fodder–it just takes a …Read More

I won’t Twitter. No, I won’t! I Twittered for about a month last fall and it nearly drove me mad. Nearly all of my writer friends Twitter regularly as part of the online professional author package that includes a blog or group blog, myspace, Facebook, and a website. And I admire every single one of …Read More

The were days this winter when I thought it would never end. I’m not one for sentimentality, but I was delighted yesterday to see the first bluebird of the year at the feeder outside my living room window. Today I saw some forsythia starting to bloom and lots of daffodils in two different yards as …Read More

I had a great time in Denver at last year’s Left Coast Crime Conference, and was sad to miss the fun in Hawaii this week. The Hawaii conference was especially significant for my friends Tim Maleeny and Kelli Stanley, who both won Left Coast Crime Awards. Kelli–who just signed a new contract with Thomas Dunne/St. …Read More

At Thrillerfest this past summer I was thoroughly charmed by the devilishly handsome author/physician Michael Palmer. By the time a writer has published fourteen bestselling novels that have been translated into some thirty-five languages, one would think he might be a little, well, inaccessible. Not so, Michael Palmer. You can find out what he’s up …Read More

Today I did something I hadn’t done in a long time: I finished reading a novel that I had begun reading just twenty-four hours earlier. It wasn’t a friend’s novel, it wasn’t a novel that I have to read for an awards panel, it wasn’t a book I was reading for research. There are piles …Read More

I’ve never been a big video gamer. I was terrible at Pac Man and pretty much gave up after that. We have three gaming systems in our house (plus a computer for each person and each dog). You would think I might take advantage of our fancy systems more than I do, but I just …Read More

What exactly might novelist Raymond Benson have in common with Morgan Freeman and James Brown? As I brushed up on Raymond Benson’s background for this brief interview, I kept thinking, “Raymond Benson gives 110% to everything he does, does it all well, and never quits.” James Brown earned the title The Hardest Working Man in …Read More

This morning I heard a woman on a doctor’s call-in show complain that her husband told her that she shouldn’t wear socks to bed because her feet wouldn’t be able to breathe. It was a bone of contention between them–she said. According to the doctor, the husband’s argument was specious. Feet don’t actually need to …Read More