Tomorrow is the day. We are settling on the purchase of fourteen and a half acres in the Southern Alleghanies of Pennsylvania. While it will be nice to have a place to escape to, the real impetus for this endeavor was the dream of eventually opening a small bed and breakfast with cottages, […]

I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago I watched The Saint—great movie. Then I went back and watched it again, but this time I listened to the audio commentary. The sad thing is, I do this quite often now.
Pathetic, I know. I’m sure some of you GG blog readers out there […]

I love summer. Always have.
There’s something about sitting in the sun, soaking up the rays, that just makes me happy. The darker I get, the better (Suntan lotion? What’s that?). If I could pick the ideal place to live it would be on a beach with the crashing waves visible from every window. No beach? […]

Forgive me if I am even less coherent than usual. I’m doing this on three and a half hours sleep and I am not one of those dames who functions efficiently when sleep-deprived. And no, it was not my guilty conscience keeping me up all night. We played a benefit yesterday evening, so the lack of […]

Due to technical difficulties, we’re having to postpone our visit with M.J. Rose. But, ohhhhh, my darling, darling friends I have news that will console you:
I have a cocktail shaker.
No more am I forced to suffer the indignity of shaking drinks in a spaghetti sauce jar and there is great rejoicing throughout the land. So […]

All this talk about school has got me thinking about my own experiences with school and writing. I was one of those annoying children who, at about age five, decided she would be – that’s WOULD BE, not wanted to be – a writer. And then proceeded to write, all the time. […]

Sometimes we get too complicated for our own good. Last week I registered my kids for school—nine pages of forms. For each child. That’s right, 18 pages total. I know that computers are wonderful and really have helped us simply our lives in so many ways. I love downloading bank transactions, but computers also let […]

I remember the first time like it was yesterday.
The nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach… The way my tongue slid across my lips (over and over and over again)… The slight tremor in my hands… The pounding in my chest… The ever-increasing heat in the room…
Ahhhhhh, yes. The joys of public speaking.
My […]

One of the questions that frequently pops up at book signings and other literary extravaganzas is “How much of your sleuth is YOU?”
And I suppose, since these are the children of our imagination, sprung fully formed from our paper daydreams, that they are all us. But…I don’t think that’s what readers are really after. I […]

I love that phrase.
Thoroughly appalling.
Mike Magnuson used it to describe Nathan Singer’s novel, A Prayer for Dawn.
That’s thoroughly appalling in a good way:
This book is crazy and hilarious and brilliant, and, because the voices in it speak so dead-on true about the crippled ways we live, thoroughly appalling. This book, no question of it, is […]