So I’m off at the Midwest Literary Festival. After a wonderful dinner last night with Melanie Lynne Hauser, Jim Rollins, David Morrell, J.A. Konrath, Stefany Evans, and fabulous festival organizers Henry and Cheryl Perez, we came back to the conference hotel.
Where I needed to write this blog entry.
Only the internet wouldn’t work. No wifi, just […]

My husband is a handy guy. I didn’t know this when I married him. In fact, it didn’t really become apparent until we bought our first house. But once I knew, hoo boy…
Before we had a house of our own, I was an armchair home improvement buff. Bob Villa and I […]

The other day I was cleaning out the refrigerator and I found some blue cheese shoved in the corner of the Deli Chiller drawer. I didn’t know how long it had been in there.
Hmm…throw it out or not?
One of life’s mysteries: how do you know if blue cheese has gone bad?
That […]

I’ll admit, I’m not a huge sports fan. Probably because I’m not a huge TV fan. I’d rather be out there doing stuff (read: I’m not a spectator kind of girl).
So my knowledge of sports is limited, at best. I know it’s a touchdown in football, a homerun in baseball, a basket in basketball, and […]

So, on Wicked Company, the list for mystery writer cranks that I moderate in my spare time (I’M JUST KIDDING, YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!) an aspiring horror writer posted a “Fear Survey.” I’m not exactly clear on his intent–I’m assuming he wasn’t depending on the results in order to finish his own work (now […]

Friends, friends, friends, what a bunch of good liars we are! Sincerity was a rousing success–and I think it ought to be a Good Girls’ Holiday tradition. Our winner for this round is the fabulous JT Ellison, whose ability to deceive crushed the competition. How did she know we’d all fall for her Mardi Gras […]

When you’re working full-time as a writer, you don’t really get sick days. But, here’s the thing - you don’t really need them.
I’m not saying that one should expect the most profound prose from oneself when one ought to be prone and resting, but there’s a lot that can be done with a […]

Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane was the first big independent bookstore I ever visited. Until I moved to Spokane the cities where I’d lived had chain bookstores and second-hand bookstores that specialized in paperbacks.
I’m such a book junkie that any type of bookstore or library gets my heart rate up—in fact, I think book browsing […]

I was like so many other people when it came to the idea of Hollywood trying to depict the horrors of September 11, 2001. It was simply too soon.
Or so I thought.
If you haven’t yet seen Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, you should. It is painful, powerful, gut wrenching, and, oddly enough, uplifting. There […]

Mr. Thrilling emailed me a few moments ago and asked if I wanted to go to the 25th Shamus Awards Banquet? I replied right back, “Sure, but I’ve got my Berkeley cocktail party at six that night. Can we swing both?”
We sound like a literary Nick and Nora, don’t we? In fact we generally lead […]