In the summer of 1914, two branches of a powerful and affectionate family came together in the Black Sea resort of Costanța. It was a summer day in the middle of July, and this would be both a family holiday and a meeting of the heads of two neighboring states. One family travelled down from…
Read MoreI love finding some ordinary part of life that is so vastly different in a foreign land. Such as the simple matter of how to store hay for the livestock for the winter. As Russell and Holmes travel through Transylvania towards the village of Bran, they see a rural landscape that is both familiar…and very…
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I met Queen Marie during a trip to Eastern Europe in the fall of 2018. My friends who own the Poisoned Pen bookshop in Scottsdale talked me into it. Not that it was difficult. They said that they were going and asked if I wanted to join them and I had never been on a…
Read MoreI’m a self-taught writer, in that when it comes to fiction, I mostly learned by reading a million stories. Naturally, I took the basic writing classes in school, and I do have a lot of How-To guides on my shelves, but I’ve never done any advanced courses in how to be a writer. So it…
Read MoreYou get two Mutterings today–because not only is it the anniversary of The Meet, but it’s also two months until Castle Shade appears on shelves and e-readers. Yay! Over the next couple of months I’ll be sharing various aspects of the writing process of the story, from travel to research to creation of the map–…
Read MoreI was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defence I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of…
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I’m working my way through the final proof pages of Castle Shade (out in three months—hooray!) …which means reading every word aloud, watching for mistakes and, more important, listening for oddities. I can only manage 50 or 60 pages a day, but I am finding small errors on nearly half the pages, even though it’s…
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Last month I posted a couple of questions on Facebook—both the author page and the Beekeeper’s Apprentices group—wondering what people had been reading in the past year. I wasn’t really surprised to find that many of you, like I, have been reaching for old friends. In 2020, reading was heavily re-reading. “I hang out with…
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Saturday (Feb 27) is a day-long celebration of great mysteries from Left Coast Crime. LCC is one of my favorite conferences, intimate and exciting, and I HATE that I can’t meet up in the bar. Left Coast was my last outing before the world shut down last year…sigh. Here’s your chance to spend the day…
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A recent discussion about my next contract (and how long it would be before I could jaunt off to Paris, sigh…) had me reflecting on how dependent I am on the use of the senses to provide what writers call the “telling detail.” I have a scene in Castle Shade (no, I’m not going to give…
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