Travel and Monte Carlo

Remember travel? Remember getting in the car and going to the airport and walking onto a plane and sitting down SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH STRANGERS and breathing their air for hours and blithely drinking things you took from the ungloved hands of the flight attendants and— (Okay, calm down, breathe now, just maybe pull up…

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Riviera Gold’s English Face

The English face of Riviera Gold! From my good friends at Allison & Busby. Isn’t is lovely? Don’t you want to be there? (Don’t you want to be anywhere that isn’t your house?) *** Riviera Gold (here) is available for pre-order, if you’d like to demonstrate your enthusiasm.  Signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned…

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Newsletter ARC winners

Congratulations— Caren, Chris, Andrea, Hanna, June, Maria, Justine, Patricia, Pamela, & Wendy ! ! ! ! Ten subscribers of my newsletter who get to enjoy Riviera Gold ahead of the crowd—hooray! (And if that’s your name and you entered the Newsletter giveaway, make sure you check your email!) The other ARC winners, from the contests…

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Video meetup

Well, it’s been an… interesting month, hasn’t it? Two weeks ago, I was in San Diego for a conference. Today, I’m not sure any of us will ever travel again… So, in that spirit, we’re embracing the virtual reach-out. Yesterday I spent a very brisk hour of keyboarding with a chat with the Beekeeper’s Apprentices FB…

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Riviera Gold galley stage

Riviera Gold …comes a step closer to your hands: (The ARCs are here! The ARCs are here!) That’s right, the bound galleys of Riviera Gold dropped into my life while I was down in San Diego, and they’re really pretty. And have a lot of words in them, too! These copies are for my own…

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The Past in the Present

The threads running from past to the present have fascinated me since I was a grad student. Back then, my academic interest was on certain themes that could be traced from the pre-Israelite cultures and through the Hebrew Bible into the New Testament and beyond. Of course, now I write fiction, and there’s only so…

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Exotic Settings

(Added note:for a few days, Dreaming Spies will be $2.99 on Nook and Kindle. in the US.) I always find it interesting to look back at a book I’ve written and reflect on what it turned out to be about, and how it fits into the rest of the series. While I’m actually writing the things,…

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Hitting SEND

One of the most satisfying sounds of my earlier years was the rustle and thump of an envelope holding 300+ pages of manuscript as it dropped into the FedEx box.  Of course, now that contracts no longer specify paper copies, the physical thump has been replaced by a tap on an icon. But it’s still…

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Tender is the Prose

As part of my general research on the next Russell & Holmes novel, I re-read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night. And frankly, I found it very hard going.  Meandering plot, puzzling metaphors, characters distorted to fit into the roles he needs for them. Start with his take on women.  The book…

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