My Life
Three terrible things I learned in a dream glimpsing the afterlife
The three terrible things I learned from a dream glimpsing the afterlife were not, at first, obvious. I woke up hard this morning. As in, I’d gone so far away I wasn’t sure I’d returned. I lay in bed for a long time not sure I was awake, and then I lifted my hands up...
Handling #grief
Handling grief is necessary, and no one gets through life without dealing with this tough emotion. Grief is one of the main reasons clients come to therapy, and in fact many of life’s toughest issues (divorce, aging, abuse recovery) come with an underpinning of grief...
Life lessons one second of video every day is teaching me
Life lessons one second of video every day is teaching me to notice all the tiny precious seconds, like grains of sand in an hourglass, passing by in my life—never to be experienced, seen or known again in the same way. Let me first back up and tell a little story of...
Prince Edward Island writing retreat
I am beginning a writing retreat with my friend Holly Robinson at her house in Prince Edward Island, Canada…but getting there, from Maui, is not a simple matter. It’s planes, trains and automobiles! I broke up the epic 6,000 mile-plus journey by going to San Francisco...
Wine country safari
To begin my wine country safari, I took the ferry from San Francisco to Marin, this time with no problems and unexpectedly, in a city of over a million people, meeting my brother-in-law Danny taking the same boat after his morning shift driving the bus. We yakked all...
#Adventures in #travel and #friendship
Adventures in travel and friendship have been coming my way, because making new friends and finding old ones seems to be a theme of this trip. Arriving in San Francisco with a week and no agenda has been wonderful! One of my new friends (my lawyer, Sandy Shepard)...
Hick from #Hawaii takes the subway
I’m a hick from Hawaii. After the last fifteen years on Maui with its mellow two-to four lane roads, I’ve lost the ability to navigate heavy, multi-lane traffic in new places. On this trip to San Francisco I decided not to rent a car: just save the headaches of...
My Writing
#Writing more than ten books in a series and staying fresh
Staying fresh while writing more than ten books in a series has been an organic evolution for me. There have been two points when I thought I was done with Lei Crime Series. The first one was right after book 5, Twisted Vine, when I’d wrapped up all the subplots and...
Bone Hook, #LeiCrimeSeries 10, is here!
Bone Hook is here, at long last, and it's a doozy! Maui’s ocean is beautiful, wild… and deadly. It’s been five years since the events of Rip Tides, and Sergeant Lei Texeira gets into hot water much deeper than she’s used to at a crime scene ninety feet down off of the...
How to edit quality pulp-speed writing
How to edit quality pulp speed writing begins with a question: is it even possible to have quality "pulp speed writing" as Dean Wesley Smith so eloquently dubbed it? My previous post was picked up by the writing news aggregator blog, The Passive Voice (if you’re a...
How to write at least four novels a year
How to write at least four novels a year is a simple matter of math. People don’t like that answer, and I don’t really either. I want it to be something mystical, magical, something inspired by muses wearing dragonfly wings and wielding lightning bolts of...
a Bone Hook infused with mana and story
A few months ago, I went into our favorite art gallery, Native Intelligence in Wailuku, looking for something to shoot for our next cover. I found a bone hook infused with mana and story. Hooks, in bone, shell, and wood, are a fairly ordinary tourist item here on...
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