[ITW interview with Gwen Florio, upon the publication of Less Than a Treason in 2017. Edited.] You are best known for your twenty-book series featuring Kate Shugak, an Aleut private investigator who lives in a fictional park in Alaska (we’ll get to the other three series in a bit). Let me repeat that: twenty books…
Poke is a travel journalist living in Bangkok, married to Rose, a retired bar girl with both now adopted parents to Miaow, a precocious prepubescent rescued from the Bangkok streets with hormones and attitude both kicking in in full measure. A very scary ex-lover resurrects himself from Rose’s past, a neat trick since she thought…
Storyknife Press: a publishing opportunity This year Storyknife has our first writers in cabins! We survived our capital construction campaign, construction, and covid, and we are now fulfilling our mission to support women writers by providing them with the time and space and inspiration (that view!) and fellowship they need to write books we will all…
It’s Laos, 1976. Dr. Siri Paiboun thought he was going to be able to retire after the Communist takeover, but instead he is drafted into being the nation’s only coroner. A doctor, yes, but Siri has no training in autopsies, so he gets hold of a couple of textbooks and has his nurse/assistant/soon to be…
Read more Assassination was a different matter altogether. It was personal and rude.
I finished the first draft of the third Eye of Isis novel last week, and under strict instructions from the August writers in residence at Storyknife I am to take a week off. Relax. Take a walk on the beach. Drink a bottle of wine with friends. Read books instead of writing them. If only.…
What a delightfully informative little book! I don’t know how they crammed so much information into just 200 pages (reminds me of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and this one doesn’t have recipes). (And why not, I ask? Hmmph.) The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar,…
[Written at Laurie King’s request for The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing, 2012.] Those “Eureka!” moments Writing successfully is sweat equity. Butt in the chair, hour after hour, grinding out sentences and paragraphs and pages, none of which, one is grimly aware, may make the final cut when it comes time to edit.…
Less than two hundred pages packed with information on the title subject, written in lively prose and illustrated mostly with line drawings from the times, plus a few photographs. Where else are you going find out that during the Middle Ages An amusement gallery was sometimes run in conjunction with a medieval zoo…In these galleries…
If you write long enough, eventually someone will ask you to contribute a chapter for a serial novel. What is a serial novel, you ask? In the archaic meaning, it’s a work of fiction published in installments–think of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and people in New York waiting on the docks for the ship…
Cahill is determined to redeem the Middle Ages from the likes of William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire) and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). On the contrary, Cahill writes The reputation of the Middle Ages for thuggish cruelty is largely (if not wholly) undeserved. which I find a bit…
