Note: From time to time on #thiswritinglife I will post reviews of books about the building blocks of our craft. If on the way to looking up “occurrence” for the seventy-third time to see if it’s two c’s or two r’s (both) and an “e” or and “a” (an e) and get sidetracked first by osmometry,…
In 2009 I was asked to answer the Book Brahmins Questionnaire on Shelf Awareness. Never hard to get me talking about books I love, so I did, and here are their questions and my answers, lightly edited. On your nightstand now: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. I was raised in…
I don’t know how it happens but every now and then my name swims up out of the ether to materialize in front of groups like the Alaska Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers, who then invite me to give a speech at their annual conference. So in October 2021 I did. Writing North of the…
The M.J. Murdock Trust, a great Friend of Storyknife, sent a film crew up to Alaska last year (2021) to talk to the people involved in projects they have funded here. An aside on the Murdock Trust–it was started by a guy who sold Piper airplanes, and the Trust donates to projects in the states…
If I had a nickel for every time somebody said to me, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” I’d be a rich woman and I’d never have to write another word. But seriously, folks. The two questions I am always asked are, 1, how to get published, and 2, how to get an agent.…
[For the 2003 Edgar awards program book]
I have a confession to make.
The first two books I ever checked out of the Seldovia Public Library were The Hidden Staircase and The Clue in the Old Stagecoach. Yes, I loved them, and yes, they returned me hotfoot to the library, where, yes, I went through the rest of the Nancy Drews on the shelf in about a month.
But after that? I didn't read mysteries much. My mother loved them, especially those of British authors, including Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. Perhaps, in the perverse way of children, because she did, I didn't. She didn’t give up, though. It took her twenty-one years of patient persistence to get me to read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.
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[From an interview with David Allen Binder, 2012 or thereabouts.] What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? To write every day. Even if it’s only a sentence a day, that is one more sentence than you had the day before. By the end of the month…
One week after… Disappearance of a Scribe, the second Eye of Isis novel, is out there in the real world now (instead of existing just between my ears). A body in Rhakotis sandals gives a nasty shock to passing fishermen, and Cleopatra’s Eye, Tetisheri, is called to the scene to investigate. Thereby hangs a tale of…
I love the acknowledgements pages in historical novels, like the ones in Jim Benn’s Billy Boyles series. It is where the writing rubber meets the road; i.e., where the writer reveals where fact and fiction diverge (or don’t) in the narrative that precedes them. So here are the “notes and acknowledgements” from Disappearance of a…
A week and a day away! Publication of the second Eye of Isis novel, that is, aka Disappearance of a Scribe. Barbara Peters calls it “On the Waterfront, Cleopatra style,” which epigram I promptly stole for the book’s tagline. Jimmy Hoffa would feel right at home. Excerpt: “Yes, Timo?” Tetisheri turned her head to see…