Beach Reads

Every trip to the beach calls for a good book or two. Before we left, I downloaded Fiddler's Lament by DH Parker onto my Kindle to read in the truck on the way down. It's the third in the Fiddling With Murder series. In this story, an old classmate in trouble causes no end of complications for Constancy Stafford and fiance Danny Egan. It's a fun, exciting cozy mystery with more twists and turns than a Missouri Ozark back road. I couldn't put it down and finished it not long after we got home this afternoon.

Even though it's possible to read a Kindle outside I didn't want to take mine to the beach where it might disappear if we wanted to take a walk. For that reason, I stopped by Barnes and Noble  before we left and got A Long Shadow, by Charles Todd. I've followed his character, Ian Rutledge, for many books and this one is has as many layers of intrigue as all the others do. In this story, an apparent assassin is stalking Rutledge as he goes about investigating the shooting of a constable in a patch of woods thought to be haunted. Rutledge himself is haunted by the ghost of a man he killed in France while serving in the Great War. 

I haven't finished it yet but reading it will give me something to do while I recuperate from sunburn.

Murder Goes South

One of the other things I want to do now that I have an empty nest is write a novel. Sounds trite. Everyone wants to write a novel.

When my daughter turned fourteen and started that separation thing adolescent girls go through it was painful, for me anyway. That's when I started writing. I tried journaling first, but you never know who's going to find it and start reading. It was easier to express myself using fictional characters. The genre I read most is mystery, mostly cozy, traditional and ametuer sleuth varieties. It was great fun killing off people I didn't like!

The first few I started on will never see the light of day and it was so long ago they are stored on floppy discs. They were first steps, small and somewhat ugly. None of them were ever actually finished either.

I did finally finish one only to learn that writing the book is the easy part. Actually getting the thing published is the hard part. You know those game machines with the crane that you dip into a vat of stuffed animals. Getting published is kind of like that.

However, I remain (mostly) undeterred and when my romance writing friend, JoAnn, asked if I wanted to go to Murder Goes South Writing conference in Atlanta, I said, "Don't throw me in that briar patch!"

Here's a link to their site: http://www.murdergoessouth.com/index.html 

You never know. I might just end up under that crane after all.