What if you were truly haunted by the ghost of Christmas past?Sometimes I think I might be.That First ChristmasWe spent our first Christmas as a married couple in a fairy tale setting. It was crisp and cold that year in Vienna, Austria. We strolled through the market...
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was part of my high school’s cheer team. I was also a member of the band, playing—yes, you read it here—the cymbals. Those cymbals were red hot when we New Yorkers played the Wisconsin fight song. Alas, we could only play the...
"Surround yourself with those who light the way." It was just another pithy Pinterest graphic; worth a nod and a smile. Forgotten in the wake of a great chicken recipe or a cat playing the piano. But I recently had occasion to reflect on the wisdom of "lighting the...
Are you travelling to Mexico but getting nervous when you read the headlines? Yes, there are security issues in Mexico, many of which I write about in the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco, but more than likely you aren't planning to travel to the...
A number of years ago, when my children were young and we were living in Mexico, my family was invited to the residence of a NATO ambassador and his family for a New Year’s Eve dinner. Our children were all the same age and the wife and I were close friends, both of...
In addition to being a famous Mexican holiday, now celebrated around the world for reasons unrelated to the Mexican victory of Puebla over the French in 1962, Cinco de Mayo is also my anniversary of being a published author. My first book, THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF MEXICO...
A few weeks ago, I cleaned out the room I use as an office and writing lair. Piles of paper got shifted from one side of the room to the other, new artwork went up (thank you, Command hooks) and some much-needed tax receipts got organized. And I found a CD...
I blame my oldest sister, really. She was studious and serious and had a lot of books. She organized them tidily on bookcases in the basement where they joined books my uncle had left when he joined the Navy and headed for Vietnam. The shelves also had room for an...
I travel internationally about every 4 months or so. This means I get to watch fellow travelers, many of whom unsuspectingly offer colorful characteristics and situations ripe for my next mystery novel. Yes, I admit it. I travel with a notebook and all too frequently...
Alot of famous quotes moan about why writing is such a solitary occupation. About writers bleeding at the typewriter, with only a bottle of gin as company. Thanks to social media, however, this is hardly the picture of the modern writer. Most writers use Twitter,...
I’ve got too many irons in the fire. I’d like to say that this is a rare event. But juggling multiple projects can be fun, which must be why I tend to overbook my creative energies. Here’s what is going on: Bookstore of the Future project Yesterday I reached out to 55...
I made two mistakes recently. The first was an expensive one. Mistake 1 Flush from my record-breaking (my records, anyway) month in September, spurred by the publication of short story The Beast in the Huffington Post’s Fiction 50 showcase, I went for some...
Other families have Game Night or Movie Night. We have Book Night. It started out as a means of self defense. We had two kids under the age of 5. My husband and I both had full time, demanding jobs, and he was pursuing a college degree at night. Reading for Survival I...
I never gave much thought to how families talk. How different conversations might be from house to house until we had this little episode in ours. The argument grew heated. I wanted no part of it. Theories were picked apart. Voices were raised. Sneers were more than...
In addition to being a celebration of the Mexican army's unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862—which has morphed into a popular celebration of Mexican culture and food--Cinco de Mayo was my first anniversary...