The heroine of Concrete Evidence, Erica Kesling, has a job and a life far from the troubles that cost her a career in underwater archeology, but she knows she’s still in danger.  If the truth comes out, she may lose the job she has now, and her entire archeological career.  The incompetent intern assigned to her, Lee Scott, is far too attractive to ignore, and may not be what he seems.  When the man who caused her career-changing disaster appears on the scene, apparently thick as thieves with the management of the Cultural Resource firm where she works, Erica no longer knows who the real thieves are.  Who stole the artifacts, and where are they now?  Who is smuggling what?  And who is out to silence Erica, by killing her if need be?  Concrete Evidence is an edge-of-your-seat ride, all the way to an ending that I did not see coming.

As soon as I finished Concrete Evidence I looked for Grant’s next book, Grave Danger, another archeological thriller which has just been released on Amazon.  I’ve added it to my Kindle, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

At lunch yesterday (a pork fiesta bowl with extra onions at Pollo Campero in Webster, Texas), I pulled out my Kindle and read Tempest in the White City, a short story by Deeanne Gist.  The story, like her new release It Happened at the Fair, which I picked up (the paper version) last weekend, takes place at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.  The story introduces Hunter Scott, a Texas Ranger serving as a Columbian Guard at the Fair, and the lady doctor who treats him for a rather embarrassing illness. (Even Gist’s short stories come with beautiful covers!)  Hunter and Dr. Tate will be back in Gist’s next novel.  Meanwhile, the download includes a peek at this year’s book, the recently released It Happened at the Fair, which is high on my To Be Read list.  I even bought an extra copy for a friend–books do make such wonderful gifts.

My mother taught me so much, as mothers do, but the love of reading that she raised me with probably had more influence on the person I grew up to be than anything else.  Mom had only a high school education, as did most women of her generation, and she wasn’t particularly fond of school (my brother inherited that preference, but I loved school), but she never stopped learning, because she never stopped reading.

Mom read voraciously.  She loved mysteries and science fiction.  She didn’t read genre romance, but she loved historical novels.  She loved humor.  She kept a list of Agatha Christie novels and their alternate titles because she got tired of picking up what she hoped was a new one and finding she’d already read it.  She made little marks on the inside covers of books when she finished reading them, but she never dog-eared a page.

Over the years she introduced me to all the English mystery novelists and most of the Americans, to John Wyndham’s science fiction and Jean Shepherd’s humor, to The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, to The Wind in the Willows and T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose.

A few years after my dad died, Mom sold her house to a woman who also loved books and was happy to take the bookshelves fully loaded.  There just wasn’t enough room in my house to accommodate Mom’s library, not on top of the collections Jack and I had accumulated.  I still have most of the books she did bring along when she moved in with us.  I wish I knew what became of that 1939 movie tie in edition of Gone With the Wind, with its eight by ten inch two-column layout and color plates from the film.  I expect it simply disintegrated; the last time I remember seeing it, the spine was covered in brown tape.

When the woman who bought my mother’s house moved on, she sent me a matched set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, also big two-column books; both have my parents’ book plates, and one is inscribed “to my Valentine, February 14, 1946, Ken.”

Miss you, Mom!  Wish I could share all the books I’ve read in the last twenty years with you.

But one of those friends, Colleen Thompson, highly recommended Evidence of Life, and as soon as I opened it I understood why.   It’s a hard book to categorize, but literary thriller may come close enough.  It’s the story of a woman, Abby Bennett, whose husband and daughter, on a camping trip in the Texas hill country, disappear without a trace in the wake of a storm and flash flood (yes, that does happen).  In the course of trying to discover what happened to them, Abby learns too much that she had never suspected, about her husband, her family, her marriage and her friends.   An excellent and beautifully written novel.

Falling for Frederick, by my friend Cheryl Bolen, was one of the first of Montlake’s Kindle serials, but is now available as a full novel.  I read it in installments, which suited me because I usually read on my Kindle once or twice a week while waiting for an appointment or grabbing lunch by myself.  So when the last installment was delivered to my reader recently, I was nearly caught up, and I found myself sitting up late to finish the story.  Falling for Frederick is a contemporary romantic suspense tale, featuring an American grad student in England, the handsome earl she meets when she’s found crouching over the body of his archivist, knife in hand, a missing (and highly valuable) artifact, and an historical mystery to go with the modern one.  And, of course, a romance.

Yesterday at lunch I opened my Kindle and began reading Concrete Evidence, by my friend and fellow Starcatcher and Firebird Rachel Grant.  Although Rachel is considerably younger than I, we have quite a lot in common:  we both studied archeology at Florida State University, worked as cultural resource management archeologists, and married men involved in marine archeology.  So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Rachel’s romantic suspense novels involve archeology.  Fortunately my own involvement in archeology (and Rachel’s, I’m sure) never included the sort of danger the heroine of Concrete Evidence finds herself in.  I picked it up again last night and had to force myself to put it away at 1:30 this morning–I had too much to do today to read all night.  I can hardly wait to get back to it.

Another of my Firebird sisters, Susan M. Boyer, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel last night at the Malice Domestic Conference, for her 2012 Golden Heart finalist, Lowcountry Boil.  Published by Henery Press last fall, Lowcountry Boil is a wonderfully entertaining mystery (with a paranormal twist), the first in a series.  Huge congratulations to Susan, and to Henery Press, a new publisher with a bright future.

Every week I think to myself that I’ll have two days to catch up on writing and editing projects, and maybe even on reading.  Usually those plans get derailed pretty quickly.  Some weekends it’s just grocery shopping, laundry, maybe a chapter meeting or lunch with a friend, or something else I can’t do during the week.  This weekend it was the return of the growing season and the sad state of my front yard.  (We aren’t goint to talk about my back yard, which needs professional help, or possible a rent-a-teen with a heavy duty lawnmower.)

Yesterday morning was dreary, and I caught some light rain as I ran my usual Saturday errands.  But when I got home my lawn was still dry, a particularly important consideration when an electric mower is involved.  The rain held off until after I finished mowing, although I could hear thunder rumbling not too far in the distance before I was done.

My neighborhood caught a little more than an inch of needed rain last night, nothing to complain about compared to the several inches which fell in other parts of the Houston area, flooding streets and stranding cars.  By the time I went out to collect my newspaper this morning, the sun was out and the ground was no more than damp, so I pulled on my new gardening gloves and attacked the area between the driveway and the fence that I couldn’t mow yesterday because of all the weeds posing as saplings.  In an hour or so I had filled the driveway with vegetation and tattered whirligigs.

The whirligigs were a good part of my motivation for this particular job.  I can see them from my kitchen window, bright colors in the sunshine, spinning tails on windy days.  Jack never understood why I disliked the kitchen in our New Orleans apartment, many years ago when I was in grad school at Tulane.  It wasn’t the ancient refrigerator with the freezer compartment just big enough for two ice cube trays and half a pound of ground beef.  It wasn’t the fact that the tap water smelled of chlorine and the cats wouldn’t touch it until it had sat in a pitcher in the refrigerator for two days.  It was the lack of a window over the kitchen sink.

So before I bundled all those weeds up to the trash collector’s specifications, I replaced my birds.  I grew up in South Florida, land of the lawn flamingo, and I think my fondness for avian whirligigs is quite tasteful in comparison.  But the old ones were so faded and weather beaten that it was just as well they were half hidden by tall weeds and scraggly branches.  I had a new set in the garage, just waiting for the return of spring, and now I have my kitchen window view back, so much nicer than a bare fence.

Of course the return of spring and the growing season means the return of regular yard work, too.  I actually don’t mind mowing the lawn, particularly not with my cordless electric mower.  It’s not self-propelled–what a battery that would take–but it starts without an argument or a trip to the gas station.  But I’m going to look into some help for the rest of the work.  It’s likely to be a long, hot summer.

I tend to be a loyal viewer myself.  If the promos and trailers for a new show interest me enough, I’ll watch the pilot, and if I like that, the show will probably keep me.  Not always.  I realized last year that I had more episodes of Smash on my DVR than I had actually watched, and I didn’t care about losing them when the DVR died.  I abandoned The Mentalist when I got really, really, REALLY tired of both Red John and Patrick Jane’s behavior.  There have been others.  But usually, once I start watching, I’ll stay around.  Heck, I’m still watching Glee, if only for the music.

I would tell you that I don’t care for violent shows, but I’m a history geek, big fan of Hell on Wheels, and I haven’t missed an episode of the History Channel’s Vikings, an even more violent series, but beautifully filmed and full of interesting characters (especially Lagertha, the kick-butt Shield Maiden wife of the protagonist).

I’m cautious about what I do start watching.  There are any number of light mystery shows on the air (or on the cable) that I have avoided simply because I don’t want to tie up yet another weekly hour. (I do watch Bones, Castle, White Collar and Rizzoli & Isles.).  The same goes for many of the series on SyFy, although I’ve been a science fiction fan forever, loved all the Star Trek and Stargate series (well, some more than others, but still . . .).  I watch Grimm and Once Upon a Time, both of them more fantasy than science fiction, but very entertaining.

Somehow the promos for the new SyFy series Defiance stayed under my radar until a couple of weeks before its premiere, when I noticed an ad on line.  The show promised several elements I enjoy, but I wasn’t sure.  I still feel a bit burned over Terra Nova (time travel! dinosaurs! Jason O’Meara!)–I hate falling for a show that doesn’t make it to a second season.  And I missed the initial showing of the Defiance premiere.  Couldn’t record it because I still haven’t gotten around to replacing my failed DVR.  Missed a convenient showing in favor of a really lovely dinner, and found myself tackling the two hour show at midnight on Friday.  Well, I figured, if this could keep me awake until 2 AM, it was worth a commitment.

Defiance is worth it and then some.  It is, truth be told, in large part a repositioned Western, set thirty years or so in the future of an Earth changed forever by the arrival of no less than seven alien races and their out-of-control “terraforming” (inaccurate use of the term, but we’ll overlook that for the moment).  The protagonist is the loner (although he’s accompanied by his adopted alien teen-age daughter) who wanders into the frontierish town of Defiance (formerly St. Louis, see the Arch over there?) just in time to see the old sheriff die in action.  Yep, pardner, Nolan is drafted/trapped into becoming the new “Lawkeeper.”

The show is full of Western and SF tropes, CGI effects, more or less humanoid aliens, gritty and sometimes spectacular scenery.  There’s the inexperienced (female) mayor, her sister the brothel owner, the patriarch of the mining family (played by Graham Greene, long a favorite of mine), the alien mob boss and his wife (played by Jaime Murray, formerly H. G. Wells on Warehouse 13), who spend an inordinate amount of time in their hot tub, a Romeo and Juliet sub-plot, an acerbic and funny alien female doctor, and lots of disintegrating ships tumbling out of orbit and causing ever weirder changes.

I love it, and the second episode was just as good.  Oh, dear, another commitment.

What shows keep you watching, even when you should be doing something else?

I’ve been making an effort.  My friends, most of them writers, dragged me into social media a few months ago, even as I resisted, clinging to tried and true excuses:  I don’t understand it, I don’t need it, I don’t have time for it.  All good excuses.  All valid.  I jumped in anyway.  And I liked it.

But I’m having trouble with Twitter.  No, not technical trouble.  The program is simple enough.  But I’m not really sure I see the point.  For a while I actually tried to keep up.  I followed my friends, local and cyber, a couple of local news sources, pictures of adorable animals, and so forth.  Maybe two hundred Tweeters.

I found myself watching personal conversations, sometimes both sides, sometimes only half, between people who apparently find it easier to tweet from their smart phones than to email or actually phone someone.  I saw pictures of lunches, children, sunsets and bookshelves.  I learned to my amusement (and sometimes amazement) that many of my women friends are extremely serious sports fans.

Many people I follow, particularly my fellow writers, post links to articles and web sites and pictures.  Interesting stories, valuable information, but I just don’t have time to go look at a quarter of them.

I can’t keep up.  Trying to follow Twitter during the day uses up far too much time.  I have a full-time job, but it would be just as much a time sink if I were home trying to write full-time.  And this with only 200 Tweeters in my stream.  Who are these people I see who are following hundreds, even thousands, of Tweeters?  Why would anyone do that?  How could anyone do that?

I don’t tweet  lot myself:  when I post something here, when I buy a book or review one on Amazon, when I see a particularly funny bumper sticker or billboard on my commute.  I’m trying to be interesting–after all, isn’t that the point of having an Internet Presence?  But I honestly don’t know why strangers pop up on my Followers list.  They are certainly welcome, I’m just not sure what, if anything, I’m giving them.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to organize.  I set up Twitter Lists and divided my contacts into various categories.  I unfollowed some of the news sources that were pelting me with things I’d already seen TV or in the newspaper.  I removed one person I couldn’t identify–she hadn’t tweeted since last fall, perhaps even more puzzled by the whole thing than I am.

The lists do seem to make information a bit easier to find.  I’ll add more to the Industry list so I can keep up with the agent/editor/publisher news and gossip.  I’ll check up on my friends and watch for new books from my favorite authors.

And I’ll try to tweet more interesting or amusing comments myself.  Once a day, maybe.

Excuse me while I send this post to Twitter.

I had picked Welcome Committee up one night when I wanted something warm and comfortable to read, and it just filled the bill.  It tells the story of a very young, newly-minted minister who arrives in a small town in Texas to take over a church, not knowing what to expect from the congregation or his new life.  Oh, he’s taken classes in church management at the seminary, but that’s not the same as real experience.  And he’s in for some new experiences, particularly at the hands of the Widows, a couple of ladies of the congregation who believe, among other things, that a minister should be married.

The Widows don’t give up on their new minister, but they set meddling in his life aside to concentrate on a damaged war vet and his physical therapist, two characters who have the reader pulling for them from their first appearance.

Jane Perrine, who is an ordained minister herself, never preaches.  She writes about life in a small town church, and about people who try to do the right thing and care about one another.  The next book in the series, The Matchmakers of Butternut Creek, is at the top of my Books To Buy list, and The Wedding Planners of Butternut Creek will be out in the fall.

Earlier this year I read another of Jane Perrine’s books, Miss Prim, a Regency romance written several years ago and published by Avalon, recently resissued on paper and for the Kindle by Amazon.  Miss Prim is the story of Lady Louisa Walker, whose staid and well-regulated spinsterhood is turned completely upside down by an old flame who pulls her into wild adventures involving French spies, a race across the countryside, and a mysterious baby.

I haven’t managed a lot of reading time since the first of the year.  Busy at work and with RWA activities, and far less writing than I’d like to claim.  I’ve read three good mysteries, Janet Evanovich’s Notorious Nineteen (who really cares about the mystery when the characters are so much fun?), Marcia Muller’s Looking for Yesterday (I’ve been following Sharon McCone’s cases–and life–since she first appeared in Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977), and Margaret Maron’s The Buzzard Table (Judge Deborah Knott is another series character I have followed from the beginning).

Currently I’m enjoying Colleen Thompson’s Passion to Protect, an edge-of-the-seat romantic suspense novel.  The Steampunk book is on my coffee table, with a book mark very near the beginning.  The book on The Searchers is there, too, without one.  On my Kindle I’m following a serial, Falling for Frederick by Cheryl Bolen.

Yesterday I stopped at the local Barnes & Noble to look for a copy of my Starcatcher sister Amy Raby’s first release, Assassin’s Gambit.  I found it on the New In Paperback kiosk in the middle of the store and stopped to take a picture of the book “in the wild” to send to Amy.  There I was, on one knee with my camera, when I realized a man was watching me.  “My friend’s first book,” I explained.  “Wouldn’t it be more help to buy it and read it?” he asked.  “I will,” I promised, “but I also want to send her a picture.”  Apparently satisfied, he nodded and walked away.  Without reporting me to store security.

But I didn’t have a new manuscript to enter.  I had a couple of old ones, good books, I believe, but probably needing some work, and I hadn’t looked at them in years.  I didn’t see anything to gain in entering either of my previous finalists, although that is permitted and some writers do it.  The book I had started was far too short to finish by the deadline (it still is).

That left Jinn & Tonic, a book I love, which had done well, but not quite well enough to make the final round, in (mumble mumble) previous Golden Heart contests.  Maybe, I thought, those first chapters could use a tweak here and there.  Well, of course they could.  I’m a writer.  And a rewriter.  I read these blog posts now and then and often find something to tweak.  Legend has it that Ernest Hemmingway used to track down his own published books in other people’s libraries and make corrections in the margins.

Giving Jinn & Tonic one more shot at the Golden Heart would also give me an excuse to bring it into sync with some of the world building I had done for Bathtub Jinn.  When I wrote Jinn & Tonic, I didn’t realize I might be starting a series, but the world of the jinn and their relatives expanded in the second book.

As I was considering my Golden Heart options (option, really), I was also dipping into Scrivener.  Why not jump in all the way, and use Jinn & Tonic as a practice piece, to see if the new software might make revising and editing easier?  So I imported the manuscript into Scrivener, set about tweaking, and in due time sent Jinn & Tonic off for one more shot at the Golden Heart.

Then I did my best to pretend it didn’t matter, even as I continued to polish the manuscript.  Why be greedy?  Why expect a manuscript that had not made the final round in (mumble mumble) attempts to grab the gold ring this time?  Who needed all that fuss, anyway?  I had a lot of work at the Scorekeeper, and for West Houston RWA.  I had manuscripts to judge for the Golden Heart in a category I don’t write.  I signed up for a Scrivener class with Gwen Hernandez.

And when announcement day came, last Tuesday, I stayed late at home, at my computer, just in case the phone rang.  I began to see emails announcing newly-notified finalists.  Early announcements.  Sisters from the Starcatchers and the Firebirds were finalists, and a friend, Lark Howard, from West Houston RWA.  By 8:30 I was thinking I should probably get out the door and off to work.

At 8:33 the phone rang.  As I picked it up I recognized the name of an RWA board member on the Caller ID.  I knew what it was, I had waited for the call, and I was just as thrilled as I was in 2011 and 2012.  Just as happy, just as dazed.  But this time, the third time, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a mistake.  After I saw the list on line, anyway.  (And HERE it is.)  A few minutes after the phone call, a friend on the RWA board sent me a one-line email: “So, how’s your day going?”

A week before the announcements I had dinner with friends before the monthly Houston Bay Area RWA meeting.  Cheryl Bolen said, perhaps a bit rashly, “If you get a call next Tuesday, I’ll go to Atlanta with you.”  Turns out she was serious.  Now we’re both registered for the RWA National Conference in Atlanta in July, and we have a hotel room reserved.  I’ve had a new picture taken.  I’m finishing my edits so I can pull Jinn & Tonic out of Scrivener (and yes, it is easier to edit with Scrivener than Word, but compiling the manuscript may be an adventure).

I have forty new sisters, my fellow 2013 Golden Heart finalists.

RWA 2013, here we come!

Thanks to all that technology, it took me only a minute or two to find the correct quote for what I had in mind, Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law:  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

About a week ago, on a Friday night, I noticed that my computer was behaving oddly as I visited familiar sites on the Internet.  Pictures weren’t loading, site formatting was off.  It was late, and I didn’t think much of it.  But the next morning some of the sites I visit regularly refused to load at all.  I couldn’t reach my blog, or any other site with a wordpress.com address, although the Firebirds site on wordpress.org came right up to greet me.

Being the sort of person who worries at annoyances like a rat terrier, I spent a great deal of that Saturday exploring the depths of my computer.  I rebooted the computer.  I rebooted the modem.  I tried to blame my problems on a recent Windows update and restored the computer to an earlier point.  That didn’t help with the connection, but at least it gave me back my Internet Explorer settings–trust me, don’t restore IE to its default settings unless you want to spend quite a lot of time getting it back to the way you like it.  I ran Spybot and Malwarebytes, and couldn’t find anything wrong.  I ran every diagnostic I could find.  Nothing helped.

By Saturday evening I had learned a good bit about the inner workings of the computer, but I hadn’t solved my problem, or gotten much of anything else done (well, I did my grocery shoppping, washed my filthy car, and ran three loads of laundry), and I could feel my blood pressure, not a good thing.

On Sunday morning, not even the weather widget on my desktop worked.  I couldn’t get on line at all.  Oh, the horror:  no email!  I dug through my files for the Verizon user guide, resigning myself to a long and possibly indecipherable phone conversation with someone who probably knew the solution but might not be able to explain it in English.  But there in the list of things to try before calling for help, right after making sure the plug hadn’t fallen out of the wall, was a suggestion to turn the computer off and reboot the modem by unplugging it.

I do not understand enough physics to know why unplugging the modem would have a different effect than simply turning it off and on (which I had tried.  Several times), but I was willing to give it a shot.

And it worked!  Well, mostly.  I could get back on line, and reach most of the sites I wanted to visit.  My email worked, although I couldn’t get to my bank.  I could get to my blog, but I couldn’t open a widget to change it.  I could get by.

By then I had pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem was not in my computer, but somewhere in my modem or my DSL line, which likely meant dealing with Verizon.  At work on Monday morning I told my story to my friend Ha Tran, who can always figure out what’s going on when the computers at the Scorekeeper  don’t work.

Ha recognized the trouble.  Not the modem, he said, it’s not old enough to fail.  More likely the DSL line, but don’t call for a couple of days, because it will probably fix itself.

And he was right.  When I got home Monday evening, everything was working fine.  Email, TV schedule, social media, online banking, the things I truly need and the things I waste time on.  I was greatly relieved, and not a little concerned by how much I depend on this collection of boxes and wires sitting on my desk.  And I don’t even have a smart phone.  Or a tablet.  Yet.

Welcome to the Wired World.  Indistinguishable from Magic.

My digital calendar is not particularly crowded.  A couple of recurring monthly meetings, a few birthdays, holidays, a few future appointments.  But the same program (an inexpensive but very useful piece of software called C-Organizer Professional) also holds my address book and all my passwords.  The thought of redoing all that was not attractive.

Fortunately C-Organizer also nudges its user to back up fairly often.  When I hit back up on the menu, however, a small box opened and asked me for the name of the back up file.  Huh?  I’m supposed to know that?  Mind you, it’s 7 AM, and dark out.  I haven’t been up all that long, and I have to go to work.  Not the best conditions for computer experiments, but I am constitutionally incapable of letting something like that go.

Doesn’t it look like it’s asking for a file name?  I hunted around my hard drive and my back up drive (yes, I do have an automatic back up program running, along with scattered flash drives), and I found the organizer back up files, but trying to enter a file name didn’t work.  After ten minutes or so I gave up and, just for the hell of it, hit the “OK” button.  And up popped the whole list of back up files.  I clicked on the one from two weeks ago, it loaded with no problems, and I had all my information back, undamaged.

Somewhere I do have printouts of both the address book and the password list, and I’m going to make sure they’re up-to-date.  I’ve been working on computers for nearly thirty years now, and I still need paper copies of the important files: manuscripts, tax files, receipts.  I edit on paper.  At the Scorekeeper we do most of our work on computers–then we print the results and store the reports in our tightly-packed filing cabinets.  What was all that talk years ago about the paperless office?

It isn’t just computer files that seem perishable.  My Kindle is a technological marvel, containing well over a hundred books, but e-reading is just not the same as holding a book in my hands.  I know books can be lost, burned, torn, destroyed in a dozen ways, but they remain permanent, self powered, in a way computer files (or those floppy disks in my attic) are not.

I returned from a weekend trip not long ago to discover that my DVR had ceased to record.  The hard drive hasn’t crashed–the box still supports the TV, and the stored programs still play.  This may be a message from the universe, telling me that I should be writing and reading rather than watching recorded programs.  One of these days I’ll have Comcast replace it.  And when I do, I’ll lose the old movies I’ve recorded on it, because they are only computer files.  Even old VCR tapes are more permanent.

When I trade that DVR for one that works, where will I find another copy of Johnny Guitar, possibly the strangest Western ever made?