A friend of mine who’d moved to a continuous care retirement community about 40 minutes away died the other day. Before his passing, he told his wife that he wanted his service to be in the new church the couple had attended for several months. A few of us were…

I’m breaking my rule about not blogging to let you know why my new book may take longer than I thought. Every time I sit down to write, somehow something interferes with my progress. Today, I stopped work to send a nasty note to the reporter who published Tucker Carlson’s…

As the end of March draws near, I will be taking a break from blogging to work on my new mystery, tentative titled Under the Sand. The book is about two billionaire brothers who live on the island in southwest Florida where my heroine Leslie Elliott and her newspaper friend,…

I just read a story on my newsfeed about how upset people were that Jamie Lee Curtis won the Oscar for best supporting actress. They thought it should have gone to Angela Bassett. I don’t have an opinion because I haven’t seen either of the movies in which these women…

A knowledgeable friend of mine was complaining mightily after learning from his reliable sources that more of the U. S.’s oil reserves would be sold to China. He was talking about the 26 million barrels of crude oil, which were released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve earlier this month. Final…

Bear with me while I toot my own horn for the next several paragraphs. I hesitantly sent my first novel to Kirkus Reviews several months ago. Kirkus is a highly regarded review organization that charges to provide you with an unbiased opinion about your book. Sometimes they love it. Other…

For the last three years or so a pleasant-voiced woman, with an accent, has been calling to tell me that she wants to market my books. I stopped counting after call 100. A couple of weeks ago, I answered to hear what I knew would be a familiar sales pitch.…

The best-selling author Scott Turow visited our little island yesterday to help raise money for the library, talk about his new book Suspect and regale us with stories of how he came to be a celebrity. He was not boastful, just honest and entertaining and giving us what we wanted…

A friend of mine who used to be the garden editor at the newspaper where I worked posted a nasty cartoon about Governor Ron DeSantis on Facebook the other day. It showed a little girl being led away by four burly men – one the governor and the other three…

It wasn’t long after the winds from Hurricane Ian settled down that the scammers arrived. They came into the horrific aftermath from the East Coast and Midwest with dollar signs in their eyes. And we – victims of this second ill wind – were helpless to stop them. They worked quickly…