A Blog for Readers and Writers of Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction
I admit it, I’ve been obsessed with etiquette from a very tender age. While still in elementary school, I somehow found myself in possession of an ancient copy of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, and reader, I read that thing cover to cover. Even more than modern ones, Victorian etiquette books are the BEST.
Read more
Entropy is the opposite of stasis, and therefore, the exact thing that makes stories so interesting. A character wakes up one morning expecting their life to roll along as it always had, and then WHAM. Disorder, a break, destruction. And nothing can ever go back to how it was, because that’s how life works.
Read more
In no particular order, here are some of the books I’ve read this past year that allowed me to walk the streets of Edinburgh, wander the fields of Ireland, live in a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, and in one in coastal North Carolina, and in one on the Czech-Polish border. Yeah… I spent a lot of time in cabins in the woods.
Read more
Lately, I’ve been on a musical biography and memoir binge, and the fact that I can listen to these being read by the artists themselves is an absolute treat. Even so, the Beastie Boys Book is an incredible concoction, unlike anything I’ve ever heard or even imagined.
Read more
Procrastination and writing seem to go together (though not for all of us. Read on.), and as a result many writers have very clean closets, fridges, and bathrooms, and their friends/family are often nicely outfitted with hand-knit thingies. Staring at a screen or a notebook can be so intimidating, the critic’s voice so snarky, that I, for one, will invent any project to free me from the angst. And I like writing!
So, I asked the Misses if this was a thing for them.
Read more
–and what better way to celebrate than by taking a peek at three gorgeous historical novels set in days when literacy was not only rare, but, for some, deathly dangerous.
Read more
August 30th is National Frankenstein Day! Frankenstein, written in 1818 by an eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin Shelley, remains an amazingly relevant story to this day.
Read more
A few weeks ago I posted about novelizations and looking forward to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Well, I got my paws on it and ladies and gentlemen, it’s a BLAST.
Read more
I find that even as little as an hour in a museum alters how I see the world, and suddenly even trash begins to look like a sculpture.
Read more
I decided to ask the Misses about which films or books they thought aged well, and which didn’t.
Read more