Darkblade is coming...

 It has been a tough month for writing my own stuff but it looks like I'm going to make my deadline for publishing DARKBLADE at the end of the month. I don't write a lot of dark fantasy but I'm really happy with how this has turned out. Here's an excerpt:

darkblade

Liam had found the sword in the witch wood two days after his 11^th birthday.

He knew his mother didn’t like him playing in the little copse of trees but he hadn’t been playing; he’d been running from Jude.

Jude was fat and stupid and mean. And though he was 13, he and Liam were in the same grade at school.

Liam picked on the younger, smaller kids, but even the teachers were afraid of him. Because in addition to being fat and stupid and mean, he was also big, standing nearly six feet tall with big hands that he could transform into fists like hammers.

He’d hit their science teacher once and got suspended for a week. Everyone had hoped he’d be expelled but Jude told his mom that Mr. Safrani had touched in in the bad places and she had called a lawyer and what had happened was that Jude came back to school and Mr. Safrani left.

It bothered Liam that after that, the adults were too scared of Jude to intervene when he was bullying one of the little kids.

Liam had mostly mastered the art of being invisible but sometimes, Jude looked right through his cloak of invisibility and pulled Liam out into the open.

And if that happened, Liam knew that he was in for a pounding just because Jude liked to pound people.

And he liked to take his time.  It wasn’t any fun for Jude if his victims just gave up and passively submitted to his abuse.

Liam liked chasing down his victims.

He liked them to run.

An Ember in the Ashes--TBR

Over at Bitten By Books, Rachel Smith is running a poll about reading reviews. Do you read them, are you influenced by them? I realized that I almost never read reviews. For me, it's all about the title. That's what attracts me first. I really enjoy fantasies with fanciful titles that aren't "twee." I hate twee. I also hate whimsical. Which brings me to covers--the second reason I'll pick up a book. I love cozy mysteries and I also love urban fantasy and PNR. But if I see one of those silly chicklit covers that look like they borrowed their graphics from the animated opening credits of the old Bewitched series, I click away. (I will make an exception for Dakota Cassidy's books, which are aewsome!)

Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes is a book that caught my eye long before I heard the hype about it. I tend to be pretty impervious to hype. (I work in Hollywood and before that I worked for magazines and no pitch letter ever began, "This is a mediocre idea with limited audience potential.") I was immediately interested because epic fantasy is so dominated by male writers. I yield to no reader in my admiration for Brent Weeks' Night Angel books but I keep wondering if there's a woman out there writing the same kind of fantasy. (And don't talk to me about that epic fantasy about the girl who is chosen to be a prostitute for people who like to inflict pain. Yes, sacred prostitution served up with exquisite world building It has hundreds of reviews and if I found my daughter reading it, I'd be appalled.)
But Tahir's fantasy is based on ancient Rome and it comes with blurbs and enthusiastic quotes from the trade and popular press. It looks like it has large dollops of romance in there too. Well, who doesn't like romance? it was published today and I'm off to buy my copy.

Happy Birthday WilliamShakespeare

Brainy Quotes has a whole section of William Shakespeare quotes. Just for fun, check it out. And be amazed all over again by the genius that was the bard! (I love that when he couldn't find just the right word, he made one up.) Attached is the image I bought last week for the cover of my Shakespeare Noir collection of short stories. I know. I know. Nobody really buys short story collections. But over the years, what with one story and then another, I ended up with enough for a book. And this is a neat image. So sometime this summer, it'll be out.

Donuts--not just donuts any more

In the beginning there were three kinds of donuts: cake, jelly-filled, and glazed. The cake donuts were often covered in cinnamon-sugar, the jelly donuts were dusted with powdered sugar (making it impossible to eat one on the sly) and glazed (both cake and yeast) were dunked in a transparent bath of sweet syrup that grew translucent and crackled as it dried. Three kinds of donuts—the holy trinity of pastries. Wanting more seemed almost … blasphemous. But that was then and this is now. Now, thanks to the whims of the foodie gods, donuts are a “thing.” And as donut shops get more and more competitive with the varieties they offer, we have to ask—how much modification can a donut take before it’s not a donut any more and some sort of strange (but quite possibly delicious) frankenfood? It used to be that if you ordered a donut, you would get a circle of fried dough with a hole in the middle unless said donut was filled with jelly or custard where the hole should be. Then bagels made the jump from ethnic food to everybody’s favorite nosh and things got a little more confusing because bagels are also round dough with holes in the center, though they were baked and not fried. It was a lot simpler when cupcakes were the pastry du jour. A cupcake either is or is not a cupcake. There are no transitional states as there are with donuts—hybrids inspired by everything from Pop-Tarts to croquembouche http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquembouche . It’s all good, but is it a donut? So we have to ask—what’s the most outrageously delicious donut configuration you’ve ever tried and where did you get it?

All sunset photos do not look alike

I used to have a roommate who was fascinated by cloud formations and she took endless photos of them. And they all pretty much looked alike. I find that to be true of a lot of sunset photos also. But a friend sent me this gorgeous photo he took out the window of a train heading north back to Bellingham. I think it's poster-worthy.

How excited am I???

One of my producers sent me this photograph from MIPTV, the big global marketplace for buying and selling television shows.He's there to hawk a project I'm involved in and I could not be more excited if I were actually there. (This is the 21st century, so much of our lives is already taking place in virtual space that I feel like I AM there.) So wish us all luck!

Trying Out Amazon's Beta Cover Creator

I'm playing around iwth a new series from my alter-ego Delia Fontana (La Bruja Roja) and decided to try my hand at creating my own covers for each of the "episodes" before going to my usual cover creator for the entire "season" of episodes. I don't know...what do you think? I have this image in color as well, and I hope to use it on the final cover of the Vetiver Quinn stories. One of my concerns is that although the story is tagged "romantic suspense," this instalment (episode/chapter) is the introduction and I haven't had my protagonists fall in love (or fall into bed) right away. But that cover photo suggests they're already hot and heavy. Thoughts?

When someone gushes over a book

I was wearing the earrings I bought in New Orleans today and the checker at my supermarket complimented me on them. I told her I'd bought them in NOLA and she told me she'd loved the city. I told her about a cab driver taking me by Anne Rice's house and she told me how much she loved Anne Rice's books. And that made me think of the time I was in a supermarket in L.A. looking over the new paperback books. An older woman, a total stranger, pointed out a book by James Patterson--The 9th Judgment, a book in the Woman's Murder Club series. "That's a really good book," she said.

How cool is that? Can you imagine how great it would be to have total strangers recommending your book to people? You cannot buy that kind of word of mouth. When the first of the Twilight books came out, they came highly recommended to me by a friend's daughter, who was in middle school at the time. She's now in college, a writer herself, and I still rely on her for opinions in all things YA and paranormal. Forget being a best-selling author. What I want to be is an author that people recommend to strangers. (Well, don't forget it but you know what I mean.)

Happy Birthday to authors and illustrators born in April

Before there were "listicles" there were lists and I always liked lists. Turns out Scholastic has a neat resource for teachers that lists authors and illustrators by their birthdays. turns out a lot of my favorite authors were born in April Like: Hans Christian Andersen (April 2) Washington Irving (April 3) Beverly Cleary (April 12, and next year marks her centennial) Marguerite Henry (April 13) William Shakespeare (April 23) Lois Duncan (April 28) There are more, but these are just my favorites.

Shameless Saturday self-promjotion

At midnight tonight, a count-down deal goes into effect for my short mystery novel Whipping Boy. You'll be able to snag it for 99 cents for a limited time as it makes its way back up to its normal price. I loved writing this book and am about halfway through the sequel (A Taste for Strange, which tells the story through the point of view of the cop who was the "co-star" of the first book). When you're a writer, you love all your books, but this one is close to my heart. I love writing the fantasy and the horror and the SF, but I really love my mysteries. It's got a 4.6 rating!! Bookmark it here and snag it at 12:01!

True Crime comjing March 31

I'm not really a true crime junkie, particularly not when it comes to chronicles of serial killers, which I find kind of depressing. But a good murder story, particularly one like this, always piques my interest. Upstanding doctor, a pillar in his church, finds his wife of 30 years dead in the bathtub. Terrible accident, or so it appears. The Stranger She Loved is already available from St. Martin's Press via pre-order and it'll be out in 10 days. Written by Shanna Hogan, who has also written books about Jodi Arias, and several other notorious cases.

Be an Honorary Mysterian

Thanks to Village Books in Bellingham--their motto is "building community one book at a time"--I have started a mystery book club--The Bellingham Mysterians. We will be meeting for the first time in May and our first book up will be Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris. This is the first in a series of mysteries set in Saudi Arabia, the tale of a missing girl who is found drowned in the desert. the book has been praised for its sense of place, and I'm looking forward to reading it. If you'd like to be a part of the Mysterians, please follow us @bhammysterians. And I'll be posting here about what everyone thought of the book.

QUEEN MAB by Kate Danley

I am a sucker for beautiful book covers (Why yes, I do judge a book by its cover) so when I saw the cover for Kate Danley's fantasy novel Queen Mab in one of my newsletters this morning, I immediately clicked on the link. I looked her up and realized that this is a woman whose books I need to read NOW. (On her Amazon author page she includes the information that she went on Hollywood Squares and lost.) You can just tell she doesn't take herself too seriously despite her impressive credentials.

Queen Mab has garnered a slew of awards and when I went Googling around looking for information on it, I discovered that it has gone through three covers. The crown/arrow one here is the most recent but she's also tried out several others, including one that (sorry Kate) looks like every cover of a paranormal romance ever created with a stock photo. (I use stock photos and illustrators myself. So do we all. But that cover did not POP. Not the way the other two did.) So, I CANNOT wait to read this book. Has anyone else read it? If you want to know more about Kate and her books, check out her website here. You can also follow her on Twitter (@katedanley) or find her on Facebook.

For the TBR pile

As I promised, it's going to be all mysteries, all the time soon here at Kattomic Energy, but life has been interfering. For one thing, I've been busy finishing DAUGHTER OF THE MIDNIGHT KING, the sequel to my debut fantasy romance, BRIDE OF THE MIDNIGHT KING. Bride started out as a lark--write a vampire version of Cinderella--and to my surprise, it's turned into my best-selling book. Who knew? The sequel weaves "Sleeping Beauty" into the mix. It's been a lot of fun. But I digress. Coming very soon, I will have reviews of the following:

Eve Paludan and Stuart Sharp's "witchy detective" series, which sounds like way too much fun. Dale Phillips' books A Memory of Grief and Fall From Grace. Fireproof by Gerard Brennan. Fireproof is another book from Blasted Heath, which consistently offers interesting fare. Also upcoming is the first book that my new bookclub--the Bellingham Mysterians--will be reading. It's Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris.

It's going to be a great month for reading mysteries.

The Big Thrill is available

And as always,this publication from The International Thriller Writers is packed with goodies, Go get it.

the Stats Don't Lie! Women Love Thrillers

there's an interesting article over at The Telegraph today, a story by Rebecca Whitney filled with facts and figures about how many women read thrillers. (Spoiler--way more than men.) This is interesting in the face of the ongoing frustration among women crime fiction writers being dismissed or ignored when it comes to things like...annual anthologies of best stories. Read the story here.

Eric Beetner's The Year I Died Seven Times--coming next week

It's the beginning of March mayhem@! Coming next week from Eric Beetner and Beat to a Pulp Press!

Free Historical mystery--for your Saturday reading

A Layer of Darkness by R. A. Niles is set in 1945 San Francisco. Get it here. Here's the book's description: In 1945 during the closing months of World War II, British statesman Nigel Cunningham lies dead, burnt and smoldering in the fetal position on a cold garage floor in San Francisco. As the crime scene begins to reveal numerous irregularities, Police Inspector Andrew Johnson senses a twisted case of appearances and realities and a frightening truth ultimately revealed by the grisly corpse at his feet. After FBI agent Ryan Kinahan is brought in with a rush of justice to convict local war veteran Mario Romano, Johnson becomes convinced of federal corruption. He finds himself pitted against his lifetime nemesis of dirty cops, but at a new level as the case opens links going up the chain of command in war time politics.

Rachel and the Pink-haired Pundit

My parents didn't watch a lot of television but they were news junkies, so every night it was Chet Huntley & David Brinkley delivering the news to the Tomlinson household. I switched to Walter Cronkite in college because he was the majority pick of the dorm and everybody watched in the commons room. After college, CNN came along and it was Wolf Blitzer. And Bobbi Batista!!! I can't tell you how awesome it was to see a woman anchoring the news. Yes,there'd been women reporters out there--the glamorous doomed Jessica Savich, UN reporter Pauline Fredericks, disgraced White House correspondent Helen Thomas, and the awesome Andrea Mitchell, but on the networks, the women didn't fly solo but were paired off with men. Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer made their marks and paved the way. And then came Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow is a force of nature and a breath of fresh air. And last night, she had two guests on her show who just seemed to epitomize what 2015 is all about. One was the new mayor of my hometown, Washington DC. Muriel Bowser is African-American. Rachel's other buest was journalist Xeni Jardin, co-editor of the BoingBoing.com site. Xeni Jardin has pink hair. (She mostly writes out tech culture but she also writes openly and movingly and with humor about living with breast cancer.) I (heart) Xeni Jardin.

And she is great on TV--comfortable with the camera and able to communicate complex issues in a relatable way. And I just thought--pundits with pink hair. A mayor who is a woman of color. A lesbian anchorwoman who is the smartest person in the room. This is a feminist's dream come true. This is 2015. Good night Chet. Good night David. I love this century

the Miss Zukas Mysteries by Jo Dereske

The Miss Zukas mysteries (twelve in all) are wreitten by Bellingham, WA resident Jo Dereske, who has written another series as well as a moving memoir about caring for relativdes with Alzherimer's Disease. Miss Zukas is a librarian, and the first book in the series is Miss Zukas and the Library Murders. The books are cozies and set in a city very like Bellingham. I can't wait to dig into the series.

Serial novels set in Bellingham, WA

The Bellingham Herald has run several serialized novela over the years and the most recent one is a mystery. You can read it and all the other serials here.

Happy Birthday August Derleth

It seems kind of counter-intuitive to name someone born in February "August" but that's how they did things back in 1909

when My favorite thing about the novelist (more than 100) , short story writer (more than 150) and anthologist is that he plowed the money he got for his Guggenheim Fellowship into his comic book collection. Yes, he was a geek before it was cool. Check out what the Wikipedia has to say about him. If you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes, you must read atleast one of Derleth's "Solar Pons" stories, which are admiring pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective.

Mysteries for Children

I don't remember reading mysteries as a child. i remember reading the Pokey Little Puppy and I remember reading Beverly Cleary's wonderful books, and then I discovered Nancy Drew books and while they were for girls, they weren't for little girls. I ran across this book, The February Friend, over at GoodReads. It sounds sweet and I have to wonder if it will launch some young readers onto a lifelong path of reading mysteries. How wonderful to be a writer that could steer so many readers in that direction. does anyone remember reading childrens' mysteries as a kid? Anything stand out?

The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel

I review Matt Richtel's techno-thriller The Doomsday Equation over at Criminal Element today. Check it out here

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March reading list: March Violets by Philip Kerr

If you haven't read Philip Kerr's March Violets--the first of his Bernie Gunther mysteries, you should put it on your TBR list. Set in 1936, it is the first of what the author called his "Berlin Noir" trilogy. The story takes place during the Summer Olympics of that year. the book was published more than 25 years ago, but remains a terrific read.

COMING IN MARCH!! The return of Kattomic Energy

Yes, the blog has been off-line since last fall but now, in the creative Year of the Ram, it has been re-energized. And reincarnated with a slightly different focus--as a mystery site, with reviews and other mystery musings. Now that I'm in Bellingham, WA--home of one of the country's great bookstores, Village Books, I will be part of a new Mystery Readers Group and hope to involve my fellow readers and writers in that enterprise as well. And this will also give me an opportunity to indulge my love for Etsy. Because there are people out there like Pattie Tierney who designs really cool mystery-themed jewelry. Check her out here. I am particularly fond of this Trixie Belden bracelet.

As Rachel Maddow would say, "Watch this space."

Spiders on My Mind

I grew up in a house where spiders also lived. We were outnumbered by the eight-legged inhabitants, but mostly we adhered to a “don’t bite, don’t kill” policy in and everyone coexisted in the way humankind has been co-existing with house spiders since at least the time of the Roman empire. If a spider drifted across no man’s land and ended up in the bathtub well, then, the spider had to suffer the consequences and was quickly washed down the drain, or scooped up in a wad of toilet tissue and flushed. I learned early you had to sort of pinch the wad of tissue if you didn’t want the spider crawling out of its paper prison and looking up at you with its eight beady eyes. I don’t remember who was the designated spider-killer in my house. My father was a combat veteran who’d grown up on a farm, my mother was the product of a Depression childhood. Both were tough, unsentimental, and fearless. We also had a cat that saw bugs as wonderfully interactive toys. With my parents and the cat on the case, an errant spider didn’t have much of a chance. But despite everything, some spiders still skittered their way into my little sister’s room. She was irrationally afraid of spiders, phobic in a way that was easy to exploit—Stay out of my closet, there are spiders in there—but hard to soothe. The spider’s dead. I killed it. Really. Somehow when there was a spider in my sister’s room, I was always the only other person who was home, so if there was spider killing to be done, it was my job. I didn’t embrace the role of spider-bane but I didn’t shrink from it either. I discovered that a spider’s blood is blue. I thought that was fascinating. I found myself wishing we could dissect a spider in biology. I’d read that spiders have hearts, things that look like tubes that only push the blood one way. I imagined something like those little pliable tubes you use to remove the skins from garlic cloves. I thought eviscerating a spider would be much more interesting than dissecting the cow’s eye we were given in freshman biology. And a lot less icky. (And don’t get me started on the fetal cat corpse we were presented with later in the year.) But spiders…I am fascinated by spiders. In the short story I’m publishing on Halloween, “Unsanctified,” I have created a group called “The Sisterhood of the Red Spider.” As you can imagine, they are a group to be reckoned with. And to lend the story some paranormal plausibility, I did a fair amount of research on spiders. I knew that in some cultures—Native American and African, for instance—revere the spider as a symbol of wisdom but I was curious to see how other cultures had viewed the spider throughout history. But I kept getting distracted by articles like this one on Three ways to draw a spider web from WikiHhow,

Sexism dies hard....

I saw this on Twitter today and you know, at first I thought it was kind of funny. But then I saw the comment by the person who posted it and it was something along the lines of, "Seems legit." And that hit me wrong. It just seemed so last century somehow, this idea that women are just about the shoes. I prefer to see Dorothy in a different light. So on further consideration, this kind of makes me cranky. Shoes...

I don't like spiders and snakes

I am putting the final touches on UNSANCTIFIED, the long story I'm posting for Halloween, and doing some research on spiders. Spiders don't actually freak me out as they do many people, but my sister was once bitten by a brown recluse and the results weren't pretty. (Literally. Turns out there are a lot of photographs of spider bites on the Internet and they're graphic enough to make you want to don HazMat gear every time you go into your back yard.) For my story I invented a group called "the Sisterhood of the Red Spider" and I spent a fair amount of time looking for a photo of a red spider.

The first time I looked, I mostly got manga images and spiders that were sort of reddish if you squinted and looked at them out of the corner of your eye. And then I ran across this bad boy. It looks like the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. It looks like a creature you want to stay far, far away from. It's exactly what I was looking for.

Another for the TBR pile: Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars

I really

like Kay's work and I'm behind several books. This cover sucked me in. I think it's gorgeous.

S. Craig Zahler's MEAN BUSINESS ON NORTH GANSON STREET--a review

I really liked Zahler's debut wester, A CONGREGATION OF JACKALS, even though I don't read that many westerns. His new book, though, is right up my alley. In fact the action begins in a dark alley where a derelict named Doggie is about to get beat down. In S. Craig Zahler’s new book, a good detective’s bad judgment earns him exile to the heartland where his investigation into a murder opens up a very nasty can of worms. MEAN BUSINESS is a great example of "heartland noir" where we know something is rotten in Missouri even before disgraced detective Jules Bettinger arrives. Bettinger is a well-rounded character who comes across as a good man in a bad, bad job. He's cynical, but there's a reason for it, and what we see of his private life--his relationship with his family members--tells us he sees them as a refuge and a respite. The writer also does a good job of making stone sociopaths understandable. They're still chilling characters but we understand what motivates them. The plot is twisty and complicated but never quite gets … convoluted. It does get kind of random a bit, though. We know some of the pieces of the puzzle up front (and that means we know more than Bettinger does at first) and we may suspect we know what else is going on, but there are a number of surprises here. The resolution of the mystery is a bit ambiguous, though. We genuinely don't know how it's all going to end, and that's something that rarely happens in this kind of book.

sisters in Crime anthology--Great Saturday reading

Secrets and lies… The seven stories contained in Deadly Debut are united by three factors—the sex of their authors, their general location (New York) and the presence of secrets at the heart of the crimes. There’s one other commonality as well—all the stories are very good even when the crimes are very bad. Secrets and lies lurk in the depths of these stories—secret lovers, secret lifestyles, secret sins. (At least two of the stories feature secrets hidden in closets. Be advised—nothing good is ever behind a locked closet door.) Sense of place is strong here, whether the story unfolds in the dressing room of a club frequented by belly dance aficionados (Lina Zeldovich’s “Murder in the Aladdin’s Cave”) or in a pocket park smack dab in the middle of gang territory (“Strike Zone” by Terrie Farley Moran). These aren’t stories that could take place just anywhere, and in Elizabeth Zelvin’s Agatha Award-nominated story, “Death Will Clean Your Closet,” it’s perfectly plausible that her protagonist never associated the slight stink in his bedroom with the dead body in the aforementioned closet. This collection, edited by Clare Toohey, is a showcase for the art of the short story and each one included is a gem and each one shows a writer at the top of her game. “Imagine if Maurice Villency and Victoria’s Secret had a one-night stand and spawned a line of furnishings destined for a Poconos honeymoon suite,” suggests Dierdre Verne in “None of the Above.” What else do you need to know about the décor of the room she’s describing? Stories by Triss Stein, Peggy Ehrhart, and Anita Page round out the collection and again, each of these stories has a secret or a lie at its center, a hard, cold kernel that has been transformed into a pearl. Crime fiction collections are notorious for ignoring women writers; this anthology shows what readers have been missing. Find it here.

Shameless Saturday Self-Promoton--Bride of the Midnight King is Free

In between the crime fiction I write, I dabble in fantasy and speculative fiction. A couple of months ago I got the iddea too set fairy tales in a world of vampires and I wrote a novella called Bride of the Midnight King under my nom de fantasy Kat Parrish. The book has turned out to be a lot more popular than anything else I've published and I'm now in the middle of writing the sequel, which will be published later this year. The cover was done by Joy Sillesen over at Indie Author Services, one of the last she created before going on a hiatus to concentrate on her own work. Friday was my birthday and to celebrate, I've put Bride of the Midnight King on a freebie promotion. From now through monday morning, you can snag the novella free. I hope you enjoy it.

Etsy never disappoints--the Shakespeare Cookie Cutter

I used to have a massive collection of cookie cuttres--zoo animals and sharks and dinosaurs and US states. But I never had this--a Shakespeare cookie cutter. You can get it on Etsy now.

Selling Jaguars with Shakespeare

My favorite ads these days seem to be car commercials. That new one for the Lincoln MKC with Matthew McConaughey and a really big longhorn bull named Cyrus cracks me up. Am I going to buy the car? Alas, no but it's a memorable commercial. I was also a huge fan of Jaguar's "It's Good to Be Bad" commercial that debuted during this year's Super bowl. Now there's a follow-up with everyone's favorite resident of Asgard, Tom Hiddleston, lurking in a garage and waxing Shakespearean as he plans world domination. Hiddleson's performance of Coriolanus (shown earlier this year on one of those filmed plays/prestige movie events things) was ferocious and feral. I was mesmerized. I liked him in The Hollow Crown too, watching him transition from the feckless Prince Hal to Henry V. Yes, this commercial

makes me want to plan world domination while driving through London at speed. Preferably with a villain by my side.

Saying Nice Things About Books

When you were little, did your mother tell you that if you didn't have something nice to say about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all? That's kind of how I feel about book reviews. Certainly there are bad books out there, and book reviewers should warn readers about them; but I made a conscious choice some time ago to only feature positive reviews on this blog. If I can't honestly give the book four or five stars, then I skip it. Because there are a lot of books that go unnoticed in the vast flood of published work out there. I think that it's also a reviewer's job to point readers toward books they might have missed. That's the kind of reviewer I'd like to be. One of the great things about my day job is that I'm constantly being exposed to books and writers I would not have read on my own. I'm not, for example, a huge fan of political thrillers. So many of them are wildly predictable and writing that's stronger on jargon than it is on style. And then I was asked to read Daniel Silva's The English Girl. It is the latest in his series about Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon whose cover is a job as an art restorer. It was terrific. So good, in fact, that I've bought the other books in the series and intend to read them all. I've also decided to do a lot more reviewing in the coming months. I've got a huge pile of books and galleys and manuscripts piling up and I know that when I start sifting through them, I'm ging to find some golden nuggets. I'll tell you about those. And in the meantme, if you like great writing, do yourself a favor and pick up one of Daniel Silva's books. You'll be glad you did.

Shakespeare fans--the Etsy Shop of Your Dreams!

I have mentioned before my love for Etsy, and I've run across a shop called IMMORTAL LONGINGS

that produces Shakespeare-themed items that are ... exquisite. I have half a dozen parked in my shopping cart (Just 17 more days until my birthday!) and will definitely return to it for my annual Holiday Gift Guide. check it out!

Whipping Boy and Shakespeare

Both my parents liked words. My father was a lawyer and he early on discovered the delight little kids take in repeating words that sound like nonsense words. I knew how to pronounce posse comitatus before I could spell "cat." And I wasn't that much older when I learned what it meant, which put me way ahead in civics class. My mother favored archaic English phrases like "dogsbody" and "whipping boy" and "dog in the manger." These were phrases my siblings and I learned as kids and I freely used them in conversation until I moved to L.A. and found that people were giving me blank looks, so I stopped. But I still love those words and I chose "Whipping Boy" as the title of my mystery novella because the plot revolves around a murder of a scapegoat. Shakespeare, of course, used all those phrases (and more). Or so I thought until I started searching for the phrase and none of my usual go-to sources could find it. (Plenty of places where one person or another was whipped, and also a reference to "Whipping Boy" in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, but no joy on Shakesperae. Sigh At any rate, I'm offering my novella free for the next five days in case you'd like to read it. There are 10 reviews now (almost all of them by people I don't actually know) and eight of them are five stars! You can snag a copy here.

Sulu & Shakespeare

Before he was the awesome force of nature and social media guru he is today, George Takei was known for his role on Star Trek

. In 1969 he gave this interview mentioning his desire to act in three of Shakespeare's greatest plays, taking on the roles of Hamlet, Brutus and Richard III. I don't know if he ever played any of those roles, but I would love to see him take on some of Shakespeare's great mature roles, like Prospero, or Lear.

Monday, Monday

thanks to the bodacious quotatious geeks at Search Quotes, I discovered a whole slew of Monday quotes, some of them by Shakespeare. the Internet, always boggling my mind.

If Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie had a daughter...

She would be the gorgeous Salony Luthra, who is one of the stars in the Indian film noir Sarabham, which got a snarky review from the Hindu Times, but sounds interesting nonetheless. Hre in L.A. it's possible to see a lot of films made outside the US, but it's good to know that Netflix and Hulu and other outfits are constantly casting their nets for content.

Shakespeare and sharks

When I saw the ads for Sharknado 2, I found myself wondering if Shakespeare ever used the word "shark." (After all, he knew about tigers, and there are no tigers in England while there are most definitely sharks in the waters around the island.) Turns out he used it twice, once as a noun and once as a verb. In Macbeth, shark parts are listed as ingredients of the witches' potion: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf, Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark. In Hamlet, Horatio uses the verb in reference to Fortinbras: Now, sir, young Fortinbras, Of unimproved mettle hot and full, Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes and of course, in the Broadway musical West Side Story, inspired by Romeo & Juliet

, one of the street gangs is called "the Sharks."

A Plague on Both Your Houses

In Romeo & Juliet, the doomed Mercutio curses the Montagues and the Capulets as he dies, victim of the long-running feud that will soon claim two more victims. The idea of "plague" was not a theoretical concept in Shakespeare's time. Most scholars believe R&J was written between 1591 and 1495. By the 14th century, Black Plague had reduced the population of western Europe by as much as 100 million. Less than a decade after the debut of Romeo & Juliet, in 1603, London was hit with a plague that killed 38,000. The Great Longon Plague of 1665-1666 was the last major outbreak of Plague in England, which is a good thing because it killed 100,000 people, or bout 15% of London's population. Wishing a plague on a family is a terrible, terrible curse.

More casting Shakespeare and a Separated at Birth

Two of the actors I'd most like to see in a Shakespeare play are Frank Langella and Benedict Cumberbatch. I saw Langella in the stage version of Dracula years ago and I saw the film of the Danny Boyle Frankenstein he did alternating the title role with Jonny Lee Miller. (Who rocked, by the way.)and I realized that Langella and Cumberbatch share a certain flair. What do you think?

A Shakespeare quote to get you through the rest of the week

Casting Shakespeare...Macbeth

There's a moment at the end of Mystic River, a nonverbal moment between Laura Linney and Sean Penn, two of my favorite actors, that made me realize just how amazing they'd be in a production of Macbeth. And just recently I saw a photograph of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and thought--wouldn't they be great as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth? I admire Angelina. I remember the wild stuff before she settled down to become the world's most beautiful UN rep and healthcare advocate, and I'd love to see her sink her teeth into one of the juciest roles ever created. In the play, Macbeth describes her as having a tiger's heart, wrapped in woman's hide and that feels appropriate.

Sunday Shakespeare Snark

No Sweat Shakespeare has put together a list of 7 amusing shakespeare memes. Bonus points for kitten cuteness.

Otherllo at San Diego's Globe Theater

I've seen some powerful productions of Othello. It's a play that's as incendiary today as when it was written all those years ago. This production from this year's Globe Summer Festival stars Blair Underwood in the title role and Richard Thomas as Iago. The last thing I saw down there was Neil Patrick Harris and Emmy Rossum in Romeo & Juliet, and I'm way overdue for a return trip. This production tempts me to take the drive.