There’s always something going on around our place lately, and yesterday I got stoned. A big dump truck showed up in the early afternoon to drop off 26 tons of large gravel. A lot of it will be used by the crew from ProScape who are installing our French drains, and I will use the […]
Terry and I both love the sound of wind chimes and she has a small set of bamboo chimes that hang here in the house. Every once in a while a breeze from one of our ceiling fans or somebody passing by will move them just enough to give us a gentle little sound. But […]
Yesterday was a good day for writing, even if it was frustrating. I had narrated a full chapter in my new Tinder Street book, using Microsoft Word’s narration feature, and I thought I was saving all along. But for some reason, all of a sudden the entire chapter, over 2,300 words, disappeared. It was just […]
I spent most of yesterday working on my new Tinder Street book, A Changing World, and as always with this series, a lot of time was dedicated to research and checking facts to get the timeline correct for the events that were happening in the last half of the Great Depression. I’m about 8,500 words […]
As I write this, Big Lake Drunk is not live on Amazon yet, but keep checking because it will be sometime today, just in time for your Christmas reading pleasure. Thank you to Miss Terry, Roberta, and Judy, for all of your hard work in editing and proofreading and getting it ready to go. I […]
Battling computer problems all the way, yesterday I managed to finish all of the read-through and corrections to Big Lake Drunk and print the rest of the pages out for Terry to edit and proofread. Then I wrote the teaser chapter for the next book in the series, Big Lake Assault. Terry is past the […]
With one delay after another, I said that I was going to try to get my new book, Big Lake Drunk, out by Christmas. Then Roberta, one of my proofreaders, started having computer problems, and I was afraid that would postpone things even more. But she managed to pull it off and got the last […]
Note: Several readers who have entered this week’s drawing have reported that they are getting e-mail notices every time somebody else enters. At the bottom of the drawing page, just above the Submit Comment tab, there is a box that they apparently checked that says Notify Me Of New Comments. If this happens to you, you should […]
You can tell winter is on the way here in Florida when the colors of the license plates start to change. That’s right, the snowbirds are coming. About this time every year I hear from RVers who are going into a panic because they can’t find a campground here in the Sunshine State. Especially any […]
I figured by now you’re probably tired of hearing about our adventures in Hurricane Ian and the aftermath. It’s kind of like old people talking about their medical issues. Nobody really cares, right? So today, let’s talk about something new. Namely, medical issues. Last week Terry had a CT scan at the Mayo Clinic in […]
After telling you in yesterday’s blog about our upcoming trip to Alabama to visit our son Travis and his wife Geli, we got a call yesterday morning that changed all of that. Travis came down with a bad headache the day before, and by yesterday morning he had all the signs of COVID. Geli, who […]
Anybody who has been reading the blog for very long knows that there’s not much that Miss Terry can’t do. From building all the cabinets and doing all of the interior work on our MCI bus conversion to replacing a window in a friend’s truck, to maintenance around the house, if it needs done, Terry […]
When we hear about violent crime, we always tend to think it’s something that happens somewhere else, not where we are. It can happen anytime, anywhere. It’s always in some far off place, usually a big city, and the people involved are anonymous. But my long career publishing small town newspapers in the Pacific Northwest […]
Well, I missed my goal of finishing Pucker Factor, my next John Lee Quarrels book, by the end of July. There was just too much going on. But I’m happy to say that I finished it late yesterday afternoon. Today I will make corrections to the final chapters I wrote yesterday and print them out […]
We awoke yesterday morning to the sound of our neighbor Jesse Bolton putting the hurricane shutters on our windows. Yes, it’s that time of year again. June through the end of November marks hurricane season here on the Florida coast. Last year Jesse installed the hardware for the clear polycarbonate hurricane shutters and put them […]
Before I do anything else with the blog today, I want to wish our son-in-law Kenny Conrad a happy birthday. Kenny is a hardworking family man dedicated to his wife and kids, and when he and our daughter Tiffany got married and brought their blended family together, I knew there would be a lot of […]
We woke up to tornado warnings on our telephones yesterday and turned on the news to see that we were in the path of a suspected tornado that was heading right at us. Since we live in a mobile home that has been added to on all four sides, the safest place for us is […]
I received a message the other day from my dear friend Donna McNicol, author of both the excellent Klondike and C’Mon Inn mystery series, along with other great books and stories, telling me that she and her handsome husband Stu are getting off of a cruise ship at Port Canaveral this morning and would be […]
Yesterday was another day spent working on my new Tinder Street book, The Hard Years. I know some of you are probably tired of hearing about it by now, but that’s what’s taking up most of my time these days. I started the day by making corrections to several chapters that Roberta had sent me […]
Except for my daily blog, I’ve been slacking off in the writing department since the release of Big Lake Ranger right after Christmas. I did bring out Murder, Mayhem, And Main Street a week or so ago, which is an e-book bundle with the first books in my three different mystery series along with a […]