Sunday morning

This is a beautiful Sunday morning. The wind is blowing, probably going to bring in thunderstorms tonight, but today, it’s bringing in hay fever time! Sneezes, itchy eyes, runny nose. Yuk! It makes a person feel prickly and uncomfortable and irritable. All you fellow hay fever sufferers, you have my sympathy. The only good thing […]

When You Read

When you read a book, what are you expecting to find? If, within a few pages, you find misspellings, poor choice of words to describe a scene or person, one grammatical error after the other, do you keep reading?  If the author of the book lets you in on what other characters are thinking, jumping […]

An Open and Shut Case

An Open and Shut Case

To the authors who read my blog: As you write your new book, do you find that you have some chapters you prefer to other chapters? To the readers who read my blog: As you read a cozy mystery, are there chapters that stand out to you? And then, of course, there are favorite parts within each chapter. […]

Migration

Have you seen or heard any wild geese flying over? They’re a pretty good sign of changing weather. Spring and fall, those geese fly to their new locations, giving us a warning that another season is upon us. Migration High up in the sky last night, A promise winged its wedge-shaped flight; A promise of […]

October’s Sun

October’s Sun

Sunlight warms the old railroad ties that hold up my mailbox. One of these days, those strong, square pieces of wood will tumble down, and they look pretty disreputable now, but I like them. They are weathered and rugged, they’ve had an interesting past, and even though their original usefulness is gone, they still have […]

A Few Sizes Too Small

I just got to thinking about words. We use them every day. Written or spoken, we can’t get along without them. So, with all the beautiful words to choose from, why do some of us use ugly, degrading, base words? Is it to get a reaction? To show that we’re really up with the times? […]