It’s hard to act like anything is even remotely okay or normal right now, so I’m not really going to try. What we all (presumably; I assume most people who read me or my books are on the same general political page) saw on the horizon has arrived. I am scared, furious, despondent, but not hopeless. Never, ever hopeless.
Perhaps some of that is because I think, read, and write about crime all the time. Narratively speaking, I think crime book aficionados are actually a pretty hopeful bunch. I’ve written time and time again about how sleuthing is a stand-in for community justice and how investigations centering people who are not formal law enforcement are a way to push back against top-down power. I think I’ll be getting to that in my next Silver Screen Sleuth piece (which I realize are not coming out with as great of frequency lately and there’s a reason for that).
What I’m Working On
So, I’ve mentioned before here and elsewhere that I wrote a book that unfortunately didn’t get picked up by anyone. Sad day. I’ve decided to keep the same central characters and focus on a different mystery. I’m about 50% of the way done with that book and will hopefully have it ready to pitch relatively soon. In keeping with themes from the Girl Friday Mysteries, I’m starting to realize that I really love writing books that, on the outside, should be cozy mysteries, but once you peel back the outer layer, you realize there’s a bit of a rotten core. Because of social media marketing brain, I think I need to start tagging it as #NothingCozyAboutHer.
What I’ve Read
🎶 One of these things is not like the other/ One of these things just doesn’t belong 🎶
It was a slow(er) January than I’d anticipated for reading because I decided I needed to read an expansive biography about one of my favorite painters. Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane was extremely gripping and offered new context for someone whose legacy isn’t exactly misunderstood (Caravaggio was, bluntly, an asshole) but is often singled out from a group from which he was not exactly aberrant. I snapped up Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach, and fell into it completely. I read one of his more teen-friendly books, Hoot, when I was much younger and I appreciate immensely that his sense of humor is only so cleansed for the younger set. For adult reads, he really lets his animosity towards certain types of people fly. There is no chance of you walking away and not knowing his politics– something I genuinely love about writers. Fever Beach maybe dragged a little bit, but if you need a bit of daydreaming about comeuppance against :::waves::: ya know, everything, this couldn’t hurt. Then I hopped into Lord Edgware Dies, from Dame Aggie. Not one of her best, in my opinion. You don’t need to use your little gray cells to figure out what’s happening here. You can skip it.
What I’m Watching
Because I’ve apparently hit that age where watching narrative film puts me right to sleep, I’ve gone all in on Ken Burns’s most recent docuseries (with co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt), The American Revolution. I managed to miss it when it came out late last year, and have been marathoning it as much as I can in the past week. It’s a marked difference from Burns’s previous most-famous war documentary on the Civil War because Ken Burns is finally awoken to race and gender politics (or he’s finally brave enough to talk about race and gender politics). It’s comforting to hear his focus include Native voices and not just in the patronizing “this is what we did to them” way but having actual Native historians talk about different tribal goals and agency. The series spends quite a bit of time discussing Thomas Paine and Common Sense, which has led me to ruminate on the power of rhetoric (and how we are letting the great American history of publishing languish in our current era).
What’s Coming Up
Good news for San Franciscans: I’m heading up to Left Coast Crime later this month and will be on a panel discussing historical female sleuths with none other than Rob Osler, Cara Black, John Copenhaver, and Nora McFarland! I’ll recap the chat as much as I can after the fact.
If you’ve been waiting on snatching up Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River and Viviana Valentine and the Ticking Clock on Kindle, this month is the time! Pop February 10th and February 26th into your calendars now. Or follow me on Instagram for reminders!
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