Carrie Rubin's The Missing Au Pair is a dark cozy mystery, one that has characters you'll like and others you'll abhor. The darkness of the mystery contrasts starkly with the bright youth of the main characters and the setting in Paris. I grew to care about Kelly, the main character whose quest is to find the missing au pair, and her friend and sometimes sidekick Wayne. While the novel starts slow, its last few chapters is a thrill ride that had me biting my nails. The ending is surprising but satisfying.

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This image was taken with a ZWO Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope. Rather than use the intrinsic ZWO app software to process it, I down loaded the subframes to a PC. I then processed them using Siril. I...

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To Mark George's Birthday Today would have been my little brother George's 69th birthday. It's hard to believe that Graft versus Host stole him from us nine years ago. I miss him every day, and I always will. I was inspired recently to write a poem for him based on two childhood memories. (The poem is a duplex, so it moves associatively.)

The not-yet released reported was obtained by CBS News Miami and detailed wrongdoing but also an inability to bring criminal charges.

Some voters dropped from Texas voting rolls may not be aware until they show up to cast a ballot. More than 1.2 million Texans are on the state's Voter

I'm borrowing Auden's title for his book-length poem that won the Pulitzer in 1948 because contemporary life is even more anxiety-provoking than in the 20th cen

The following is a "blast from the past." I'm in the middle of cleaning up my blog when I find this WP post I wrote in February 2013. I don't think much has changed since then. After a 3 years' absence, I've decided to re-enter the blogosphere but with a different purpose. I simply want to write, and I'm tired of writing in my head.

after Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” I’ve buried the word in all its parts and tenses patting the soil with my shovel, and still it seeps up out of its grave to ravage me. It …

The alarm on my phone signals the time for six pills because I can’t handle my screaming until my surgery date & there are no hospital beds available before then although I started my pil…

One of the very top creative nonfiction journals is Hippocampus Magazine. I was pretty jazzed to be interviewed for them by Rudri Patel, the co-founder and co

David is this week’s host and he has asked poets to write about life changes as follows: Sometimes life changes enough that something familiar becomes new again. “Think of something you…

Och!  This is one of those times that I had a clear and concise idea in my mind the moment I sawt the photo but when it came time to “put to paper” became a jumbled mess of words with n…

Featuring Your Next Weekend Read! Tales from the Irish Garden-The Missing Pieces, by Sally CroninScrap-Salvaging a Family, by Luanne CastleHeld Inside the Folds of Time, by Merril D. SmithCelebrati…

Sharing my joy of sunflowers in our garden and of our cat Raji, our sexy cat.

I've been a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors out of the UK for several years, so when Howard Lovy asked for someone who could give advice about using beta readers, I put up my virtual hand. I was very pleased to be asked to discuss how my teaching has informed my beta reading. (To keep myself honest, I will say that other beta readers have different approaches.)

A bit about Kurt Vonnegut American author, Kurt Vonnegut, is known for his blend of dark humour, science fiction, and strong anti-war messages. World War II and Dresden: Kurt Vonnegut fought in the…

If you're a blogger you might know Marie at 1 Write Way (this recent blog post of hers was a reposting of her fantabderful (yup, needed a portmanteau word) revi

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Robbie and I are excited to present this year’s theme for the Sunflower Tanka Anthology: Life’s Simple Pleasures What are life’s simple pleasures? Maybe they personify those trans…

A note to readers: This review was posted here in 2015 when Doll God was first published. Since an ebook version of Doll God is now available, I'm posting it again. Mary closed the slim volume of poetry and leaned back against the stiff cushions of her couch. She never was one to read much poetry, except occasionally Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, whose works had stayed with her all these years since high school.

A poetry collection now available as an ebook.

My first book Doll God was published eleven years ago and won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. DG has caught up with the times as of today. NOW AVAILABLE IN E

In Scrap: Salvaging a Family, Luanne Castle pieces together a picture of her childhood, particularly her relationship with her dad.

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Great news about Scrap! You can now order the ebook on Amazon! Sorry for shouting! I'm just excited. Here's the link: ORDER SCRAP IN EBOOK ORDER SCRAP I

Image: Library of Congress Substack Call-and-Response From time to time, I will create a call-and-response post, when a post on a WordPress blog prompts me to respond with a post of my own. For tod…

The ebooks for my two novels are half-price for the entire month of July!

John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence, 1819. (The painting depicts the presentation of the Declaration to John Hancock. Trumull intended to show all the signers, even though it’s not his…

Musing about turning 69 and Stoicism.

Christine Jackson is retired from her day job, three decades of teaching literature and creative writing at a South Florida university.  She continues to clock in on a life-long night shift writing…

Night terrors woke my baby son.We let him lie between us, but he refused to sleep.So I put him back, and resumed crying.Pinwheel would be a great wordif it wasn’t so close to pinworm.If pinwheels s…

I am excited to be participating in a book blog tour for Deborah J. Brasket's second novel, This Sea Within. I had read and reviewed her debut novel When Things Go Missing (which you can read here). To whet your appetite for this second novel, here's the copy from the back cover as well as an excerpt from the first chapter.