Here in Texas over four hundred people have contracted measles in the past few months, resulting in the death of at least one child. Most of these cases were preventable with a vaccine. So why weren’t the victims immunized? Some are infants, too young to be vaccinated. A few may …
As I have written in other blog posts, I am fortunate in that I have access to a great deal of my family history, thanks mostly to my father, the family genealogist. I am lucky that relatives collected stories, wrote them down, and then passed them down. And because of …
I have a couple short stories in the works set in the piney woods around the Houston area. One story, entitled “Predators and Prey”, features a homeless teenager who is forced into working for an illicit animal breeder hidden in the forest. The other story, for an upcoming music based …
As some readers may already know, my husband is from Ecuador. I met him when we were both students at the University of Texas at Austin. Most of my husband’s extended family still lives in Ecuador. On our second trip to visit them, in 2003, my husband’s grandmother asked if …
The 1970s! Disco! Abba! The Eagles! Richard Nixon. The end of the Vietnam War. Women’s Rights. And, umm, yeah, other stuff. I was born mid-decade and have no real memories of the 1970s. Writing about the 1970s, for me, isn’t a matter of “write what you know,” but rather one …
My story entitled “A Matter of Trust” was published in Black Cat Weekly #110 on October 8, 2023, via editor Michael Bracken. The story features genetic genealogy private investigator Maya Laster who first appeared in “Disappearance of a Serial Spouse” in Black Cat Weekly #79 in March 2023. In this, …
I admit that the ending of my story “Short-Term Murder” in issue #88 of Black Cat Weekly may include wishful thinking. The plot of the story revolves around a murder in a short-term vacation rental in a neighborhood. Two of the neighbors work together to solve the murder after one …
Submitting short stories to markets and getting the right story in the hands of the right editor at the right publisher to fit with other stories in a given anthology or magazine is like tossing dice. Or maybe I’m throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. No …
My father is the family genealogist. He did extensive research into both his family and my mother’s family. Dad’s family is rather straightforward—all arriving in Texas in the 1870s and 1880s from what is now the Czech Republic. My mother’s mother was Irish American. Her parents arrived in the US …
The fact that the victim in my upcoming story entitled “Merry Library Murder” is a librarian is not a sign of hidden hostility or wishful thinking. Rather, the opposite is true. I set the story in a library because I spend a lot of time in libraries. Most of my …
