Hi Grace,

I know what you mean about Euro/dollar exchange...it's got to get better

I havn't been to Italy is ten years...The most beautiful country in my travels.

Joe

Hi Grace - any SOHO writer is a friend of mine - they are one of my favourite publishers (along with our own local Text and Bitter Lemon of course :) )

Soho and New York aren't the only ting we have in common. I'm Italian (from Rome) and can't wait to read Commissario Cenni. I love Umbria and want to start at the beginning. What is the first title? Ciao, Camilla

Ciao amica. I read your comment before reading that you wanted to be a friend. We do have a lot in common. Your husband is a painter. I paint too-have a studio in Brooklyn. I even sold some so I guess I can call myself an artist although I feel pretentious when I do. Would love to met you in person. Let me read il Commissario first. Ciao camilla

Umbira, Italy? Oh how wonderful...been to Florence, Milan, Rome and stops along the way, but not Umbria. Now a series to get me started for my next trip. My book, The Beatitudes, is a paranormal thriller set in New Orleans. It will be out in the fall and I am donating all royalties directly to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation. Libraries support the infrastructure of a great city, so I have started The Beatitudes Network to promote awareness of the importance of public libraries in NOLA.
The blogsite www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com describes the Network, has excerpts from The Beatitudes, recipes, and more. Merci mille fois. Lyn Lejeune.
Writers, please pass the word…..it’s for a good cause….don’t let the libraries of New Orleans or the US go the way of The Great Library of Alexandria.

Welcome. I'm a writer - about Asia - but not Soho. I did go on a book tour last year with one of your fellow Soho-ites: Colin Cotterill. We're good pals. He's in here somewhere too.

It's great to make so many friends in one evening. Thank you all for wishing me well, and I send the same wishes back to you.

Yep, we made a road trip out of it, from Los Angeles to Bouchercon in Madison. We called it the Disoriented Express and stopped off at a bunch of bookstores along the way to put on PowerPoint presentations with Asian pop music. Touring with someone is a lot more fun than just touring by yourself.

Hi- I just went to Partners and crimne (I live on 9th and Fifth) and bought your book. Steve, the manager there said it's a gtreat one and he hopes there will be more. I look forward to reading it. I was afraid I'd find italian mistakes after I read the one on the bacjk written by Cara Black. For your neeext book feel free to vet the Italian with me. I'll be gald to help.I'm off to Rome on the 11th of September and will be back at the end of the month. Have a great time in Maine and we'll get togetherin the fall. Goodluck on the next one-I bet Laura is going to love it. let me know. Ciao camilla

I forgot-I have done some still lifes, but now am into abstract. Ciao C.

Welcome aboard! I've been introduced to several SOHO writers on Crimespace - I'm going to need to make time for reading.

Sure-send the Italian over. I'm away all next week in Washington. I may not be bale to get back to you until the follwing week. I could meet you on Tuesday the 21st- on Wednesday I go to the studio and Ghurday I leave again. If you're coming down to look at line edits does that mean Laura took the new manuscript? I hope so. Ciao Camilla

Ah, New York. I visit there often. I just read *Songs of Innocence* by Richard Alias. He paints the non-tourist scape of the city as well as anyone I've read.

Intrigued by your photo - where is that?

Thanks - I was in Italy so long ago, but it looked familiar. Nice! What adventures you have had!

Grace,
Did you ever get my rather long response from 1:08 early this morning? Curious.

Given the choice of Down East or Italy ... Down East, but NYC is soooo expensive. Middle of the City? Times Square or Central Park? (Just kidding)

You know I face that euro thing here, of course with me it's pounds. I cringe at the exchange rate! two to one at the moment! goodness. whatever amount in dollars you get, it's sliced in half. grrrrr!

Blood Meridian, jarring and raw in action, unerringly, even insuperably lyric in language, even when the words themselves are desribing something that is horrific or unsettling. It's an experience that is still in digestion in one of my gizzards.
More suggestions for preservation. A 'reverse catalyst' Normal catabolism, or breakdown of living matter, accelerates after death. In chemistry, I've got a PhD, we speak of two needs: thermodynamics and kintetics. Thermodyamics simply says that one state or condition is more stable, or lower in energy than another. It is true, for example, that graphite is more thermodynamically stable under ambient conditions than diamond. But most married women have confidence that they will not awaken the next morning to find a graphite engagement ring. That part is due to kinetics, since the process -- which relates to the mechanism of how the atoms or molecules rearrange from one state to another -- is incomparbly slow at room temperature. This doesn't mean, as deBeers would have it, that diamonds are forever. Very hard they are, but like most hard materials they are brittle. They can crack along cleavage planes if you drop them on a sidewalk. Or they can, like very expensive charcoal, burn if you use pure oxygen at 850 degrees C. The trick for you, as regards decomposition is to find a reverse catalyst that takes decomposed matter back to its orginal form. Hormones are biological catalysts. But there is, aha, another method. Radioactive Cesium can be used to irradiate sluge, killing all its bacteria. Such sludge can often be used as fertilizer if it is in other ways inoffensive (no carcinogens, etc.) Much of decomposition is bacterial, and an irradiated body would have no living bacteria. It is true that NASA, in trying to produce a sterile capsule for testing the presence of life on Mars, has actually produced -- using high energy radiation = new species of bacteria which can endure radiation, as predicted by both Darwin and chaos theory. But it is a possible way to go. The problem them becomes avoiding or minimizinig, by selecting the kind of particles and energies thereof, the normal BEIR, or biological effects of ionizing radiation, which means that the shape of your corpse and dense tissue, like bone, would be the same, but the soft tissue's DNA would begin to unravel. Grist for the mill

Hi Grace, another Soho writer here. Is that the Concordia Temple in Sicily in the photo? I have the same one on my site!
I will check out your current book; I hadn't know it was set in "my decade", the 1940s!

Jim

Hi James,
It's definitely Sicily, Agrigento, but which temple I can't remember. My new book, which will be out in May 2008, is set partly during WWII but most of it is in present time. "The Last Enemy" begins and ends in 2002, during Easter Week. I haven't read your book yet, but I am planning to, when we retire to Maine and its cold and lonely winters. Congratulations on your excellent reviews and the Dilys nomination. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. I just received my new novel back, by hand today from Soho. There are so many red marks I feel somewhat disgraced, but all are improvements. I seem to go from sprinkling too many dashes around (last book) to too many apostrophes (this book). I've pretty much decided to stick with commas, periods, and question marks from here on in, and the occasional semi-colon.

hello grace,
how are you. not off to italy til november. i've been practicing eating spaghetti without getting it down my shirt. hope you're well. cc

Grace,
While we're discussing means of preserving corpses we shouldn't forget the preChristian European sport of offing your enemies and chucking them into peat bogs. There they have remained anaerobically for a couple of milennia. Tannic acid has helped keep them in very good shape, even soft tissues.

Grace,
Evidently my last comment got folded into negative cyberspace. Here it is again. You should not be concerned about your body losing hair from radiation premortem. Normally this happens, but Harold McClintock, an employee of Westinghouse at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington, absorbed one hundred times the normal lethal dose of radiation during an accident involving the explosion of an ion exchange column for separating Americium. He survived, pointing out that some people have very robust immune systems, and polymerase repair mechanism for ionized DNA. McClintock did not lose his hair, either.

Hey!
While in college, I worked as a chaufer for the Brophy family on top of the hill in La Jolla, CA. The family tree was from Utah, if I remember. Any relation?
If a author writes a novel in the forest, and nobody reads it, did it make a sound?
I'm newt, slithering from the shallow end of the gene pool, into the open ocean. Sharks are likely to eat me before the salt water kills me, but who wants a quiet life?

For those with whom i've had more than token exchanges, I need to let you know that crimespace has become strangely warped as of late, at least as regarding getting messages to me. If frustrated and in need, try d.hoof@att.net instead. Thanks.
Grace, how goes the dead body business?

Hi Grace and Greetings: Just to let you know that my New Orleans noir mystery, The
Beatitudes, has received 5 starred reviews! I am donating all royalties to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation to help rebuild the public libraries. I have posted Chapter I on my blog www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com. Please read and if you like it, help rebuild a library for NOLA. Thank you Lyn LeJeune

Happy new year Grace...are you in Italy?
Cara