Good for you, Debby. Congratulations on the new book. My fourth novel came out in July--The Second Savior. Took a detour and wrote a nonfiction book about how to detect lying. My agent is shopping it now.

Terrific, Debby, I look forward to meeting you - Anne

Aloha, Debbie. Hope things are going well for you. We just moved to a new house and acreage, and we really like it. Take care.

HI n ty---there's a couple chapters in my publisked book The Rhyme Man--it concerns a drug gang called The Tangarora in old china town there

Here's a Hawaiian novel idea. Maybe not right for you, but something that Hawaiians, including my brother, should think about. Economically, island economies are always at risk. With rising fuel costs, tourism could slow to a trickle. How would such a backdrop play out for any story?

I'm glad you're enjoying the site. I always wonder if the material is well-received.

Mahalo Deb,

Looking forward to reading your books. I used to go to the islands every year but after the bubble burst my travel funds have reduced me being land-locked. Hopefully, soon, "I will return."

The scuba has been great male bonding stuff for us bros, with night dives, diving wrecks and stuff. Glad that you're into it. After the Sydney Olympics my wife and I went to Heron Island near the Great Barrier reef and I got in five dives. The reef is still incredibly diverse -- or was seven years ago -- and the white tipped reef sharks had enough to keep them from getting too hungry. Went face to face with a five hundred pound grouper. Bottom times were representative but would be longer with double eighties or rapid rebreathers. So far I haven't gone there. I need to tell you what I learned from one of the women on the dive. She did the drift dive inverted (upside down) at neutral bouyancy, so as to see all the coral without the possibility of smashing into it. I picked it up right away. Once you get used to looking down instead of ahead or down, it kind of grows on you. And here's something: Hawaiian novels it would be far from unnatural to work in scuba, as Peter Benchley did both in Jaws and The Deep. Note on Benchley. He extracted a whole paragraph -- you can find it if you like -- verbatim from my friend Tom Allen's Shark Almanac and used it in Jaws for describing the great white. Having been educated by Jesuits, Tom is very philosophical, offering that "Plaigerism is the most sincere form a flattery." I'm not sure my reaction would have been as tempered.