Some weeks back, I guest-blogged on another site about a concept known as spontaneous generation—the likelihood of people exposed to the same mass media stimuli coming up with the same idea. This theory can explain why two movies with the same premise can be released by two different studios at virtually the same time. Armageddon and Deep Impact, for…

Sometimes I feel like Homer Simpson. I forgot what I'm doing or what I'm thinking as fast as I'm doing it. I'll walk into the kitchen and wonder what the hell I'm doing there. Then I have to smack myself in the head and go "D'oh!"

I had a "D'oh!" moment this morning. I hadn't realized my friend Deb Baker had a book out this month. It's the second in her Yooper…

Got into town early today and posted the first completed version of The Gifting, plus synopsis (hurrah! hurrah!) to The Literary Consultancy (http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk), where it can fester away for a while waiting for a report to be done. It's such a relief to get it away onto the next part of its journey. Which is ironic really, as Simon does a great deal of journeying of his…

I'm new to crimespace and one thing I've noticed is that whenever I visit my crimespace page, it tells me "You haven't written your first blog entry!"

It kind of makes me feel like I'm being yelled at, and I get enough of that, well, just about everywhere. So, here I am, writing the blog to end all blog... reminders. Or at least one of them. I wonder what my Crimespace page will get on my case about next…

Shops are strange places indeed. Lord H came home last night with a pack of kiwi fruit emblazoned with the legend “Wash Before Eating”. Well, I have yet to find anyone who actually eats the skin of a kiwi fruit, but there you go. Lord H thought they’d be better off adding a label saying “Open This End” for the hard of thinking. Could be useful for eggs too.



Waving goodbye to Lord H this morning was something of a shock actually. I’d said goodbye at the front door and then rushed to…

As its getting close to Thrillerfest 2007 in NY - details www.thrillerwriters.org

So I thought I'd paste over the report that I wrote over the fun I had last year.

ITW Co-President Gayle Lynds wrote a nice preface

I took a stack of photos which I have arranged into a slide show to accompany the report :-…

posted by Doranna Durgin

No, seriously. Or old fogey, or behind the times, or something. But when it comes to book trailers--the next cool shiny marketing trick--I'm wholeheartedly unimpressed.

I've always been of the opinion that just because a thing can be done doesn't mean it should be done. Like when the first word processors hit the scene--suddenly we had all these fonts available to us, and we could use as many as we wanted in a single…

[ I posted this over at Book Place also but thought I'd post it here as well. ]

I came to Book Place by way of Crimespace which was the first "social network" that I decided to join. With Crimespace I saw the point, I'm an editor of an online e-zine of crime fiction. Ditto with Book Place as I'm a hopeless collector of books.

I've spent a lot of time adding new "friends" as the requests come in. I try to check out each member page as I go to get some idea of who…