Got it!

I think I’ve solved this murder!

Whew.

 

A healthy, low calorie chocolate milk shake? Really?

Really.

I make one of these whenever I deserve a treat, and you’d be surprised how often I deserve a treat. Only about 125 calories, and simple to make –

1 cup almond milk

1 tsp Truvia or 1 squirt of Sweetleaf liquid stevia

2 heaping tsps cocoa powder

1 cup frozen strawberries

I make this right in the serving glass with my beloved Cuisinart Smart Stick immersion blender (uncompensated product endorsement!), so there’s less to clean up. First blend the cocoa and sweetener into the almond milk, then blend in the strawberries several at a time.

The frozen strawberries give the cold and thickness, and of course the cocoa and stevia bring the yum.

You could use cow’s milk and sugar, I suppose, but why would you? If you haven’t tried almond milk, you owe it to youself. It has the thickness and consistency of regular milk, but fewer calories and fat than skim milk. Does it taste exactly like cow’s milk? No – it tastes better! (IMO, of course.)

And one last thing – to take this chocolate milk shake right over the top, when you’re blending in the cocoa powder, add a sprinkle of cinnamon. Trust me, just do it.

 

Died On The Vine now available at Barnes and Noble

My mystery novel Died On The Vine has gone live at Barnes and Noble:

Died On The Vine at Barnes and Noble

Look who’s back from the beauty parlor!

She knows she looks spiffy!

Shiny Maggie!

Am I playing without a net?

Or would you call it running with scissors?

Lemme tell you a little secret.  I started writing a mystery a couple days ago — and I don’t know who did it!

Hope I can figure it out…

 

Started a sequel!

Today I started a new novel, which will be a sequel to Died On The Vine. Set in 1998, it will explore the wild and woolly early days of online auctions. Working title is Bidding On Death.

 

Friday (the Thirteenth) black cat blogging

And since it’s Friday, and what’s more, Friday the Thirteenth, here’s a handsome black cat:

Liam Looks Up

 

Died On The Vine now available at Amazon!

Here we go! You can buy a Kindle version of Died On The Vine at Smashwords, but now it’s also been uploaded at Amazon:

Died On The Vine at Amazon

In a week or so, it should also be available at Barnes and Noble, Apple store, bunch of other places.

 

Here it is!

Fifteen years in the making, here’s my first book, published and ready for download.

Died on The Vine

You can download in format for Kindle, Nook, HTML for computer reading, PDF for printing out, plus a bunch of other options.

Go take a look!

 

How I wrote a book and then lost it for over a decade

It was the mid-90s. I was recently retired from the Navy and working as a tour guide at a local winery. And I said to myself, “Self, wouldn’t this be a great setting for a mystery?” (Not that there’s anything intrinsically violent about wineries, but it was just so picturesque.)

So I wrote that mystery, set in a fictional small winery in rural Virginia. Titled Died On The Vine. And I finished it. And I saw that it was good.

Couple problems, though. First problem was word count. For you youngsters, back in those days, if you wanted to get your words presented to the eyes of readers, you had two choices. One was to submit to publishing houses (or to agents to have them submit to publishing houses), and the other was to self-publish. Back then, self-publishing meant spending thousands of dollars and almost certainly winding up with a basement full of unsold books.  And I don’t even have a basement, so you see the problem there. How about publishing houses? Well, publishing houses wanted a word count range, and my book wasn’t there. I’d told the whole story and my book needed to be significantly longer.

So – how do I make my book longer without those page-long scenery descriptions that nobody reads? I pondered the problem. While I was pondering, another issue presented itself. You see, I’d made my story thoroughly modern. Yessirreebob, there was e-mail, there was Usenet, there were car phones! You see where I’m going here? This was the mid-90s, and what was cutting edge one day looked hopelessly outmoded before you knew it.

And then, life ensued. The rewrite languished until I looked at the manuscript several years later and realized that if I brought the story up to date, the characters would be getting too old. (There’s a Vietnam War backstory that nails down the character ages with no real wiggle room.)

The manuscript found its way into the file cabinet, where it hibernated, while the years past.

But now look!  Self-publishing, ebooks!  Last fall, I remembered – say, didn’t I write a book once?  So I dug out the manuscript and reread it, and realized that with the passage of time, the stuff that had seemed outmoded a decade ago had mellowed into quaint period charm. So I wrote a brief prologue and epilogue and left the rest of the story set in 1996.

So what’s going on now is that I’m formatting Died On The Vine for publication as an ebook, and my talented sister made me a book cover (see previous post).

And that’s where things stand now. I’m rechecking my format and hope to soon be able to announce the publication of my mystery. Better late than never, right?