The Reds on Vacation

 

LUCY BURDETTE: Summer’s coming very early this year with Memorial Day on May 24, yikes! I think we’re all feeling a little worn down and overworked by the long winter. We wanted to give you a little notice about a change in our summer schedule here at the Reds. Get out your flip flops and back your bags--the Reds are taking a summer vacation!  We won't go far and we'll still chat every week, but our summer schedule will be a little different as we all write our books and teach our classes and generally catch up. Maybe even go on vacation! Starting next week, May 25, we’ll have a group chat on Mondays and a writer’s choice on Thursdays. We won’t schedule guests this summer either—they get a vacation too:). We know some of you will be disappointed and will miss reading the blog every day–but, we haven’t taken a break in 15 years! (In other words, we’ve saved up our vacation days and decided now’s the time to use them.:). So what will we be doing?

Reds, I am determined to finish The Paris Recipe by June, before I have to get started on Key West #17. After that, we’ve planned a week getaway in Maine with a bunch of grandchildren and other relatives. And after that, maybe stay home and enjoy the summer in Connecticut. What are your plans for the summer?

RHYS BOWEN: as you can imagine I’m taking baby steps forward into a new stage of life. Living alone is something I have never done before. From college dorm to sharing with friends to marriage. So it will feel strange. Being able to do what I want without consulting someone else. So I’m flying down to grandson’s graduation this weekend. I plan to join Clare and co in San Diego, join Dominic either in Canada or San Juan islands and go to England in September   Oh, and finish a book I’ve put on hold and do all the publicity for this summer’s release. 

HALLIE EPHRON: Change is good!

I’ve got a flurry of teaching gigs in the next three months, including the Book Passage bookstore’s annual Mystery Writing Conference https://www.bookpassage.com/mystery. Rhys will be there, too! Also Elizabeth George and Lisa Scottoline and Rachel Howzell Hall…

I’ll be giving a talk for the Grand Canyon Sisters in Crime. Teaching my two-week mystery-writing class for SinC Guppies. Giving several workshops for the annual fabulous Surrey International Writing Conference in October. 

All of these are on my web site at http://hallieephron.com with links. 

Beyond that, my fall to-do list is topped by: Decide what I should do next. I have the start of a novel and some other projects noodling around. A lot of unanswered questions. Very much at a crossroads.

JENN McKINLAY: I’m chiming in from Spain! I’m  visiting the set where they’re shooting the adaptation of my novel PARIS IS ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA which will air on Hallmark Plus in July! Thrilling!

This summer will spent traveling a lot - a visit to CT for a book event at the Cragin Library in Colchester on June 12th, a trip to the Nova Scotia cottage at some point, and possibly a week in San Diego. I’m tired just thinking about it. Oh, and I suppose I have to start writing something again. Hmm…what will it be? 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My summer starts with a bang as Youngest brings the Very Tall Dutchman home for two weeks in June to met the family! I’ve cleared off my calendar so we can show him some typical Maine delights - a Sea Dogs baseball game, eating at a lobster shack, hiking in Acadia and visiting a Super Wal-Mart. Yes, that last was among the American experiences he wants to explore.

I’ll be working on a book, about which I can say no more at the moment, and I’m planning to devote much more of my time to my garden/grounds, since I’ve let everything go to wrack and ruin in the past few years. I’m planning a couple of stays at Old Orchard Beach, and rounding out the summer with the wedding of the daughter of dear friends.

When you live in Maine, you don’t travel in the summer, because HERE is where everyone wishes they could be!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: My 2027 book is due September 1. My 2026 book will be published on September 1. You do the math about what I will be doing this summer!  And into the fall.

It’s all very exciting, and quite wonderful, and there is absolutely no way I can take a work-free vacation. Happily, luckily, we have a lovely back yard with flowers everywhere and  a pool, and sitting outside and being in the lovely (we hope) weather is always so satisfying.

(I just got back from a whirlwind–Teaching at the MIT Weekend Writing Seminar, teaching the International Thriller Writers 8-hour Master Class (!), and a CraftFest Class and so much more. I was the featured speaker at Crime Conn and and and…well, my schedule is packed as you can see here hankphillippiryan.com/events ! )

And Rhys, we are thinking of you every day.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: This summer I will be doing all the edits for my book, A LONG COLD SLEEP, which apparently now has an April ‘27 release.  And then I’m hoping to have my long-overdue knee replacement, which I’ve been putting off for at least five years because I was trying to finish books. After that, I can start planning for trips. It will be three years in July since I’ve been to London and I am desperate for a visit!

Red readers, what are your summer plans??

Take Another Look At It

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: A brand new visitor to the Reds' world today–and we are so thrilled to welcome her! And  the amazing Rhodi Hawk is asking a very provocative question–see what you think at the end.


“When the Mirror Hangs Upside-Down”

by Rhodi Hawk


On a snowy Colorado night in the 1970s, I tore up the stairs, screaming, to escape my aunt’s basement. You’d think my sister and I had found a man wielding a bag of bones down there. But no. We had merely watched something scary on TV.

The thing is, it felt like something had happened to us. The terror burned its brand onto my psyche. Forty years later, I remember every detail. The red and gold weave of the sofa as I hid my eyes. The scent of coffee, cigarettes, and heating oil. The way my sister finally burst from her seat in a dash for the stairs, which mobilized me from frozen terror to galloping terror. I can feel the imprint of the textured linoleum beneath my fingers as I clawed stair treads, vaulting up to safety with hands and feet.

Fast forward twenty years to the 1990s. That same show came up again in the TV listings, and I resolved to face my fear with a friend, this time in my sunny living room. I warned her it was going to be terrifying.

Well. The show was ridiculous. Pure camp. In the climax, a cursed broach comes to life as a rat the size of a Mastiff, but it just looks like a big stuffed animal. My friend and I were palsied with laughter. Also, I was mystified by my little-girl terror, which made no sense in my new reality twenty years later.

The show was called Night Gallery, an anthology like The Twilight Zone. Both featured Rod Serling. The name of the episode was “A Feast of Blood,” based on the short story by mystery writer Dulcie Gray.

Now, in the 2020s, three more decades have passed, and I have yet another perspective. I see that the writing was actually quite good—it’s just that the monstery climax fell victim to cinematic limitations of the day. And it starred Sondra Locke—something even my twentysomething self didn’t pick up on despite having seen her in several Clint Eastwood movies.

It amazes me how our perceptions change over time. Sometimes there’s contrast even in the short term. 

After a neurological disease put me in a wheelchair, I gained a new delight in small things. 

An enlargement of matters I’d previously breezed past. Favorite old novels inverted themselves to reveal fresh layers.

Even new novels: I read Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True twice in three months, and the second reading felt like an entirely different book. A straight murder suspense became an investigation into vagaries of intense relationships. Though I clocked these things in both readings, they morphed in detail and emotion. I understand, of course, that the change in me informed the change in what I read. It was as if the mirror had been hanging upside down, then got flipped.

In my new novel This Town Won’t Tell, a roadhouse waitress perceives herself as a lone wolf in her snowy mountain town. That perception changes after she is preyed upon by dangerous people, forcing her to reach out to the townsfolk who have always been

waiting for her to let them in.

Have you ever read something, only to re-read it later with an entirely different experience?

I’ll confess something to you. For all my maturing, and despite my newly evolved analytical lens, as I typed the words “A Feast of Blood” just now, I still felt a whole-body tension—coupled with giddy hysterics.

HANK: SO interesting!~ I am not much of a re-reader, I have to admit, but I saw the musical Miss Saigon many many years ago, and thought, yes, fine, this is fine. And then last year-ish, I saw it again, and was knocked out with the depth of it. Certainly the show had not changed–but I had.

And in high school they forced me to read Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder, when I was in high school and I thought it was so silly and melodramatic. Now I cannot even think about it without crying.

How about you, Reds and Readers?


Rhodi Hawk is the International Thriller Writers award-winning author of several novels, including her latest, This Town Won’t Tell. In recent years, a motor neuron disease has left Rhodi a wheelchair warrior with impaired cognitive ability. That neurodivergence informs Janey’s struggle with reading in This Town Won’t Tell. Devoted to wildlife and the natural world, Rhodi lives in piney woods with a pair of vultures, her dog, Frankie, her cat, Pumpkin, and her husband, thriller writer Hank Schwaeble.


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RhodiHawk.com

 

The Hostess with the Mostest...cleaning to do

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: When we talked about our summer plans, I mentioned the kick-off for my season is hosting Youngest and the Very Tall Dutchman (they're coming over on KLM; does that mean I can call him the Flying Dutchman?) Of course, I want to make a good impression, and more importantly, he has allergies, so I'm attempting to remove as much dust/soot/cat hair as I can from the premises. It doesn't help that I burn wood all winter long and that the family room carpet is covered with a gentle sprinkling of bark and twiglets.

 

 

This isn't the first important guest I wanted to impress, of course.  Ross and I hustled like MAD when his father visited us at This Old House for the first time. It was a scorching hot day in August, and of course, we also had to deal with a two-year-old and a seven-month old while dusting, weeping, polishing, etc., etc. When Dad arrived, I dropping my rag and spray bottle on the kitchen counter, and yelled, "Honey! Come on downstairs!" Ros reaching the foyer just as I opened the door to greet my father-in-law -- and my husband promptly vanished upstairs without a word and didn't reappear for a good half hour.

 

He later explained he didn't want his dad to see him all sweaty and sticky. and he didn't understand why Victor and I kept laughing about his disappearing act.  (If you've heard people say, "There weren't any autistic people being born in the 1950s," let me introduce you to my husband...)

 

 

However, I admit I was even MORE frantic a few years later, when my mother came to stay for three days. (She never lingered longer than that, holding to the old adage about fish and guests.) I was so freaked out about the mess, and the dust underneath the mess, and the dirt under the dust, that we hired a professional cleaning service to come in and basically power wash everything. 

 

 

It was ridiculously expensive compared to our budget, but the peace of mind it gave me was priceless. I didn't hear a single critique while she was visiting! (Well, not about the house. She had a few things to say about my hair and my parenting.)

 

 

Of course, many of you will remember we were known for our huge Christmas dinners. We hosted twenty to forty friends every year between 2003 and 2019 (excepting '16 and '17.) It got easier prepping the house every year, as the kids grew older and were able to genuinely assist in the run-up. Also, since it was an annual affair, we all knew the drill. 

 

However, inevitably, there was enough "what the heck do we do with this" stuff to fill a basket or box, which would get stashed up in the attic. Did we ever reclaim those boxes? No, no we did not. I was in the attic yesterday, looking for old children's books to pass on to baby Paulie, and stumbled across a few. At this stage, I think it's best to not even look at what's inside; out the door and straight into the trash bin will be best.

 

Dear Readers, have you had V-I-Vs (Very Important Visitors) or a high-profile event at your party? How did you carry it off?