Today left our region hot and dry with gusts of wind, movement and change allowing for a promise of cooling moisture in response to it, even the slightest hint of autumn-toward-winter chilling — as far as things ever chill here, though they cool quickly when the air is this dry. Dissipating smoke enhanced the golden autumn light, and a pink sunset lightened the colors of bougainvillea against hazy green foliage, under a hazy blue sky. My backyard at sunset today made a sight I wanted to memorize, or paint. Even a deadly fire leaves some beauty behind.

Fire season in Southern California. The sky is yellow, smoke lingering like fog in the sky, the sun orange, and our windows closed. A wildfire burning in Cabazon, near Palm Springs, has killed three firefighters. Santa Ana winds have blown much of the smoke in our direction. This creates a surreal world in which we’re not sure from one minute to the next whether the fire is still far up in the neighboring county, or a new one has flared up in our own neighborhood. I try to keep my mind off it, but the smell has seeped into the house, and it’s difficult to ignore — a constant reminder to pray for the firefighters.

“Yeah, I have one just like it in my living room.” Maybe not my living room, but in my yard. That Richard Dreyfuss line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind came to mind when I read about the nasty little bit of California that made its way accidentally to Connecticut, where a woman found a black widow spider in a bunch of grapes. She rushed it to a poison control center, and it made the national news.

I’m glad she didn’t get bitten, and that she had an interest in bugs, so she recognized it. (An adult female black widow spider is shiny black, with a bulbous body and usually a red hourglass marking on its belly.) But if someone in Southern California finds a black widow spider, it doesn’t make the news. It certainly raises a personal alarm, and we get quite a bit more upset when they come indoors. But they’re all over the place, which is why I wear protective gloves when I work outdoors. They usually stay outside and don’t like to be around people — someone picking grapes must’ve caught that one sleeping. Here it would be killed and become a close-call story to tell one’s friends, otherwise unremarkable. A black widow in the national news? To me that sounds like a slow news day.

Then again, if snow covers the ground here, even in winter, at anywhere within 800 feet of sea level, it definitely makes the news. The last time that happened where I live was in 1967. When the ground turns white around here it’s more likely the result of a hail storm. And call me paranoid, but I tend to check every bunch of bananas I bring home, for exotic South American spiders.

I guess it’s just what you’re used to, and it’s always exciting to find something you’re not used to — better if it doesn’t do you any harm. That’s one reason I love to read. A primary appeal of books, for me, is those vicarious close encounters with the unknown. I prefer my more dangerous close encounters to come in the form of fiction — like a good mystery novel.

Or should I say, let me take you on an outing with my secret love.

“Who?” you ask.

“Poetry,” I whisper.

Those of you who’ve read Shadows Fall have probably guessed that I’m a huge fan of William Wordsworth and Emily Brontë. I’m a poetry fan, all the way around. I love dead poets, old poets, young poets, and poets yet to be born. While writing that novel, I feared that I’d bore all the non-poetry fans with my unrelenting references to poems. I held back as best I could. For instance, I wanted to quote the entire body of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” and the entire portion I was then familiar with of Emily Brontë’s “The Prisoner.” Which reminds me, until recently I was only aware of five stanzas of that Brontë poem, beginning with:

“He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:”
(more…)

David J. Montgomery asks in Crime Fiction Dossier, Don’t you hate it when you can’t find a book to read?

All I can say is, that’s how I first got the itch to write one of my own. It began as a silent, searching angst, when I had plenty of books on my shelves, but this hunger inside, a dissatisfied craving for a particular type of story not there. I began to realize the story I wanted was inside of me.

This began to happen when I was a teenager. I’d read every romantic suspense novel I could get my hands on. But this aching longing persisted. One night when I was seventeen I dreamed about a young woman, wrongly accused of murder, swimming across a lake to escape the real killer. That’s how I conceived the idea for Shadows Fall. I didn’t begin writing it until many years later. In the meantime I made lots of false starts, first chapters, and short stories. I even wrote whole novel manuscripts for other stories that didn’t sell. It was after I gave up writing fiction for a year, in disgust with myself, that Beth Gray demanded to have her story told, or else. I knew I wouldn’t be free of that longing, that I couldn’t give up writing fiction, and that character wouldn’t leave me alone, until her story was outside of me.