As an island girl - raised on the shore of Long Island, New York, and for five years a resident of Cousins Island in Maine's Casco Bay -- it is always a joy to return to the Maine coast, and particularly to Higgins Beach in Scarborough, Maine. Here, the tidal changes are distinct, creating expansive sand bars at low tide and shrinking the beach considerably when the tide is high. I love this stretch of coast at every tide, including the lingering in-between, and this year I made sure to take more beach strolls than ever at dawn and sunset.
My writing time was very much devoted to my passion for writing postcards, not only to longtime friends and family but to members of The Noble Correspondents, a Sherlock Holmes scion society founded by Michael Barton. This very communicative group has a passion for corresponding via snail mail, with some members using vintage typewriters and others using fountain pens or a particular pencil, to write their missives.
Although I did not produce more poetry, it was nevertheless very happily on my mind, as I am in the process of answering excellent questions for a conversation/interview in the esteemed literary journal Tupelo Quarterly about Sisters in Time, my chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June of 2026. The poetry in this chapbook is centered on my experience unearthing a pagan burial in a fourth-century,Roman-era cemetery in Winchester, England.
Meanwhile, long beach strolls -- particularly when the mist rolled in making the scene literally atmospheric -- made ideal circumstances for mulling more developments for my thriller, A Man in the House, with its opening scene appearing this month in the British edition of Crimebits2: 100 Opening Gambits for Great Thrillers & Linked Mystery Puzzles, selected and edited by Scottish crime writing luminary Val McDermid. The US editiion of Crimebits2 will be published November 1 and can be preordered here.