Happy May Day!

Today is the last day to enter for a chance to win one of three copies of Diamonds Are Truly Forever on Goodreads. Enter HERE.  Don’t miss your chance!

The May issue of The Big Thrill, International Thriller Writers’ monthly ezine, released today. It has a feature article on Diamonds Are Truly Forever. You can read it HERE.

Diamonds releases on May 22nd!

There’s a scene in Diamonds where the hero, Drew, takes the heroine, Staci, to the gun club to get some practice with the new pistol he’s given her.  Over the weekend, I went to the gun club firing range to get a little practice with my Makarov. It’s a little gun, but it has a big kick.

Getting some practice at the gun club

The Spy Who Left Me

And The Spy Who Left Me is specially priced at $2.99 across all digital platforms–Nook, Sony, iBooks, and of course, Kindle. Get it from your favorite e-retailer.

April is starting out as a promising month for me. I hope it is for all of you, too.

I've been featured on Pixel of Ink

And more exciting news today–Pixel of Ink featured The Spy Who Left Me as their Hot Deal of the Day for Friday March 30. For a limited time it’s on sale for $2.99 everywhere ebooks are sold.

Lucky Days Free Par-tay

Pink Slipper for free!

It’s almost St. Patrick’s Day and I’m feeling like passing along some luck in the form of giving away Pink Slipper on Kindle. What’s luckier than getting something for free?

And I’m not alone–I’m par-taying with the best of them at the Lucky Days Free Par-Tay
March 14th-18th!

Visit the Lucky Days Free Par-tay Website. Click here.

Discover over 40 amazing ebooks: Romances, Thrillers, Mysteries, Humor, Fantasies, and more! Including Pink Slipper, by yours truly.
All FREE at Amazon.com

Fantastic ebooks, many by award-winning and best-selling authors.

There’s a genre for every reader’s taste.

Romance from sweet to hot, suspense, paranormal, humorous, historical–an awesome range.

If mysteries and thrillers are your thing you can’t go wrong. Police action, murderous mayhem, amateur sleuths and more.

You’ll also find horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and women’s fiction…. A fantastic selection!

Got kids? Lucky Days has books for elementary school age and teens alike.

Don’t miss out! Soon these amazing ebooks will be back to their usual prices. Grab them while they’re FREE! March 14th-18th.

Who says you can have too much of a good thing? You can never have too many great books. Load up your Kindle and tell your friends and neighbors to do the same.

The FREE Par-Tay is a BLAST!

Visit the Lucky Days Free Par-tay website.

Novelty Rearview Spy Glasses

But, believe it or not, there are some shades of sunglasses that actually increase visibility in rainstorms, too, cutting down on peripheral sheen and allowing you to see through road mist better. And hazy, high overcast days create their own kind of brightness that sunglasses combat. Yeah, we know all about the applications of sunglasses for every kind of weather here. Sunglasses aren’t just for sunny days, you know. Not in the Emerald City, anyway.

Novelty Spy Glasses Rearview

I’m a typical Seattleite. I have many, many pairs of sunglasses that run the gamut from rain and haze sunglasses to bifocal sunglasses. Fashion sunglasses. Cheap, disposable beach sunglasses.  And more expensive driving sunglasses. And recently, I got another, really cool kind of sunglasses—rearview spy sunglasses similar to the ones I feature in The Spy Who Left Me and my upcoming May release Diamonds Are Truly Forever.

My Serious Rearview Spy Sunglasses from the International Spy Museum

Rearview spy sunglasses have a reflective coating on the inside of the lenses. When you’re wearing them, you can see behind you by looking at the edges of the glasses where the area behind you is reflected. They’re great for bicyclists and moms who need eyes in the backs of their heads. And spies, of course.

Spy Sunglasses Rearview

I have two pairs—a cheap, kid’s novelty kind that I got for about $3.99, and a more serious pair. Both of them work as advertised. One piece of advice when wearing them—people with long hair should pull it back in a ponytail or bun to get the best rearview out of your glasses. Otherwise you run the risk of merely seeing the sides of your hair reflected. Very disappointing whether you’re on a covert mission or you need to keep an eye on the kid.

I was the hubby’s adoring crowd. And I held his coat and wallet while he flew. Basically, I doubled as his locker, which they offered for free. But, still, an important part of the mission. I did take the fifteen-minute class with him and learned all the hand signals before he suited up and went to the wind tunnel. You can’t hear a thing in the flying chamber so you have to watch for the instructor’s signals. My favorite signal—the one for relax. Relaxing is the key to successful flying. And something to remember in life—want a happy flight? Relax and enjoy.

The actual flight session was half an hour divided among about eight participants. Each flight lasted one to two minutes and each skydiver had two to four flights. The peanut gallery and I had a great time watching our loved ones bumble around in the chamber, I mean, fly. If you go to watch, be sure and stay for the end. The instructor puts on a show worth seeing and really flies like Superman. Now that looks like fun!

My husband iFlying

This is the perfect adventure for the weekend spy wannabe or adventure enthusiast. My husband had so much fun flying, he even laughed when I told him he reminded me a bit of Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

Here’s what I found—yes, in my opinion, the critics are right in some of their criticism. It has an over-the-top, implausible premise that was sometimes hard to get past. There wasn’t much covert about the way the heroes, Tuck and FDR, performed their clandestine jobs and they really abused their agency privileges. It’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be fired for behaving like they do. The acting was good and enjoyable, but I had to agree with the critics that I didn’t really feel the chemistry between the Reese Witherspoon character and the two male leads. In fact, the love story fell flat for me, which, as a romance writer, was a real disappointment.

Judging from the movie preview selection—the upcoming Batman movie, for example, whose trailer soundtrack nearly rumbled me out of my seat –This Means War, although touted as a film both sexes will enjoy, is really geared more toward men. It’s not romantic in the way women typically enjoy like The Vow is. The two heroes seem to enjoy their competition with each other more than being genuinely in love with the girl they’re fighting over.

But the movie does deliver a fair share of laughs. Everyone around us seemed to enjoy it and we did, too. It was visually appealing, had some good explosions, some laughs, a few sort of tender moments. I hope Hollywood makes more action romantic comedies. A movie that appeals to both men and women really is a great idea.

In order to playfully have good fun with something, you have to be familiar with it, and maybe even love it. I love Bond movies and novels, and spy thrillers in general. As well as, of course, romances. Last year I was wandering through one of my favorite stores—Costco—and found four centenary releases of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. Okay, the Fleming centenary was 2008 and this was 2011, but I was still happy to find them and pick them up for a good price.

From Russia With Love, Centenary Edition

From Russia With Love was one of the books I bought. I read it this past week and was struck again by what an excellent writer Fleming was. His writing is descriptive and evocative. And the man knows how to create suspense. The book opens with a woman giving a man a massage. Fleming makes the scene scary and suspenseful without shedding a drop of blood. And in the books, Bond is a man who has emotions and is much more dimensional than the celluloid Bond. I actually like the literary Bond much better than the any of the movie Bonds.

This weekend I also had a disappointing experience of seeing a movie adapted from one of my favorite series of books, a movie that fell way flat of the book. I wonder—would I love the Bond movies as much, if I’d been a fan of the novels first?