Tulo: “First you put this ridiculous raincoat on me and now you are taking a picture of me peeing? No shame.”...

As National Novel Writing Month has ended, I’ve started to think about the balancing act that writers face in terms of action versus thinking. In some ways, I’m definitely a woman of action. I’m intuitive and listen to my gut. If my heart tells me to jump, I usually...

Can you spot the snow on the San Gabriel Mountains? Tulo and I were admiring the view during a recent dog walk. #winter #snowinSouthernCalifornia  ...

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s taken me a while to grab hold of my female voice. Maybe a psychoanalyst can figure out why, but then again the reasons may not be germane. After my third Mas Arai mystery (that series is all written in the third person), I...

The winter months are for sleeping in....

Every November I find a group of people who are doing NaNoWriMo and swim behind them in the water’s wake. NaNoWriMo is the annual write a novel–well, 50,000 words in one month–campaign. I first attempted to sign up but didn’t like being tied to a certain word count goal,...

For some reason, I’ve been in the holiday spirit this month, so I was delighted to encounter these red berries, which I learned was pyracantha. Thanks, Derek Yee, for the heads-up!...

My friend, exhibition developer Heather Lindquist, turned me onto the application, Evernote, when we were working together on the book, LIFE AFTER MANZANAR, which was published last year. Evernote, which can be a free download, is a quick way to create notebooks of pages. These pages can have notes...

The title of my blog post is “An Iguana in a Japanese Garden.” Photo of the iguana, compliments of my mother. Click HERE to read the post. Thank you, Sherry Harris, of Wicked Authors, for inviting me to participate.  ...

Tulo is a senior dog but he still continues to jump up on low walls whenever he can. (No worries–his vet says as long he can do it, it’s okay.)...