Writer Going on a Road Trip

Heading out to Monterey, California. The Left Coast Crime Mystery Conference starts Wednesday with a workshop by best selling authors Jan Burke and Jerrilyn Farmer. I'm looking forward to the trip with a girlfriend and fellow writer/critique partner--her first mystery Con (we be writing Romance now).

 

I'm heading up a panel of 'amateur sleuth' writers. Why they chose me is still a bit of a confusion because my novel is less sleuth and more paranormal, suspense, hero's journey, but I accepted the challenge for the experience of being a moderator.  So here are my panel mates and the book they are promoting (Sunday, March 23 at 10:15 - 11:00) :

 

 

Margaret Dumas:  Dumas lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She was shortlisted for the CrimeWritersAssociation Debut Dagger award for her first novel, Speak Now, which Publishers Weekly dubbed a “sparkling debut.” The sequel, How to Succeed In Murder, was released in May of 2006 to glowing reviews.

      Speak Now – comic cozy meets crazed spy thriller

 

Denise Weeks:  describing herself as novelist and failed hippie, launches her new book: APRIL, MAYBE JUNE

      Murder by the Marfa Lights – Cozy soft-boiled mystery set in Marfa, Texas, among the Marfa Mystery Lights (ghost lights) and a cast of eccentrics. Gentle humor, Ariadne French and her older sister Zoe are co-sleuths in this suspenseful tale. There are oddball eccentrics, a crazy town that trades on its fame as the home of the Marfa Mystery Lights and a mystical Native American lawyer.

 

Jill Amadio:  An award-winning journalist, author, collaborator, ghostwriter, and screenwriter.

      Digging Too Deep - Feisty British gossip columnist Tosca Trevant is banished to the U.S. at the request of Buckingham Palace. Idly snooping out of sheer boredom, she stumbles across what she believes to be human remains in a recently widowed music professor’s rock garden. Tosca asks a retired U.S. Secret Service agent for help, and by solving the riddle of a coded music score, the two sleuths bring a serial killer to an unexpected end.

 

Marta Chausee: is a wanderer with a long history of foolhardy adventures. She crossed the Sahara in a beat down, rusty old Jeep with three friends and fifteen crazed Moroccans, Once, out of funds, she stowed away in the luggage rack of a train compartment from Gibraltar to Madrid. Just before the troubles, she explored the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, alone and happy, for twelve hours.
(we recently met and hit it off right away--both of us have that, 'let's try it and see what happens' gene)

            Murder’s Last Resort -- Set in the go-go 80s on a swank Florida hotel property, Murder’s Last Resort amateur detective, Maya French, is challenged to find and stop a sophisticated murderer, who has infiltrated and is disrupting the Sapphire Hotels and Resorts Awards Conference.

 

. . .  and myself, Cora Ramos: Quiet and innocent appearing until an adventurous opportunity presents itself, then I have to dive in and go for it. I trust in the powers that be to keep me safe from my, at times, foolhardy self. One of those adventures was in Mexico, the experiences from which my first novel was born.    
      

           Dance the Dream Awake – Not technically an amateur sleuth, Tessa Harper is on a mission to find out why she is having unrelenting nightmares of a Mayan sacrifice. She travels to Mexico, into the Yucatan, which forces her to experience another lifetime where her past begins to make connections to the people in her life now, one of whom is murdered as a result of her probing. What she learns will change her forever.



If you get to the conference, come on up and introduce yourself. Love to meet you.