Today, as promised, we have a female FBI Special Agent as a guest blogger–what a treat.  Being a special agent sounds like an incredible career for women. She tells me that the FBI has been hiring female special agents since 1972!  –Heather * There are no guarantees for the Special Agent in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  I was reminded of this fact the first day I […]

  The Girls with Guns post has been much more popular than I expected! Check out this photo a reader sent in of her beautiful 6’4″ daughter with what John just pointed out to me is an AK-47. In his words: “You can tell that it’s an AK-47 because of the second tube on the top. The expanding gas that pushes the bullet down the  barrel enters the tube and […]

Summer is on the horizon and the teenagers are asking where we’re going on vacation. I haven’t told them that the question is not where but whether—as in whether we are taking you. As teens they are more demanding, setting moratoriums on seeing shrines and lingering at dinner. They complain that no one understands when the crazy husband is joking—they were mortified when he asked the waiter whether they’d hire […]

I like to write stories on the edge—almost absurd, but then you realize that life can really get this nutty, as a reviewer of my novel False Alarm put it. It’s a fine line. While researching my just-completed novel, The Incompatibles, a black comedy about family dysfunction and infertility, I saw a Newsweek article “You Got Your Sperm Where?” about men who call themselves donorsexual—a guy who gives his sperm […]

You know how I like to draw heavily from real life so the novel I’m just finishing is set right here in the Silicon Valley outback.  I’m calling it The Incompatibles— a whacky black comedy about infertility—possibly the world’s first. There’s an aggressive sperm recruiter on the loose, coming between a Los Gatos couple, who get themselves into a darkly comic pretzel, working at cross-purposes to get a baby. I […]

After seeing my SWAT Training post, a lawyer emailed me that she had taken all her secretaries to the gun range— and made them wear skirts and high heels! Afterwards, she took them out for a drink. I love this photo of the high-heeled shooter.  We could have used her at SWAT Training—much feistier than the Lara Croft look that the crazy husband envisioned. She would have shown those boys. […]

John got a hankering to take SWAT training so we went to the backwoods of Half Moon Bay near Mavericks, where they have Hawaii-5-0 sized surf waves in Northern California that few are willing to risk. I love that area, especially that funky restaurant called the Moss Beach Distillery, which has the Blue Lady Ghost, who they say haunts the bathrooms and steals earrings. (She was featured on Unsolved Mysteries.) […]

            Poor Zar had dysplasia in his elbows that if left unchecked was going to have him not using his front legs and hopping around the yard like a bunny. Out on his walks he would go on a sit-down strike if his legs hurt him. (He also does that if he gets too hot, but that’s another story.) So he had surgery in both […]

Writers are like hoarders—you stash all your little stories and lines from your life (my high school friends still remember me with my notebook). “Never date a guy who turns more heads than you do,” —interesting advice from a dear friend during college, which I had my character, Virginia, giving to her daughter years later in False Alarm. Your friends might be sick of your stuff, but writing is a […]

At the sports firm, one of my colleagues put up a trophy animal head in his office behind his desk. The implication is that he shot it himself (I sort of assume that when someone hangs a head), but no one asked any questions. Don’t forget this is downtown San Francisco, where you could be spray painted for wearing fur, probably shot for hanging animals in your office. We have […]