A week of words and laughs Mario here:

NEWS FLASH! Check out my thoughts about the future on the Eos HarperCollins blog.

This week I've been settling back into my routine, which meant lots of writing, writing, and writing. And reading.



Finished Elaine Viets hysterical mystery, Shop till You Drop. Helen Hawthrone takes a dead-end job in an upscale boutique where she endures one indignity after another until murder and mayhem come to the store. Viets slices and dices our materialistic society with satiric observations:

On the screen was a photo of a luscious-lipped blonde in a tight black dress with a zipper up the front. In the next shot, Desiree was in a loose-fitting black body bag with a zipper up the front. Desiree's enormous breasts created a mountain in the body bag.

I'm working on Night Life by Caitlin Kittredge. She is May's featured author in the Barnes & Noble Paranormal and Urban Fantasy Bookclub. Drop in and say hello.


Jackie Kessler (left) chats it up with Caitlin on Richelle Mead's comfy red sofa.


Last Saturday I attended Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Inside the Writer's Studio, with novelist (and 5280 editor) Eli Gottlieb interviewing poet Mark Strand (take a deep breath--former Poet Laureate of the United States and Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, plus three National Endowment of the Arts grants, fellowships from the MacAuthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and much, much more). Here's Strand waxing poetically when he's actually about to knock back that martini. (Photo lifted from flickr)



After an afternoon of such high culture, that night I took the low road with a show by the Queen of Raunch, Margaret Cho. Nothing, nothing, was taboo or so funny.

  ¶ posted by Mario @ 6:20 PM