A Review of Summer
Amid the heat, finding time to chill
The best thing about summer is that people go away, and things slow down. In August, New York City is practically a ghost town as everyone takes off for the country or the beach, or to take a flight to a spot on their bucket list. This means it’s so much easier to get a parking spot on the street, and to get tickets to a movie or a museum exhibit without waiting on long lines.
As hot as it is in NYC, it’s much hotter in Israel now, so my daughter’s family comes to stay with us for the summer. I’ve been busy taking them to the park to play basketball, to the Museum of Natural History to see the taxidermy animals and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the mummies and the armor. But one highlight of their trip was meeting my son’s new dog, Blizzard, a Shiba Inu puppy.
My grandkids also got to spend some time with their grandfather, who turned 92 this month. He also just got an aortic valve replacement, which was amazing because he was in the hospital for only one night, and his recovery time was easier than when he had cataract surgery.
We took a road trip up to Columbia County, where we had a summer house for several years, and stopped off at the local lake across from our old house (which has now been turned into a horse farm) to go swim with the fishes (literally, not in the crime writer sense) and picnic. There’s great summer stock in our old town, so we got to see Guys & Dolls and my youngest grandson really enjoyed Annie.
Writing News
As any writer will tell you, you never know how many people to expect when you’re scheduling a Book Talk. So I was pretty surprised and gratified for having an audience of about 150 people to attend a book talk I gave at the Young Israel of Woodmere on Long Island. I did a slide show on the history of the Ghetto of Venice, and signed a lot of books.
Since business is slow for my day job during August, I got to spend more time on my writing, and I’m just polishing the last of my new book baby, The Surrealist Circle, which is a noir murder mystery set in the art world of Weimar Berlin. Thanks to a Zoom session from Sisters in Crime with JD Allen on how to write sex scenes, I’ve ramped up the sexual tension in this final draft. Hope to get it out to querying in the fall.
Then I’ve got several short stories in development, “Casanova and the Prague Mystery” with Casanova as the amateur detective solving a murder in Prague, “Captain Bligh’s Sword” featuring Errol Flynn to be published in Celluloid Crimes (Level Best Books), one inspired on the old rock song, Dreamweaver, for submission to an anthology, and a final draft of a short story inspired by the Cabaret song, “Money, Money” about a gentleman thief who steals an iconic painting from the Doge’s Palace. in Venice not for money, but for a parking spot for his boat.
Next week, right after Labor Day, I head off to Bouchercon Mystery Conference in New Orleans, where my third novel in the series, The Courtesan’s Pirate has been nominated for an Anthony for Best Historical. Wish me luck, and if you’re going I’ll be on a terrific panel, on Thursday morning at 10:30am, “Kickass Female Protagonists: Prince Charming Is Out of a Job” with Steph Cha, Tori Eldridge, J.T. Ellison, Taylor Stevens, moderated by Hank Fillipi Ryan.
Looking forward to the fall!
Nina Wachsman