VANISHING ACT IN VEGAS

SIN CITY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!   Former vaudeville magicians, 80-year-old Flossie and Sterling Silver, try to unravel the mystery surrounding their grandson's new girlfriend Mara the Magnificent, a magician who performs at the Glitz Palace with a white peacock act. Silver Sister twins Goldie and Godvia try to convince their mother and uncle to just enjoy Las Vegas and let them be the sleuths. But Flossie and Sterling enjoy putting on disguises and working "undercover." It almost earns them a couple pieces of real estate six feet under instead.

The Kindle edition of VANISHING ACT IN VEGAS was just released on Amazon and the paperback will follow soon. BarnesandNoble.com has a great presale price on the paperback and they will release it August 28.

A MONTH WITH TWO NEW BOOKS

After lots of hard work, WRITERS' TRICKS OF THE TRADE (the book)  is finally available as a Kindle on Amazon. Look for the eBook and paperback to pop up on most online bookseller sites nationally and internationally by the end of the month.  The paperback will also be available for order at your favorite local bookstore.


My greatest thrill is when someone emails me to say that something I wrote in my Writers Tricks' of the Trade column helped them or got them past a bump in the road. Yesterday I received thanks from a few fans.

Writers' Tricks of the Trade: 39 Things You Need to Know About the ABCs of Writing is a handy reference about 39 things a fiction writer needs to know in a field filled with challenges.

In addition to my columns in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas editions of examiner.com and this new book, I've also launched a new blog: Writers' Tricks of the Trade at http://writerstricksofthetrade.blogspot.com. Every month on the 15th the latest issue of the new Writers' Tricks of the Trade newsletter will be uploaded to the site with the debut issue on August 15.  SUBSCRIBE to the blog for all the postings and the newsletter.

I'm delighted that many people in the industry have jumped on the bandwagon, and the blog and newsletter will feature several guest contributors in addition to many of my own articles. SO PAY A VISIT AND CHECK IT OUT.

As if having one book release wasn't enough, the third comical Silver Sisters Mystery VANISHING ACT IN VEGAS also releases this month with the Kindle and eBook first, followed by the paperback. And, my sister Phyllice Bradner and I are already working on #4, DIAMONDS IN THE DUMPSTER.

When Beverly Hills advice columnist Godiva Olivia DuBois' son Torch, an Academy Award winning FX expert, moves to Las Vegas to work on a new show about imploding buildings, his 80-year-old grandmother and great-uncle, former vaudeville magicians, fire up their '59 Caddy and take a road trip to Sin City. Flossie is determined to make his new condo at the High Rollers Plaza feel homey.

When they introduce him to beautiful magician Mara the Magnificent, star of the show at the Glitz Palace, the comical crime caper begins. Filled with typical high comedy from Godiva and her over-the-hill flower child twin Goldie Silver, the quartet is led on a merry chase when a mystery surrounds Mara. Don't miss this one!

I LEARNED FROM MY OWN BOOK!

How strange is this? I had to go through the galley of the Writers' Tricks of the Trade book so many times in a quest to find even the smallest errors, that  I discovered yesterday I'd actually learned from it. What a concept~learning from your own book.

Yep. It is true. I'm happy to say that I  think the galley is now error-free - hallelujah -  of course if Murphy's Law kicks in, the minute it's in print some obscure error will suddenly become as brilliant as the marquee on a theater. I'll deal with it if it happens.

Anyway, I'm back to working on the new Silver Sisters Mystery Diamonds in the Dumpster and my "coming of age at 42" book Confessions of a Cougar.

I got to thinking about how I started my writing career with how-to articles and in writing the book I've come full circle. I must say I loved the luxury of being able to take the time to tightly edit and add to the content of many of my examiner.com columns in creating the 39 Things You Need to Know About the ABCs of Writing Fiction. I truly appreciated the ability to present sometimes complex concepts in simple, entertaining language.

So now let me tell you how I realized I learned in the process. Phyllice and I plotted the entire story of Diamonds in the Dumpster while I was in Oregon last month, and I was only waiting to finish the Tricks of the Trade project to begin writing. I'd sent her the preliminary Chapter 1 and she felt that should be Chapter 2 so she wrote a new introductory Chapter 1. I love her style and humor when she writes, but as I was reading back through the new Chapter 1 and the now Chapter 2, some of the "things" I'd been reading ad infinium in my book invaded my thoughts.

I found myself picking up slight glitches or faux pas that would have slid past before. I don't know if was my brilliant style (LOL) or if repeated reading drummed it into my already crammed brain, but were those little things that could be improved or occasionally deleted, daring me to fix them.

I'm having lots of fun with writing Diamonds in the Dumpster. It's always fun to write about my favorite twins and their feisty 80 year old mother and uncle. This time since the oldsters have a much bigger role, it is particularly fun to invade their heads and thought processes.

All that is left now for Writers' Tricks of the Trade to go to publication  is for the rest of the blurbs to come in and the final cover design. This is exciting. More to come.

MORGAN
www.morganstjames-author.com

BACK IN THE "BIG" CITY-PRAISE FOR SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

My sojourn to McMinnville is over and I'm back in Marina Del Rey CA. This is the first time in many years I've flown with Southwest, and I have to say they definitely get it right. At least for this trip. By paying a modest $10 fee each way, they automatically check you in which gives you a preferred position in line. I was number 22 coming back from Portland and got exactly the seat I love: Row 6 on the aisle. They don't charge for luggage---BTW today's L.A. Times reported that luggage fees now account for about $3.4 BILLION dollars a year.

I always look for non-stop flights, but this time I took one with stopovers in Oakland CA (don't get off the plane) in each direction Why? It was more than $200 cheaper than the competing airlines, and don't forget the lack of fees for luggage. These people have the efficiency of Disneyland when it comes to moving crowds. Within 25 minutes the Oakland passengers were off the plane, the Los Angeles ones on and we were in the air. We arrived in Los Angeles at 10:23 p.m.--7 minutes ahead of schedule. Kudos to Southwest!

This morning after setting up my laptop I realized the thing I missed the most while at my sister Phyllice's house was typing on a keyboard rather than directly on the laptop. Talk about frustration. I'm simply not used to using the keyboard on the laptop and the cursor kept jumping around creating some very unusual words like seboardtting-- see what I mean. Anyway, it's always good to go and good to come back, particularly when I'm able to come back with 30 outline pages of a fully plotted Silver Sisters mystery. We actually managed to stay on point despite gossip sessions, rerun episodes of Law and Order, Numbers and Bones, and the insanity of Phyllice's house with people coming and going. Yep. We have our plot.

When we are together, it always reinforces how much alike we are in some ways, even to the extent of events in our lives paralleling, and how different we are in other ways. As Phyllice sometimes puts it, she is the country mouse like Goldie Silver and I'm the city slicker like Godiva Olivia DuBois.

We also spent some time reminiscing about our Uncle Sol, the perennial youth. In his seventies, Uncle Sol was still going on 17 in spirit. He was the spot of sunshine in a day and could make generations of kids and adults laugh. Some of the humor in our books comes from his antics and we both agreed that as kids we didn't realize the gift he gave us of looking at situations with a positive eye, always infused with laughter. After my father died when Phyllice was 12 and I was 17, he was sort of a surrogate dad for several years. He used to call himself the voice of reason and that's what we gave the Silver Sisters' uncle Sterling Silver.

That's all for now.

SMALL TOWN EXPERIENCE

I've been in McMinnville Oregon since last Tuesday so Phyllice and I can plot the next Silver Sisters Mystery, "Diamonds in the Dumpster." We have been putting in lots of hours and today she is in her booth at the Saturday market so I have time to do some catch-up.

I'm a big city person, splitting my time between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and being in a small town like McMinneville Oregon is always a relaxing experience. Life goes at a slower pace. Phyllice lives a block from the main drag, 3rd Street, and the gallery where her artwork is exhibited is just a block and a half away. It's nice to be here during the time that she is the featured artist for the month. Her wall comes down just after the time I return to L.A. and then her work will be dispersed throughout the Currents Gallery and another artist gets the big wall.

Last night we took a nice walk from one end of the main street to the other, stopping along the way at a brew pub to have some dinner. The only movie theater in town is an intimate back room of a restaurant where they show second or third run movies. Life is definitely a different pace. There was an actual theater at one time, but I guess it didn't make it. Tonight we plan to go hear some music at the hotel on 3rd.

In addition to everything else she does, Phyllice has turned her big old house into a guest house so there are always an assortment of characters present, from the wine distributor who lives in the garage and takes care of the garden, to the cop in the attic. The house is about 4,000 s.f. and over 100 years old, and totally wonderful. She has turned the downstairs into a small boutique shop called Katz and Dawgs and uses the huge dining room as her art studio. Occasionally, people who come in to browse also buy one or two Silver Sisters books. Yesterday a couple from Astoria WA bought A Corpse in the Soup and Seven Deadly Samovars. They now have rare copies autographed by both of us. That's pretty unusual since we're not together that often.

McMinnville is the home of Evergreen Aviation and the Evergreen Aviation Museum. If you ever get into this area, that is a must see. It's where the Spruce Goose has been housed for the past several years in a building designed specifically for it. The Museum has now expanded to 3 buildings and they just added a water slide like none in the world. They hefted a 737 to the top of the building and it is the entrance and part of the slide. Imagine that. It will be a huge attraction. They take some of the vintage planes to the airfield across the road sometimes and fly them.

Well, time to get myself together and walk over to the market to see what my Sis is up to. She's a big fish in the little pond in McMinnville, and many people in town know her. I'm lucky if my neighbors on my own street know me! When we went to dinner the other night a Silver Sisters fan approached us saying she recognized us from our website photo. She had seen Phyllice at art shows as well. Ah. Celebrity!