My first radio INTERVIEW

I just had my first radio interview, with Baron Von Herron at KZSB in Santa Barbara (re-broadcast all over, and on satellite too!). I tried to keep my wits about me and say something interesting and relevant—though truth to tell, I was out ‘til all hours the night before celebrating a graduation. I’m not positive I succeeded in sounding like a cool cucumber, but at least I got the “first” over with. That’s always the one that makes me nervous!In other news, the response to the portrait contest has been great, and we haven’t even announced it yet! We put a little item on the website, and people seem to be ferreting it out. One entry was from a woman living in a FEMA trailer, who lost her photographs in the Katrina flood. She asked whether I could paint a portrait from a Xeroxed copy of a picture of her mother as a young woman. One of the many great things about painting is that the imagination can fill in so many gaps—as long as there’s a likeness that can be seen by the mind’s eye, the paint can capture so much. People have asked me whether painting the portrait’s not too much work, but I’m genuinely looking forward to it. Portraits are my favorite thing to paint. At this point in my life, even if I won the lottery I would hang around writing stories and painting portraits…except that I would fit in a trip or two to Paris and Florence, maybe around the world as well. Painting and writing on a cruise ship while navigating the globe—now that has potential! Right now my sister and I are working like fiends trying to finish the manuscript for Book 3, Brush with Death, by the end of June. Yikes! It always seems to come down to the wire. But this book is set in an actual historic Oakland columbarium—a mausoleum full of urns holding ashes, or “cremains”—and it is great fun to write. The Chapel of the Chimes was designed by famed architect Julia Morgan back in the 1920’s, and is wonderfully spooky and beautiful. We’ll be posting a sneak preview of Brush with Death on the website soon.