I'm honored to be on a Left Coast Crime conference panel again this year. Held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to which I shall drive the 800 or so miles in my teeny Hyundai coupe, the conference promises to be the best yet. I'll be staying with fellow auto journalist and racer Denise McCluggage, who has lived in Santa Fe for decades. She's an author, too. We are among the first females to write car columns -heretofore hogged by males, so we go way back.

Tons of mystery and thriller writers at the conference will be looking daggers at each other as they jostle for sales and attention. which they richly deserve, of course. Writing a book is hard, tormenting, exhilarating, and rewarding. Then, on top of all that, mystery writers have to come up plots, clues, red herrings, nice and naughty characters, and wicked prose.

I'm almost finished with a biography I am writing about a retired CEO who rose from humble beginnings to the top of his industry. In between he fathered 12 children who turned out to be pretty amazing themselves.

Called the Secret Service Bureau in Santa Ana, California recently to ask for an agent to speak to our Orange County Sisters in Crime chapter about their work. But they declined. Never mind, we have a fabulous ForensicsFest lined up this month, with four experts telling us how their work helps solve crimes. They includes a forensic anthropologist, a forensic pathologist, a police sketch artist, and a brave man whose company cleans up the blood and spewed brains after the crime scene has been cleared.

What else? Querying agents like mad, seeking a home for my screwball amateur sleuth, gossip columnist Tosca Trevant's tale in "Stone Cold Dead." Tosca speaks Cornish and brews god-awful mead while solving murders. Tosca was thrown out of England because she discovered a royal scandal and planned to write about it in her "Tiara Tittle-Tattle" column. So she's landed on our shores, in California, to do her best to meddle here.