Brenda Buchanan

This weekend was the second Maine Crime Wave conference, and it was a blast.  Maine has an embarrassment of riches in the crime writing world, and some of the best in the business were on hand this weekend. There was a lot to learn, a lot to share and plenty of laughs along the way.

Here is a photo of me with Lea Wait, who writes cozy mysteries (her latest is Twisted Threads)  as well as young adult mysteries (her latest, Uncertain Glory, has been nominated for an Agatha Award) and Chris F. Holm, whose Big Reap, the third in his Collector Series, has been nominated for an Anthony Award. His thriller The Killing Kind, to be released in September, is drawing rave advance reviews.

At Friday night’s event, Two Minutes in the Slammer, ten intrepid writers took to the microphone and wowed the audience with brief, powerful passages from their work.  Kudos to Anne Fowler, Bruce Robert Coffin, E.J. Fechenda, Heidi Wilson, J.T. Nichols, Jen Blood, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Lea Wait, Maureen Milliken, Sandy Neily, Alice Adams and Jim Hayman for giving such terrific, brief readings.

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This morning’s beach walk turned out to be what I think of as Spring Shift Day, when the tilt of the earth in this northern clime finally hit a convincing tipping point.  I breathed deeply, pulling the notably softer salt air deep into my lungs, finally confident that winter is behind us.

Appropriately enough, it is Easter Sunday, and the transformation that has occurred in the past seven days has been nothing short of miraculous. The sand was no longer frozen underfoot, the ocean was that lovely blue-green summerish hue, and the wind had lost its sharp winter bite.
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It’s Maine and it’s February, which means it’s often cold and frequently snowing. This month has been off the charts cold and snow-wise, but if you let the weather coop you up inside, you miss a lot.

Case in point: today’s beach walk. Virtually every Sunday afternoon we head out to one of the local beaches for a bit of fresh air. Our favorite is Scarborough Beach, but the hike in through the marsh ponds feels endless on a really cold day, especially on the way back to the car after 45 minutes of being buffeted by the wind.  This afternoon icy snow pellets were bouncing off the windshield, so we passed on Scarborough Beach.

When the footing is decent we go to  Crescent Beach in Cape Elizabeth, where the hike through the woods and fields to the south end of the beach is especially lovely. But when there’s several feet of snow on the ground it requires snowshoes, and we’d forgotten to put ours in the car today, so Crescent was out.  

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