Elena Santangelo's Blog

2 DAYS ONLY!

On Sunday, November 30 and Monday December 1, these short stories from my Twins Mystery Series will be FREE on Kindle. Click on the titles to link to the page.


Mirror, Mirror - A man sees premonitions of serial murders but no one believes him, until psychologist Sara Ziegler is sure that her twin sister Gen is the next victim.

Ring of Truth - Sara and Gen Ziegler suspect a neighbor of domestic violence, but what does that have to do with the ring Gen finds in her vegetable garden o...

DOUBLE CROSS was just released in paperback. This is the third novel in my Twins Mystery Series and the second one where both Gen and Sara play equal parts in the solution. It's one of those novels I drafted ages ago, but only finally figured out how it should work a few years back.

I was traveling a lot back then, and most of my vacation destinations were in the U.S. desert Southwest. I fell in love with the Southwest when I first visited there 30 years ago, before I even considered a career...

I KNOW a lot of people who won't read short stories. They seem to believe that if a tale takes less than 70,000 words to tell, it somehow isn't worthy. Me? I love shorts stories. I can devour one in a quick sitting when I don't have much time. Like a lovely bite of chocolate between meals.

I've been reading shorts as long as I can remember. My love for the form was especially cemented in place by the short mysteries and supernatural tales of Agatha Christie. I branched out from there to read o...

I don't have profound thoughts often, so this might not be up to the standards of those who think profoundly for a living. But it occurred to me that, since language is a development of intelligence,  making a typo--missing a comma, misspelling a word, using a homonym by accident, forgetting the "ed" at the end of a past tense verb, whatever--will always make the person doing the writing look stupid.

Professional writers are not those people who construct language perfectly, but those who...

I heard that the U.S. might soon authorize a horsemeat packing plant in New Mexico, despite recent news stories about alarm bells being raised because horsemeat was found in IKEA's Swedish meatballs and sausage. Americans, it seems, are less adverse to pink slime in their fast food than equine protein.

An NPR interviewee was asked why Americans are so against the thought of eating horsemeat. He gave kind of a lame response, saying, more or less, that we think of horses as pets.

Avid readers know i...

I heard that the U.S. might soon authorize a horsemeat packing plant in New Mexico, despite recent news stories about alarm bells being raised because horsemeat was found in IKEA's Swedish meatballs and sausage. Americans, it seems, are less adverse to pink slime in their fast food than equine protein.

An NPR interviewee was asked why Americans are so against the thought of eating horsemeat. He gave kind of a lame response, saying, more or less, that we think of horses as pets.

Avid readers kno...

My best friend in the mystery writing world, author Robin Hathaway, died last Saturday. I'm going to skip her professional resume here--you can find it on her website or Amazon author page if you're interested.

Robin and I met twenty years ago at a Mid-Atlantic Mystery Convention, at the founding meeting of the Delaware Valley Chapter of Sisters in Crime. We spent the majority of our friendship, I think, in a car or train. At first we traveled to New York City for MWA dinners and Edgar week a...

At the beginning of this month, I heard that doctors had been asked to weigh in on the gun control debate. That's the last I heard about it. Some representative of the NRA or  other gun advocate is on the news at least once a day, but nothing more from the medical world. We hear all about guns--how different ones work, etc.--and, in an abstract way, about gun victims, yet nothing about gunshot wounds.

As a mystery writer, I'd be pretty poor at my job if I only researched various types of guns for...

At the beginning of this month, I heard that doctors had been asked to weigh in on the gun control debate. That's the last I heard about it. Some representative of the NRA or  other gun advocate is on the news at least once a day, but nothing more from the medical world. We hear all about guns--how different ones work, etc.--and, in an abstract way, about gun victims, yet nothing about gunshot wounds.

As a mystery writer, I'd be pretty poor at my job if I only researched various types of...

You might have noticed that I haven't posted here since August. I think I've exhausted the subject of writing, so I've been rethinking what to do with this space. Meantime, Beth Ann (teen science whiz and costar of my Possessed Mystery Series), asked if she could use my blog to save the earth. Could I say no? Here's her first entry.

Wind Energy Turned On Its Side
by Beth Ann Lee

Last summer, London's Olympic Park included 7 vertical axis wind turbines. Here's a photo.

They look pretty classy, don...