Writer writing

[Mette, Stanley, Cindy]

We have had the opportunity to share our location with a series of interesting guests and family members. Mette and Stan are out first and only international guests. We first met Stan many years ago when he was a faculty member in the University of North Dakota College of Aerospace Sciences. Stan had many interesting responsibilities for the program including as I remember working with countries of the Pacific Rim to send students for nondegree programs. I met him because his graduate work at the University of Illinois was in instructional design. He and I developed the proposal that eventually led to the Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) graduate program. He is a pilot and had written books in multimedia learning and human factors as applied to pilots. Stan moved on, but maintained a residence in Minneapolis as well as South Africa (his home). Our daughter Lynn watched his place on occasion when she was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota and we always have stayed in contact although we did not see each other on a regular basis.

Stan has become a very successful writer of crime novels set in Africa writing with a colleague Michael Sears. You will find their work on Amazon (paper and audio) under the name Michael Stanley. Crime novels are not my highest priority reading, but I have read a couple that Stan has written and I can recommend them as quite engaging. There is plenty of local history and current events embedded in the stories to increase your understanding of this part of the world. In the past couple of years we have spent more time with Stan again after attending a reading with Stan and Michael at a local book shop. This has been our first meeting with Mette who is from Denmark and like Stan a person with a wide assortment of international experiences. They have been a very interesting couple to spend a week exploring this island.

Anyway, so Stan announces he is going to have to get his blog post written. I had no idea he had a blog. It turns out he and Michael share responsibility for making contributions to a blog called Murder is Everywhere. This is a group blog maintained by a collection of crime writers from all over the world. Stan says you can pretty much write about anything when your turn comes up, but your books are pretty much off limits unless you have a new book that has just been released. I was thinking about this group and decided I would be intimidated adding posts by the company I was keeping. I already have a couple of folks who let me know when I have failed to notice a misspelled word, but think of how much worse it could get if the way you develop your stories came under scrutiny. Stan posted recently so if you take a look soon after I offer this post his comments on Hawaii should be near the top.