Hello Everyone,

So I'm dropping in (out of nowhere), with no apologies for (how many) months of no-show? :-)

Can I say that my thoughts have been with you all? Like my Crime Sistahs and, I'm sure, with many of you, the last few months have been packed with changes. I spent the summer in France (yes, it was fantastic), working on my newest manuscript (yes, I made progress, but no it's not done), and now I'm preparing to attend Bouchercon '08. I'll arrive in Baltimore on Thursday and stay through Sunday. On Saturday. I'll on a panel about amateur detectives, "Keeping It Real." (The title speaks for itself, don't you think?)

But the real reason I finally decided to post today after this embarrassingly long silence was to bring notice to a particularly marvelous, insightful and spot-on column that's appearing in the Baltimore Sun online. Fellow Bouchercon attendee Austin Camacho writes about black detectives. His topic: Black Ain’t Nothing But a Detective’s Color. He writes: "His topic: Black Ain’t Nothing But a Detective’s Color. Camacho writes:

"It’s not about race. It’s about the characters. It’s about the mystery.”

Camacho writes a hardboiled series, featuring detective Hannibal Jones, set in Washington DC. In this column, he notes how commentators always want to call Jones a "black detective, as if that were its own genre." He goes on to state, "If my work must fall into a subgenre, let it just be hardboiled detective fiction."

Thus Camacho touches upon an issue that continues to face many of us: If you are of the darker genus, then your work is often categorized first by your ethnicity, and then by, belatedly, by its literary genre. Thus, we have romance, then we have "black romance;" we have mysteries, then we have "black mysteries," etc.

Camacho then goes on to write what amounts to a fantastic tutorial on the nuances of noir and hardboiled detective stories. I loved it and hardily recommend it. And when I see Camacho this weekend, I'm going to let him know it.

I hope to also see some of you this weekend. If you're in the area, then please don't hesitate to walk up and say hello.

In the meantime, take care and God bless.

Regards,

Persia

(This is not my regular column day (that's Friday) and I want to thank my Crime Sistah for letting me put my two-cents in on her day.)

National Domestic Violence Awareness Month

I wanted to take today to acknowledge that October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

You may recall that, in June, I participated with 11 other authors in the benefits anthology, The Power of Love. If you have a moment, I hope you'll take a look at the anthology. Details are on my Web site. All of the authors and our agents are donating all of our proceeds from that anthology to a battered women's shelter. With the way proceeds from book sales are paid, you could say the anthology is a gift that will keep on giving to the shelter.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about with you today, sister to sister.

Domestic violence statistics are tragically familiar. Annually, 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by their partner. One in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. And 50 percent of men who frequently assault their wives also abuse their children.

If you or someone you know is in trouble, please remember help is available. The National Domestic Violence Hotline has a 24/7 toll-free number, 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).

Patricia