Michael Haskins's Page

For anyone who has visited Key West, or any Caribbean island, the first thing they notice is a phenomenon known as ‘island time’. Things travel at their own pace. If a beer takes 10 minutes to get to you, so be it. If you have to wait in line 15 minutes while the clerk and a shopper chat, life goes on. What visitors don’t realize is that ‘island time’ is just one outward sign of an entire lifestyle which is totally foreign to most Americans and Europeans. While non-islanders see it as rudeness a…

On the weekend, Bobby from the Los Angeles Mystery Bookstore called and set a time for my July 19th signing, 2 p.m., and asked if I minded sharing the time slot with California writer Michelle Gagnon. I am so honored to be signing in one of LA’s oldest and most prestigious bookstores that I would sign with the devil just to be included. Well, I Googled Michelle (and you should too) and found a very attractive young lady and, if reviews are anyway to judge, talented too! I am glad she’s not the…

This weekend I will need to gas up the Miata and, for the first time, I will pay more than $4 per gallon! My friend Lee Fairchild is visiting from Ohio, where he said gas prices are still within the high $3 range. I assured him it would be closer to $4 by Memorial Day. The price of gas has blown my book-signing budget. I knew going into this that signings didn’t pay for themselves in sales, so I budgeted for gas, food, and, where needed, lodging. Signings sold books and got my name out there fo…

I have left my Jeep under the house (I live in a stilt house, I didn’t bury it) and bought a 2001 Miata. The Jeep got 15 mpg, on a good day, and the Miata gets 30 mpg most any day. I have gone from almost $100 a week in gas to about $30. That’s a pretty good savings. I am also a lot more aware of my running around in the evenings and on the weekends and schedule things now, like dinner, movies, a trip to the Hog’s Breath. According to my friends, and reports on the news, I am not unique in this…

I wrote my book. It took about a year, but if you put my writing days together it would have been a full six months. It took a lot of sweat, a lot of rewriting and mental anguish. The publisher sent it to an editor in NYC and it came back to me with a few minor corrections. I was asked if I really wanted to leave mention of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in the final chapters. At that time, Castor’s illness was all over the print and electric media and, of course, the Cuban exiles in Miami were ce…