Moving Day

Sorry about the lengthy silence here, but we've been busily hammering away behind the scenes, and although we're still sweeping up the sawdust and rearranging the partitions, it's time to make a shift. So, if I might ask you to click over to the new Mutterings site, we will resume our discussions...

http://laurierking.com/wp.php/

Blogger has been great, in spite of my grumblings, but in the general upgrade, we're taking things into our own hands.

And with luck Laurie may learn how to post photos!

A nice start to the day?

Well, friends, perhaps I should apologize for urging you to sign up for Booked for Breakfast, what with that real downer of the lady’s dead mother on Tuesday and the oddity of my most recent book being Folly, followed today by my most recent book being The Art of Deception. I agree, a much better title, and if it weren’t rather late, I’d just agree to the change, but still. However, maybe you’ve managed to enjoy the snippets of Justice Hall at the end of each day’s letter. And I’m sure future weeks will go more smoothly—it should surprise no one that if it has to do with electronic communication and LRK, something will go awry.

Elaine Viets and the art of book marketing

[There's supposed to be a nice cheery book cover here, but those of you who read my last post won't be surprised that Blogger won't let me post it. Sigh. But you can see it and some other nice stuff at http://www.elaineviets.com ]


Back in December, some of you may remember a essay by Elaine Viets on the Lipstick Chronicles blog, concerning the Male Romance novel. Witty and with substance, Elaine gently inserted the skewer into the attitude that boy books are gritty, cutting edge, and worthy of review, where girl romances are, well, not.

Elaine has a new book out. Unfortunately, Elaine also has a brain recovering from a stroke, which means she won’t be touring, which means the promotion set up by her publisher has its legs kicked out from under it.

So some of us agreed to step up and say Hey, and support this great lady of crime fiction. And turn readers on to a fun book, as well.

Please go out and buy a copy of:

Murder with Reservations: A Dead-End Job Mystery
By Elaine Viets
NAL Hardcover. $21.95
ISBN: 0-451-22111-7
On sale now.

More information about the book can be found at http://www.elaineviets.com

Constipation

My name is Laurie, and I am a dialup connector.

This is a shameful state of connection, I confess. And I swear, it's not entirely my fault. I have honestly tried to connect in a more up to date fashion, but the world doesn't want me, certainly not enough to lay its high-speed cable to my door. So I plug in, and as the world outside gets more and more complex, and every site out there gets gigabytes of bells and whistles attached to it, I wait, and I wait.

This post, for example. It took twelve minutes for Blogger to appear on my screen in a form I could use. First it paused for thought, its blue bar stuck four-fifths of the way across the address. It paused while I made coffee, it paused while I let the cat out, and when I tried again, it paused just to let me know it could. Finally, it took me to my sister's site, my sister having been the last person to use Safari. And when I suggested I was not she and it was Mutterings, not gmail, I wanted, it paused some more.

Constipation on dialup.

My web lady tells me that rescuers are just over the horizon, that the program we bought from England, then had to change servers to install, will make my life a thing of ease and beauty. That one day soon I will but click a button and I can post--Lord, pictures? Italics? Indents?--the door to my personal electronic Paradise will glide open with the sound of heavenly choirs.

In the meantime, Blogger will not permit me outside the bounds of this rather dowdy setting. And although I appreciate the opportunity to blog at will, I do rather look forward to the day when I can blossom and post in all dimensions of the e-world.

However, it is the first of the month, and it's been a while since we've done a Q and A. So if you'd like to send me some questions, I'll hoard them, until Blogger permits me access to Mutterings.

***

As for New York, you no doubt have seen the results of the Edgars awards on Thursday night. And on Friday, I had a nice time at the Flatiron Building, where St. Martin's Press first welcomed me back in 1993 and where its Picador imprint will be bringing out the first four Russell books in the fall, in trade paperback with very striking covers. My agent, my daughter and I had lunch with the great Ruth Cavin, editor extraordinaire who has nurtured so many writers into their careers, and who is still going strong despite closing in on the end of her ninth decade on the planet.

Daughter and self crept off to the airport late in the day, sat and read for the extra hours until the flight finally left, and arrived home at 3:45 Saturday morning.

This country is just too damned big for comfort.

Edgars Thursday

The Wednesdays of Edgars week are for the symposium, when people shell out money for a day of panels and an interview with that year’s Grand Master, in this case, my distant (very, very distant) cousin, Stephen King. And although it’s intended for writers new to the business, I often shell out my own ninety dollars in order to listen to my colleagues talk about their experiences, because I always learn something. This year I got a free pass to the other panels because I was on one, so I stayed on to listen.

One of the pleasures of being on a panel is that often you get to meet writers you’d never met before, or if so only briefly. This time the only person I’d worked with before was Jerry Healy, which meant I got to meet Sandra Brown, Joe Finder, and Barry Eisler—I had to come to NY to meet Barry, although he lives maybe fifty miles from me, but on the inland side of the mountain range while I’m on the coast, and although it’s not quite the case that never the twain shall meet, it’s much more likely to meet in NY for Edgars or Anchorage for BoucherCon.

And one of the pleasures of this particular gathering is that I have the leisure to sit and have a chat with various people, which rarely happens in the rush of BoucherCon. SJ and I enjoyed a long breakfast and a walk up to 59th Street Wednesday morning, talking about writing and the publishing business (which are not at all the same thing) and tossing ideas at each other, a great and rare joy.

But I skipped out early on the agents’ and editors’ cocktail party that evening, somehow I don’t have a lot of excess energy this trip. And today it’s been quiet, breakfast with agent and daughter, coffee with friend Les Klinger (World’s Greatest Expert on All Things Sherlockian, and about to take on the title of W. G. E.on A. T. Draculanian), responding to emails from my editor, writing this blog, and putting together my (brief!) remarks for the Edgars dinner tonight.

Tonight you can see the results of the Edgars awards on the MWA web site, or read all about it on Sarah Weinman’s always-excellent blog.

And tomorrow I will try to report on things myself.

In the meantime, you can imagine sixty writers, new and established, print and film, who are trying to ingore the growing jitters in their bones as they consider the awards tonight.

I've been a nominee and I've been a judge, and I have to tell you, the judges find it a whole lot easier to eat their banquet dinners.

Edgars week, 2007

And a big Hey There from La Manzana Grande. My daughter and I are here for the Edgars, the week where the mystery world tells itself that things are cool, and we’re all on the top of the pile, literarily speaking.

So we flew in on Monday, in a United flight out of San Francisco that was configured so the entire flight had enough leg room for a woman of normal height, ie, five foot ten. Very nice.

Tuesday I had breakfast with my editor and publicists at Bantam, three cool and incredibly hard-working ladies. Then the day at leisure, which meant wandering and having a nap and then extricating ourselves from 42nd street (the Pres and various prime ministers seem to have been in town, which meant ten thousand police moving all the taxis on.) to go up to 81st street and the Black Orchid’s annual street party. This is a small bookstore in square footage, which means you get there and see two or three dozen people standing on the street outside a house on 81st, all of them with glasses in their hands. You sidle inside, which takes a while because you have to say hi to everyone, but once there you say hi to Bonnie and Joe, and sign whatever copies of your books they have on hand, and shake hands with the workers who are more like family, and then you sidle back out (which takes a while, as above) and when you come out Lee Child is holding up a corner of the building, so you stand and talk with him a while and then Annette Meyers catches your arm and pulls you down the steps and you talk with her and her husband Marty, and then SJ Rozan in her cool Malcolm X shades needs greeting, and Twist Phelan and and and.

Then you realize that your agent, who is freshly off a plane and whom you promised to feed instantly, has been given nothing more substantial than several glasses of wine, so you pull yourself away from six other fascinating people and take your agent and your daughter next door to the Italian restaurant and feed them, by which time the night is finished and you go to bed, and so to sleep.

And on Wednesday there’s breakfast with SJ and a day of seminars, which means that this seminarian must run and will see you tomorrow.

The joy of lex

So now that I’ve finished with TOUCHSTONE, I’m finished with it, right? I can give it to other people and go sit in the sun eating strawberries and reading all the novels that have come out in the past six months, right?

Well…

Sure. Except it’s Edgars week in New York so I leave tomorrow for five days, and I have a short story badly overdue so I’ll be working on the plane, and by the time I finish the story my editor will have done her read of TOUCHSTONE and have her suggestions for tweaking the ending, and just a little in the beginning, and maybe that middle…

Actually, although I complain as loudly as anyone else about the process of the rewrite, in truth I find it the most satisfying part. If writing were a sport, the first draft would be the downhill slalom, a barely-controlled fall off a mountain while dodging obstacles: equal parts thrill and desperation. Making it to the bottom in one piece is the primary objective, after which you can worry about the time it took.

But the rewrite process is closer to figure skating, where craft comes to the fore: the craft of shaping the routine, the relationship between the moves and the theme, and then going over and over every part, to make sure you’ve hit it absolutely right. Over and over, every part, with a pencil to change that generic verb to a specific one, to sharpen that description to remove the waffle, to delete all those unnecessary phrases that appear when thinking about how to say something gets in the way of saying it. Then when you’ve done all that fine-tuning, you have to stand back and look at the arc of how it hangs together, at which point you realize there’s a little problem with the protagonist’s motivation, so you rip out six chapters and redo them, starting over again with the pencil and the generic verbs and sharpening the waffles. Oh, and watching out for peculiar mixed metaphors.

Whenever I am asked to give a lecture on writing, I generally talk about the art of the rewrite, handing out Before and After examples from my own work. Sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking words, chapter breaks, and punctuation, and reading the two samples aloud generally illustrates why I’ve made certain choices. Other times the rewrite will have changed straight narrative into dialogue, and I’ll spend a while talking about why too long a stretch of one form or the other wearies the reader. And sometimes a two-line scene will have become three or four pages, when I’ve realized that I needed a) to expand my description of a character or setting, b) to add a plot twist, c) to pause for a more leisurely exploration of what’s going on, giving everyone a breather, d) needed to divert for a while into humor, again as a breather.

As I’ve said before, my first drafts are little more than 300 page outlines of the book I am trying to write. Some people put everything into their first drafts including their protagonist’s kitchen sink: the brand, whether it’s stainless steel, porcelain, or fiberglass, its size, even the depth (real cooks like deep sinks, after all, as do parents of small babies, and if God is in the details then surely the more detailed the writing, the closer to divine it is?)

I don’t usually write that kind of first draft (although some chapters of TOUCHSTONE were awfully prolix, as I felt my way through the political situation by having the characters talk, and talk, and talk some more.) Some parts of one of my first drafts are complete, but others give little more than the bones of the story, so that even minimalists like Hemingway (or, as he claimed to be) would find it hard to support any cuts from them. The rewrite adds form and color, individuality and interest. The rewrite crafts the life in the routine.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sweating over your first novel or if you’ve published seventeen novels and made it onto the New York Times list: If you’re not just phoning it in, every book is a new universe. Every book is a learning experience. Every book involves re-inventing the wheel.

Every book, I remind myself that it is so.