Your attention please...

Ahem.

The New and Improved Laurie King site is now up, including two new pages: Mary Russell's World, on which can be found All Things Russell, and a press page, still in progress but with two pretty cool documents related to LOCKED ROOMS

Please let me know how you like the changes.

Musings and mutterings

A theological musing to start your day.

Are human beings ephemeral works of art? Installations, shall we say, along the lines of an Andy Goldsworthy daisy-chain of leaves drifting in a stream? Or is our soul the equivalent of a bronze sculpture, guaranteed to be around until the earth falls into the sun?

One argument for the immortality of the human soul is that nature doesn’t waste things, and that considering all the effort of shaping a human being’s inner life, it is inconceivable that it should simply dissipate when the motion of electrons in the brain ceases.

But what if we are Andy Goldsworthy daisy-chains of leaves, drifting in a stream? What if our ephemeral nature is precisely the point?

Odd neighbors

A recent temporary lapse in the demands of my time, due to sending a first draft off to my editor and having to wait for a reply, drove me to my shelves. Not to read, but to see if I could do something about the double waist-high stack of books waiting to be shelved, about a third of which came in for the Best First Edgar award I judged last year.

So I ruthlessly culled, ending up with eight or ten grocery bags ready for the library, and a richness of virgin space on the shelves. Which soon was filled but never mind, I have my floor back.

In the process of filing, however, I amused myself in noticing patterns (these are, I should mention, shelves devoted exclusively to crime fiction.) Why, for example, are the Cs so action-filled? Lee Child and Liza Cody are followed by Michael Connelly and John Connolly, them come Patricia Cornwell and Robert Crais—one embraces Edmund Crispin as a calm and academic cuckoo in a nest built of razor wire.

Mostly, though, what struck me was the occasional odd juxtaposition of neighbors the alphabet makes for. Some are nicely placed, such as Anna Quindlen’s BLACK AND BLUE next to Ian Rankin’s BLACK AND BLUE (this one is, I admit, cheating, since they first came together accidentally and should have been separated when I organized their books chronologically, but I couldn’t bear to pull them apart.) Andrew Taylor is surely very comfortable next to Josephine Tey, the two of them leaning together and murmuring dry and witty English jokes, and I imagine that, after an initial bristling mistrust, Sara Paretsky and Robert Parker would eventually find a certain pleasure in trading pithy remarks, as might Dashiell Hammett and Joseph Hansen, Margery Allingham and Margaret Atwood. Hill and Hillerman would quickly become Reg and Tony, two old men with different accents but a similar abiding interest in the workings of the human heart.

Then there are the unlikely clans: the Burkes, Alafair, James and Jan, surpassed only by the Smiths: April, Ian, Julie, Martin Cruz, and Sarah--imagine the family reunions.

Michael Dibdin and Peter Dickinson might even find something in common, for all their differences, but at some pairings, the mind can only boggle. James McClure’s SONG DOG next to Sharon McCrumb’s ballad series? And Nevada Barr with…Dave Barry?

Probably a good thing my editor works so fast, and I can get back to what I should be doing.

Hardback sows' ears

I should have known you guys would get it right.

Yes, the inserted material in THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE was the section where the senator’s daughter is kidnapped in Wales.

The book, from the beginning, was unavoidably episodic, a series of linked short stories. How else to do a book about a young woman learning a craft and building a life? But the thing that ties it together as a novel, without giving away anything here for those of you who haven’t read it, is the Welsh section and how it relates to what follows.

That is how I write a book. Often, thankfully, the structure is there in the first draft, merely (!) needing a good polish. But occasionally the first draft itself is lacking, and I need to paw around it for a while to see why. Perhaps if I had ever taken courses in how to do this writing thing, I might not find myself stumbling around in the dark so much as I do. But I didn’t, so I do.

This is where a good editor comes in. An editor is a writer’s primary reader, and ignoring his or, more often, her criticism is almost always a mistake. Not that they are always right; they are just righter about judgments than the person who has produced the words. If an editor doesn’t get it, if an editor misses something or finds a sequence illogical, odds are nine out of ten readers will, too.

So I had That Conversation with my own editor yesterday, and we pinned down between us what was wrong with the first draft. Or not wrong, but simply inadequate. And then with the assignment of an impossible task, she blithely signs off and leaves me to my task, of making a sow’s ear into a delicately embroidered and aesthetically pleasing silken coin-purse.

However, since the book itself had its roots in an utter impossibility, and when she first trailed the faint odor of it across my nose eight months ago (saying wistfully, Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow tie together Kate Martinelli and Mary Russell?) my first reaction was a firm and unequivocal, No, it simply wouldn’t work--since, as I say, the book has been a highly unlikely enterprise since before I signed the contract, well, hey, impossible seems to be my middle name.

Now pardon me while I pour my coffee and get back to the transformation business.

How long is too short?

There’s an interesting discussion over at a blog called Crime Fiction Dossier that is somewhat related to the last post here, and in fact, I was a little surprised that no one brought its topic up in a comment. Maybe my readers all think I’m so perfect that they don’t even think of me in terms of writing to command? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the question I had rather expected to see was, Who says the book needs to be longer?

And it’s true, most contracts now specify the word count, and the trend is for super-sized books. I had to laugh at the last Parker novel, which is, if you look at it closely, maybe 45,000 words, but it’s got large type, huge margins, and it’s printed on really, really thick paper. It looks like a grown-up book, but if Parker didn’t have a name already, he’d be lucky to find someone willing to print it as a novella. Maigret-sized books just don't cut it in today's market.

And it’s also true that many of the big books are just bloated with filler, and when you get to the end you really wish some editor had been allowed her scalpel, or machete.

In this discussion of size-versus-quality, there is an inevitable comparison between today’s behemoths and the slim classics of the Golden Age. Even Sayers’ later novels are short by today’s standards. However, if you look at those classics, many of them are not exactly complex. Thrillers aside, the traditional mystery almost never expanded to include personal considerations; now, the characters’ lives outside the mystery are generally used to enrich the story, interweaving with the investigation and being affected by it in turn.

I have never been told that I have to meet my word count. I suppose that if my publishers were looking for a reason to get rid of me, they could zero in on that and use the fine print to give me the boot, but practically speaking, word count is used to indicate the size of the story, not the size of the book. A 100,000 word novel is apt to have a wider scope, a complexity that a 60,000 word book does not; the bigger number allows the writer to take the time to explore—the characters, the case, the world in which the book is set. A bigger book has the potential to be substantial in a way a slim book does not.

Which is not, repeat NOT, to say that a big book is automatically more substantial, or even better. The difference in Stephen King’s THE STAND between its originally published form (the size of two books) and in its truly huge 450-pages-restored form (the size of three) is not one of complexity, just of size. And to compare that book with, say, any of Josephine Tey’s little masterpieces is to put one of those bizarre, hand-sized giant-oyster pearls next to a cut and polished diamond.

Maybe Sandra’s current book needs to be a tight, slim, ripped little volume, or maybe it needs to relax and spread just a little: I don’t know. My own writing tends to be too tight for comfort on the first go-round, my first drafts being a sort of guide rather than an actual book. If I followed the traditional Hemingwayesque dictum of cutting one word in three (instead of adding one in three, which my rewrites generally do) I’d have a nice, clean, unreadable synopsis. My own current project needs additions, needs the sort of enrichment that comes with pages.

Not a lot of pages, and I like to believe that if I had a book whose nature resisted expansion, Bantam would publish it regardless of size. It is enormously reassuring to know without a doubt that, at the very least, my editor would fight for the book’s right to be small.

But she might lose. It’s a commercial business with a not very large profit margin, and (as the Parker books show) what it boils down to is that people hesitate at shelling out $25 for a novella. And since a book costs about the same to put on the shelf no matter the number of pages, cutting it to $18 can mean losing money.

None of us much want to be the cause of our publishers losing money.

Reinventing the wheel

You would think that after, God, is it sixteen novels? the seventeenth would go pretty much like the others. First draft in three or four months, a sort of expanded outline (since I am constitutionally incapable of doing an outline beforehand) that tells me what the book is supposed to look like; giving it to my editor to have her tell me that yes, the places I think it lacking are indeed the places it is lacking; four or five months rewriting what I put down in order to have it actually look like what I envision it to be; another editorial round (I am blessed with a Real Editor); a last revision; off it goes to line edit and copy-edit; the really last revision on that poor cross-marked and Post-It’ed thing; off to type-setter; a final really absolutely last niggling set of changes (until the bound galleys come out and then my peppering Longsuffering Editor with uncaught typos and unnoticed chronological anomalies so that I begin to feel like that character in Sayers' GAUDY NIGHT, whose book must be ripped from her hands and given to the typesetters; after al of which I’m so sick unto death of the book I never want to think of it again, so I go on tour and get to talk about it nonstop for a month.

That, in theory, is how it goes. So why with this book, to be the fifth in the Martinelli series, am I going back to the way I wrote THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE eighteen (heavens!) years ago?

That, too, had an impossibly short first draft to which I went back and added an entire chunk, transforming it into a novel not just in length, but stylistically. (I’m not going to tell which it is; let’s see if you can guess which section I’m talking about—and no fair posting it as a comment if you’ve already heard me tell this before.) And this Martinelli V (nameless, yet again, sigh) is an impossibly short first draft of barely 300 pages, to which I am going to be adding a large chunk. As it stands, it is two novellas wrapping around each other, so what I have to decide is, do I make it three novellas and count on the third to tie everything together, or do I work enriching threads through the larger of the two, as I had intended to in the first place but got bored or ran out of threads or something?

None of this makes a lot of sense to someone who hasn’t seen the manuscript, I know, but I just thought that any of you struggling with a first novel would like to know that even someone who had been through the process sixteen times before just keeps sitting there and reinventing her wheel.

Although why the hell I should imagine anyone wants to know that it doesn't get any easier, I can't think. Maybe this is just one of those ways writers try to discourage possible competitors in the field, and the truth is, anyone who has published a few novels discovers the secret method that flings a book out in polished form in three months.

Yes, that must be it.

Fearfully and wonderfully made...

The San Francisco Chronicle recently informed me that the blood of autistic kids (autism being a diagnosis currently skyrocketing around the Bay Area) tends to show an inadequate level of immunity. The article I read made no philosophical reflection on that fact, made no attempt to point out a psychological parallel of the autistic person’s lack of immunity to the merciless stimulation of the world around them, but the parallel is there.

However, it connects—somewhat indirectly, I know, but this is a blog, not a graduate essay (hi, Zoe! now get back to work) —with a book I read recently by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, called ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION. Grandin is an autistic woman who has become a renowned expert in animal behavior. The book is fascinating not simply because of the insight into the way animals think, but because she is a person who treats animals and human beings with precisely the same attitude. A born Buddhist.

Anyway, she talks (page 106) about the hormone oxytocin. Nursing mothers know oxytocin, or its manufactured substitute syntocin, as the hormone that stimulates the let-down of milk. Without the let-down, the infant would starve, but it is also a pleasurable experience for the mother, since it does double duty as one of the hormones of sexuality.

Grandin writes, “Oxytocin is essential to social memory: oxytocin is the hormone that lets animals remember each other.” Patting a dog raises the oxytocin level in both dog and person; it ties together the two species for their mutual benefit. Oxytocin also kicks in a physiological boost for the act of motherhood, and for the state of monogamy.

God, truly, is in the details.

correction

The site referred to in yesterday's post should be found here, or so Sarah tells me. Sorry if I led you all astray.

Edgar in a fluff

This entry is in response to a discussion going on over in Sarah Weinman’s excellent Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, regarding the Edgars awards and privacy. Sarah’s remarks were sparked by a DorothyL posting from one of last year’s judges (Tony Fennelly) regarding her strong objections to the book that won, and that led to a discussion of whether or not Ms F. had the right to air her objections in a more or less public forum, and then to the question of whether that year’s other nominees should know what was going on, and then to whether or not the comments (by this time numbering in the fifties) might not get back into a discussion of the topic and not a discussion of the discussion… Highly entertaining, all of it, and I won’t mind if you go read it before coming home here. Anyway…

I was (as careful readers of this blog may remember) chair of one of the other Edgars committees this past year, and was rather taken aback by the whole discussion, mostly because I couldn't remember anyone telling me to keep mum forever and ever. Since I also chaired it several years ago, and even wrote an article for the late lamented The Armchair Detective on the judging process, you can understand my concern--senior moments lurk over the horizon, but I'd thought I was safe for a while.

But it turns out, to my relief, that the nondisclosure agreement is a new development for 2005. Looking over the MWA guidelines we judges were sent last year, I find the following:


Committee members should use discretion and not comment on the judging process of their committee while they are judges.
Results of interim ballots, plus any discussion among committee members should not be shared outside the committee. No committee member should answer questions or make comments directly to an author, except to confirm receipt of the work. After the balloting, Committee Chairs should impress upon each member the need for absolute secrecy concerning the winner, so that all nominees may enjoy their full two months in the spotlight with their publishers and public.

Note: "While they are judges" And “their full two months.” The MWA concern here was clearly that the winner not be leaked prematurely, not that the process never, ever be discussed in some Masonic pledge-unto-death. However, now one is sworn to secrecy, so I suppose my long-ago article will be, almost literally, the last word. The last legal word, anyway—although one has to wonder how this new policy of silence will be enforced. Will MWA instigate a yearly Brute Squad? Harlan Coben and Gary Phillips, say, whose job is to stand around the bars in mystery conventions listening for indiscretions, prepared to pick the offending judge up and dunk him or her in the fountain? (You know, I’ll bet that’s ONE committee MWA won’t have trouble filling.)

However, to come back to earth for a moment, what concerns me is this:


THE VOTING PROCESS
A minimum of two rounds of voting is required. [details of the voting process cut here]... When a winner is clear, the Chair should poll the committee to determine that each is, if not happy with the result, at least not actively unhappy. If there is any such instance, the Committee Chair should discuss it with the General Awards Chair who will discuss it with the Executive Vice President, if necessary.


In other words, there is a mechanism in place for lodging objections. I do not know if Ms Fennelly used this option and was overruled, or if she failed to use it. In either case, I would strongly assert that she should have had every right to request that her name simply be removed from the committee and the voting process. Whether it’s an award or a book blurb, a writer must be able to stand by anything with his or her name on it.

However, I beg everyone to keep in mind that, although the Edgar is a tremendous honor among ourselves, that we love the awards ceremony, dutifully read all the nominees, note the award on a book’s cover, and those of us lucky enough to have one count it among the things we would grab first in a fire, an Edgar is not (alas) a guarantee of success in the bigger publishing world, and losing is no condemnation to failure. The truth is, publishers look at the award with a polite but jaundiced eye, and a glance at the list of past winners and nominees is sobering.

I agree that it is impolitic of Ms Fennelly to blurt her objections aloud, but then I was raised in the "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothin' at all" school, and the article I did for TAD was cautious about naming names. Maybe that’s why no gag rule was slapped down after it came out? I really must learn to be more disruptive.

Finally, concerning the question of talking to the losers. I personally was overjoyed to hear that my very quirky third book, TO PLAY THE FOOL, was sixth on the list of five back in 1995. Not even a scroll for the wall, but a source of pleasure nonetheless. If that insider’s knowledge comes to me in the future, I suppose I’ll be morally obligated to pick up the ex-judge and look for the nearest fountain.

Meeting Mr Smird

I am reading (or perhaps rereading, parts of it sound very familiar) Anne Fadiman’s EX LIBRIS (subtitled, Confessions of a Common Reader, although from page one it is clear that this reader is anything but common.) It is, obviously, about her passion for books, about such topics as the difference between a courtly book lover (who uses a bookmark) and a carnal book lover (who argues on, corrects, dog-ears, and even rips to pieces the pages,) the urge to read a book or author at the place most connected with said book or author, and the collecting habits of devout sesquipedalians.

She has, as you might guess, a chapter on compulsive proof-reading, the sorts of things about which the book EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES was written. Examples of typos from ads and Holy Writ (Thou shalt commit adultery) are scattered joyously through the pages, including the thoughtful and musical, “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the Big Band Theory.”

When I was first getting started in this writing business—before it was a business for me, in fact, back when it was still just an illicit pleasure (illicit because it cost the family both time and money)—and my typing skills were so bad the pages were more Wite Out than ink (remember typewriters?) I used to have my manuscripts typed by a friend. Of course my handwriting was never great, and because when I was first starting I never really thought of the pages as being for anyone’s eyes but my own, I didn’t bother making trying to make them more legible.

But still. One of the high points of that period was in the typescript of THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE. The book, for those of you who need a reminder or who stumbled on this blog thinking it belonged to the other Laurie King, is about one Mary Russell, who in the spring of 1915, dressed in her father’s hand-me-downs, is walking the downs of England’s southern coastland when she literally stumbles across the retired detective Sherlock Holmes. They trade insults for a while, as strangers are apt to do, challenge each other to a duel of wits, and then when the bored and distracted Holmes refers to Mary as “he” she blows up and declare with adolescent outrage, “It’s a good thing you did retire, if that’s all that’s left of the great detective’s mind,” and triumphantly whips off her concealing hat to reveal a pair of long blonde braids. Score one for Mary Russell, her first victory in a precious few.

Except that when the typescript came back to me, it had been vastly improved by Gretchen’s misreading of my scrawl on the page. Russell’s withering response, her full-throated adolescent battle-cry, now reached the climactic declaration: “It’s a good thing you did retire, if that’s all that’s left of the great detective Smird!”

The Triumph of Will (and Lorenzo and Luis and...)

I love WIRED magazine. I don’t understand half the articles in it, they might as well be written in KiSwahili, but when they're not about the latest development in Microwhizz software or the revolutionary twist in the Frimastan that allows bites to chew at an unprecedented 5000 chomps per second, they almost always have a fascinating take on them.

The April issue, for example. There’s the inevitable article about the new movie Sin City, a graphic novel come to the screen. (I’ve seen it, and it’s as full of violence, adolescent macho posturing, and melodramatic angst as you might expect.) There are several articles (and a LOT of ads) concerning Neat Things to Buy, a nice piece on China, one on hybrid cars, and so on.

Then there’s the one called La Vida Robot. It’s about the sort of robot-building contest a lot of high schools have, letting the geeks have a field day assembling a machine that does some designated task. In this case, the task was to build a robot that could do an underwater survey, and it was sponsored by NASA and the Office of Naval Research.

Most of the schools that entered the contest—indeed, most of the schools that have any kind of robotics engineering program at all—stand in pretty fancy places, and their students come from homes with fancy incomes. But the story is about a high school in Phoenix that is pretty much the opposite of fancy. It’s also mostly Hispanic.

Four kids make up this high school’s robotics team: Lorenzo Santillan, Christian Arcega, Oscar Vazquez, and Luis Aranda. They are all illegal immigrants out of Mexico. They live in the most basic of shelters, and may not have electricity, much less a home computer. They’ve had to learn English along with all the other skills of their school life. And Phoenix being very far from any coast, I imagine they’d never seen the ocean until they went to Santa Barbara for the robotics contest—they tested their robot in the public pool.

And these kids took on MIT. And they won. Read the article, I promise your eyes won’t be dry at the end of it.

The four brilliant underwater engineers from West Phoenix are now trying to figure out how they can afford to go to college.

AND........
Some housekeeping.
For the reader who asked about an old woman diarist, she's probably thinking of May Sarton. Enjoy.
And yes, Nevada Barr is certainly a real person, and that is indeed her name. She is one of the first of her generation to be given weird names by proto-hippie parents.
As to the male nominees question, we've talked recently about the topic, and will return to it, I promise.
Finally, yes, I will be doing a tour for Locked Rooms: Phoenix, Houston, Seattle, San Diego, LA, and a lot in the Bay Area. We'll post details on the site later this month, and include the schedule in the newsletter.