Sweating the details

Wrestling with the PostIts still on the rewrite, it's like the stage of getting the manuscript back from my editor and finding one small notation in the margin that throws an entire sub-plot into question. So with my own notes, three or four words will represent two long days of sweating the details.

I really, really must learn how to outline a novel. If anyone has learned how to do this (as opposed to doing it because it's natural to them) could they please let me know how? I could turn out two or three books a year if I didn't have to rewrite.


***
I wrote a bit ago about Cuba, and for those interested in the ongoing ban of things Cuban, you might look at the site of a humanitarian group, whose attempt at giving a collection of computer equipment to Cuban school kids made the administration unhappy. Right, clearly the IFCO's stuff was meant for the Castro regime to use in bringing down the evil West.

And in the comments to the comic Novel post, FeltHat asked about about proposed legislation in Britain that would make it illegal to joke about god. I hadn't heard about the proposal, but if it is true, it's nothing new--for many years in Britain, sacrilege was a felony. Dorothy Sayers' radio play about Jesus was hugely radical for the time, since it marked the first broadcast of Jesus as an object of entertainment. (Assuming that listeners found the play entertaining, which is stretching the meaning of the word.) Odd, considering the generally blase attitude Brits take about the whole religion thing. The business of dragging God into political speeches and victories in sporting events leaves them, by and large, hugely puzzled. And rightly so.

Which the Wodehouse?

Okay, I'm scribbling down recommendations as fast as I can. You guys are great.

And for those of you who caught the Wodehouse miscredit, good for you. Those words are probably best attributed to Cole Porter, although Wodehouse did work on the musical and added a London verse when the production opened there. It's not too clear just where Wodehouse's contribution began and ended. Full points.

The comic novel

First, let me just say (not directly related to the above title, although her books can be funny, and she more so) that Barbara Seranella seems to be doing a lot better. Her body seems to be accepting the second liver, and although she's got a long recovery ahead, the worst of the white-knuckles phase may be passing. Don't expect to see her at BoucherCon in Chicago, however. Ever Superwoman has her limits.

***

Reading Robert McCrum's recent biography of PG Wodehouse, I was reminded that this brilliant if personally odd creator of such inimitable individuals as Jeeves and Psmith also wrote some of the catchiest songs of the Thirties—

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
Now heaven knows,
Anything goes.

(Now you're going to have that bouncy little tune in your head all day, aren't you? Sorry.)

The touch necessary for comic genius is deft and undefinable. Like pornography, I know it when I see it; also like pornography, it varies wildly with the eye of the individual beholder. How else to explain the popularity of Jasper Fforde, that most heavy-handed of modern comedic writers? And I've been working my way through Mark Helprin's FREDDY AND FREDERICKA, in which a literary writer adopts the same techniques. A bumbling Prince of Whales who stumbles naked out of Buckingham Palace into a patch of tar and seizes a homeless man's (can you guess it?) yes, feather pillow, which explodes and... His ardent lover, the countess Boylinghotte. A manor named Moncay House, a dog with the Chinese name of Pha-Kew (after whom the aforementioned bumbling P of W has to run, shouting the name loudly), an Australian newspaper magnate named Digeridoo....

You get the picture. The funniest part of the book so far is the way in which the manifold problems the P of W and his wife Diana--er, I mean Fredericka--have when they are dropped into New Jersey, naked and without resources, magically fade as soon as they get into the hands of the African American community. 200 pages in.

It isn't even that slapstick humor isn't funny, because it is--if you haven't read Alexander McCall Smith's trilogy about the linguistics professor, you should. The first one, PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS, is quite amusing, in a lovely dry British way. But there is a scene in the second one that has never failed to evoke startled gurgles followed by outright belly laughs and even tears of laughter from the people I've given the book to. And I've given it to a lot of readers with widely varying senses of humor and degrees of sensitivity. Read the first book, to lay the groundwork, but please don't miss the second, THE FINER POINTS OF SAUSAGE DOGS.

The bludgeon approach to humor, in which the reader can see the blow coming, as if in slow motion, and has to stand in place waiting for it to fall, somehow doesn't do it for me. Dry and understated incongruities, startling slaps to the back of the head, yes--I aim for those in the Russell books, although by and large reviewers don't seem to grasp that they're meant to be funny books, so I don't bring it up. Readers in general often get it, although they're still startled to find me amusing behind a microphone. Perhaps it's just that anyone with a vaguely Edwardian hairstyle and a background in theology isn't expected to be able to make jokes?

And the logical follow-up comment here would be, If you can't makes jokes about God, what can you make jokes about? However, in the current era, more humorless than the Eisenhowerian, God is off limits.

Anyway. Does anyone out there have a particular funny book they'd like to recommend?

Free stuff

I don't know if everyone who reads this blog also gets the newsletter, but in case you are one who does not, we're giving away stuff over there. The Recorded Books folk have been very generous with tapes and CDs of LOCKED ROOMS, CALIFIA'S DAUGHTERS, THE GAME, and KEEPING WATCH, so we'll give some of thm away on the 10th of August. However, you'll need to sign up for the LRK newsletter, which has just gone out. Or you can email webmaven@laurierking.com to sign up. Last chance at free stuff for a while.
***
Tomorrow: the comic novel. Or maybe: the cockroach.
We'll see how I feel in the morning.

Writing on Post Its

So I came home on Thursday, a week ago, from sending my daughter back to London (one kid back from a battlefield, the other out, oh dear) and spent the next three days either sleeping or pushing back the tide of what Lao Tse called the Ten Thousand Things: accumulated mail (one lost check didn’t surface until mid-week), laundry, stocking the pantry with something resembling foodstuffs, that sort of thing. The main offender is the pool table that sits at my elbow as I type on this computer, which when the kids are not home turns into a worktable, i.e., a flat spot for junk: cartons of LOCKED ROOMS headed for contest winners and the good people on the acknowledgments page, leftover fortune cookies from the launch waiting to be sent off to my publicist, all the empty boxes, padded envelopes, wide tape, felt pens, and scissors necessary to pack and ship away those books and cookies, flyers destined for the recycling bin—you get the picture. The pool table is not exactly clear now (a stack of Recorded Books tapes and CDs for the upcoming giveaway--the newsletter about this goes out soon--currently bears pride of place) but the green cover is slowly coming back into view.

By Monday, having managed, through full nights and naps, an average of nine and a half hours of sleep in three consecutive 24 hour periods, I could feel my brain beginning to twitch back into life. Just as the sure sign of exhaustion for me is losing words, now my vocabulary was beginning to unfurl again, and I could sense that, sometime in the near future, I might be able to formulate a series of complete and intelligible sentences.

I picked up the manuscript and began to read through it, passively at first, but by Tuesday my pencil was making its scratches on the pages, and on Wednesday I could see its problems.

Finally, yesterday was Post It day. I go through inches of Post Its, mostly those four-inch square models that resemble lined yellow pads. As I write, and especially as I go through with an eye to the rewrite, I make notes:
Dog? [meaning, is Mutton, Roz and Maj’s dog from NIGHT WORK, too old to still be around?]
Leder too like Ledbetter—change [meaning I’ve given two characters names that are too similar on the page, so Lt. Leder will become something else. I do this a lot with names, a real bugbear for me]
Note PG’s cell phone missing [a plot device]

As these thoughts have occurred to me and I’ve written them down, I post them first on the window next to me, and then when I can no longer see the UPS man coming up the drive, I take them down and stick them in two overlapping rows on appropriate sheets of paper, each concentrating on some aspect of the book. By the time Thursday arrived, I had half a dozen sheets, each of which held twenty or so notes, and I began moving the notes to their place in the story--"Dog?" ended up on a page with a barbecue at Kate's house. Of course, some of the Post Its had three or four notes on them, or else the notation applied to several places in the text, which means that by the time I finished transferring those little yellow sheets onto the manuscript (What am I talking about? I never finish transferring them, I always have a handful that I just abandon to their fate, churlishly reminding me of unmade corrections years later.) most every page of the 300+ page document had its yellow square. Some now have a thick accumulation, indicating a chapter that will need a thorough reworking, an din two places I have added a piece of paper with its flurry of Post Its, where a new chapter will grow.

Of course, today I have friends from Indiana coming for the day, and tomorrow I’m on a panel at Books by the Bay. But Sunday, I’m set for actually writing. Now that my Post Its have told me where.

...addendum to below...

...and for those of you in foreign lands, just send me the SAE (self-addressed envelope) and I'll provide the stamp. Those international postage thingumies are far too much of a hassle.

Bookplates and global warming

For those of you who couldn't get to an event or already have a book and don't want to order a second from my local guy (see my web site's home page if you're interested in ordering from him) what about a book plate? I've made this offer on the newsletter, but if you aren't getting that, let me repeat that I have LOCKED ROOMS book plates (with the cover of the book on them) that I'll sign for you if you send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope at P.O. Box 1152, Freedom CA, 95019. I also have a few for THE GAME left, if you'd like.

It's five thirty in the morning, in July, in California, and rain is falling. Yet we are told that global warming is a theory that needs more research. Why is it so difficult to grasp that we human beings can have an effect on this planet? That something big can yet be fragile? Our poor children, who will have to pick their way past all these old folk with their heads firmly planted in the sand as they go and try to patch the globe together.

Actually, we're having a very interesting cycle of events in this part of the world. I live on a piece of hillside in coastal California that straddles the transition between oak forest and redwood, with the redwoods mostly further up the creek in the dampness, and the live oaks ("live" meaning they're evergreen) covering the hills. Last year we had a terrible time with yellow jackets (wasps, to you Brits) all up and down the West Coast. My sister and her husband got stung any number of times when they were out running, we gave up eating outside by the beginning of July, we bought one of those pop-up netting tents and were phobic about slamming shut doors. I thought about screening in part of the deck, which would have been ugly as well as making the house dark, but put it off because I knew it might be temporary.

And sure enough, this year the creatures are few and far between. The difference? Well, I noticed that the number of oak-leaf caterpillars was also much lower this year--sometimes the pool is awash with them in early spring, the ground covered with their droppings, but this year, no. I think the yellow jackets eat them. I think the caterpillar population reached a height last summer, the yellow jackets built to take care of them, and this year equilibrium has been reached.

Here endeth the lesson.

Barbara Seranella

I know Barbara Seranella from conferences, mostly—that’s how mystery writers usually meet, since in our daily life we tend to be barnacles, working our own particular patch of the sea bed. Our paths had come together briefly a few times, but not until the Monterey Left Coast Crime were we on assigned to the same panel.

Barbara, Dana Stabenow, and I, on a panel ostensibly discussing first lines. I know Dana well, but I hadn’t read one of Barbara’s books in a while so I bought her most recent, and wondered why I’d let my reading of her lapse. Real characters, a zing of dialogue, clever setting—solid books, and great fun.

I really shouldn’t say the panel was “ostensibly” on first lines because we did cover a great deal of solid content, and in fact it turned out to be a hour of fast-paced one-liners, genial insults, raunchy comments, and laughter. I doubt the tape caught half of it. It was an unlikely but brilliant match, and the only reason I was thinking of going to Bouchercon in Chicago this Labor Day was because Dana, Barbara, and I were set for another panel, and it's not often you get the chance to play with two razor-witted, funny, creative women like them.

Barbara is currently in the hospital fighting for her life, a new liver in place--her second transplant, as her body rejected the first it was given. And yes, I’ve seen the recent study that says anonymous prayer has no power of healing, but still.

Barbara, we’re with you.

Armor on or off?

For those of you who have been following the blog for a while, you may remember I wrote that my son was being deployed to Iraq. Well, he’s back in the States for a while, somewhat leathery from the climate but intact, and although he’ll be going back in a few months, for the time being the anxiety level has fallen to the standard maternal throb in the back of the head.

Which makes the dream I had this morning interesting. I’m talking to my son, and break off to tell him that I have to get going, but first I need to retrieve something hidden in the back of my closet. The closet, perhaps inevitably, is filled with books (not actually—I keep my books on shelves when I can) and I have to pull them out and stack them up to reach behind them for—the AK47 I have been issued. I hand him the gun because I know it will interest him (the AK47 was the Soviet equivalent of our M16 in Vietnam, and like the M16 is still in use in much of the world), then I give him a kiss and tell him to wish me well, and doesn’t he think it’s funny that his Mom is now off to basic training?

The odd thing is, I’ve been thinking lately about the lines, “Let him not boast who puts his armor on/As he who puts it off, the battle done” in the context of the tour, as if I’m finished the hard part of the year and can now rest on my laurels. In fact, however, I am only buckling the rewrite armor onto me, a much tougher proposition than being wined and dined while talking to people about that fascinating subject, me.

Apparently my subconscious thinks otherwise.

Viva Cubanas!

My last solo event for LOCKED ROOMS was Tuesday, followed by forty-eight hours of rushing about getting a daughter onto a plane, and then a rare eight-hour night's sleep. And now I face a stretch of seven weeks of all Martinelli, all the time.

We ought to have a name for the book any time now, the emails fly fast and furious between the coasts as I propose and my editor disposes, then we reverse the process for a while, just so we both share the varieties of irritation. Honestly, my children were easier. Hell, buying a house was easier. Don't be too surprised if you see a book with a slash in the title, her name for the thing on one side and mine on the other.

I had a very nice packet from a reader in Cuba, who sent me a set of postcards from the Hemingway house museum through a friend in Spain. For those of you who don't know, US travel to and from Cuba is severely restricted, limited to educational groups and service organizations, with enormous penalties should some college student decide to catch a flight out of Cancun just to take a look (happened to a friend's son--do not try this.) The ban seems ever more ridiculous, petty even, given the current state of international politics, but heaven forbid that I should be able to answer a reader there directly. (Post to Cuba isn't exactly banned, it just tends to get lost along the way.) In any case, Dear Reader, your English is just fine, mucho mehor que mi espanol, en que yo me necessita un dicconario para hablar como una nina de tres anos. (Sorry I can't add a tilde to that last word, I think you know what I mean.)

And for those of you who have asked specific questions here over the past month, well, maybe you should ask again. Touring is a black hole, and anything that happens during that time tends to remain there.

Glad to be back, and thanks to all of you who showed up at events, and those of you who bought copies of the book. I've just picked up the mail from my PO Box, so if you've requested a bookplate, they'll be on their way soon.

...spoiler?

...and to answer brackman 1066, and all that--the excerpt on which the Locked Rooms section of the crossword is based is from the very beginning of the book, so don't worry about spoilers.

The Writing Life

Seems to me I am an odd choice to speak to a writer’s conference. I’ve never taken so much as a class in writing, not since checking off the English requirement in junior college, and frankly don’t even know the right technical terms for a lot of what I do.

However, the 75 or so folk who paid good money for the Corte Madera mystery conference this last weekend seemed happy enough to receive my meanderings about historical fiction and characterization in general, and LOCKED ROOMS in particular. And I got the chance to have leisurely conversations with friends I rarely see, from Lee Child to Cara Black, meet new writers (and would-be writers), and to have dinner at a house with one of the most gorgeous views of San Francisco Bay that you could imagine, the complete panorama from downtown to Bridge to Marin hills.

So what did I say? Simple rules:

To be a writer, write. And read.

Write your passion, not what you think sells. Write for yourself, not for others out there somewhere. If you love it, chances are better that others will, too.

Give yourself a break. Writing is hard, and if you feel like taking a day off, take a day off. If you end up taking so many days off that you start talking about writer’s block, look at why—I generally find that when clearing the tool shed and cleaning the oven seem like a good ideas, it’s because the back of my head knows there’s a problem looming, and it’s digging in its heels at being painted into a corner.

And a related topic to unanticipated problems: If you’re an outliner, if your mind is happy to visualize the bones and then clothe them in flesh, by all means draw up an outline and write around it. But there are many of us whose minds just don’t function that way, who can’t see where we’re going until we’re there. And the only way of knowing which you are is to try it.

Simple rules, perhaps obvious rules. Still, it must be confusing for students to hear me say that I spend longer in the rewrite than the first draft, then listen to Lee Child saying that he doesn’t think rewrites are valuable because they just end up robbing the story of its vitality.

Worse, both he and I are right. For us.

I suppose that the most valuable thing I can say to all you writers out there is: Good luck.

The Thursday blat

Okay, for those of you who haven’t done the New Yorker's Laurie King/Mary Russell crossword, you really should. Not only is it a way of telling them (them being my publisher) that you’re paying attention to LRK’s books, but you can actually win a mystery cruise trip that sounds pretty fun. I mean, what’s not to like about leaving to driving to a man in a uniform for five full days, sitting in a deck chair and catching up on your stack of reading? Anyway, since you’ve probably missed buying the magazine itself, you can copy it from the New Yorker site. The link is here. If that doesn’t seem to work let me know and I’ll put up another.

The ladies over at the blog called Lipstick Chronicles (that is, http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com) are having a grand time hashing out the male/female question as it applies to crime writing. Laura Lippman’s been the guest the last two days, and a couple of masculine types will be brought in to lend balance (although I know Harlan too well to fall for his Hard-Boiled act. The guy’s a dad, with a sheepdog, yet. He writes in coffee houses, and even his baddest villains can’t bring themselves to curse beyond “Damn”. See what happens when you tower over six feet? People think you’re tough.)

Where was I? Oh yes, sorry, the six synapses of my brain that have survived The Tour thus far ceased firing for a minute. I’m off today to the mystery writing conference in Corte Madera, for which I shall have to pull together said synapses to present a keynote address tonight. Maybe I’ll try the same method that worked so well at the launch, and get the audience drunk.

I am sure that those of you who have persisted with this on-the-road blog are sick of the details, as am I. Life will return to something resembling normality after Tuesday, when at long last I open the first draft again and see what kind of mess THAT is in.

But my idea was to give you some kind of idea of the life of an author on book tour, and I think I’ve managed that.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Gross aliens and other entertainments

The interview I did with Kacey Kowars is available on his site, for those of you just dying to hear the dulcet tones of Laurie R. King. And if anyone out there saw the television spot Saturday morning or hears the radio bit today, let me know what you think.

I’ve had an entire forty-eight hours at home, leaving only to go to lunch and a movie with my daughter. Unfortunately, we decided to do the Fourth of July thing and see The War of the Worlds, which was so abysmal we then came home and fed Independence Day into the tape player to take the taste of it out of our minds. Why does Hollywood persist in the idea that they don’t actually need a writer for a script? The problem, of course, is trying to convert the original movie into an action-adventure vehicle for that Scientologist gentleman (and, will anyone look at that standard staring expression of Cruise’s quite the same way after the Lauer interview?) WotW was a scary story, but basically there’s nothing for a hero to do except stay alive, and keep his kids alive, until the viruses do their thing. Anticlimax doesn’t begin to describe it, in this case, and I’m not even going to apologize for giving away the end because honestly, it’s not worth the investment to get in the door of the theater.

However, the Fourth is over, and I’m on the road again. Today to Santa Rosa, and I’ll overnight in SF because I have a noontime event there. My Abyssinian cat may never speak to me again when this tour is over.

home. sort of.

Home, sweet home. I had breakfast with my movie agent, who assured me all sorts of things were on the brink of happening, then joined up again with Peerless Ken the escort, who took me to sign at three or four places on the way to Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks. Of course, by the time we ended at 2:00, the holiday traffic had begun, and we got to the airport a shade after the one hour arrival. Security was slow, and when I got to the gate I discovered it wasn't a gate but a shuttle, and only winsome angst and exquisite politeness got the shuttle out of the bay and the driver calling ahead to let them know I was on my way.

Traffic home was blessedly light, I came in the door and made myself a triple-scrambled egg on toast (water only since a waffle at 9:00) then greeted daughter, husband, cat, and mother, in that order.

And tomorrow I have to leave at 6:30 in the morning to do a five minute live television spot in San Francisco--at nine on KRON channel 4, for any of you who are up at that hour.

But after that, I have two days off, to sit and stare at the walls.

Thanks for keeping me company on this mad dash across the countryside, I trust I've made some of you reconsider the pull of a writing career?

La La Land

The launch party pictures are up, accessed through a link on the home page or from the Locked Rooms page. Sorry you weren’t there?

The trip along the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles ought to be sold as a tourist trip, it’s such an adventure in Californiana. Long beaches decorated with neoprene-clad surfers, beach huts here and there constructed out of driftwod and palm branches, the palms themselves, long and short, smooth and shaggy. And at either end, classic rainway stations, with colorful tile and high ceilings. The one in San Diego has been restored to its original 1915 splendor—plus the notice that the terminal has wireless connection. Sometimes modern life is most satisfying.

So I had a nice relaxing train trip, three hours rocking along in comfort on the tracks as opposed to two and a half hours fighting into an airport and back or two and a bit hours on the road. California really ought to try this mass transit stuff.

Once in Los Angeles I was met by peerless escort Ken Wilson, who knows everyone and everything in the city, and has the knack of keeping a weary author on tas and in good cheer. We paused for a bite with Les Klinger, author of the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, with whom I hope to do some sort of event when volume three is published this fall. Noon was an event at the Mystery Bookstore, people dropping in and chatting while I signed their books. We then went down to tape a television interview with Connie Martinson, which is broadcast on a lot of cable channels including UCTV. We then got to the hotel at quarter to four, I ran another shirt under the iron and called in a sandwich order from room service, and at four Suzanne Gibson and Warren James came to my room to tape an online interview for their program www.hour25online.com (sorry, can’t do a link from here) We had to cut it short because Ken was waiting for me downstairs, so I swallowed the sandwich and a quick coffee and left for two drop-ins, one of them at my old friend and long-time supporter Barry Martin at Book ‘Em in Pasadena, the other for Mystery and Imagination bookstore. We were running late, and we were late for the event at Vromans, but the hundred or so in the audience didn’t seem too upset. I talked and they asked questions, and Meredith from this blog brought some great pictures from the San Francisco launch last week. Meredith is also going to be at the Corte Madera conference next week, so you may get a report on that, too.

Nine thirty Ken dropped me off at the hotel again, and I hope to have an actual night’s sleep (yes! I did) before meeting my Hollywood agent for breakfast.

One advantage of all this is, writers then don’t complain at long hours bent over a laptop.