Sunday 25 September

Just so you know how very cutting edge this whole blog thing is, I am currently writing this in the kitchen of Adrian Muller, who is sitting five feet away, reading the blogs I posted last night. Hi, Adrian!

The Sunday newspapers are a great source of perverse amusement. Not so much the Kate Moss shock (My God, who would have thought a clean-cut, innocent-faced girl like that even knew what cocaine was?) as the news that armed Navy dolphins are currently cruising the Gulf of Mexico, hunting for divers and wind-surfers. Seems that we have three dozen of these trained Flippers that use toxic dart guns to shoot at possible terrorists swimming near military vessels. Problem is, Katrina let them loose. And maybe they have their toxic dart harnesses on.

Now there’s the beginning of a thriller for you.

Adrian has even found the link so you can read the whole article. Now, with a guy that efficient in charge, shouldn’t you sign up for next year’s Left Coast Crime in Bristol?

Friday 23 September

Yesterday in St Just I came across a small store called Just Cornwall that specializes, as one might imagine, in material from Cornwall. Tapes to learn the Cornish language, necklaces made by local craftsmen, pots and T-shirts and Cornish fudge and coffee cups with the Cornish flag and of course books galore. I am now the owner of books of old photographs, books on Cornish place-names, on archaeology and crafts and folktales, and the complete libretto of a three-play miracle play recently put on in the town of St Just.

Yesterday my daughter had an enforced off-day, something she ate that disagreed with her and allowed a year’s worth of tension to work itself out. So I left her at the very remote cottage we’re renting for a few days, a converted barn that, until the current owners bought it a few years ago, had no vehicular access at all. Now it has a road even worse than any I have lived on, which is really saying something. But it is quiet and lovely, and inhabited by a trio of lady Labs, three generations of affectionate non-guardians.

And of course, no wireless access, hence this is delayed yet more days. I will, however, be able to send it off from the home of Adrian and Jen Muller, in Bristol, where we will be on Saturday. Many of you in the mystery community may know Adrian Muller, who has done interviews with about 95 percent of the writers out there and reviews of the other five percent. His current project is next spring’s Left Coast Crime, a conference generally held on the left coast of the United States, but in 2006 on the left coast of Britain, namely, Bristol. If you’re free and looking for a good time, put it on your calendar for next March. And I’m not just saying that because Adrian is letting me use his wireless access—he puts on a great event. And Britain can be lovely in the early spring.

Today, with my daughter recovered, we drove off in search of old things. Tin mines, standing stones, iron-age cities, and a very nice vegetarian bistro in the town of Cripplesease. We’ve been very lucky with the rain, which fell during the night but cleared in the morning, and had a few hours of fitful sun as we clambered through fields and over stiles, explored churchyards and paused to admire the long view towards the sea.

This is a peninsula, with the sea never far away, in fact or in one’s mind. From here the Spanish Armada was spotted, near here the town of Mousehole (pronounced Mowzel) was burned by those invaders, and both of the Iron Age forts we explored today had their faces towards the sea, just in case. I understand that the theory of Phoenician presence here has lost what acceptance it once had, but I firmly hold to it, and plan on giving it at least mention in the book. (One advantage of writing historical novels is that one is not only allowed to incorporate archaic ideas, one is expected to.)

Saturday we move on, to Bristol, the Mullers, and civilization. But I have to say, when I retire, I’m seriously considering these parts. I will restore a decrepit tin mine, put my study in its upper reaches, reserve my table at the local pub, and write about warm lands.

Wednesday 21st

Today we did the other half of the Heligan story, the Eden Project. I won’t bother to explain, since I’m sure they have a superb web site (which my guide book tells me is at www.edenproject.com), but I can only say that at the end of our time there, my daughter and I agreed that our own university, UC Santa Cruz, might do well to dome over their own quarry, which is used for little more than a handful of college graduation ceremonies on sweltering June days, and create a garden within.

Examples abound there of the free and easy English system of liability—a dangling wire to which, for ten pounds sterling, you can be strapped into a rock-climber’s harness and pushed off across the valley of this one-time china-clay quarry, whizzing madly over the heads of the people below until caught by one of a pair of attendants on the grassed-over roof of the dining hall. I couldn’t think why they bothered issuing helmets to the people on the wire—a fall would kill anyone including the person below. And inside the two biospheres, one dry and the other moist, hazards abound. All part of the fun.

I was interested to see, in the California section of the dry biosphere, our agricultural industry characterized as dependent on poison, pesticides, and illegal immigration. Yes, I suppose, but a little simplistic.

But the place was astounding, if for nothing else than the mere fact that thousands of people visit every day to look at, basically, plants. Kids and old folks alike seemed to be having a grand old time, oohing at the papaya fruit growing overhead and opening the drawers of spices to sniff and touch. My daughter even knows a couple who were coming to the Eden Project for their honeymoon.

England is a great country.

But now we are in Cornwall, which is in many ways closer to Brittany than to England. We are staying in a converted barn out in the middle of the Penwith peninsula, a stone’s throw from Land’s End. Last night we ate in St Just, a delightful town that reminded us strongly of Santa Cruz, but with stone buildings. Art abounds, the folk are laid back, there are women in the streets wearing long skirts and bare feet as they climb out of their Land Rovers, and we even saw a handful of skate-boarders.

I may never come home.

Tuesday 20th September

Back in 1997 or so I wrote a book called (in the UK) THE BIRTH OF A NEW MOON or (in the US) A DARKER PLACE. During the time I was putting it together, I happened to be at Barbara Peters’ Poisoned Pen Books in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Barbara handed me a copy of a book about the rebuilding of a garden in Cornwall. Tim Smit’s THE LOST GARDENS OF HELIGAN recounts how this mad musician almost literally stumbled across an estate that had gone derelict since the Great War, and decided to restore it. We’re not talking about a nice one-acre patch of flower bed, we’re talking country estate--walled-in kitchen gardens and cutting beds, orchards and glass-houses with grapevines and pineapple, rides and lawns and vistas and pools, acres and acres of once-cultivated land left to the wilderness for seventy years.

I needed a remote and evocative estate for the book I was writing, and stole images and ideas from the Heligan project for the place my religious community sets up their sinister shop.

I hadn’t actually been there, however, until today.

They’ve worked on the place for fifteen years now, and it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like when Smit and his friends hacked their way through in the early Nineties. For the purposes of fiction, sometimes imagination is a better spur than hard cold fact. But this is a fabulous place, and one could only wish that the house itself was a part of it, and open to the public. Although again, perhaps imagination is better, picturing Calke Abbey to go with the gardens (Calke being the interior equivalent of an abandoned gardens, a great house gradually abandoned, each room left as it was the last time its door was shut, scattered toys and mouthwatering embroidered bed fittings alike.)

We stayed the night near Mevagissy, following a detour when I clearly remembered having booked a place considerably closer to Penzance and having to backtrack. Mevagissy was probably once a charming town, but between the parking problems and the number of ice-cream shops, it continued the theme of abandoned purpose. And if you ever go there, do not fall for the encouraging “P” sign that points down to the harbor. The only Parking you’ll find there is for residents, and you have to risk a fall in the harbor to find it, threading the car along a track designed for donkeys, with no wall between the tire and the water four feet below.

Many things in this country show the result of no judicial concept of punitive damages. If a city, a store, or a shopping mall can’t be sued for more than the costs involved in replacing a car or medical fees, there’s little incentive to get things fixed and accident-free. I’m not complaining, mind—I’m a great appreciator of the Darwin Awards, and think that a lot of stupid acts should come with capital punishment, to weed out future repetitions. It was merely a comment.

Monday 19th

I suggest you look at the web site for a place in Cornwall called Burgh Island to see where I spent Monday night. Strictly speaking, this is an island, if only at high tide, which today came conveniently toward evening as my daughter and I sat drinking our pints of Devon cider (12 percent alcohol) and watching the causeway disappear a few inches at a time beneath the waves. To make it most exciting, people seem invariably to want either to leave or to come onto the island just as the waters are closing in, so that they scurry to and fro across the increasingly narrow causeway, and finally through the water itself. Even when the land disappears, those in the know are well aware that, for a while anyway, just a few inches under the water is firm sand, and confidently stride out into the foam.

However, for those either wearing insufficient footwear, running later than the intrepid pedestrians, or simply wanting a more dramatic entrance or exit, there exists the a sea tractor. We took one look at it, and decided immediately that the only possible accompaniment to the contraption was the theme from Star Wars, as it belongs to some alien landscape. Maybe on the swampy planet where Luke trains with Yoda. A Rube Goldberg device of immense dignity, chuntering its way across the watery pathway with its burden raised well above the surface, they call it a sea tractor, but one expects it to unfold and change function like the Transformer toys my son used to play with many a year ago, its wheels shifting into arms, the forward motion of its engine giving way to a clamber up the cliffs.

The sea tractor alone is well worth the price of admission.

Sunday 18 September

I am now launching off the map, and will post when my machine comes with range of a signal. Probably when I return to Heathrow on October 1, alas. I will, however, keep a journal of events, even if it can’t be posted regularly, so do not give up on me entirely.

Before we start, there are two things I should mention:

The radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge” airs September 25, 2005
HOUR ONE - “Elementary Holmes”
*Forget the deerstalker cap and the calabash pipe. The real Sherlock Holmes is much hipper than that. One scholar suggests that with his violin, creative spirit, cocaine and costumes, Holmes was the rock star of his day. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we’ll investigate the elementary Sherlock Holmes, from the new annotated edition - to his wife!
Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind (Nan A. Talese)
Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms (Bantam)
Leslie S. Klinger, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: the Short Stories; the Novels (Norton)

And for a photo of Laurie at BoucherCon, see:
http://nycphoto.interactivenyc.com/archives/2005/09/bouchercon_36_c.html
(Apologies—the instructions for creating a link didn’t follow me from California)


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Sunday, 18 September.
Today was a day on the river. Sunday in Oxford, the bells ring, the swans proudly sail, and the tourists ram each other’s boats on the river and do their best to fall in.

A punt is an awkward form of transportation. A rowboat, a canoe, a kayak—all possess a fairly immediate relationship between the effort and the result. But a punt is long and heavy, and the person in charge has to think twenty or thirty feet ahead of the boat itself.

Propulsion works like this: The punter stands in the back, which in Oxford is the low part—in Cambridge, where the river is carefully tended and artificially shallow, one stands on the raised part, a position much scorned by Oxford cognoscenti. The punt pole is a young tree, three and a half or so inches in diameter and twelve or fourteen feet long, preferably of wood, often of aluminium (sic: the British spelling.) One end has a metal cleat of two prongs, to grab the bottom of the river.

So, standing and holding the pole upright and free of the water surface, the punter then lets it drop straight down, at a place slightly in front of his or her feet. When it hits down, the punter leans forward and pushes the boat forward against it, pushing on the pole hand over hand until reaching the end of the pole, at which point the punter either lets go and loses the pole entirely, or hangs onto it and pulls it up in three or four neat jerks until it’s free of the water again. (For a romantic version of how it’s done, see Dorothy Sayers’ GAUDY NIGHT. What she doesn’t mention is how great it is for building abs.)

Sounds easy, right? Except that you also have to steer, using the pole as it pulls behind the boat before it’s jerked back into the air. And avoid ramming the bank or crashing into other boats. And keep the swans from climbing aboard and attacking the passengers. And keeping an eye out for low branches that will thwack the backs of one set of passengers’ heads or poke out the eyes of the forward-facing passengers. And keep the kids from losing a finger when two punts brush together, which happens all the time. And… well, you get the idea.

But it’s great fun, really, especially when you moor the punt against the bank and go for a picnic, coming back to find your boat missing or stove in by yobs.

I probably don’t need to mention that the whole punting thing goes better with a lot of beer.

A London Friday

My daughter tells me that it was Arsenal, not Manchester United, playing soccer football the other night. As I was just off a plane, it might have been the Forty Niners for all I could tell. Apologies to both teams. (But I still don't know who Tun is.)

Thursday in London, it rained. Not exactly a redundant statement, since they’ve been having a warm, dry spell here—or warm and dry for London, anyway. I set off from my hotel up near Hyde Park to meet my new British editor near Oxford Circus (a meeting of roads, not elephants and jugglers) and decided to walk, but the rain was heavier than I had thought, or at any rate, steadier, and by the time I found the place, I was soaked from the knees down. Raincoats just aren’t meant for tall women.

Although the restaurant lights failed about five minutes after we got there, that was the extent of the day’s disasters, and the meeting went well. We talked about plans for next year’s books, paperback and hardback, and generally got to know each other. Allison and Busby is a relatively small British company with a great crime list (I found last night that my friend Harry Keating—HRF to the mystery world—is going to be published with them as well.) They’ve done the last two books of mine here, and seem interesting in continuing our relationship, so all was good.

It wasn’t until Friday that I got to my excuse for coming to London, a trip to the Imperial War Museum. This is a superb place to visit, its focus obviously on Britain’s wars, but the scope of that focus is broad, encompassing women during wartime, a current exhibit on the Holocaust, a fair amount of war-time art, and similar themes. I was there to look at espionage between the wars, and found myself escorted to the upper level reading room, where the extremely helpful and knowledgeable gentleman in charge laid out books and manipulated the computers to find me a reading list. Mostly I copied down titles, which I will see if my university’s research librarians can track down for me, and I also got suggestions for how to find a capable research assistant to do long-distance library fossicking for me.

Dinner was at a nice, familial Italian restaurant with Harry Keating and his wife, the actress Sheila Mitchell, long-time friends who love my daughter as their own. Talk among the four of us ranged from writing to acting to politics, and a grand time was had by all.

When we got back to the hotel, we found the television was playing that movie about vampires with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, fascinatingly awful in all kinds of ways.

And so to bed.

From London town

Well, kids, as I figured, with Laurie in charge of it, my new laptop began to sulk and wouldn’t connect to the world its little tabs told me was out there. All those electronic waves, and nobody to link up with…

When last I wrote, dear diary, I was flinging things in the direction of my suitcase in preparation for a day amongst the natives of Los Angeles. Actually, I suppose very few of them are, strictly speaking, natives, but it’s the sort of place that anyone who has lived there longer than two months is considered more or less native. But I digress.

My intrepid guides to this foreign land are the two good ladies who took me on as a client some years ago, my agents at Cinelit. Everything you think you know about Hollywood agents? Forget it. These women actually read books. Even when they don’t have to for their job.

We fought out way from the airport down Lincoln Boulevard, a land of car dealers and nail salons, to a lovely hotel on the beach at Santa Monica, where we had lunch watching the seagulls and roller bladders skim up and down. Thus fortified, we ran the gauntlet back into the city to see the various people who express an interest in transforming first KEEPING WATCH and then A GRAVE TALENT into films for the small screen. And I have to say, if these project come through, they’ll be in good hands. Everyone in sight had won prizes and worked with fabulous actors, and I kept wondering, “So why are you people talking to me?” But there is little more ephemeral then a project in Hollywood, so I shall say nothing more as to these prospects. If anything firms up with either or both of them, I shall let you know.

I was then taken back to LAX for my evening British Airways flight to London. I went through security, found a lack of restaurants on the other side, and went back out to hunt and gather, ending up at a sushi place for some California Rolls (do they eat California Rolls in Japan??) and green tea. Thus fortified, back through security and hiking down to the far end of the world, to wait for an hour, then another hour, all the while being reassured that the tail winds were so powerful we’d be there early anyway. Since all I wanted to do was sleep, I was not much interested in the arrival, but eventually we were let on, I was given my magic pod in business class (bought with miles, not dollars,) and I went to sleep.

For six hours. I’ve never slept six hours on a plane. Barely had time to watch a movie at the end of it, but I arrived without that horrid, coming-out-of-anesthetic sensation I usually have at the end of a long flight. My stepson met me and took me home for a cup of tea, gathering up the family and going into London to remove my daughter’s accumulated kitchenware, suitcases, and four-foot tall giraffe keyholder. We had dinner in a remarkably noisy Thai pub (the food and owners were Thai, the beer English) with Manchester United trouncing some opponent named “Tun” on the screens overhead. (We were all a MU crew, and no one could tell me whether Tun was Tunbridge Wells or Tunisia. Nor did they care.)

Then, flagging at last, I was dropped out near Hyde Park at the hotel, where I passed again into blissful sleep, unheeding of the cars and sirens outside my window.

The next day, rainy London.

Promotion (III) (the intention...)

Of course, there’s a third third approach to the promotion game: If you don't want to let your publisher do all the arranging and deciding, yet you don't want to just go out and hawk the book all by yourself, you can hire someone to help you.

Independent publicists can be especially effective for a new writer, or for one published by a small house with a small promotion budget, or for someone just interested in going the extra mile. I hired a publicist this year for LOCKED ROOMS, and would like to say a little about it--unfortunately, I have run out of hours before the plane's wheels leave the ground, and so I'll have to return to the subject later. More, as they say, to come...


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That's right, friends, Laurie is packed and heading for the airport this morning. I'll be spending the day in Los Angeles doing the full LaLa thing, Taking Meetings with producers and writers. What, oh what shall I wear?

Then this evening I climb onto my British Airways chariot and end up in London, where I will be having a modicum of fun and, more importantly, doing research for the next book. (No, really, I'm working hard!)

I thought that, as this is the first time I've been blogging at the beginning of a book, I might use the medium to let anyone interested in the slow and convoluted process of building a book follow along. Not that I'll be talking out loud about the precise details of the book--I don't let anyone know what's going on, since I don't usually know myself, and it feels too much like having someone look over my shoulder as I write.

But where I go and what I do in the process of gathering material, the sticking places and reflection, those I'll put down.

For now, I will say that it's a stand-alone, not one of a series. It's set in England, during the Twenties.

The book's name is TOUCHSTONE.

Promotion (II)

The funny thing is, nobody really knows what works when it comes to selling a book. Because everything publicity-wise is done simultaneously with publication, when they do a NY Times ad or a New Yorker crossword puzzle or a country-wide flying banner, there’s no discernible bump in the numbers to show the result of that particular action. Who knows, the book might have sold just as well without the extra event?

In the end, after sixteen books, twelve years of being published, and thirteen book tours, I’ve decided that promoting a book is a bit like parenting: The main thing is showing up. In parenting, the idea of “quality time” is a delusion of busy adults, who imagine that there is any short cut around the quantity of time it takes to raise a kid. In publishing, writers like to imagine that there’s a short cut around the well-worn path to establishing a writer, if only they can find it, or their publisher would let them in on it.

I’m afraid that for the majority of us, those who haven’t been born with a famous name or are personal friends with Oprah or have been dropped into circumstances that catch the imagination of a vast slice of the reading public, there simply are no short cuts. You write a book, the best book you possibly can; you manage to sell it to a real publisher; the book sells enough copies to make your publisher interested in the next one, which they buy, and to which they commit a handful of promotion dollars. That one sells a few more, but you still concentrate on writing the very best book you possibly can.

This isn’t to say there isn’t promotional work to be done by the book’s writer. The first book will benefit by personal, local contact—not a nation-wide tour, not big ads, but you, dropping in to booksellers, particularly the independents, in your area during a slack time of their day, carrying a copy of your book and maybe a nicely printed review or bio or something, and shaking the hands of the manager, the buyer, and anyone else who stands still for you. Friendly, chatty, not in the least pushy, just telling them that you’re local, that you set the book in the area, that you have friends and family there. No need to finish the sentence:"...who will come in and buy it."

You are one of a thousand new writers that manager will come across in the next few months: You can stand out by being obnoxious (“You really need to have some copies of my books up front.”) or by being really nice. Guess which approach will get that manager to look at the flyer you hand her, and which will spin the flyer into the nearest bin without a glance?

Your local independent will generally do you an event, possibly a group signing with other local writers. Your family will show up, your friends will buy a copy, and you shake the hands of everyone you see and graciously introduce yourself, thanking them for coming.

Next year: repeat.

One reader at a time. One bookstore at a time. It's mostly a matter of showing up. Go to your local writers group if you like, particularly if you can volunteer some time there. Go to conferences if you can afford it, shake hands and see how other people do it (both the writing thing and the promotion thing.) Be the best writer you can—and the most dependable. A book a year, year in and year out, lovingly written, agonizingly polished, is what it’s about.

One book at a time, one reader at a time. With determination, with luck, with an unending willingness to learn, your readership grows along with your backlist.

Promotion (I)

Back before the Flood (sounds like a joke; isn’t, not really) there was BoucherCon, with me and 1,999 other denizens of the mystery world scurrying through the halls of the Chicago Sheraton listening to, or participating in, panels and talks on more subjects than you can shake a laptop at.

Remember BoucherCon? No? If you don’t, then clearly you were there, one of the participating writers, who spent four days caught up in the cycle of buying drinks for friends old and new.

But some of us ventured outside the bars, to see the sky and talk with friends. And one of the people I saw was my editor.

Back in March there was a survey through the web site to see if we could figure out 1) Who buys my books? and 2) Why? Well, the results came in the other day, to say that most of my readers are well-educated, fairly high-income women. Which might be either flattering or informative if I didn’t think that most people who answer online surveys are well-educated, fairly high-income women.

So when I asked my editor about the survey, and about promotion in general, I found that, getting right down to it, the publishing world as a whole is every bit as uncertain as this writer about the best way to promote a book.

Take the crossword puzzle that was in the New Yorker earlier this summer (now on my web site, along with the answers, if you haven’t seen it.)

This puzzle was done by Random House as a very cool promotion for LOCKED ROOMS, and had just a ton of entries. It’s an example of how the publishing world continually experiments with promotion—what works, what doesn’t, what is appropriate for this particular writer and this specific book, although it might not work for another? As the person who just writes the thing in the first place, I freely admit that I don’t know how to sell the finished product. I suppose my instincts as a reader are more useful there than as a writer, asking myself why I, personally, am buying this hardback novel rather than that one.

Touring is of course still an active part of the promotion of a book, but even that is being scaled back. There are just so many writers on the road these days, it’s hard to get a big turnout for anyone under the level of Clive Cussler. The value of advertising is debatable, giveaway tschotchkes (key rings and refrigerator magnets) evoke yawns, and even post cards and bookmarks are tossed into the recycling.

Did the crossword puzzle bring in as many new readers as it did entries? Does a page-high ad in the New Yorker, or a quarter-page ad in the NY Times, or a plane flying cross-country dragging a banner across the sky, bring in new writers?

The truth is, no promotional campaign pays for itself, dollar for dollar, in books sold then and there.

So what's a girl to do?

More tomorrow.

More ravings from Laurie

One reader of this blog objected to my use of the word “refugee” in the last post. I did not use the less loaded term “evacuee” precisely because I wanted the emotional punch of the word. It is a shameful thing, to have tens of thousands of homeless and abandoned citizens at loose in the country, dependent on the good will of individuals and organizations because the government has failed and abandoned them.

Why else is the federal government there, but to step in and oversee a situation too big for local government? It is one area in which I am Republican rather than Democrat, in my grudging recognition that there are some things that can’t be left to local authority.

But when a man with clearly inadequate training is chosen to head a demanding federal program--when any number of unprepared men (and yes, a few women) are chosen to head equally demanding programs--apparently on the basis of friendship with the chief executive, the situation is ripe for disaster, and it’s just blown up in their faces.

Unfortunately, it’s also blown up in the faces of the men, women, and children caught in the path of Hurricane Katrina.

Simply put, these public office holders did not do the jobs we paid them to do. And when they failed, they were blithe and glib about the consequences, reminiscing before the cameras about wild student days and anticipating the prospect of sitting on the rebuilt porches of friends’ houses, while a few miles away, old people and infants were dying for lack of food and water.

Why the hell are there no angry Democrats rising out of the muck? Why can the Democratic party not manage to gather up the righteous fury of the nation and give it one clear voice? I want to see someone stand up and say, Enough. I want a clear moral vision to shine out of the filth and humiliation. I want those stinking waters of New Orleans to be used to grow a crop of politicians who care. I want to have a country I can be proud of again.

I want a Jeremiah.

Speaking

Two blogs mention book-related relief for our US refugees: MJRose's blog on September 7th, and Susan McBride in the Lipstick Chronicles, also on September 7. Because of the unfortunate possibility of scams--white collar looting--I can't suggest where to send your money. But if you have a group of refugees in your town, take them a bag of books, especially children's books. Write a check to the Red Cross or to your church, if they're responding. And most of all, don't lose your anger.

If you're reading this, you are by definition among the elite upper crust, as am I. We Americans like to think of ourself as a classless nation, because the walls of class here are more easily breached than in places where class is defined by birth, but the raw facts are currently being shown on CNN and the evening news. Those of us who can afford computers, who have been blessed with the education to make sense of them, who have a clean, dry place in which to sit reading words on a screen, are this world's upper class. As such, we have a responsibility to shelter the poor, and we have failed. Poverty is a condition, not a moral state, and the only thing that keeps any of us above the line is luck.

I am happy to say that my own publisher, Random House, and its corporate head Bertelsmann, are parting with a million dollars. They are also matching employee donations, and sending children's books to shelters. They sent the same monies to the victims of the tsunami. I hope other companies are doing the same.

But I wonder how many of our country's so-called leaders tithe? How many of those self-proclaimed caring Christians habitually write out checks for a generous slice of their income? Tithing is hard--ten percent of what you earn is a cut large enough to feel, no matter the income. That's the idea. Sacrifice is meaningless if it doesn't hurt.

But the funny thing is, it also heals. Offering something important to the poor, or to the gods, or to God, returns it to the giver. And holding on to anger, nursing it and aiming it where it might do some good, also heals.

Enough. This country, this people, is greater than what is coming out of DC. The shame of their comments, even those of Barbara Bush, a woman I had thought relatively sensible, humiliates us all in the eyes of the world, in our own eyes.

Enough. I am a Christian. I am an American. These people do not speak for me.

What I did over Labor Day Weekend

BoucherCon is always a somewhat otherworldly experience, with a couple thousand mystery fans tripping over each other for four days and continually coming around the corner and seeing a familiar face, a thing that happens about once every ten years in the rural area where I live. This year’s conference was odder than usual, because the other conference going on at the Chicago Sheraton was the St Vincent de Paul society, often in the next room. The name badges were oddly similar, from a distance, so you found yourself studying a group of five or ten smiling individuals coming at you and wondering which they were. The men were easier to guess, because there aren’t a whole lot of mystery fans who dress in polyester slacks and striped polo shirts, but the women were less of a sure thing. The only people I would have bet on were the monk (theirs) and the guy in the kilt (ours).

I always begin the conference with the best of intentions, marking up my printout of the panels so I know what I’d like to go hear—based mostly on participants, rarely on the subject. A lot of writers don’t even try to make panels, but I like to hear friends speak, or sometimes to hear people I don’t know but whose work I enjoy.

Or that’s the original idea, anyway, except that things tend to go south fast, and on my way to a panel I’ll see a friend and go to coffee instead. (I drink a lot of coffee at BoucherCon.) Or I’ll realize I haven’t had lunch and it’s three in the afternoon so I buy a sandwich and take it outside, only to get waylaid by a couple of booksellers and dragged into the bookroom for an hour or two of gossip.

The few panels I did get to were well run, by which I mean, the moderator actually moderated instead of dominating the entire hour, and seemed to have a) read the people on the panel and b) thought about the questions s/he was posing. I heard about a couple of nightmare panels, the sort of experience that seems to drag on for painful hours, but saw none.

My own panel was great. Dana Stabenow moderated, on the topic of how to keep a series fresh, with Charlene Harris, Gillian Roberts, and Barbara Seranella (who looked physically frail after her liver transplant earlier this summer, but unflagging in spirit—she handed out onions with the label, Thanks, but I’ll keep the liver. Black humor, BoucherCon style.)

I saw my editor a couple of times, for a talk about THE ART OF DETECTION and later a dinner with publishers, publicists, and other writers. The next night a bunch of us had a gorgeous meal at an open-air Greek restaurant followed by a walk through town, ending up at Millennium Park, packed with kids playing in the high-tech fountain. I had breakfast every morning with Dana, a good friend who lives too far away, a hugely restorative hour on the hotel’s riverside terrace with Margaret Maron and her husband, two of the world’s Good People, and a snatched half hour with SJ Rozan as we were both getting ready to leave. I managed brief chats with a dozen others, briefer hugs and greetings with a couple dozen more. And in all this, I even managed to raise a chunk of cash for the conference’s chosen charity, by having a character name auctioned off. I don’t know that I would have paid what the two ladies did for their friend’s birthday present, but I was relieved when the name turned out to be easy to incorporate.

So, I am back home, the cats are beginning to leave off with the cold shoulder, and I can begin to think about England in two weeks. If you’d like to check out the action at BoucherCon, go to Sarah Weinman’s blog and go through her references. And next year, you might like to join in.