Sightings

A couple of notes on LRK sightings. I'll be in Chicago on September 27, on my way to Madison. And for Chris passing through SF, I will be dropping by to sign stock at that Borders on the afternoon of the 1st, along with most of the other bookstores in SF, if you want something signed.

And thanks to all of you for not letting slip spoilers to the book's ending.

LRK Googles away

If you Google, oh, say “lesbian detective,” or “Sherlock Holmes,” or “Kate Martinelli,” or a bunch of similar search words, look at what appears on the links to the right. Some of them are just me, but some of them can win you a hardcover copy of The Art of Detection.

(I had to have all this explained to me, in small words. LRK is just such a techie.)

TAoD day

Happy ART OF DETECTION day!

The publication day for a new book is a time of tension for a writer. (Although come to think of it, when ISN’T a time of tension for a writer?) Yes, the PW, Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal reviews are in, and positive, but now the newspapers wait in the wings, pens sharpened. And there’s the question of numbers—will devout Russell fans spurn this book because it has Kate in it? Will Martinelli readers scorn to buy it because it has Holmes in it? Will I be flamed by Sherlockians, because Holmes speaks in it? Or will the book simply fall into a black hole and never be heard from again, causing my publisher to curse my name and cancel my contract so that I have to live in my car with my mother, my husband, and my two cats? (The kids have their own cars.)

This is my baby, whom I’ve lived with since September, 2004. I’ve labored over it, fallen in love with it, hated it, despaired over it, sweated and chuckled and obsessed over it, written and rewritten and changed and polished, turned loose and snatched back and perfected and wondered over. It was finally given a name, after long discussion and the rejection of a hundred possibilities, and then cover art came and the baby had a face and a name. The page proofs left my desk in October, and theoretically THE ART OF DETECTION was finished, but even then I found goofs and blew up over the wrong font used in the Holmes typescript section and fielded typo queries from the proofreaders and early readers of the ARC.

And then it shipped, and landed in the stockrooms of bookstores around the country. And today the booksellers have unpacked them and displayed them on the shelves, and patrons walking by the New Books shelves will spot the cover, and…

Thank you all for your kind words this past year, and I hope you absolutely love the book.

Laboring away

Not a lot of work being done chez King the last few days, although a lot of labor. Memorial Day weekend is one of the two social high points on the family calendar (the other being Thanksgiving) which means friends-and-relations from as far as Portland flying, driving, and crawling in (our driveway is really, really steep). Which means a flurry of tidying and scrubbing and shopping, and of course this always manages to coincide with major non-writing projects such as the two-day residence of a team of gardeners starting at the top and working their way down, and a major clear-out of a storage shed. And in the corners and gaps hauling out the rewrite for Touchstone and trying to remember what I was doing.

So you’ll hear from me again when the dust settles next week and the last airport run has been done—which will more or less coincide with the publication of The Art of Detection on Tuesday.

Events will begin Thursday, and in June I’ll be at--
1st: San Mateo, CA
2nd: Menlo Park, CA
3rd: Capitola, CA
5th: Lexington, KY
6th: Nashville, TN
7th: Los Angeles, CA
8th: Tempe AZ
And an event with Leslie Klinger: Scottsdale, AZ
9th: Mesquite and Gilbert, AZ
12th: Seattle, WA
13th: San Francisco, Berkeley, CA
14th: Corte Madera, CA
23rd: Half Moon Bay, CA
24th: Santa Cruz, CA

For details, check out the Events page of the web site.

Then in September: England and Italy. More on that later, but if you’re free from September 20th to 23rd, take a look at the
The Women's Fiction Festival in Matera, Italy.

Casting pods

There are two audio podcasts out there to do with my recent adventures in the Artist of the Year trade. First, my KUSP radio interview with the always excellent Rick Kleffel, posted on his Agony column (and I’ll just put the address here, since many of you have problems with my links):

http://trashotron.com/agony/news/2006/05-22-06.htm#KingLaurieR

And on Saturday afternoon, I participated in a very interesting (to me, anyway) panel with James Houston and Morton Marcus, again moderated by Rick Kleffel (What can I say? The man is good.) That podcast link is:

http://trashotron.com/agony/news/2006/05-22-06.htm#052506

The panel discussion will be edited down and broadcast on KQED radio on June 1st’s Talk of the Bay.

Let me know what you think of these.

New stuff

We’ve done quite a few changes to the web site recently—take a look at it. You might especially enjoy the new Kate Martinelli’s World page. Let us know what you think.

Post traumatic post

So, children, what have we learned by Saturday’s efforts?

I learned that I can write through the panic. It’s nice to know that I still have the skill to zero in on what I’m doing and let the outside world fade. I could do this when I was first starting as a writer, when I would take my pad and pen, propping my artist’s clipboard against the wheel of the Volvo while my kids were at soccer practice or piano lessons. I’ve written during the five weeks and three days that my mother had plaster to her armpit on both wrists and needed my help every hour at least, which meant I had to turn the flow on and off both fast and often. I’ve written with construction projects going on around me, Skil saws and radios playing. And now I’ve written in an office with people dropping in and out to say “It’s going really well” and “You’ve got to go down and see, they’re so quiet it feels like church.”

There are many kinds of distraction, and now I’ve had that one.

I’ve learned that I can, not exactly turn off the editor, but I can put him into a box and ignore him. What I wrote on Saturday (which will remain up on the Santa Cruz Parks Department site for a while) is simply a first draft, the writer feeling her way into a story. It’s jerky, clumsy, directionless, and on the edge of bad, but it’s there, and I can work with it.

I’m hoping that by the end of June, I will have both completed and rewritten the story and will post both versions on my web site.

And I’m hoping that, more than mere curiosity, the finished project might be an interesting teaching tool, for would-be writers.

So, what did you think, those of you who watched it live? And more, what do you think, those of you who just read the story-to-date?

Is this of interest? Was it worth the effort, not only mine but the enormous effort of Kathy de Wild, who organized it all, and Michael, Maitreya, and Andrew, who got it running and kept it there?

[I’ll have more to say about the panel discussion with Jim Houston, Morton Marcus, and myself, but that’s a later post.]

I’d appreciate some feedback, suggestions, comments—not so much about the story, since I don’t know that you can say much about a rough first except, do finish it, but for the process itself.

And to everyone out there—thanks for your kindness and support leading up to this. It was appreciated.

What time is it?

A note about the time of Saturday's event.

It begins at 11:00 Pacific Time, but yes, we're on Daylight Savings now. It might be simplest to ring your operator and ask what time it is in CA. Or maybe someone could post a means of looking up the time online?

Writer's Improv, live

As I'm sure you know by now, unless you've just stumbled on this site, I am scheduled to do an event as my performance to celebrate being named my county's Artist of the Year. That event will be a writer's improv, when online viewers can watch the live writing of a story eventually intended to go into a collection edited by Dana Stabenow.

On Saturday, May 20, at (please note time change) eleven o’clock Pacific Standard Time, anyone wishing to see what LRK is up to has two options. The first takes you to a live video of the story being written—in other words, you see exactly what’s on my screen, taking into account a minor time lapse. That one will be at:

http://www.scparks.com/improv/PRC_Live.asx

If, however, you’d rather sleep in that morning, or if you forget and want to see how it went, you have an alternative on which you can scroll back and see the earlier portions of the short story being written. That one will stay up for a while, then later we’ll shift it to the LRK web site. Its location on Saturday will be:

http://www.scparks.com/improv/improvlive.html

The folks who put this all together suggest you note that the live view (video) of the writing will require Windows Media Player 9 or newer. So you have two days to go buy a new computer for this event.

Also, remember that if you’re watching the HTML page, you will need to refresh it periodically.

I’ll receive my story prompts on Saturday morning, in seven areas: first line of the story, name of a Middle School, characteristics of an imaginary video game, etc. I’ll then let them ferment in my mind for a few hours, so that when I sit down with my laptop in a very pleasant room at the Simpkin Swim Center (Parks Department hdq) in Santa Cruz, the entire story will be laid out before me, right? And I’ll just type smoothly with nary a stumble or hesitation for two solid hours, right? With three-quarters of the story to show at the end of the time, right?

Oh sure. It’s just as likely you’ll see not a thing, just a few abortive words, quickly deleted.

When the kind tech gents, Michael and Maitreya, were setting me up the other day, they offered to include an audio feed, I guess so that dedicated LRK readers could hear their beloved author cursing and shouting irritably for coffee. I declined the audio, so it’ll be okay if your young children are in the room while you’re watching.

I hope you enjoy this. There’s going to be a Q&A at the end of it, but it’s only set up for actual live and present people. Maybe if you’d like to post questions and comments here after you’ve watched, I can answer some of those online as well.

The whole point of this exercise (there is a point, really, beyond the daredevil factor) is to demonstrate the writing process, so students and beginning writers can witness, first-hand as it were, the laborious voyage from original idea to finished story. I hope to get the story actually completed by the end of June, but eventually I’ll post it on the web site, alongside the first draft that I produce this Saturday.

I hope we all have fun with this, and maybe learn something.

(Yeah, like: never volunteer to do something live.)

Yours,
Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year, Laurie R. King

Icy fingers

Am I scared? I’m hearing the question almost daily now, and frankly, I wasn’t until people started asking me.

On May 20th I go online and write, for all the public to laugh at. Having been named my county’s Artist of the Year, it seemed to me I had to give back, and this is what I came up with: let them see just what a writer does, stumbles and all.

Except that stumbling is fine in the privacy of your own study, with the delete key at hand—in the study, to paraphrase the old movie trailer, there’s no one to hear you swear. But I’m doing this under a spotlight, metaphorically at least, and if I think about it too much, my fingers are going to freeze up.

Now, I compartmentalize really well. I schedule surgery and don't freak out about it until that very morning. I seize a project and go with it and don’t worry too much about what’s waiting for me in the wings. But it’s hard not to think about what’s happening on the 20th when in the past week I’ve done a clean sweep of the local media, talking to both dailies, both weeklies, the local NPR station, and the community television guy, and every one of them has asked, “Are you getting nervous?”

Thanks a lot, I wasn’t until you kept putting it in my face. How am I supposed to concentrate on this very tricky rewrite I’ve just picked up again?

I’ll be doing a radio interview on KUSP Friday morning with Rick Kleffel, and I’ll let you know where he archives it all.
And if you’d like to contribute prompts for me to wrap the story around on Saturday, you can download the (deep breath) Santa Cruz County Parks Department’s Artist of the year Writer’s Improv form from their home page

The story and project are especially geared towards middle school kids, so if you have any of those around the place, especially if they’re interested in writing, you might let them know I’m looking for topics.

The "P" Word

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to talk to the local (Northern California) Mystery Writers of America group about, among other things, promotion.

Now, as I said to Cara Black when she asked me, I’m probably not the person to talk to for recommendations about promotion. Joe Konrath, sure; Laurie King, not so much. But she asked and she’s a friend, so sure.

And speaking of Joe, I’d planned on writing this post when I came across his on the same topic. Take a look at his detailed working-out of the things a writer should do by way of promotion. Which is not to say that I agree with anything there, just that it’s interesting to know how a marketer looks at the question.

Basically, what I had to say to the MWA group was, there’s nothing you can do in the way of self-promotion that’s cost effective. Conferences, tours, hiring a publicist, printing bookmarks, keeping blogs and web sites (figuring minimum wage costs for those, as doing it yourself, the dollar outgo is limited)—dollar for dollar, you cannot earn back what you put out.

So does that mean none of it is worthwhile? Not at all. I’d agree with Joe, it’s all worthwhile, it’s just that you can’t count costs.

I have to say first that, I’m sorry, but all the promotion in the world can’t make a success out of bad writing. This isn’t to say that bad writing can’t be successful (no names named, here) but when a book does skyrocket into a year on the NYT list, it’s always due to some weird phenomenon of popularity we might as well just call luck. The deliberate slog of self-promotion might sell half a dozen copies, but the ignition of an unexpected bestseller is a burning match dropped from the heavens.

So is all self-promotion pointless? Absolutely not. Authors, like individual books, sell by word of mouth, and every little bit helps.

But that’s the point: Every little bit helps. A friendly chat with a bookseller helps them remember your name out of the pile. Making an effort to meet and thank your publisher’s local sales reps puts you on their map, just as an evening spent in the bar at BoucherCon puts you on the radar of a dozen other writers.

But, you say, all of these are things I would do anyway; isn’t there something extra I should do, some mailer I should be sending, some skill I should master?

Well, yes. Not the mailer, but the skill.

Learn to work a cocktail party.

Most of us are writers because we don’t thrive in the hurly-burly of real life. We like our solitary nests, we spend most of our time wrapped in fantasy, when clever repartee is there for the asking, heroines never have spinach on their teeth, and hemlines never sag. Coming out, finding ourselves surrounded by people who believe themselves a) more attractive and b) more important than we are is a cold shock.

Working a cocktail party is a matter of sliding into this world as if it is our own. Walking up to perfect strangers—worse, to strangers who are already in conversation with other strangers—is like being the new kid in a class halfway through the year, except with alcohol. And you need to be confident without seeming pushy, friendly and not obsequious, witty without…well, you get the idea. You have to behave as if you were comfortable there, when in fact all you want to do is crawl under the banquet table until all the legs around you go home.

It’s a skill, like writing a pitch letter or weeding out those repetitive words that creep into a page, and the only way to learn it is to do it. Your local library having a get-together? Go along. A gallery having an opening for an artist you never heard of? The ideal occasion. BoucherCon coming up? There’s two thousand people who don’t give a crap about you, ripe for becoming your teacher.

And while you’re in the BoucherCon bar, glance under the tables around you. It’s amazing who you’ll see there, waiting for the legs to go home.

More with the questions, yet

Two questions I missed, and one latecomer:
Q: Nikki wanted to know, Ok I caught the Lord Peter reference, and I know you said no more questions (I can wait 'til June if I must, but this has been bothering me for AGES!!), but how do Holmes and Russell know Lord Peter??

A: You think I know? And you think I’d ever be able to find out, since I can’t write Lord Peter without permission? But London is a small city, smaller yet in the years after the Great War, and surely such eminent minds wouldn’t have overlooked each other.

Q: And Ruth asks, As a criminology and criminal justice student I'm curious as to whether you've ever studied any criminological theory? Having studied feminist criminology this year and then re-read Night Work, I found myself looking at it from a slightly different angle, which made for an interesting read.

A: Theory? No. I like the idea of feminist criminology, but couldn’t begin to guess what it involved.

Q: Meredith asks, in the blog weeks ago you spoke about the "quickening" of the character of Belinda Birdsong and said we would hear more. Might some of this be mentioned in TAOD?

A: Yes, definitely: BB is a central character

Il Secreto di Eva

Sorry to go off the air for a week, my computers—both of them—were having a holiday. Not sure if it was related to the previous posts, but I suppose all machines are imports, even Macs, so perhaps it was.

And since we're in that vein, my local independent (very independent) bookseller at Crossroads Books has some foreign translations of various LRK books that he’ll send to any one who orders a copy of the upcoming THE ART OF DETECTION from him. He has ten German editions (various titles), four Dutch, four French, and a Portuguese, plus an assortment of ARCs, if those interest you. His address is crbkswat@sbcglobal.net (The address on the web site’s home page has a typo, leaving off the “c” at the beginning, sorry about that.) if you want to add a foreign LRK to your collection. There’s no charge for the book, just whatever additional postage comes for mailing it along with THE ART OF DETECTION. And I’m happy to sign both of them, if you want.

Support your local independent bookstore—or mine, for that matter.

(And what do you suppose is the book to which the above title is attached? Typos likely, as I'm working from memory and sans coffee.)

May q & a II

Okay, enough questions for May, save any others for June (or July?)

Q: Erika says, I'm sure you've been asked this multiple times...I recently finished "A Grave Talent" - did you have any artist's work in mind when you created the character of Vaun Adams? I imagined her work to be as that of a Northwestern Frida Kahlo. Am I off-track?

A: I think of Vaun’s work as being Bouguereau with soul. More representational than Kahlo, the beauty of Vaun’s images are stressed several times, and are the reason she isn’t taken seriously by all critics.

Q: Meredith wants to know, (adding, I'm going to do this as non-spoilingly as I can muster)--There was this character in Locked Rooms that you told us we would hear more about, but in LOCK it didn't happen (& I asked you about it).

A: Um, sorry, I need another clue.

Q: L Crampton notes, I'm reading my delighted way through your work, Laurie, and am pretty sure I spotted Lord Peter Wimsey in A Letter of Mary?? Was that him? I love your interweaving of time and place and contemporary (to the characters) personalities, whether in fact or fiction. Delicious.

A: That was indeed Lord Peter, although since my editor didn’t catch the reference and I was completely wet behind the ears when it came to the minutiae of literary theft, nobody thought to ask permission from the people who hold the Dorothy Sayers copyrights. I had a stern letter demanding that I remove the reference, although when I pointed out that 1) Actually, the appearance was minor and could have been any of a thousand junior officers wounded in the War, 2) changing it would necessitate an explanatory note on the back of the title page saying why the paperback didn’t correspond with the hardback, and 3) I would be happy to offer them a payment and my personal thanks, they graciously backed down.

However, they didn’t take it so far as to ask me to write a Sayers sequel…

And an anonymous answer to my query yesterday, about researching the difference between the US and UK systems of university: As a reference librarian, I can't pass up a reference question .... Re: info on UK Universities: I went to www.ox.ac.uk and got the Oxford home page. Clicked on FAQ, History and Structure, and went to question on Relationship between colleges and the university. I learned a lot -- hadn't realized what I didn't know. It doesn't answer the part of the question re: going down/being sent down though. One could also go to Cambridge's site: I got into Oxford's originally by googling Oxford University, so one could also google (www.google.com) Cambridge University.

And finally, Q: Does anyone have any information about when the next Mary Russell book is coming out? Thanks.

A: THE ART OF DETECTION contains faint traces of Russell, visible to the cognoscenti, and major signs of her detecting spouse. In 2007, TOUCHSTONE will be out, set near Russell in time and place, but without direct reference to her (although some of the women in it she would like a great deal.) But in 2008, we will see Russell and Holmes returning home to Britain, and possibly find out then about “Holmes’ lovely, lost son.”

May q & a

Q from Wimindance: Here’s a question, in the second Martinelli you refer to the Morningstar murders but don't give many details, are we going to hear more about this case? It seems Kate did a lot of growing through that case; is there a short story out there somewhere I've not seen?

A: No short story, no hidden and pseudonymous novel. The Morningstar case clearly did not go well, and unless I make it a part of a larger story, tying it in to a later case, I can’t see much appeal in the case by itself. Which doesn’t automatically negate it, just that I haven’t figured out how, if at all, to use it. Not everything one mentions in a novel has to be fully explained. Cf. Conan Doyle’s references to such cases as that of the giant rat of Sumatra….


Q: Myninki asks, What do you think about books piracy over the Internet?

A: I’m not sure if this question refers to the internet sale of unauthorized books, or a possibility of printing off whole books based on the Google reference site? In either case, as a person with a wholehearted appreciation for the precarious nature of a writer’s finances, I think it hardly fair to rob the writer of a percentage of his or her royalties in order to save a few dollars. Theft seems harmless when the only victim is a large corporation, but from my perspective, my pocket gets picked as well.


Q: Whitmangirl asks, Do you have any advice about where a confused American can go to learn about the English university system? I read lots of books set in England and always feel a bit out of my depth when they start talking about the various colleges and being sent down and all that.

A: Surely there must be web sites out there on just this topic? Anyone have any to suggest? If so, I can add this topic to the Mary Russell page next time I’m doing renovations.

Q: Elisa wants to know, Did you foresee the plot for Locked Rooms when you created Russell's history in Beekeeper? Or did you just have to hammer it into shape?

A: Both. I knew the vague outlines, or rather, I knew some specific elements of the events, but not the full picture, and certainly not the (how to say this without a spoiler?) the outcome of her investigation into her past. It would have made life simpler if I had clearly drawn out what happened, since with LOCKED ROOMS I had to sit down and try to fit the bits and pieces I’d already given into the narrative I had in mind, which wasn’t always easy. A similar thing happened with writing O JERUSALEM after BEEKEEPER, since I had only the most general ideas of what went on during those weeks. And then later when I tried to fit Ali and Mahmoud into JUSTICE HALL…. Oy.

(I’m just waiting for the corrections to pour in when people find problems with THE ART OF DETECTION and its predecessors.)

Busting our red, white, and blue buttons

Even before coffee the following morning, the thrill of all those millions of faces remains with me--glossy black and pasty white and all the colors in between, marching in the sun across this country and having such a blast at it. Men and women from Senegal or Ireland, families from Bangladesh and Iran, waving their multiplicity of flags and speaking their marvelous texture of accents, people who love, simply love being here. I’m still choked up thinking of them all, and honestly, I think that instead of holding up that torch and peering into the night, Liberty ought to be spreading out her arms to welcome them all in. Borders are obsolete, racial prejudice is a slap in God’s face, and today, just for a little while, I’m just overjoyed to be an American.

And now it’s May, so if you have any questions for Laurie, send ‘em in. I can’t promise I’ll do an Ask Laurie next month, since the book will be out and the tour barreling in on me like an express train, so here’s your chance.


And by the way, those of you who have been following the trials of the Italian writer Mario Spezi as publicized by his co-author Doug Preston will be interested to see this from Sarah Weinman’s blog:

In an email statement, Preston explained the situation: "[On Saturday morning], unexpectedly, an independent three-judge panel annulled the imprisonment of the Italian journalist Mario Spezi and ordered his immediate release. He was set free unconditionally, not even under house arrest. The judges clearly did not think very highly of the evidence--or rather the lack thereof--that Judge Mignini and Chief Inspector Giuttari had presented against Spezi. While Spezi's legal problems are far from over, at least he is finally out of the grim Capanne Prison.

My friends in Italy tell me that the enormous publicity surrounding the case, in Italy and in America, was an important reason why the panel took the unusual step of overruling a fellow judge and annulling Mignini's order of imprisonment."

Solidarity

It being the first of the month, normally I’d say you could send in questions for me to answer. However, in solidarity with my immigrant brothers and sisters who are out on the streets today protesting the government’s latest delusion, this descendant of immigrants suggests that we do without her labors today, and begin May’s Ask Laurie tomorrow.

Instead, go rent the film “A Day Without a Mexican” and dream about the November elections.