Once again into the fray

Life after a tour returns slowly to normal. The teetering stack of mail diminishes, those letters from readers that have been sitting, read but unanswered, since before the Edgars in April down to the last two (until the next trip to the post office box…), the cat taken to the vet and the fifty-seven urgent phone calls that didn’t get made beforehand checked off.

So there’s the rewrite, 358 nice tidy pages sitting beside a great, hulking, completely unorganized pile of notes. The villain’s name not villainous enough, change to something that hisses (don’t you love computers, that can do this without WiteOut everywhere and curses bistering the air?) Bring in said villain earlier, make him THERE. And what about the three—no, four—settings for the book, how better to use them? Look up the use of British titles, how the daughters of dukes are addressed. Find your notes on the weather for the spring of 1926.

I finally got my hands back on the rewrite on Saturday, and I’ve been working flat out since then (it now being Wednesday morning) and I think I may have the first 20 pages more or less how I want them.

(With luck, the middle of the book may go faster.)

One of the things I often talked about on the tour was the writing-in-public project that’s in progress on my web site, the beginnings of the short story I did as an improv and its eventual presence on the site as a proper story, with commentary on why certain choices were made in the course of the rewriting. And I would tell the audience, I’m doing it because when a beginning writer looks at a book like THE ART OF DETECTION they often say, “I couldn’t write a book like that.” And I have to agree, I couldn’t either.

But I could rewrite a book like that.

Singing praises

THE ART OF DETECTION’s tour is officially over, after Friday’s event in Half Moon Bay and Saturday in Santa Cruz. These two stores are shining examples of how to succeed in an unfriendly world: be outgoing, run your life with efficiency, and participate fully in your community.

Bay Book and Tobacco (yes, really—although in answer to your next question, no, the place doesn’t stink of cigarette smoke. They have a tidy and self-contained humidified room containing very high class cigars, the idea being that people after books will pick up a cigar, and people after cigars will stop to peruse the titles. I will say, this audience had more men than usual.)

Where was I? Right—Bay Book in Half Moon Bay is in a shopping center in a small town that gets a lot of tourist traffic. They first came to my attention in 1998 or –9, when I was asked to drop in and sign some books. I did so, and was casually told that they’d sold 140 copies of FOLLY the year before. Hardcover.

That’s a lot of books for a small store. I think they must have pressed a copy on every person who came in, maybe tripping them and jamming one into their purse before they could get up. But it’s a small town with a population of locals who don't always want to drive over hills for entertainment (and anyway they're regulary cut off from San Francisco by the collapse of portions of the same road where Mary Russell lost her family) so they drop in to the bookstore. At the same time, weekenders escaping the heat of the central valley find the coastal fog conducive to leisurely reading. Some day, one of the chains may think Half Moon Bay worth their while, but not for now.

Bookshop Santa Cruz is the first bookstore I remember shopping in. When I was a kid my family used libraries, period, and although I remember lots of books, I never owned very many until I hit university. Bookshop is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary. It used to be in a funky brick building that collapsed during the 1989 quake, at which time they set up shop in a tent out back. Booktent Santa Cruz (they’ve left a sign in the new shop, back near the toilets) was where we did all out gift shopping for the years until they rebuilt, and now they’ve been in this shiny and no longer so new building for, the new owner/manager tells me, for thirteen years. Neal Coonerty’s family still is in charge, as Neal moves on to run larger things as a county supervisor.

As an indicator of the place a bookshop can hold in the heart of its community, thirteen years ago when Bookshop was ready to move from the tent into its new digs, they used a human chain of volunteers to shift cartons of books down the street and in the front door. And they had more people show up than there was room for on the street.

I love bookstores, especially the independents. And I’ll be there for Bookshop’s birthday party in early November.

Future pings

One of the questions asked so often at readings that they have become clichés is, Where do you get your ideas? On the one hand, the question is meaningless, because life is a constant inundation of stimulating ideas. On the other, I can understand the puzzlement--however, the question should be rather, How you can pick out of the avalanche of daily life the one seed that can grow an interesting story?

My answer is, you listen for the ping.

The ping is the reverberation set off by an image or a phrase or an idea, that “Hmmm…” factor that makes it hard to shed. It’s like the original fragment of grit that works its way inside the oyster, and stays.

Sometimes the ping is small, which is why it’s a good idea, especially for new writers, to carry a notebook around and get the ping-idea down before it drifts away. Of course, often when you go back and look at the idea notebook, it seems to be full of the most nonsensical, cold, and dead-end notes, whose primary cause for thought is to make you wonder why you bothered to write it down in the first place.

Which is fine. Any idea that doesn’t jump off the page at you a few days, or weeks, after you put it there probably isn’t powerful enough to have a book coalesce around it. But if you find yourself going back to it, thinking about it at odd times, and particularly linking up other ideas, settings, people with it, there’s your idea for a book.

For example, reading Oleg Steinauer’s posting on Contemporary Nomad, he talks about a site called Future Me, with which you can email yourself or another person at some future date.

Hmmm. (Ping.)

Laugh for the day

Going over the accumulated copies of the San Francisco Chronicle from the past 2 weeks, I find this gem of a headline, its article reprinted from the NYT:


Bush urges immigrants
to learn English, history


Now there's an idea.

TAoD tour, a round dozen of days

On the last day of The Great The Art of Detection tour, I slept in until 7:30 in the morning, about two hours after I usually wake up. I convinced the hotel’s internet service that I was to be trusted with their electrons, checked my email, washed my hair and had breakfast, and sauntered out of the hotel at ten o’clock.

Then the drop-ins began, working my way through the east bay: Black Oak, Deisel, Dark Carnival, Barnes and Nobles on Shattuck and in Jack London Square, Borders in Emeryville, B&N in Walnut Creek. All of these stores sell my books, all of them have managers and staff who know what they’re doing (except maybe one, but let’s not talk about them because maybe it was just a bad day.) I signed, I shook hands, I gave them each a thank-you packet, and I managed to circle the Bay in time for a quick dinner and the evening event at Book Passage in Corte Madera, my last tour event—I have two more to come, in Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, but they’re not until next week.

So is there any point to this grueling ritual of the publishing world? Or is the writer merely undergoing a semi-masochistic experience designed by the publisher to teach her not to ask for more promotion?

A tour is exhausting and it is exhilarating. It’s your chance as a writer to meet the people who are the ultimate point of this entire year of effort, the readers. Audience questions point to where audience interest lies: if everyone were interested in the love life of the characters, then perhaps future books (or blogs) should address that. On the other hand, if they’re interested in research and the informative aspects of the novels, that may justify an emphasis there.

It also allows the writer to make contact with the bookseller, whether by doing an event or just dropping in to sign and chat. “Read anything exciting lately?” is a great opening line, as you take out your pen and the manager is standing there, too polite to go off and get back to work. Or, “What’s the big book this summer?” (The consensus? There doesn’t seem to be one this year, perhaps as a reaction against recent experience—everyone’s afraid to create another Dan Brown machine.)

But now I’m home, and yes, Vicki, home does look different—mostly because I had to fight my way in the front door because of the waist-high stack of cartons from the Mystery Bookstore in NY that, in a moment of weakness, I agreed that they could send me. When will I learn?

But the cat was pleased to see me, woke me up at 5:15 by staring at my nose purring loudly, at which point I shoved him in the direction of my knees and went back to sleep for five minutes, and came wide awake with an earthquake, the first in quite a while.

Homecoming is not always such an earthshaking event.

But thanks to all of you who came out to an event, who told me you read this blog, and who bought (or will buy) the book. You make it all a pleasure.

TAoD tour day eleven

Tuesday:5 am wakeup call (I’ve had two alarm clocks die on me in the past week, both the dependable Swiss Army kind. Never trust a new alarm clock without a backup call from the desk.) and 6:15 pickup. Long line to get through security, longer line to get coffee from Starbuck’s, on the gift card given me many days ago by Mary, thanks again. Late into San Francisco, onto the ridiculously fun AirTrain ride down to the car rental agencies (I’d recommend that, if you have kids and a flight out of SF, you schedule twenty minutes extra to circle the airport. A free thrill ride!) To my relief, Avis had a small SUV available, so I don’t have to drive several hundred freeway miles hunched down behind the wheel of a pavement-scraper.

I would have driven my own car up and left it at the airport, but we’re a little short of cars at the moment in the King household and so I’m in a rental Subaru (automatic shift, of course—no point even to ask for a manual.) I managed to make it into SF in time to grab lunch before the Stacey’s event. Stacey’s is on Market Street just at the edge of the financial district, so one gets an interesting mix of homeless people and men in $2000 suits, and all the varieties in between. It was an enthusiastic group, and we had a good time.

Back in my shiny white automatic shift Subaru, I went down the peninsula a short way to sign late-arriving stock for Ed Kauffman at M is for Mystery in San Mateo, then drove to Berkeley to check in to the Doubletree that’s right on the Berkeley marina—an elegant view out the glass doors. And dinner with my beloved agent Linda Allen (a San Francisco resident) at one of my favorite Berkeley places, Eccolo on Fourth Street before my evening event at the nearby Cody’s. Unfortunately, a mixup as to time had me making my leisurely way up the street a quarter of an hour after it was to have started—I was originally scheduled to sign at the Telegraph Ave store, which is now on the edge of closing, its owner driven out by the shift of people with money to plunk down for hardback books away from the scruffy and picturesque haunts of my youth. And since Telegraph schedules their events at 7:30, though the Fourth Street starts at 7:00, well, Reader, I was late.

But they were forgiving. Much good discussion, a young fan with her mother asked some good questions, we talked about writing and being a writer and how characters take over and what this means.

And as we were drawing to a close, I decided to introduce a pair of friends who were witting in the back, local writers I’ve known for years. So I had the two men stand up and introduced the first one and talked about his books, only it wasn’t Tony Broadbent standing there, it was Kirk Russell. My poor enfeebled brain, after plane flights and driving and drop-ins and five hours sleep two nights running, had just shifted rails on me and switched the identities of two local writers I know, like, and have read. God, poor Kirk, he was so gracious about it, but really, I must never go outside the lines at an event.

Sorry, Kirk, and thanks for coming to hear me put my foot in my mouth. Sorry Tony, I’ll probably call you Kirk when next I see you. And sorry Dylan, for dragging you into my idiocy.

I did get Dylan Schaeffer’s name right. Do I get points for that?

And after nine hours sleep, I may get through the day without any other major faux pas. Yes, this is the last day on the road, and tomorrow I can get back to that other thing I do. Now, what was it? Oh, yes, I remember—I write.

TAoD tour day 10

Maybe everyone in Seattle spends their days drinking coffee and reading books. It would explain a lot, not only about the number of coffeehouses and great bookstores, but also the general laid-back attitude of a city filled with people whose fantasy lives are well enough fulfilled that they don’t need to be ill-tempered. In any case, the people here love books. I signed stock and chatted with the booksellers in some great stores, especially Elliot Bay down in Pioneer Square, where escort Susan and I had lunch, and Twenty-Third Avenue books, which has one of the greatest layouts of any bookstore—a huge area filled with assorted tables and surrounded by a food hall, where kids come with homework after school and adults come any time, and the bookstore has cooking demonstrations. The ever-great folks at Seattle Mystery bookstore, who have kept Califia’s Daughters on their bestseller list for two years, arranged for a constant stream of people during my hour there, and then tonight, a full house at the University bookstore. This was probably the biggest event I’ve done on this tour, despite the end of the semester last week which, presumably, sent a fair number of the students home. But those who came managed to fill the place, came up with a lot of great questions, and even bought a bunch of books.

And people gave me presents, a necklace and a bottle of St Peter’s Ale, in answer to my blog the other day about needing a drink.

(And by the way, I do like kids, you know that, right? Just because I wanted to pick one up and shake it after a child-infested flight, doesn’t mean some of my best friends aren’t kids. Honest. Actually, it was probably the parents I wanted to pick up and shake…)

Tomorrow a 6:15 pickup for a flight back to the Bay Area, and two busy days, with a pair of events Tuesday—Stacey’s in SF at midday and Cody’s in Berkeley in the evening—and a whole passel of drop-ins Wednesday, working up to an evening event at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

And thanks to everyone out there who has come to an event and told me they read the blog. Glad you’re having a good time. I sure am.

TAoD tour day 9

So, what sells books? I love libraries, as anyone who reads this blog or noticed the dedication to The Game will know, but it’s always tough to get a publisher to subsidize events at libraries. A touring author is, after all, supposed to be on the road encouraging people to buy her books, and love books though library patrons might, they are often hesitant to plunk down the price of a new hardback.

Library events are for the long term. If fifty people show up for an event, maybe a dozen will buy one of the paperbacks the sponsoring store has laboriously dragged in, three will go for the new hardback, and the rest will put in their name for one of your titles at the check-out desk. However, with luck, both patrons and paperback buyers will be so caught up first by your scintillating personality, then your brilliant writing that, next time around, they’ll venture the full cost of the new book.

Ideally, then, library events supplement real (ie, selling) events. On Thursday night, the event I did with Les Klinger attracted sixty or seventy customers to the Poisoned Pen, of whom maybe half bought my book, the others bringing in old books for signing or risking seven dollars for one of the paperbacks, so as to get a taste of LRK. But because we sold these books, and because the Poisoned Pen sells a ton of my hardbacks by mail order, Bantam was happy to send me to three library events during my Phoenix stay.

And in the end, the library patrons of the Phoenix area proved very generous. At one of them we sold twenty hardbacks, with a fair number at the other venues as well. If I could guarantee these numbers with every library event, I’d probably be able to do an all-library tour. But even as a supplement to the main event, I’d say these were successful. Thank you, Phoenicians!

In addition to store events and the odd library talk, my main activity on these tours is flitting from one side of the cities I’m in to the other and signing stock at other stores. In fact, however, I’ve found that just the signing of books is not the most important part of these drop-ins. Yes, stores like to be able to put an “autographed” sticker on the cover, because those books sell better than unsigned ones. But it’s also good to talk with the salesmen and especially the managers. In a chain, it is an unfortunate truth that sales clerks are apt to be underpaid, ill trained, and young. In other words, these are temporary booksellers with whom there is little commercial point to talk, because they won’t be working in that store or even in retail bookselling in a year’s time.

Now, the manager is a different story. The manager in a chain has usually been working for the company for several years. And I venture to say that no bookseller sticks with the job just because it’s a job. That might be their initial entrance into the store, but they stay because they love books. And considering the bad press that the chains have gotten over the years, being depicted as bullies who take pleasure in driving beloved local Mom-and-Pop independents out of business, the manager is often pathetically grateful when an established writer comes in and actually wants to talk books and say thanks. So I have made a point of asking to speak to the manger or events person in each store, chain or not. Each time, I thank him or her for selling my books, and give the manager a small packet with two or three clever items and a thank-you letter to back it up. While I’m signing stock, we chat about books and business, then I shake all the hands in sight and we go to the next store.

Now, from a marketing or promotional point of view, I don’t know if this does a thing. The packet costs me (yes, me) a couple of dollars, and I’ve given away 250 of them in the past month, by mail and in person. Still, even if it doesn’t sell a single book more than I would have sold anyway, it makes me feel as if I’d done something nice for my partners in crime.

And if you’re a bookseller and I haven’t said so to you directly, please consider yourself thanked here, and in the future.

However, as I write this, Friday evening, I’m in the Phoenix airport waiting to catch a plane home. I intend to see some pointless movie during my Saturday off, and sleep in maybe until six o’clock, and not say a single word about books for two days.

See you in Seattle.

TAoD day 6

Friday’s flight was restored to the normal complement of children, or else I’d have begun to wonder if a home-schooling project was following me around. I arrived to find the delightfully named Pierre O’Rourke waiting for me, my usual Phoenix escort, and he drove me around this huge city to sign at one store after another. Mostly chains, as you would expect in a city growing faster than a baby whale, but the staff for the most part knew what it was doing, and at the managerial level I found book lovers all.

In the afternoon I had an event in the library in Tempe, the university town at the southern end of Phoenix. This is a library that embodies the new definition of such as a community center rather than a book repository—as I sat waiting for Pierre to pick up up afterwards, the doors never stopped opening and closing, with every possible variation of humanity coming and going: old folks and kids, dark and light, skirts-and-heels to dusty grunge. They even have a café, which always tickles me in a library. And they managed to round up nearly fifty people to listen to LRK on a Thursday afternoon, then sell some books on top of that. I love libraries.

We had some confusion at the end of it, one of those situations where a well-laid plan is sure to go awry, and it did. My evening event was to be with Les Klinger, whose three-volume Annotated Sherlock Holmes lays the groundwork for all Sherlockian scholarship for the next generation (and who is currently working on a similar volume for Dracula—2008 pub date.) His email indicating that his flight arrived at 4 sent Pierre to the airport while I was at my event, only there was no LA flight arriving then, and none with the number given. The mystery of the missing Sherlockian!

Of course, he arrived, took a taxi to the bookstore, and we met up just before the event. And what a lot of fun it was. Take two very different writers who like each other and have enormous respect for each other’s work, add a dozen local Sherlockians (“The Desert Beekeepers”) and forty or fifty other mystery readers, put them into a well-run bookstore with a couple of tall chairs and mikes, and you have a classic Poisoned Pen Books event, an hour of laughter and interesting ideas.

I’ll take that show on the road any time.

Afterwards, Pierre whisked Les off to get his flight back to LA, and I came home with Barbara, owner of the Poisoned Pen, to have dinner with her and her husband Rob, owner of the Poisoned Pen Press, my new UK publisher.

Today, Friday, I have two more library events and a stack of books to sign for the Poisoned Pen, then home for a whole thirty-six hours before flying to Seattle. I may not post a blog for today, unless something particularly interesting happens, but will write from Seattle.

Take care, enjoy your reading, and thank you, Mary from Nashville, for the Starbucks gift card—I toasted you with my latte in LA.

TAoD tour day...?

Okay, so here’s a day.

2:00 am: Nashville hotel. Young neighbors come in, party an hour, maybe more.
4:45 am: Other neighbor’s radio alarm begins to play. Neighbor sleeps, LRK wakes, realizes that her own alarm clock (set for 5:30) has stopped.
7:00 meets driver for ride to airport to catch 9:00 flight, trip takes 10 minutes. Look for Starbucks to spend gift card nice reader has given me the night before: no Starbuck’s.
9:00: Flight takes off.
9:02: Child across the aisle begins to scream.
9:03: Child in front climbs up onto seat back and sticks finger in air blower, experimenting with loud and satisfying noise. Alternates with pushing the button to call the flight attendant for the next four hours.
9:04: Child across the aisle and back one row begins naturalist experiment of elephant noise, alternates with brother (next seat) looking out window and shouting “Oh my God!” for next four hours.
11:00 Pacific Time (1:00 Tennessee time) plane arrives. LRK falls to the ground and kisses it, sprints to keep ahead of forty three children on her flight, looks for drink, finds none.
11:45: LRK’s bag finally comes off the carousel, after all but three of the families with children, although LRK could easily have carried it on but didn’t because she wants to be polite to the others using the overhead compartments. LRK swears she will never be polite again.
11:46: Ken Wilson, escort extraordinaire, catches LRK on his third circuit through pickup area. LRK seizes KW’s lapels and swears that if any child in her vicinity begins to cry, she will pick up said child and shake it. Expresses wish for drink and gets into car. KW laughs politely and drives to Thousand Oaks.
12:20: LRK finishes signing books and chatting to nice Mysteries to Die For lady, gets into car, expresses wish for drink. KW laughs again, offers tuna sandwich at local café. LRK obediently eats tuna sandwich and odd iced tea with elderberry(?)
1:00-4:00: KW manoeuvres traffic while talking on phone and making witty conversation with LRK, takes her to Mysterious Books and Borders, where LRK meets many booksellers and fortunately no loud children, shakes hands and expresses appreciation that booksellers continue to sell books, signs stock, gets back in car. Again, no children; again, no drink.
4:20: LRK returns call on cell phone from agent, learns that blah blah something buzz in ears contracts maybe? And that The Art of Detection debuts at number 30 on the NYT list. Call other agents, Hollywood variety (having played phone tag all afternoon) and tell them, cut off twice by the company with the fewest dropped calls.
4:40: KW pulls into parking lot for Book ‘Em mysteries, long-time LRK supporters; signing, conversation, discussion of books read: agreements, disagreements, no drink.
5:15: Find apartment of Hour Twenty-Five radio program friends Warren and Suzanne, talk about writing and Sherlock Holmes for an hour.
6:30: Scurry into Warren and Suzanne’s bathroom to change out of wrinkled trousers and brush hair, drive to evening event at Vroman’s.
7:00-8:30: Vroman’s event. Familiar faces, friendly greeting and intelligent questions, reminder of why I do these things. Sell books, sign stock, shake hands.
9:20: Arrive at fancy hotel, leave bag in car, drop things across lobby filled with glamorous people who clearly have not been traveling all day. Stump up to room, hugely grateful that electronic key works and door opens. Drop things onto elegant purple velvet fainting couch next to bed that could easily sleep a family of four, open minibar located under flat-screen television the size of a bathtub, find non-lite Heineken in the very back of the minibar, open.
9:34: Call room service, ask for tortilla soup and green salad.
9:35: Turn on laptop, write blog. Drink beer. Aah.
9:50: LRK finishes blog, plugs in high-speed wireless connection. Connection fails.
10:00: Dinner arrives. Nice gent in white sets up cart in front of bathtub-sized television, chats, leaves. LRK sits down to fragrant soup, turns on plasma television. Plasma television does not go on.
10:26: LRK finishes nice dinner in front of dark television, considers sitting on edge of marble bath to watch smaller television in bathroom, instead decided to use dialup connection and complete virtue of day by sending off blog.
11:00: LRK brushes teeth, thinks about sitting on edge of bath to watch what feeble memory thinks is a second session of John Stewart eviscerating Wm. Bennett, decides she is mistaken and anyway if she fell asleep on the marble bath she would bash her brains out, and goes to bed.
7:30 am Thursday: car arrives to take LRK to airport.

TAoD tour day 6

The Cracker Barrel is a chain of restaurants across the South (mostly) that are serious purveyors of carbohydrates. Pecan pancakes, grits (No, really, it’s not polenta under another name. Italians wouldn’t recognize it.), something called potato casserole that is a very, well, solid combination of potatoes and cheese—oh, and don’t forget their biscuits. With honey. Just in case you were interested in Southern cuisine. (They also rent audio tapes, and did an interview with me a year or so ago for their newsletter, I think. Never saw it, but I sure remember the email address of the interviewer.)

As for the hospitality, the South lays it on as thick as the honey on their biscuits. Davis-Kidd is another in the great independents, linked with the Joseph-Beth store that I did last night. I was greeted by a dozen or so of the local Sisters in Crime group, and came away with presents I shall treasure, with the memory of their warm welcome.

Great questions, too. I mean, I can rattle on in any direction with little encouragement, but it’s a great feeling with an audience not only knows what I’m doing and why I’m there, but wants to know more about, well, everything.

Tomorrow, an early pickup and Los Angeles, and the kind of escorts to zoom me through the town, Ken Wilson.

TAoD tour, day 5

Lexington is a gorgeous town. Clearly, that is the reason people at the event tonight drove from Cincinnati and Columbus, to see Lexington. I’m glad to have given them an excuse of a LRK event. But we know the truth.

This was one of those rare days with large gaps in the schedule. The first time this happened to me was years ago during a tour to Minneapolis in January. Minneapolis is a downtown with gerbil tubes crossing above the streets for pedestrians, but the tubes go in and out of shops, and the shops are closed a lot on weekends. I was, of course, there on a weekend. Having not thought to bring work with me, knowing no one in town, and not having clothes warm enough for a stroll in the four degree weather, I went through the books I had brought in no time at all.

This time, I had my laptop and I had work—a short story I’ve promised Michael Connelly for a collection he’s editing for the Mystery Writers of America. It’s an anthology about The Badge, so he suggested a story about Kate Martinelli, and I tried, but I think she’ll only appear in part of it. The main character is someone we’ve seen before however, in the second Martinelli novel. That’s right, Brother Erasmus returns. However, since To Play the Fool clearly says that Kate never saw him again, I couldn’t make her the cop in question.

Anyway, I got seven pages done, maybe a third of the story, so it was a productive day even if I didn’t sign a ton of books. I had a radio show by telephone in the morning, then this afternoon Barb the media escort took me to sign at a couple of faraway stores. The evening event was at a really great independent called Joseph-Beth, which has a number of stores up and down the area. I hope all of them are as great as the one here in Lexington.

Tomorrow, driving to Nashville, with a promised stop at the exotic palace of biscuits-and-eggs called Cracker Barrel. Stay tuned for a restaurant report, tomorrow.

TAoD tour, day 4

One of the frustrations of flying is seeing something from the air and having no one at hand to ask for an explanation. Which mountain is that? What are those weird circles? And over Texas, why has someone shaved the vegetation along perfectly straight lines, with no awareness of paved roads crossed and feed lots skirted? To fight brush fires, and perfectly straight because they were built by descendents of the ancient Romans?

Now if I could just figure out a) what is that huge area of nothing but dark gray sand and rock we flew over, and b) why there are cities plunked down in the middle of it.

The first time I flew was a trip, all by myself at the age of fifteen, to Sea/Tac from San Jose to spend some time with my father. I was sitting next to a soldier going back to Fort Lewis (where my son would be stationed, thirty-eight years in the future) who couldn’t have been more than nineteen himself, no doubt en route to Vietnam. Such romance, for a shy teenager.

Planes have transported me to London and Port Moresby, Easter Island and Jerusalem, Tonga and Barcelona. I have flown half a day in a plane that holds more people than some towns I've lived in, and I've flown an hour in a plane so small, a sack of potatos had to be offloaded to compensate. I've walked off into air-conditioned buildings and onto steaming tarmac, and once onto a grassy slope that, when time came to leave the mountaintop mission, meant that the plane reached take=off speed just by rolling, and then had to flip into a wingtip pirouette at the bottom of the hill lest it cross the chasm and smash into the opposite hillside--the larger (ie, unportable) scraps of previous airplanes served as a reminder to the pilot.

All you have to do is submit to the will of the airlines, turn over your life and luggage to the skill of a man with stripes on his arm, and walk out to—magic!

So why have the airlines permitted the romance of travel to fade from flight? Sure, plane travel is so commonplace even grandmothers climb on board, but surely the PR folk could have got some mileage out of making people THINK it was still exciting? Like, building airports that aren’t a nightmare to be stuck in, and where half the time a passenger can’t even see the planes taking off.

Because air travel really is a thrill, if you can step back and see it with new eyes. I’m sitting here in the Dallas/Fort Worth terminal, surrounded by tons of straining metal filled with human beings, with a lady to my left talking into the air about what her friend (who one assumes is not imaginary, but is on the other end of the phone that is sticking out of her ear) likes to read and how she really doesn’t like to be touched so she tensed up when the pedicurist tried to give her a massage, and to my right a gent from (I’d guess) Pakistan, in animated conversation with a friend in a language very like that of northern India, but intriguingly different. And here I am going to talk to people in Lexington, Kentucky about what I write, and all because the Wright brothers thought it would be ‘way cool to see if they could get that machine up in the air.

If that’s not romance, I don’t know what is.

See you in Lexington.

TAoD tour day 3

Today I did an event for the store that has been supporting me in this writing gig since A Grave Talent in 1993. Capitola Book Café is owned by four women, one of whom was married to a colleague of my husband’s when he taught at UC Santa Cruz, which is how I came into their sphere of influence. They put my name on their marquee: Laurie R King talks about A Grave Talent, the first time I’d ever seen my name in letters that enormous. And they put my name on their marquee again this year, as they have every year in between.

This was the same store Lee Child signed at Wednesday night, so if you just lift me from the audience and put me where he stands in the photo on his blog (http://www.leechild.com/bloghardway.html), you can pretend LRK has the technical expertise to post a photo on her blog, too.

I love independent bookstores and the women and men who run them. I worry about independent bookstores, because the landscape is lessened when they fade away, and I encourage you to support them, simply by buying books from them. Big chains can be great, and are often staffed by people whose enthusiasm for books overrides the corporate realities of the chain economics, but towns need independents as well, just as towns need libraries.

This message brought to you by a writer who owes her living to the support of mystery bookstores everywhere.

Tomorrow is spent in the air, and as most air journeys are much of a muchness, I probably won’t post anew until I’ve got to Monday night.

Hope you’re enjoying the book.



This interview I did with Kacey Kowars a week ago is now available, and can be formatted as a podcast for download off the site.

www.kaceykowars.com

TaoD tour day 2

Friday was a drop-in at the Barnes and Noble on Steven’s Creek in San Jose, where inevitably no one had any idea that I was coming, but by lovely synchronicity the solitary cashier had just set aside her very own copy of The Art of Detection to buy, so she had me sign it. And as we stood there waiting for the manager to find the stray copies, she introduced me to one customer after another—and sold one book after another. Three books in five minutes, and we might have run through the entire stack if we’d been actors able to maintain the attitudes of happy surprise.

A new kind of author event: leaning with one elbow on the check-out counter. Try it, if you have a friend in book retail.

The evening event at Kepler’s was a very different matter. Successful, but another animal entirely. Chairs were set up, and occupied by fifty or sixty warm bodies (despite it being a Friday night with presumably much to offer in the way of entertainment in the Bay Area.) I told the Kepler’s staff how very happy I was to be there, and meant it—last year Kepler’s closed, just after its fiftieth anniversary, from the sorts of pressures felt by independent bookstores across the country. But the community wouldn’t have it, and pulled together to save this bookstore that began as a center of leftist politics and went on to form a part of the backbone of the Bay Area literary scene.

We love Kepler’s! Please buy a book from them!

And I had the kind of interesting questions you learn to expect from that sort of audience. This time, someone asked about my background in theology, in a way that had me talking about the letters I get from readers who read my novels in dire times and found ease. And I had to say, that this is a thing I would never have heard had I stayed an academic theologian. Comfort is a valuable resource, and if I can ease the grief of someone whose mother is dying or provide distraction for a person undergoing chemotherapy, my existence may be justified.

Or even provide an alternative universe for those of us driven to madness by modern life. Given traffic, cell phones, and the newspaper headlines, who among us wouldn’t rather be hunting for a clue on the Marin headlands with Sherlock Holmes?

TAoD tour, June 1 (day 1)

This is the split-brained part of a tour, before I’ve entered an airplane but when things are flying about around me.

I started yesterday, with a drive to San Francisco and a tour of nine bookstores with media escort Naomi Epel, who knows all the places to park illegally in the city. I saw the new Cody’s, a gorgeous store, and the beloved and threatened Clean Well-Lighted Place, plus the Borders on Union Square that always has a huge pile of LRK books. And of course SF Mystery books, and Booksmith and two Books Ink and—well, suffice to say, if you can’t find a signed copy of The Art of Detection in San Francisco, you’re not looking hard enough.

The launch event was at M is for Mystery in San Mateo, where Ed Kaufman put out the wine and cheese and the audience politely put up with my first-reading dithers, when I try to remember what the book was about and why I wrote it.

I should also mention that I had dinner-and-a-beer with Lee Child on Wednesday night. Lee’s great new Jack Reacher novel Hard Way was released about a week ahead of The Art of Detection, and Lee is on the road just ahead of me. You can read about his tour on the blog he’s keeping (and see a picture of LRK listening intently) at http://www.leechild.com/bloghardway.html

Today a visit from a passing Aussie step-grandson, a conversation with my contractor (yes, the same one receiving the dedication in Folly) about bathroom cabinets, a (please God) final attack on the contents of the rodent-infested storage shed with the kind boys of 1800GOTJUNK, a shower and hair-wash afterwards, and then to the beloved and triumphal Kepler’s, where I am always among friends.

Nothing like a varied life.

All promotion, all the time

Laurie R. King's THE ART OF DETECTION promotion
is now live on Mysterynet. This promotion and sweepstakes will run through 6/26.

http://www.mysterynet.com/

http://www.mysterynet.com/books/

And to catch Laurie on the road:
1st: San Mateo, CA (San Francisco drop-in signings)
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 and Berkeley, CA
14th: Corte Madera, CA
23rd: Half Moon Bay, CA
24th: Santa Cruz, CA


Beyond that, check the Events page on the LRK web site, for Madison, UK, etc.


My local bookseller now has a good supply of The Art of Detection that are signed, and he’s happy to stick in an ARC or foreign edition of one of the other books as well, if that would just tickle your whiskers. He’s at crbkswat@sbcglobal.net --tell him Laurie sent you.