Sex

(Do I have your attention now, class?)

I’ve been thinking about sex lately. My current villain’s sex, to be precise, what kind and how much to describe.

Sex is a tricky thing for a writer. And I’m just talking about what’s on the page, so stop your sniggering, you in the back. Because it’s so loaded with emotional and physical baggage, because the actions being talked about are so intensely personal yet universal, it’s nearly impossible to avoid clichés. One of the best sex scenes in recent fiction is the core event in Ian McEwan’s ATONEMENT, a lovingly described coitus interruptus that reverberates through the lives of every character there, and even that scene flirts with clichés as a means of avoiding them.

For various reasons, I’m often labeled as a cozy writer, whose books you can give to granny or your adolescent daughter without worry. And it’s true, the Russell books, because they are written as if by an old woman looking back at her life—what’s more, a dignified, faintly supercilious, and very proud old woman—she doesn’t go into details about her sex life. She has it, you can read that in what she doesn’t say about her reactions to having her hair brushed by her husband, but it’s all between the lines, yearn though readers will that the narrator will go past hair-brushing and playing-with-fingertips into the juicy stuff.

Similarly, the Martinelli stories. Kate is presented, from the beginning, as an intensely, almost phobically private individual. And because her sex would be of the lesbian variety, and because I’m not writing those books for an exclusively lesbian audience, I kept them, um, less detailed than I might have had she been straight.

Of the standalones, in FOLLY and KEEPING WATCH the protagonists are a little busy with other things (sanity and rescuing children, respectively) to do much rolling in the hay. There’s one fairly explicit scene in DARKER PLACE, at a place where the character needs the intensity of the sex act to complete the transformation of going undercover (the theme of the book is alchemical transformation, and the alchemists knew all about sex-as-metaphor for their work.)

And now TOUCHSTONE. Six main characters, four men and two women, and they’re a lusty lot. Plus, the mid-Twenties were as liberated a time as the Sixties, for similar reasons—freedom of movement (the motorcar as a tool for liberation—there’s a PhD topic for you), a war in the background, mind-altering substances (the martini vs marijuana/LSD), a surge of women’s lib, readily available birth control (the rubber in the Twenties, the pill in the Sixties).

And that’s to say nothing of the music, you know what that kind of music will do to the urges of young people.

So here I have a noble American who’s been around several blocks; a wounded Englishman (“Touchstone”) who is still in love with his ex-fiancee (whom he left so as not to tie her to his problems); the ex-fiancee who is now attached to a radical politician; the wounded Englishman’s sister, the only virgin in sight; the radical politician (and you can imagine how demure he is); and the villain.

With all those pheromones flitting about, is it possible that the villain doesn’t have a sex life? And being the villain, wouldn’t his sex life be, well, villainous? He’s sure not the sort to have a gentle hand-holding relationship with the vicar’s daughter, nor is he the kind for a wife and kids. He’s kinky through and through, and the only question is, how much of that kink do I put on the page?

So you can see why I’ve been thinking about sex.

Islamofascists in the strawberry fields

I live in a farming community. If you have Brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving or a stuffed artichoke in a restaurant, you're eating from a field I drive past. If you ever buy Driscoll strawberries, think of me. Apples, lettuce, celery, wine grapes, you name it—if it doesn’t need weeks of high heat, we probably grow it. (And oh yes, sorry about that spinach thing, although really it was from the next valley over, not ours. Honest.)

And this season, height of most harvests, farmers are plowing their crops under. Apples are rotting, lettuces are bolting to seed, grapes and bush berries are being picked far into the night.

But by God, our borders are secure.

Farmers can’t find workers to bring in their crops because the Bush administration needs a villain in this election year, and has chosen to create one out of the residents of our southern borderlands. Half the workers in our fields are here without documents, and honestly, so what? The kinds of young Muslims Homeland Security has in mind, the sorts who strap bombs to their chests in crowded places, are about as likely to walk across the border from Mexico as they are to swim across the sea from Libya. They could simply drive across from Canada, one supposes, but by God we have to make sure no terr’ist gets into our country, and the border with Mexico is a nice picturesque target, and who will make more trouble if we intimate that they are swarming with murderous Muslims, brown Mexico or white Canada?

Considering our own record with domestic terrorism, maybe Mexico should close the border to us (and isn't a nice twist that Mexico banned Californian lettuce...) Canada might want to seriously consider doing so, as well.

In the meantime, my neighbors had to call out friends-and-relations to help with their emergency grape harvest (two days of heat and--wow), and my ex-neighbor down in the valley had to plow under a quarter of his crops this year because he couldn't get them harvested. Half the farmers in the Pajaro valley have had to watch at least a part of their year’s work go down the drain. It's been especially hard on the organic farmers, who live on a very thin profit margin and whose produce is a lot more labor intensive than that of farmers who sterilize their fields before planting and spray them during the growing season. Organic farmers in the Pajaro Valley are seeing their crops choked by untended weeds, and paying their skilled workers for fourteen hour days, and losing ground every day.

Strawberries will be five dollars, and stink of the chemicals they receive eighteen times over the growing season, but by God we’ll keep those Islamofascists from swimming the Rio Grande.

A paean to librarians

I adore librarians.

I throw myself at their feet, I put myself in their hands, I embrace them fully, I adore librarians.

Thank you, Andrea and Beth and Pat and Linda and Eva and Ann and all the others for choosing THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE for the 2006 Spokane is Reading project. Thank you for the amount of work you went to in organizing the venues, in putting together the ten thousand flyers all over the city (the first to hit my eye was at the airport, as Andrea and Beth held it up for the admiration of arriving passengers.) Thank you for continuing to fight what must feel like an uphill battle against the myriad of other time-consumers—or as I put it in the dedication of THE GAME:

For the librarians everywhere, who spend their lives in battle against the forces of darkness.

As I’ve said here before somewhere, I really hope that on the next tour I can do a number of library events, both to support the institutions and--hey, I’ve got bills to pay!--to get the LRK name into corners it may not have reached. The two events I did in Spokane were filled with enthusiastic, well-read people (it’s a library event, duh) who made every minute a pleasure. They even forgave the gritty voice from the cold I caught three days before. And to give lie to the Accepted Truth of publicists everywhere, they bought books!

And a big thanks to Chris from Auntie’s Books and her hard workers, who was not only one of the planners, and showed up to sell books, but when she ran out of copies of BEEKEEPER, then ransacked the city for them in order to have enough to sell at the evening event. Pride, not profit, rules at Auntie’s. (At any rate for those particular books, which not only cut her wholesale discount but added on the cost of gasoline…)

Spokane is reading...

Spokane is reading…Laurie King!

Or at least, they're all hunkering down to read THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE. If you live in eastern Washington state, I hope you know this already, and will come to one of the two October 19 events, sponsored by one great library system and Auntie’s Books (and no, yours truly did not sit for the portrait on their logo.)


It’s been a great joy, and huge relief, this past week to immerse myself in TOUCHSTONE again. Monday I only managed a couple of hours, but the rest of the week I put in full days, and have now regained a sense of what the book is and where it needs to go. Portions of what I’ve been working on I haven’t read since I wrote it last May, which meant that I kept discovering plot twists and character complexities that I’d forgotten about. Of course, the problem is that when a person writes as I do, blindly, most of the work comes with reshaping the earlier portions of the book to fit with later revelations.

I have one bit left that I hope to tackle this morning, working in necessary information into existing scenes. It’s a tough balance, feeding the reader just enough information so the book’s tension makes sense, but not enough so s/he begins to flip pages. When I’ve got this section down, I’ll print it off and give it to my agent for her first read, and then begin to work my way down the list of “Changes” that I’ve noted all along.

It is, I fear, a very long list.

826 Valencia

For any of you in the SF Bay area who are looking for something truly thrilling to do next Tuesday night, October 17, come join Cara Black, Jim Calder, Nadia Gordon, David Corbett and yrs truly for a mystery seminar at the incomparable 826 Valencia writing project in San Francisco. You can sign up at their web site .

What's in a name?

I recently changed my villain’s name. Computers make this blessedly easy, although in one of my early books, back in the days before words were processed, I had to go through and stick that white paper tape in a hundred spots after I decided that the name was just wrong. Not, in those days, a decision undertaken lightly.

But now, buttons remove the sweat from changing names, or places or colors or even sexes, although that last takes a bit more work. So when I decided that Aldous Martin was just a bit too noncommittal, that I needed something that hissed in the mind, changing him to Aldous Carstairs was a task that didn’t take a complete read-through of the manuscript, paper-tape in hand.

My main character has retained his name since the very beginning—Bennett Grey (English spelling, since he’s English.) And although I have both a Sarah and a Laura, and may in the end change one of those ladies, I don’t altogether mind the similarity of their names.

But I’m wondering about my hero. (And by the way, please don’t worry that I’m giving anything away here—you’ll know the hero and the villain the minute they walk on. And of course you’ll suspect that one or the other of them isn’t what he seems, which may or may not be true.) He’s an American in England, very much the stranger in a strange land, a tough, New York gumshoe-type among the bluebloods. His name is Stuyvesant, distantly related to governor Peter (although yes I am aware that the last descendent died childless in 1953) although he’s of a part of the family that’s come a ways down the economic ladder.

What’s giving me hesitation is that although his name—Harris Stuyvesant—looks fine on the page, knobby and rough and interesting, it’s a bit of a mouthful. Half the readers out there probably couldn’t pronounce it. Stooey—? Stoy--? Which in itself might not be bad, except that my publishers are thinking of another with the same characters, which makes it into a series of sorts, which means that the name is attached to it. (There—I’ve given something away: Harris Stuyvesant survives. Except, of course, if the next book I’m thinking about is a prequel…)

So I have my ear out for an alternate identity for my Yank hero. If anyone out there is struck by the perfect Stuyvesant substitute, let me know, and you can get your name into the acknowledgments page of Touchstone.

CA leads the way

Every so often, government takes the lead. This happened a few years ago when a law was passed requiring communities to curtail what went into their dumps and landfills, cutting back by so many percent over the next few years. By having the issue pushed down their throats, communities were forced to embrace recycling in a big way—bigger than industry could deal with, at first, as mountains of plastic jugs and newspaper began to accumulate, dutifully set aside for the overbooked manufacturing plants. The early problems have been beaten down, however, and the wholesale covering-over of perfectly good land is slowing a little.

Now my state legislators have decided to tackle global warming, on their own and thumbs-to-the-nose at the Feds. One in eight Americans live in this state. California has a bigger GNP than most of the world’s countries—the world’s sixth largest economy. In turn, of course, we consume more than our fair share of everything. But now we’re going to require the state’s producers of greenhouse gases to cut their emissions by twenty-five percent in the next fourteen years. It’s a pragmatic plan, by which companies that cut more than what is required get credits that they can sell to other, less adaptive companies—not perfect, but workable.

When we had tax credits for solar devices a few years back, there was a tremendous boost to solar technology. When the Republicans allowed the tax credit to lapse, growth of solar industries slowed. This Californian law will encourage green industries once again, and with luck, lead the way for the rest of the country.

Who knows? Our great-grandchildren may even be able to breathe.

Madison in the rear window

The Sunday of BoucherCon is a tail-end kind of a time, with panels going on but a distinctly autumnal feeling in the air. I rudely invited myself into a car headed for the airport in Chicago at a more useful time than the one I had originally intended to share with Les Klinger, and heartlessly abandoned Les to a solitary drive instead of spending six hours on my own in O’Hare.

Instead, we drove up to a vacation spot called the Wisconsin Dells that one of our party remembered as an idyllic scenic spot, which over the past four decades has been transformed into a ticky-tacky wonderland of pirate theme parks, dinosaur theme parks, water slides, and the very worst American culture has to offer. There was no way to the river that wasn’t in private hands, no hiking trail or picnic spot other than one scruffy patch of hillside in the town of Wisconsin Dells that was surrounded by a rusty barbed wire fence.

Not only can one not go home again, really, one shouldn’t try.

I reached home three hours late, following delays at Chicago that forced a stop in Denver for refueling (modern life is certainly complicated) followed by the nonappearance of the car I’d booked, delayed by having to wait for the AAA to give it a jump. Fortunately, once started it continued to run. Even more fortunately, when I got home I found the place still standing and everyone where they should be.

So, was BoucherCon a success, from the LRK point of view? Absolutely. People who’d never heard of me had me sign books for them, a thing that always astonishes me—not that there are people who don’t read my stuff, since really, who can please everyone, but that despite 14 years, 17 books, and an aggressive commercial publisher, there can be mystery readers who apparently haven’t heard of Laurie King. Faithful readers had a chance to tell me how great I was, so I had the opportunity to practice my graciousness skills. I saw friends, met new people, had the opportunity for an extended conversation with six of those faithful readers. I sat in the sun with my British publisher and ate a plate of the best French toast I’ve ever had, and sat in an Italian restaurant and drank beer with two of the best friends I’ve ever made. I learned things about publishing, came away with other ways of looking at my job, and was reminded of the tight community we’ve somehow constructed around a loosely-knit center.

BoucherCon can be lonely for first-timers, especially if they haven’t learned the art of walking up to strangers with outstretched hand. But it gets better and better with experience, and even for newcomers, there’s a ton to learn and to do.

So look at this, and we’ll see you there.

Madison IV

BoucherCon Saturday began with…a Farmer’s Market! That’s right, the entire Square around the capitol building was lined with stalls selling the most mouth-watering selection of fresh vegetables and fruits, cheese, honey, all sized bags of popcorn (“Oh yes,” one man told us, when we remarked on his 25 pound bag of popcorn, “this is the winter’s supply.”), baked goods, cheese, goat’s cheese, flowers, curd cheese, 10 year-old cheddar cheese, frying cheese, windflower honey, black locust honey, twenty colors of jellies, and Oh, there’s another cheese stall. Fascinatingly enough, the entire population of shoppers (leaving aside the iconoclastic tourists) move in the same direction, counter-clockwise around the capitol building.

Yes, I bought some cheese to fry. Hot grease—what’s not to love? And the coolest metal sculpture that goes around a colored glass ball and looks as if it’s spilling perpetually into it. Makes no sense, until you see it.

A great event with Les Klinger at Booked for Murder, a quick flit back to the hotel for an even greater panel with Dana Stabenow, Nevada Barr, and Val McDermid, which was just about everything you could ask for from a panel—and from the reaction of the audience, they agreed.

The awards ceremony was held, and an interview with Nevada as guest of honor. Coffee with one friend and a new acquaintance, a drink with two other friends, and dinner with a third set of friends—none of the meetings planned, all of them just happening across each other and saying “Are you…?”

I admit, I left the Sisters in Crime dessert bash early, and didn’t manage to get to Lee Child’s party that started at ten o’clock.

I admit it: I’m a BoucherCon wimp. I can only manage to stay on my feet for fourteen hours.