Edgars Thursday

The Wednesdays of Edgars week are for the symposium, when people shell out money for a day of panels and an interview with that year’s Grand Master, in this case, my distant (very, very distant) cousin, Stephen King. And although it’s intended for writers new to the business, I often shell out my own ninety dollars in order to listen to my colleagues talk about their experiences, because I always learn something. This year I got a free pass to the other panels because I was on one, so I stayed on to listen.

One of the pleasures of being on a panel is that often you get to meet writers you’d never met before, or if so only briefly. This time the only person I’d worked with before was Jerry Healy, which meant I got to meet Sandra Brown, Joe Finder, and Barry Eisler—I had to come to NY to meet Barry, although he lives maybe fifty miles from me, but on the inland side of the mountain range while I’m on the coast, and although it’s not quite the case that never the twain shall meet, it’s much more likely to meet in NY for Edgars or Anchorage for BoucherCon.

And one of the pleasures of this particular gathering is that I have the leisure to sit and have a chat with various people, which rarely happens in the rush of BoucherCon. SJ and I enjoyed a long breakfast and a walk up to 59th Street Wednesday morning, talking about writing and the publishing business (which are not at all the same thing) and tossing ideas at each other, a great and rare joy.

But I skipped out early on the agents’ and editors’ cocktail party that evening, somehow I don’t have a lot of excess energy this trip. And today it’s been quiet, breakfast with agent and daughter, coffee with friend Les Klinger (World’s Greatest Expert on All Things Sherlockian, and about to take on the title of W. G. E.on A. T. Draculanian), responding to emails from my editor, writing this blog, and putting together my (brief!) remarks for the Edgars dinner tonight.

Tonight you can see the results of the Edgars awards on the MWA web site, or read all about it on Sarah Weinman’s always-excellent blog.

And tomorrow I will try to report on things myself.

In the meantime, you can imagine sixty writers, new and established, print and film, who are trying to ingore the growing jitters in their bones as they consider the awards tonight.

I've been a nominee and I've been a judge, and I have to tell you, the judges find it a whole lot easier to eat their banquet dinners.

Edgars week, 2007

And a big Hey There from La Manzana Grande. My daughter and I are here for the Edgars, the week where the mystery world tells itself that things are cool, and we’re all on the top of the pile, literarily speaking.

So we flew in on Monday, in a United flight out of San Francisco that was configured so the entire flight had enough leg room for a woman of normal height, ie, five foot ten. Very nice.

Tuesday I had breakfast with my editor and publicists at Bantam, three cool and incredibly hard-working ladies. Then the day at leisure, which meant wandering and having a nap and then extricating ourselves from 42nd street (the Pres and various prime ministers seem to have been in town, which meant ten thousand police moving all the taxis on.) to go up to 81st street and the Black Orchid’s annual street party. This is a small bookstore in square footage, which means you get there and see two or three dozen people standing on the street outside a house on 81st, all of them with glasses in their hands. You sidle inside, which takes a while because you have to say hi to everyone, but once there you say hi to Bonnie and Joe, and sign whatever copies of your books they have on hand, and shake hands with the workers who are more like family, and then you sidle back out (which takes a while, as above) and when you come out Lee Child is holding up a corner of the building, so you stand and talk with him a while and then Annette Meyers catches your arm and pulls you down the steps and you talk with her and her husband Marty, and then SJ Rozan in her cool Malcolm X shades needs greeting, and Twist Phelan and and and.

Then you realize that your agent, who is freshly off a plane and whom you promised to feed instantly, has been given nothing more substantial than several glasses of wine, so you pull yourself away from six other fascinating people and take your agent and your daughter next door to the Italian restaurant and feed them, by which time the night is finished and you go to bed, and so to sleep.

And on Wednesday there’s breakfast with SJ and a day of seminars, which means that this seminarian must run and will see you tomorrow.

The joy of lex

So now that I’ve finished with TOUCHSTONE, I’m finished with it, right? I can give it to other people and go sit in the sun eating strawberries and reading all the novels that have come out in the past six months, right?

Well…

Sure. Except it’s Edgars week in New York so I leave tomorrow for five days, and I have a short story badly overdue so I’ll be working on the plane, and by the time I finish the story my editor will have done her read of TOUCHSTONE and have her suggestions for tweaking the ending, and just a little in the beginning, and maybe that middle…

Actually, although I complain as loudly as anyone else about the process of the rewrite, in truth I find it the most satisfying part. If writing were a sport, the first draft would be the downhill slalom, a barely-controlled fall off a mountain while dodging obstacles: equal parts thrill and desperation. Making it to the bottom in one piece is the primary objective, after which you can worry about the time it took.

But the rewrite process is closer to figure skating, where craft comes to the fore: the craft of shaping the routine, the relationship between the moves and the theme, and then going over and over every part, to make sure you’ve hit it absolutely right. Over and over, every part, with a pencil to change that generic verb to a specific one, to sharpen that description to remove the waffle, to delete all those unnecessary phrases that appear when thinking about how to say something gets in the way of saying it. Then when you’ve done all that fine-tuning, you have to stand back and look at the arc of how it hangs together, at which point you realize there’s a little problem with the protagonist’s motivation, so you rip out six chapters and redo them, starting over again with the pencil and the generic verbs and sharpening the waffles. Oh, and watching out for peculiar mixed metaphors.

Whenever I am asked to give a lecture on writing, I generally talk about the art of the rewrite, handing out Before and After examples from my own work. Sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking words, chapter breaks, and punctuation, and reading the two samples aloud generally illustrates why I’ve made certain choices. Other times the rewrite will have changed straight narrative into dialogue, and I’ll spend a while talking about why too long a stretch of one form or the other wearies the reader. And sometimes a two-line scene will have become three or four pages, when I’ve realized that I needed a) to expand my description of a character or setting, b) to add a plot twist, c) to pause for a more leisurely exploration of what’s going on, giving everyone a breather, d) needed to divert for a while into humor, again as a breather.

As I’ve said before, my first drafts are little more than 300 page outlines of the book I am trying to write. Some people put everything into their first drafts including their protagonist’s kitchen sink: the brand, whether it’s stainless steel, porcelain, or fiberglass, its size, even the depth (real cooks like deep sinks, after all, as do parents of small babies, and if God is in the details then surely the more detailed the writing, the closer to divine it is?)

I don’t usually write that kind of first draft (although some chapters of TOUCHSTONE were awfully prolix, as I felt my way through the political situation by having the characters talk, and talk, and talk some more.) Some parts of one of my first drafts are complete, but others give little more than the bones of the story, so that even minimalists like Hemingway (or, as he claimed to be) would find it hard to support any cuts from them. The rewrite adds form and color, individuality and interest. The rewrite crafts the life in the routine.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sweating over your first novel or if you’ve published seventeen novels and made it onto the New York Times list: If you’re not just phoning it in, every book is a new universe. Every book is a learning experience. Every book involves re-inventing the wheel.

Every book, I remind myself that it is so.

c'est fini

TOUCHSTONE is finished. The world's longest rewrite, certainly MY world's longest rewrite, and I've sent it off to my editor just in time for the frantic last-minute business of getting off to New York. The first draft a year ago was 400+ pages, the second draft in December was slightly more than 500, this (final, absolutely, no questions except maybe tweak a couple things) version is 640 pages, 170,000 words, polished and perfect and gloriously alive on the page. I feel as if I'd been pulling a car uphill for the past three months. I feel as if my head is leakng grey matter. I feel...

...relieved.

It'll be party time in New York, I tell you what.

Librarians and other loves

Happy National Libraries Week!

Kiss a librarian today! Or at least thank one.

Nibbles and bites

My beloved publisher (now, how many authors do you know who would say that?) is playing with a new venture that you may want to get involved with. It’s called Booked for Breakfast, and designed to that every weekday morning, you start you day with a delicious and maybe even nutritious serving of fiction, five minute’s worth in your email. Lee Child, Barbara Cleverly, Lisa Gardener, Dean Koonz, writers you know, writers you don’t know, and writers you thought you knew but maybe didn’t, so much.

And Laurie King. I’m on the schedule in the first part of May, and you can sign up here, at BookedforBreakfast.com.

Which sort of relates to a question posted here by Carlina, asking--has anyone gotten this month's newsletter? I signed up to get it back in January and have not received one yet...just curious...Perhaps I should send the person in charge an email? Thanks for your time!

No, sorry, no one has received a newsletter since December. I refer to the newsletter as more or less quarterly, and yes, this quarter has gone on for a long time. I’d hoped to send a newsletter in March talking about our New Internet Project, and then said project got bogged down in software questions and one web person who decided to get out of the business (oh, and then there’s my own up-to-my-eyebrows-in-rewrite status) and reinventing the wheel and—

Anyway, I’m sorry, I hate to send newsletters with nothing but drivel so I just haven’t sent one. I’m at the mercy of other people, from family to hired guns, and unless I teach myself programming overnight, you’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Honestly, it’ll be worth it when it comes out. And if you’re not signed up, you could do so now.

There was also a question that came in a while ago, from mbhs, concerning professor Donald Nicholl at UC Santa Cruz.

If you have a copy of O Jerusalem, take a glance at the dedication. Donald and Dorothy were great friends, the godparents of one of our children, and we miss him a lot.

Ordering Independents

To order books from independents (mystery specialists or otherwise) you can either phone them up, or go to their web site. To order from three of my favorites, drop them an email:

Seattle Mystery Books, as I posted yesterday:
staff@seattlemystery.com

My local guy in Watsonville, who is great if you want me to inscribe, or just sign, a book for you before he ships it:
crbkswat@sbcglobal.net

And one of the biggest, best, most knowledgeable, and nicest mystery booksellers around, in Scottsdale:
sales@poisonedpen.com

Environ/mental action

I want to talk to you a minute about your bookstore.

Yes, you. You know that place you go on this very machine you’re looking at right now, where you click sideways and you’re either at a river in Brazil or among a whole lot of really strong women (tastes may vary) and you decide you want a book? Yeah, that place.

Or say you’re driving by the mall and you have twenty minutes before you need to pick up The Kid so you drop in to that enormous supermarket of books and get a latte and an umbrella and a cute set of refrigerator magnets for your mother’s birthday next week and in the process pick up the book that’s stacked so high near the register it practically falls into your shopping basket, you know, THAT bookstore.

I just wanted to have a word with you about environmental responsibility. No, not the hairspray and SUV type that is threatening to kill off 30 percent of animal species in the next five minutes, but the kind that is having a similar devastating effect on our city streets.

The Seattle Mystery Bookstore is just one of an endangered species, small independents. SMB lives on a nice sloping street in Seattle, not far from Pioneer Square, and they love books. Oh, I’m sure a lot of the people at The A Place and The B Place and The B&N Place love books, too, but the folk at Seattle Mystery really, really love their books.

Of course, I have a special place in my heart for these folk for a lot of reasons, but notable among them is because they have kept my sci-fi oddity, CALIFIA’S DAUGHTERS (by “Leigh Richards”) on their bestseller list pretty much every month since the book was published going on three years ago. That’s right, August, 2004. For thirty-two months, JB and Bill and Fran, and all of them have been putting a copy of that book into the hands of every customer who asks, “So, what’s good?” So that last year, two years after it was published, CALIFIA shared number five on their bestseller list.

A sci-fi title, in a mystery bookstore.

But it’s not just my own loyalty speaking here. Seattle Mystery recently started a blog that functions as a guest book, where authors in the store for a signing write a Hi There! and post it. Take a look, it will give you an idea of what independent mystery bookstores are all about.

And it goes without saying (although as you see I’m going to say it anyway): The only way JB and the rest can indulge your need to read Dana Stabenow’s recipe for truffle pasta or Harley Jane Kozak’s remarks on cookies or a whole bunch of writers commenting on jet lag is IF YOU BUY BOOKS FROM THEM. Them or another independent, they’re pretty generous-minded.

They’re in it for the love, yes, but that roof over the books costs money.

Circumscribed passions

I’ve been thinking recently about my early days of writing, in the late eighties and early nineties before I was published and I had to carve writing time out of life.

My kids were young. I started writing when my second child went off to preschool three mornings a week, although I did manage more hours than that, most times, because my parents lived on the same property with us and my mother would take the boy pottering in the garden (the kid hasn’t pulled a weed since he was five, which may tell you something about the difficulty of infecting a kid with your own particular love.)

Back then, I would do the school run, then sit down and plunge into my ongoing fictional dream, coming out reluctantly when the clock nagged me to leave for pickup duty. Then when the kids were old enough to start in on after school sports and piano lessons, I would take my oversized clipboard and my legal pad, prop it against the steering wheel, and write for an hour in the afternoons. It isolated me against friendships with the other parents, but it got the books written.

Later on, I was a published author, with contractual obligations to produce words. This was great, because I actually had an excuse to do what I wanted to, and didn’t have to justify my addiction to the clip board and writing pad. But it also meant that my passion became a job, which inevitably took a little of the sparkle out of it. A superb job, and it was still occasionally a battle to work the writing life in and around the rest of life (Summer vacation is coming—aaugh! Or, I have to finish this first draft before school lets out on Dec 17th or my kids will hate me forever!)

Back then, it was the kids who set the boundaries on my writing life, because kids have to be fed and transported and noticed. And now I find I’m in an oddly similar situation with a husband (who is doing really well, thanks for asking) whose mobility problems mean that he needs someone around to do things for him and listen to make sure he’s not headed for trouble, like when he sees the massively heavy rechargeable lawnmower sitting out and tries to be helpful and put it away, leaving his walker behind to do so…

So I’ve arranged with his assistant and general factotum to come in full time, a thirty-five to forty hour week, and that’s where my life is, during those hours. I shop, I go to the gym, I see my dentist, and I write, because I cannot focus on two places at once.

The downside is that I have this massive rewrite pressing down on me, despite the generosity of spirit exhibited by Bantam when it comes to deadlines. But the upside is, I’m rediscovering the thrill of writing within limits. If I only have thirty five hours a week to focus on the book, by God it’s a tightly focused thirty-five hours. I break to make tea, eat lunch, and answer the phone, maybe half an hour total throughout the day, and then it’s back into the book.

I’m finding that, as happened back then, I tend to think about the book more. I always think about what I’m writing anyway, especially a first draft, but this is more like actual writing, but just suspending the part where the words are being set down. And there’s no delay and dithering, no taking leisurely side-trips into other peoples’ books (novels or research) while I’m at work. The car comes up the drive, I take my coffee and have my shower, walk into my study, and flip the switch.

I’m probably being the world’s worst Pollyanna, seeing the bright side of a black hole. On the other hand, there may be something to this nine-to-five business. I’ll have to try it in the future, not permitting myself to write to my heart’s content.

But now I have to go, because it’s time to make the coffee, eat the breakfast, and get ready for the car to come up the drive.

Hot flash!

Technical difficulties having to do with the number of working hours in a week and the inability of LRK to produce satisfactory clones has delayed the promised announcement for today. But fortunately, my excellent friends at the Seattle Mystery Bookstore have stepped into the breach, with the following hot news flash (and if you know where the report originated or know of any AP wire photos on the subject, please don't hesitate to let us all know more) :



A stunning announcement from Britain has rocked the scientific and literary world for the second time this Spring as a multinational team of archeologists report having found the ossuary of Sherlock Holmes.

“We’ve been searching for his resting place for decades, though most have laughed at us”, said lead researcher Dr. I. M. Bruce-Partington. “Clues as to the burial grounds of the Great Detective were carefully hidden within the Canon and, with the help of the latest AI from around the Globe, we were able to crack the case. It was a solution worthy of the Great Man himself.”

The exact location of the find was kept secret to ensure treasure hunters, true believers and members of the Moriarity Crime Syndicate wouldn’t be able to disrupt the work. Thought to be sited somewhere to the Northwest of London, deep in the Moors. “While the Moors are thought to be largely boggy, it has been widely known within the geological community – as well as the archeological community, I should add – that cave-like structures do occur and are quite stable and dry.” Explained Dr.Charles Milverton. “The spot we’ve been excavating is quite large and contains a number of boxes related the Holmes family, as well as boxes we believe to be associated with them.”

According to Dr. Jonathan Small, the first ossuary to be discovered bore marks that were quite difficult to decipher. “The marks seemed to be saying ‘my crafts’ as if we were going to find knitting needles or paintbrushes inside. Our cryptographer, Gloria Scott, recognized it to read MYCROFT, and from there it all began to make sense. We have no unearthed ossuarys holding the remains of Mrs. Hudson, John and Mary Watson – those were found in a niche with a number of old battered metal dispatch boxes - our literary investigator, Professor L.S. Klinger, is pouring over those and his report will be forthcoming – in a separate niche. We are most puzzled by the recent discovery of 5 other limestone boxes. Tests are still ongoing and we are not confident, at this time, to announce whose remains those might contain.” One of the most intriguing is one which bears the damaged carving “Maria de Frans---”. The American specialist Leigh Richards has been called in to work on that stone container.

The literary world has been ablaze with comments and controversy. Most mainline, serious critics have railed at the thought that Sherlock Holmes could have been a real person. “What’s next?” demanded Thorneycroft Huxtable, MA, PhD, “The crypt of James Bond, Miss Marple’s headstone?” Reached at the prestigious Istituto per gli studi religiosi di Bologna, Professor Sabaglione objected strongly: “è questa gente di mistero pazzesca? sta confrontando un detectivo fictional ad una figura santa! deve essere uno scherzo!” A spokesman for the British Crime Writer’s Association, who requested anonymity, expressed guarded enthusiasm. “This is something like the discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls, I should think. Just imagine how this could change our understanding of the beginning of the mystery story.”

Most excited seems to be the Minister of Tourism and Visitors, Frances Carfax. “We in Her Majesty’s Government are quite thrilled with the possibilities this scientific discovery may provide. Sherlock Holmes is a beloved figure world ’round and, if this cannot be proven beyond a doubt to be the final resting for Mr. Holmes, his believers will not be deterred and will flock to the site in massive numbers. True believers, as we all know, will bear any effort or cost to be close to those they worship and we very well may see the beginning of a new Holy Land of Literary Greats. The PM and Her Majesty are quite excited.”

San Francisco Holmsian expert Philip Gilbert was unavailable for comment. However, spokesman for the Gathering of Critical Literatis, Sir George Burnwell, retorted “Harumph! Really, Holmes, while an interesting fictional figure of minor importance – good lord, we’re talking about genre fiction, after all - cannot possibly become the central figure of such economic and journalistic focus. These people toss about words like ‘Great’ and ‘Canon’ as if just any creature of fiction can have holiness bestowed upon Him. Anyone believing such rubbish is simply a fool.”