Laurie R. King: Mutterings

Just in time for Mothers Day, an article telling us that, if stay-at-home moms got a monetary compensation for the 90-plus hours a week they work, it would average $117,000 a year.

(Ninety plus hours a week, by the way, if she manages to get 8 hours sleep a night–big if–leaves said Mom with 20 hour of free time a week. Many mothers would question if they get that much…)

I was a professional Mom for a number of years when the kids were small, although since my tools included hammer and Skil saw, probably “homemaker” was a more precise term. My husband made a decent salary, and thanks to the garden (plus freezer and canning jars), the sewing machine, and the handywoman skills, we kept outside costs down. In any case, it would have been tough to have a normal job, since as an academic, he figured summers were for travel.

I’m a believer in having an at-home parent, male or female, when kids are small. Kids don’t need quality time, they need quantities of quality time. Obviously, some mothers have no choice but to work outside the home, and even La Leche League (which organization I love, and for whom I used to be a counselor) recognizes that not every mother can stay at home. Other moms find being at home all day, every day a sure recipe for madness, and although a few of those might have benefited by re-thinking the whole need-to-reproduce question early on, kids are tough and day care or nannies can also produce great human beings.

This is my first Mother’s Day without a mother to greet with a flower or some chocolates. So to everyone out there who is, was, or ever had a mother, I say to you: Happy Mother’s Day.

I reached New York (read: Manhattan) for the first time on the Monday night of the Memorial Day Weekend, 1993.  The next morning I set off in a taxi (admission: in fifteen or more visits over the intervening years, I’ve never yet been on the subway) to the Flatiron Building and St Martin’s Press, to meet the editor I’d been working with and talking to over the phone for the past eighteen months.

Ruth Cavin, then in her mid seventies, had plucked A Grave Talent out of the stack of the great unpublished and given it a home.  It came out in January, 1993, and sold well enough to go into three or four printings by the time I showed up in New York, but it was still four months away from receiving its Edgar nomination, and eight months from its win: In other words, one more first novel among hundreds of others.

Ruth and her assistant Elizabeth (now long gone out of publishing, sensible woman) welcomed me, showed me around the offices, introduced me to various Terribly Important People whom I promptly forgot, and then Elizabeth proudly handed me a color Xerox print of the proposed cover for the next book, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.

“Oh,” I said.

“Isn’t it great?  We just love it.  I was so glad it came in before you got here so you could see it.  Here, you can have this copy, take it with you.”

I will pause for a moment while you examine this.  Closely.

I went back to my hotel room, set the page up on the table, stood back—and started to cry.

Oh my God, what could I do, I was a nothing author and they were My Publishing House and the cover was awful, just terrible, ugly and creepy and jumbled and…

Oh dear.  And I am not good at confrontation, never have been.  But in the morning I summoned all my New Yorkish In-Your-Faceness and made a phone call to Ruth, and after agreeing that it had been great to meet her and that yes, we must do it again soon, I cleared my throat and screwed up my face and, making a tremendous effort to keep my voice steady, said, “Um, about the cover?”

“Yes, it’s striking, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose.  But really, I don’t think it…says what you want to say about the book.”

“Hmm.  Do you think so?”

“Oh yes, I really do. It really doesn’t.  It doesn’t capture any of the—”

“Okay.”

“Pardon?”

“You may be right.  I’ll send it back to the Art department and see what they can do.”

“Oh.  Well.  Thank you.”

 Then I stretched out for a while on the floor and breathed quietly.

 Note–the much-improved final version of the cover, as it appeared on the original St. Martin’s edition:

The first time I passed through New York—well, actually just the airport—was on my way to India back in the Seventies. My chief impression was amazement, that people actually talked like dat.

Twenty years later, I had a book published by St Martin’s Press. It did okay, well enough that they wanted another book, and maybe one after that, so I began to think that maybe I should pull up my stumps and go introduce myself. I had chosen an agent by eliminating those I couldn’t drive up and see, but there wasn’t much I could do about moving the actual publishing house into this time zone.

So in September of 1993, when The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was in production (for publication in early 1994) I got on a plane for New York, a young hippie mom venturing into the Big City.

My introduction to New York’s gentle manners was when I was standing in line (yes, I know, being New York I was in fact standing on line) for the shuttle bus into the city. For some ungodly reason, I had decided it would be a good idea to fly on the Monday of Labor Day Weekend. The line was long. The bus was stuck in all the other traffic trying to get to the airport. We were there a long time. And the young backpackers next to me, spotting the ticket-seller coming past, asked him in all innocence if he knew when the bus would come.

“You don’t want to wait? You don’t have to wait, you can have your money back, you want your money back, here, I’ll give you back your money, you don’t have to—” How you say, In your face? With each demand, the two Californians stepped back a little more, as if adjusting their stance to a high wind. When they did not thrust their tickets out to be exchanged for cash, the man gave up and went away, leaving two pale visitors who would think twice before venturing a question.

The bus came eventually, and we all crawled our way into Manhattan, but one thing I never have figured out: Why haven’t all the residents of New York just murdered each other in a fury?

In our next adventure: Laurie meets her editor, and is reduced to tears by a cover.

So, why New York?

Not an existential question, although indeed when I’m standing on a street corner in the rain jostled by humanity and competing with twenty other black-clad women (all of them in shoes that I could not even stand in, much less leap for a cab door in) for one paltry taxi with its lights lit for custom—when I’m in that state, as I say, I wonder why the hell this mad city should exist.

But actually, I mean by that question, why do I go to New York? This is a big country. I am a busy person. Like most other busy people in this big country, I don’t have money to burn, so I keep track of where it goes, and I think twice about anything with too many zeros at the end of its price tag.

This trip to New York cost me four days (five if you count Saturday, spent bleary-brained when the most I got done was laundry), a lot of energy, blisters, the contributed good will and effort of the family members covering my responsibilities at home, and more zeros on the price tag than I need to think about.

What did I get in exchange?

A renewal of friendships, difficult and rare in this business. Hand-shakes with a lot of people, reminding them of my existence (as I said, this is a big country, and Monterey Bay, CA is on the farthest edges.)

Business talks of the kind that simply don’t take place over email or telephone, those wide-ranging and apparently amorphous conversations that only later blossom into actual business, when a casually dropped idea puts down roots, when a shared interest or acquaintance opens unexpected doors.

The more deliberate business talks, appointments made with editors and publicists in which questions and proposals are batted around for a while, and comments made that come to loom large: the minor complaint about a manuscript that turns into an important revelation; the question about trade versus mass market that brings insights into the industry, and the looming questions of electronic versus paper, tastes and trends, the arc of a series, the unexpected and the wildly anticipated: What’s next in this business?

And of course, there’s book talk: What have you read? Yes, even people who spend their every working hour with type in front of their eyes still read for pleasure, and talk about it: What have you read recently that you loved? What have you hated and discarded, despaired about and admired, sold and bought? What books have covers that work, or covers that don’t? What book did what was expected, and which did precisely what everyone thought it would? And the genre itself: mystery versus thriller, series versus stand-alone, women and men, here or abroad, the meat and potatoes of daily life that gets overlooked in the flash of truffles and arugula.

I return home tired and broke, but restored in my awareness of what I do for a living, and a loving.

I am a writer; the publishing industry is centered in New York; therefore I go to New York.

More on Laurie’s First Trip to the Big Apple in a day or two.

As some of you may have picked up over the years, SJ Rozan is one of the friends I’ve made in this odd business, where colleagues tend to be spread very, very thinly around the world. But since her home base is New York, and since I go to NY once a year and we both often go to BoucherCon at its various sites, it does mean that I manage to see more of SJ than I do a lot of my other writing buddies.

This past week I had breakfast and two parties with SJ, catching up on the year, and she told me about her plans for a summer in Assisi. And I nodded in polite interest. I asked the right questions, showed the proper enthusiasm. And I was happy to hear that she might be able to do this again, really I was. But I was also deeply, grindingly, jealous. I SO want to go. Not to teach, you understand, but to take a class—from her, or a class in painting, or Italian cooking, or anything.

Imagine: two weeks, living in a community of creative people intensely focused on their work, in one of the most beautiful small cities in the world. Here’s SJ’s own description of a morning in Assisi. Think of it: breakfast with painters and poets, classes that treat your passion seriously, in a setting that makes the spirits soar with its physical and historical perfection.

As SJ says:
What I emphasize to prospective students is not only the things they’ll learn and the work they’ll accomplish in the writing workshop, but also the joy of being able to sink into two weeks of the company of other writers, painters, dancers, poets — artists of all kinds. It’s a feeling that can’t be beat, and in this case, neither can the location or the food.

Oh, I love SJ, but I want to be her.

So if you know anyone who would love this, please send them the link—sure, the exchange rate is foul, but this also means that the student has more of the instructor’s time and attention. And SJ is a very fine teacher.

Please sign up—if nothing else, in order to share your bliss with us here at Mutterings!

The Edgars award winners for 2008 are at http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

I had a grand time at the Edgars banquet, especially since I wasn’t a nominee so there was no nerves and quivers, just hanging with friends and catching up on publishing life with people in the business. 

But I’m tired and it’s after midnight, and I doubt I’ll have much time to post in the morning before I go visit my Picador publishers, so as a treat I’ve written a post for a friend’s blog,

 ***

One of my rare pleasures is seeing friends, both because I’m so locked down into work I can’t get away, and because friends, well, ditto.  But I had a lovely brunch the other day with my fellow writer Laura Crum.

Laura writes a series around an equine veterinarian.  I met her a lifetime ago when she had her first book coming out and I had maybe two on the shelves, and we shared not only publishing houses but editors (St Martin’s Press, and Ruth Cavin.)  We live a few miles apart, which means I see more of her than friends who live in Alaska or England, and even come across her in the grocery store from time to time.

So, as I say, we managed to carve an hour out for lunch, and in the course of that Laura mentioned that she’d been asked to join a group blog.

Now, Laura and I are pretty different, professionally.  She plans her books, she populates them with real-life friends and animals, and she writes mostly in Santa Cruz County, with actual neighborhoods and restaurants (although she tends not to have people poisoned in any café she knows and loves). I do none of the above.

I go to conferences, I tour every new book, I keep a blog and a Book Club and a newsletter, and I break my neck to do a book a year most years (sorry about 2007, friends.) Laura, on the other hand, has a life, in which writing is one part, but not an enormous part.

And, Laura knows horses.  I know…well, I know what they look like standing in a field.

Anyway, I offered to write a guest post at her blog, and since it’s a blog about horse fiction, horses are what I’ve written about.  You can find it at http://equestrianink.blogspot.com. 

And if you want to know more about horses, don’t listen to me, listen to them.

Shannon Byrne has posted some pics of Tuesday night’s launch party for The Blue Religion at Mysterious Books, some of which include LRK, at http://picasaweb.google.com/ByrneMediaGroup/BlueReligionBookParty

(thanks to Sarah Weinman for the head’s up!)

Wednesday was lunch with SJ Rozan, a meeting about a MWA project I may be getting involved with, and the annual Agents and Editors party, which I like to go to in order to show one writer’s love for all those people whose names DON’T appear on the cover of the book they’ve worked on. 

Thursday, half over now, has had two of five events already, including breakfast with World’s Greatest Editor Kate and Super-Publicist Sharon up at the Random House building, then wandering around the Fifties for an hour until I met with Les Klinger and Dan Stashower (who won an Agatha at Malice Domestic this weekend, congrats Dan!) at the ever-amusing, if obscenely expensive, Twenty-One Club.  I am now cooling my poor Californian toes (we don’t walk by the hour in CA) for half an hour before the Ellery Queen-Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines party, after which I dash back to the hotel and change for the Edgars dinner itself.  And if I survive that, I’ll stagger around the corner for Otto Penzler’s post-Edgar bash.

 Does this seem the proper life for a person whose most exciting days involve 2500 words on a computer screen?

Wheee—it’s Edgars Week!

Up at 2:00 and on the road by 3:15 for a 6 am flight, doesn’t that sound like fun?  Well, when it’s in the cause of MWA’s Edgars week, yes, it’s fun.  The rest of the plane seemed to think so as well, although I don’t believe all of them were headed for JFK for the same reason as I, especially the twenty or so teenaged hip-hop kids laden with an incredible number of huge stuffed animals.  However, I soon saw the reason for the animals, as the kids all spent the flight draped over the padding, snoozing.

Me, too.  Not with the four foot high stuffed dogs, but with the snoozing, which brought me up to almost six hours of sleep, plenty to keep my partying until, well, ten o’clock.  And yeah I know that’s only seven West Coast time, so I’m not a party animal.

Tuesday of Edgars week has always been Black Orchid day, when the bookstore up on 81^st street flings open its doors and Bonnie and Joe pour wine for writers and readers alike.  But the Black Orchid has closed, sadly, which made us all the more grateful for the launch party hosted by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Books down (FAR down) in Tribecca.  Bonnie and Joe were there, too, and Michael Connelly and seven or eight other contributors to The Blue Religion.  (You might be able to order copies signed by the authors there last night from Mysterious Books, not sure.)  Lee Child was there, with the fabulous Maggie Griffin (Publicist to The Stars) and too many other friends-and-relations to list here, and we had a drink and some of us signed a LOT of books and chatted and took pictures (I’ll post links if people send them) and then some of us realized we were about to pass out from lack of nutrition, so we migrated around the block to an Irish pub for fish and chips or shepherds pie or veggie curry (me) and chatted with Sarah Weinman  and Jason Pinter, and I met Tasha Alexander  and Ken Bruen (whose The Priest is nominated for a Best Novel Edgar,) and…nope, can’t list them, because I have to post this and run off, this time to The Village where I’m having brunch with SJ Rozan.

But in case I get carried away and don’t open my trusty laptop until next week, let me say that the indomitable Sarah Weinman will be blogging live from the Edgars banquet itself, so you can follow live time the excitement of the night.  I’ll be there, at the Random House table with my editor and publicist and other RH authors, and I’ll give you a virtual wave, look for me among the hundreds of others.

Now—off to a day of writers and books!

(Sorry I can’t work out how to link on the laptop–for your info, here are the links:

Ken Bruen and the other nominees: http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

Sarah Weinman’s blog: http://www.sarahweinman.com/

Tasha Alexander: http://www.tashaalexander.com/

The Edgars Banquet live blog: http://www.mysterywriters.org/?q=mwablog

I was saddened to read of the death of an unmet friend, a reader who wrote to me several times from the House of Lords, first in praise, then in an exchange of methods of decanting ancient port and a discussion of snooker versus billiards.

This is one of the interesting aspects of being a writer, when one comes into contact with the most unexpected variety of readers. I had hoped to meet Lord Beaumont when I got to England this June; now, my London visit will be the less for it.

(And had you known before this that the House of Lords kept a blog?)

For some reason, it often takes people by surprise to find that I am an amusing public speaker. Deliberately amusing, that is, not laughable. But I’ve been speaking to groups for a long time, since long before I became a writer, and I am very comfortable manipulating the attention of fifty or five hundred people.

I am enough of an amateur, however, to find that beginning with a large and enthusiastic group makes the process easier: the more crowded the room, the greater the chance the evening will sparkle.

Last night at the Royal Oak library, the SRO crowd led us straight into a great time. At least, I had a great time, and if the crowd was unhappy, their laughter hid it very well.

Of course, it was helped by having come from a festive dinner with a glass of very nice wheat beer, attended by librarians (led by Royal Oak organizer Rosemary), John Lamb as the representative male (he’s a singer and directs a writing retreat, which would like to have me come), and four (or was it five?) sets of mother-daughter Friends of Russell, including Nikki and Caitlin, who had driven from West Virginia for the chance to play with Laurie.

Thank you, Metro Detroit libraries, for three days of fun and ego-building.  May your Dewey Decimal system never fail, may your patrons remain always polite, and may all your books come back to roost.