Laurie R. King: Mutterings

If you wander over to the BoucherCon program site at http://programmingb-con08.blogspot.com/, you’ll find my name quite a lot–

October 9-12, 2009, Baltimore BoucherCon

Thursday 11:30:

LIVING IN THE PAST (Jethro Tull) Getting research right. Laurie R. King(M), Rennie Airth, James R. Benn, Charles Todd, Jeri Westerson

Thursday 3:00:

IT’S ONLY MAKE BELIEVE (Glen Campbell) Telling lies for a living. Thomas B. Cavanagh(M), Martin Edwards, Alison Gaylin, Laurie R. King, Martyn Waites, Michael Wiley

Friday 4:30:

WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO (Tina Turner) Is the protagonist a hero on a quest for Justice, Truth, and The Restoration of Order or just another slob getting the job done? Declan Hughes(M), Charlaine Harris, Laurie King, Val McDermid, S.J. Rozan

Saturday 8:30:

DO THE STRAND (Roxy Music) The Sherlock Holmes archtype and its influence. Sophie Hannah(M), Peter Blau, Steve Hecox, Laurie King, Hank Phillippi Ryan

Saturday 2:00, Orleans Street Branch library:

Author Laurie King moderates a panel on Mystery with fellow scribes Frankie Bailey, Charlaine Harris, Gary Phillips and Cara

Black

Two of them I’m moderating, so you won’t hear a lot of what I think on those subjects, but if I had to choose one, it’s that Friday night panel with Val, SJ, and Charlaine: all modesty aside, we rock together.  And with Declan to egg us on, the place may never recover.

Not too late to sign up at http://charmedtodeath.com/register.html

You may nave noticed that there’s nothing to see here, and moved along.  I am head-down in the rewrite, six or eight hours straight of either reading the thing aloud (muttering it, actually, and haltingly, since I stop every few words to change something, then have to re-read the paragraph as corrected) or else inputting the changes, my eyes flipping back and forth between printout and screen, printout and screen, printout…

It’s ridiculous.  I have a life on hold, appointments to make, friendships withering on the vine for lack of attention, bee people to see, antique airplane folk to question, and here I sit, head-down over the laptop.

I want to take a class in Japanese.  I want to learn to cook Thai, correctly.  I want to go to someplace with sand and watch waves come and go and come and go and come and go.

Life is what happens when you’re doing other things.  Like writing a book.

Anyway, this too will pass and I will emerge, blinking and growling—oh, and Muttering, too.

In the meantime, here’s a thing.

Next month on the Virtual Book Club we’re reading FOLLY, the novel that threatened to clear the offices of Random House when everyone who read their special in-house ARC got a faraway look in their eyes and started to greet each other in the elevators by asking, “Have you ever thought of building a cabin somewhere?  Do you think I could get a sabbatical to do it and then write about it?”

(This month we’re reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s brilliant memoir on madness [her word] An Unquiet Mind.  My introduction and the discussion are here [sorry, my links are still not working on Wordpress]:

http://www.laurierking.com/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=44 )

But on August 28, we’re giving away 7 copies of FOLLY:

Two hardbacks will go to members of the Laurie Loves Libraries List. If you haven’t submitted your library to be part of the list, email us now at info@laurierking.com with your favorite library’s name and address!

Also, a signed trade paperbacks of FOLLY will be given to winners drawn from each of the following groups:

LRK Newsletter registrants

LRK blog Registrants

Active VBC members

All VBC members

You can sign up at those here:

http://www.laurierking.com/joinus.php

And finally, a UK version of Folly will go to a member drawn from LRK’s Facebook page members.

Good luck, everyone, and—see you on the other side! 

My daughter dared me to write about the movie we saw last night (Hi, sweetie) because she thinks my fans imagine me as hanging around the art-movie house (And you’d better believe Santa Cruz has one, or three) instead of guffawing helplessly over a piece of gore-soaked inanity like Tropic Thunder, and that I should hesitate to admit such lowbrow taste for fear of offending my readers’ delicate and intellectual sensibilities.

Too late.

You have to understand, I don’t see a lot of movies at the moment, it being tough to get a replacement set of legs-and-ears in the evening, so I have to choose my films carefully.  Nothing dark and emotional, don’t have room in my life for that.  No cartoons, too much of a risk that they’ll be candy-floss.  Something with a lot of explosions and either an interesting story line or humor, and both is a bonus.  Hancock, Batman, and now Tropic Thunder: I’ll save my emotional intensity for the dvd, thanks.

(This is not to say I recommend any of those three movies to most normal human beings.  This latest one particularly is gruesome and foul, and it you’re nauseated by a high and unending jet of red coming from a shot soldier’s helmet on a film set, you really don’t want to see what they do when the hero saves his buddies by picking up a grenade.  And: not for kids.  Not.)

Raunchy and offensive (not just against “retards”, which is the focus of current criticism, but against everyone) and clever and ridiculous and, if you’re in the right mood, and have a strong stomach, just the thing. 

Afterwards, we ate sushi.

I’ve written here about my fondness for RIF, the national Reading is FUNdamental program that gives books to kids.

Well, I see that there’s a nice program going on, of all places, at Macy’s.  If you give them $3 as a RIF donation, they’ll pass all of that $3 over to RIF, and give you a discount of $10 off a $50 purchase.  All of which sounds a bit like a shell game, but means that if you’re going in to buy something anyway, you can save $7 and make kids happy. 

And if you’d like to see my RIF blog post, it’s at http://laurierking.com/wp.php/?p=455, and I would have linked you there but I gave in to my machine’s entreaties to accept the offered upgrade its system, even got up at one in the morning to start the process so it wouldn’t eat our daily allowance of satellite time, and in thanks it’s hidden the link button on Word Press.

The editor, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is the writer’s first reader. She (well, yes, there are a few guys in editorial chairs) is more than that, of course: the editor is generally the person who buys the book for the publishing house, negotiates the contract, knocks the book into shape, and oversees the myriad of steps to publication and beyond, from author photos and cover art to showing her enthusiasm to the sales force and deciding how much money the company is going to spend in promoting the book.

The editor is the writer’s main point of contact with the publishing business.

But before all that, she is the writer’s first point of contact with the reading public. No matter who the writer gives a manuscript to—family, friends, writing tutor, UPS delivery guy—it’s the editor’s read that matters. Editors can be wrong, but it’s the editor’s trained eye for the written word that has put her into her job, and that keeps her there.

Many people outside the writing world don’t see this. I’ve heard indignation, that someone would tell a writer what to do, force the writer to shape a story in a direction not her own. And certainly, there are cases where the editor’s vision of a book is at far remove from that of the author. Wars are fought over less.

I, however, am a fairly humble writer (with much to be humble about, I know.) So when my own editor said that the middle of The Language of Bees seemed to need some taste of peril for the main character, Mary Russell, I listened. And spent the past week adding 8500 words of hands-on encounter between Russell and the villain—or perhaps one of his henchmen, you’ll have to wait and see (if you’re taking notes, it’s the part in the house.) And my editor was right: a sharp up-tick in focus wakes up the middle of the book, since before that, much of the villainy was off-screen.

My first reader has made it a better book.

Of course, this means that the character I had to introduce has thrown the remainder of the book completely out of whack. So I now have to rewrite 100 pages down to their bones. In three weeks.

And to show it, a bunch of us BoucherConners will be extricating ourselves from the confines of the conference in October and popping up at some of the Baltimore libraries. I’m hoping I don’t have a panel assigned me Saturday morning, because I’d love to be in the library audience when Val McDermid and others are talking about Femme Noir.

If you like, you can come a bit later and watch me try to bring four very disparate crime writers into line. The link is here.

Watch what you ask for. I said I was torn between watching the Olympics and not, and man those opening ceremonies sure fill the screen…

Except not. Ten minutes before broadcast, the lights went out chez King. Went on ten minutes after they finished. So I guess Someone Has Spoken. Any neighbors out there who are reading this? I apologize.

Guess I’ll go order the third season of Dr Who, the second season of Eureka, and Torchwood if I can find it, and have a Sci Fi August.

I like the Olympics. Some of the events make me yawn, but opening ceremonies, the beauty of the competitors, the tug-at-the-heartstrings that the television networks do so well, generally keep me watching.

But this year, I have a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m not sure how much of my attention the games are going to get. I thought it wrong to give China the games in the first place—as a parent, I generally rewarded good behavior, rather than take the approach, If we give the kid a good thing, he’ll act nicely in gratitude.

But I was willing to go along, and half-agreed with the idea that anything that brought the eyes of ten thousand journalists into an area might have positive results in the long run.

However, Tibet is still being ground underfoot, politically, economically, militarily, and the Chinese solution to that uncomfortable situation was to deny the world’s reporters access to banned web sites while they’re in Beijing.

However, the government’s solution to air pollution has been to shut factories and ban cars for three weeks, counting on the workers’ patriotism to keep them from complaining too loudly about the loss of pay.

However, water is being redirected from the farmers to supply the taps, pools, and fountains of the visitors. No rice this year, kids, sorry, have an ear of corn instead.

However, I have to agree that there are human rights concerns in deputizing the population to snitch on their neighbors.

However, they’re bulldozing entire sections of the city and shoving the inhabitants out into the countryside in what one commentator called the greatest destruction of Beijing since Ghengis Khan.

However, the thing that may have me watching a lot of DVDs the next three weeks is the revoking of speed skater Joey Cheek’s visa, because Cheek has spoken out against the violence in the Sudan—and the Sudan sends China oil. The White House says it “hopes that they would change their mind.”

Damn it, Jimmy Carter pulled us out of the Olympics in protest of (ready for a drop of irony in your morning coffee?) Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, over there on the other side of the world.

Nope, the Olympics aren’t going to leave a very sweet taste in my mouth this year, sorry.

Anyone have any DVDs they’d recommend?

Sometimes you just need a laugh.

Thanks Meg, and I still owe you a cold one, see you in the bar in October.

For those of you who don’t live in the interesting state of mind that is California, I thought you’d like to know that we out here on the far left coast are aiming at the end of democracy in America.

Yep, that’s us. Although most of us are more interested in figuring out ways to ride out bicycles to work without getting pulverized by idiots on four wheels, and a certain percentage of the population spend more energy on getting the local Trader Joe’s to bring back those cans of mixed beans they used to do.

One of the drawbacks of letting writers (Hi!) outside the covers of their novels is that, while lots of them turn out to be great fellows you’d love to have a beer with or invite over for your next barbecue, there are others who make day-old dishwater look sparkly, and then there a few you feel rather like backing away from, slowly.

I like and admire a number of Orson Scott Card’s novels—not all of them, and I admit his take on the acts and attitudes of very young children seems very off to me—but Ender’s Game and the Alvin Maker series belong on anyone’s shelf of permanent science fiction. However, when he opens his mouth, it’s like Mel Gibson after the drunk-driving arrest: Maybe I don’t want to see that next movie. And maybe I’m not so keen on Card’s next book, because my hands might feel a little grubby after I pick it up.

Card has written a vicious article for the Mormon Times (thanks to John Scalzi for bringing it to my attention—and aren’t we all subscribers to the Bloggernackle?) that might have come in from planet Far Far Away. He hits all the stock rant points, including that court decisions have made legal “any abortion up to the killing of a viable baby in mid-birth.” Mid birth? I’m sorry, that interpretation of abortion law is just plain nuts.

He goes on to say, “Marriage is older than government.” Well, relationships certainly are, but marriage as an institution?

Marriage is both a personal institution, and an economic and legal one. Our current recognition of gay marriage here on the left coast addresses the latter concern: when two people live together, share assets, and raise children, there need to be means of fitting their legal status into the system. The states have no interest in dictating how churches deal with gay relationships, merely what happens to the kids when the parents separate, what insurance the homemaker of the pair can expect from the company that employs the other, and who gets to make health-care decisions for a severely ill person.

Card promises that in another column he’s going to talk about the causes of homosexuality and the reasons is persists. I just can’t wait.

I’m sorry, I could go on frothing at the mouth over each subsequent paragraph of his article (“Human beings are part of a long mammalian tradition of heterosexuality”—clearly, since that’s how the whole reproduction thing is designed, but on the other hand, homosexual behavior is found in all kinds of species) however, to be honest, I began to feel ill before I reached his conclusion.

But I’m just a Californian, and everybody knows our chief goal in life is to end democracy. Have a good day, now.