Laurie R. King

I meant to say, I had a meeting Thursday morning with my editor and publicist (who is the p.’s assistant but the p. herself is off on maternity leave.) We had breakfast in the private dining rooms of Random House, which is rather like eating your friut bowl in the board room. Planning goes ahead for the Martinelli, including a re-issue of the first four, whose disparate covers reflect the artistic whims of two publishers and a certain degree of literary uncertainty.

Thursday night was, as I’ve already written, the Edgars awards. I read my list of nominees, handed the statue to Don Lee, clapped for Jeff Parker, and went for a beer.

Friday I had to myself, and spent the day cruising up Madison avenue to the new MOMA, where my agent, Linda Allen, is a member and had given me a day pass so I didn’t have to stand in line to hand over twenty dollars. I’m not so sure the museum is a huge improvement over the old one, although I’ve read praise about it. Certainly it’s nice to be able to see Monet’s lilies from across a room rather than right on top of them and turning a corner, but I’m sorry, I thought the light in that particular gallery made the lily pond look as if someone had been swimming in it and stirring up the mud.

I dropped in on one of my favorite shops, the Dahesh museum that has glorious textile and pottery products for sale, but didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without, and admired the new little Vaio laptops at the Sony store across the street, but for some reason, New York is not a shopping town for me. Maybe my taste is more Greenwich Village boutiques, and it’s hard to schlep down to the village from midtown, but in any case I never do much in the way of retail therapy there.

So, sore-footed after four days of trudging the pavement, I took myself back down to Grand Central, bought my husband some fruit that he loves (called ground cherries, or husk cherries, or the proper Physalis) and my mother some chocolate, retrieved my luggage from the Library, and retreated to Kennedy airport.

The flight was smooth–the seat belt sign never went on once in the six hours–but for some reason the people around me were very restless, and every time I dropped off one of them jostled me back into staring at Nicholas Cage doing something bizarre with the declaration of independence and Ben Franklin’s glasses. I made it home without falling asleep at the wheel, at half past eleven, and managed to get an entire six hours of sleep, more than I’ve had in a week. Tonight I will drop into unconsciousness by nine and pick up a few lost hours, but in the meantime I will wade through the week’s mail, the 45 emails that accumulated while I was locked away by the Library’s sulky machines, and reassure the Abyssinian that I’m not going away for a while, honest.

So daily blogs are over for the time, maybe I’ll try again when I’m on the road for Locked Rooms in June/July. I will put a photo of Edgars night into the next mini-newsletter, sometime this next week, so if you aren’t on our mailing list, you might like to sign up for it now.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programs….