Laurie R. King

Bow, bow you lower-middle classes
Blow the trumpets! bang the brasses!
(Isn’t this a good week to start out with Gilbert and Sullivan?)

Anyway, start up the parade because we have another winner, number five, who I believe, if my eyes aren’t deceiving me, is new to the mailing list. Apologies to you who’ve been with us since the get-go, but congratulations to Suzanne in Williamsburg, VA, who wins a copy of the bound galleys for THE ART OF DETECTION. There are three more in the stack, waiting for signature and an envelope, and if you aren’t signed up, you can’t win one. Go to LaurieRKing.com and click on the menu bar for the newsletter, or connect here. And remember, if you get your friend-and-relations (Now, where else can you find both G&S and AA Milne in the same post? Don’t answer that, I don’t think I want to know.) What was I saying? Oh yes–your friends-and-relations to put their names down, it increases your chances of stealing their ARC, since they only won because you made them sign up. Works for me…

The tour for THE ART OF DETECTION is taking shape, there should be something on the web site before too much longer, and TOUCHSTONE’s first draft has crept over 300 pages, so with luck I’ll have it tied off before I go to New York for Edgars week on the 24th. Not that this means much, since the result is what the Brits refer to as a dog’s dinner, lots of unidentifiable scrapings and unrelated fragments that you really don’t want to look too closely at. My long-suffering editor will probably insist on seeing it, why I can’t think other than her chronic masochism (she’s been an editor a long time–of course she’s masochistic) or maybe it’s her chronic insomnia, hoping the mess bores her to sleep. Harley Kozak over at The Lipstick Chronicles has a description of her own messy first draft, although she has the opposite problem from mine when it comes to length–I write short to begin with, and choose in the rewrite just where to develop characters/place/subplots/etc.

I’ll take my laptop with me, and if the idiot in front of me doesn’t lie in my lap during the flight, start the short story I promised Michael Connelly for his MWA collection. Due in March, but oh dear, did he mean this year?

I’ll get to your April queries beginning tomorrow, hope your day is dryer than mine looks to be.