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…

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…

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.…

Fifteen libraries are soon getting sets of the first four Russell novels, from Picador Press. Thank you, everyone who sent us the names of their favorite library—we’ll drop your library a note, to let them know they’re loved, and we’ll leave their names in the electronic pool for another drawing soon. Alameda County Library System,…

Wednesday was a double-header here at the Everyone’s Reading The Beekeeper’s Apprentice library tour—after a lunch out-of-doors with Connie Silver, the librarian who was instrumental in the choice of Beekeeper’s Apprentice for the two counties, and a visit to the gorgeously renovated Bloomfield Township library, we invaded the nearby Doyle Center (great name, no?) for…

  Happy National Library Week!   …that being why I’m in Detroit, celebrating with the patrons and staff of the Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Farmington, and Royal Oak libraries. Wednesday I got up at Oh God Hundred hours and drove to San Francisco, there to be locked into a plane with far too many other bodies…

Deep in rewrite territory now, I’ve worked my way through about half of The Language of Bees. So now, instead of dithering around with plot lines dangling, or with plot lines starting up with no warning because I thought of them as I was writing, the thing approaches life as a sequential story. I’ll wrestle…

My name is Laurie, and I’m a cartaholic. Yes, cart as in cartography, maps, those foldy things you wrestle with in cars and end up jamming furiously into the glove box. A couple years ago, Les Klinger and I were doing an event in Chicago, after which we planned on driving to the BoucherCon in…

Over at MJRose’s site, Susan O’Doherty recently posted the text of a talk she gave encouraging women to reclaim their selfishness. The entire thing is worth reading—yes, for you boys, too—but one line in particular caught me: “We’re not supposed to take time out for ourselves when there are others depending on us. That’s selfish.”…

I just received permission from my Hollywood agent to let you all know about the following letter she sent me recently: ** Dear Laurie, I know you said in that conversation we had last fall that you didn’t think Jeremy Irons would be quite right for the part of Holmes, but we have received a…