The Green Man flies

The Green Man–rewrite finished, although never to my complete satisfaction–has zipped its electronic way across the country and landed in my editor’s computer. 427 pages, some of which are not at all bad. Look for it, and its author, in your local bookshop in June 2010. Not under that name: I hope to have its…

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Listening to the story

This part of writing, the rewrite, is why I’m glad I don’t have to produce two or three books a year.  And it’s why I’m glad (well, almost glad) that I’m not a writer who locks herself into an outline.  Because what I’m doing now is listening to the story. The first draft gives me…

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End games

I’m finishing my trio of posts over at the Well Read Donkey today, on endings. While also working ten hour days refining the final draft.   I wonder if my post over there makes the least bit of sense?

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Plots & PostIts

I’m over at Kepler’s Well Read Donkey again today, talking about plots, problems, and PostIts (with a photo of the last, a small avalanche of the yellow lined PostIts I use, then fold in half when I remove them so I know it’s a point I’ve finished with.)

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A visit with old friends

Sometimes one gets a chance to revisit old friends.  No, this is not a paean to Facebook, but mention of a short story, long out of print, that’s going to take another stroll across the stage in a collection of Sherlockiana being published next month. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains a short story…

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Donkeys and meteors

I’m over at the blog for Kepler’s bookstore this week, The Well Read Donkey, talking about beginnings, middles, and ends. While you’re there, maybe you could even click onto the Kepler’s link and buy a book?  Hooray for indies! And I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Perseid meteors are…

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Congratulations, Ms King, it’s an ending

Yesterday was crunch day. I’d worked my way through the rewrite, incorporating half a tree’s worth of PostIts and a brick of graphite, and reached the final scene. I wrote it back in April, which as you may or may not remember was a busy time anyway for LRK and her e-world, and although there…

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Name that baby!

You thought that once the Fifteen Weeks of Bees were over, we’d be finished with contests, right?  Ah no, we’re just beginning. How creative are you feeling?  Well, sharpen those pencils and wits, kids, because Laurie needs a title.  That’s right, The Green Man just doesn’t do it.  As a working title, sure, because it’s about…

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The City and The Writer

So there I was, smack in the middle of the kind of plot problems that come when you’ve written a complicated first draft through some really difficult times, when the ever-clever Rick Kleffel asks me to talk into a microphone for him. He was doing an NPR piece for All Things Considered about a pair…

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Jon Carroll tips his hat

One of my favorite columnists at the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Carroll, has nice words to say about me today, here. It’s always a kick when someone gets it, when the things that amuse me (fiction linked to fiction linked to reality and getting lost therein) amuse others as well.

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