Posts by Laurie King
Wednesday (oops) on Writing
Today’s subject is deadlines, and the breaking thereof. Not really, although I do mean to post on Wednesdays, and this week got away from me. Writer’s Wednesdays (or in this case, Thursday) here on Mutterings are my musings on various aspects of the writer’s trade and life. This week: a venture into e-publication. ** Last…
Read MoreWriting (or not) on the road
Today’s Wednesday on Writing will be brief, since I am in New York for The Edgars, and not only is writing on the iPad a laborious process, I also hit the ground running and have little time for a leisurely reflection on the writing process. Today I will be on a panel in the Edgars…
Read MoreCoincidence
Today is Writing Wednesday here at Mutterings, and the day’s topic is the role of coincidence in crime fiction. Some of you will guess by this that I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson. Her latest Jackson Brodie story, Started Early, Took the Dog, is the fourth in what is dutifully described as a series, following the…
Read MoreThe romance of research
An academic’s love letter to the stacks, to mark National Library Week. Now, I’m as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes…
Read MoreWe Love Libraries!
Happy National Library Week! I had an impressive tour of the Santa Cruz library last week, from check-in to donations collection. I’ve also had a haul of books from the university library, building blocks for the story I’m working on. Both reminded me how much I love and depend on libraries. Don’t go to your…
Read MoreWednesday: on writing
Rather, on non-writing. One of the most frustrating things about being a writer is when you can’t. I’m not talking about being blocked by internal inabilities—“writer’s block.” I’m talking about what Lao Tse (he must have raised small children) called the “the ten thousand things.” I was spinning along just fine with the current novel—working…
Read MoreH.R.F. Keating
I was going to talk about research today, but HRF Keating has died, a friend and a writer I admired tremendously, and so this Wednesday’s Mutterings will be about him. I met Harry when I was a very new writer, at a conference in Scottsdale. A couple years later, he came to the Monterey BoucherCon with…
Read MoreThe absolute final cover
…and when I got back to Santa Fe from Taos this afternoon, what do I find waiting for me on the tubes of the Interweb but a final version of the Pirate King cover, really truly final this time: You can compare this with the one I’d thought was the final cover, a few posts…
Read MoreThe conference as tool
Wednesdays here on Mutterings are about the writing process, from nouns to e-readers. Today, since I’m in Santa Fe for Left Coast Crime, I thought I’d talk about the conference as part of a writer’s life. We’re a solitary species, we writers. Except for a few of us who work in tandem, and for those…
Read MoreClothes make the (wo)man
We are instructed not to judge a book by its cover, and yet we do all the time. I once had a publisher tell me he initially rejected one of my books because he disliked the US cover, although later he adored the story. And if a publisher falls for what a cover has to…
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