Just in time for Mothers Day, an article telling us that, if stay-at-home moms got a monetary compensation for the 90-plus hours a week they work, it would average $117,000 a year. (Ninety plus hours a week, by the way, if she manages to get 8 hours sleep a night–big if–leaves said Mom with 20…
Read MoreI reached New York (read: Manhattan) for the first time on the Monday night of the Memorial Day Weekend, 1993. The next morning I set off in a taxi (admission: in fifteen or more visits over the intervening years, I’ve never yet been on the subway) to the Flatiron Building and St Martin’s Press, to…
Read MoreThe first time I passed through New York—well, actually just the airport—was on my way to India back in the Seventies. My chief impression was amazement, that people actually talked like dat. Twenty years later, I had a book published by St Martin’s Press. It did okay, well enough that they wanted another book, and…
Read MoreSo, why New York? Not an existential question, although indeed when I’m standing on a street corner in the rain jostled by humanity and competing with twenty other black-clad women (all of them in shoes that I could not even stand in, much less leap for a cab door in) for one paltry taxi with…
Read MoreAs some of you may have picked up over the years, SJ Rozan is one of the friends I’ve made in this odd business, where colleagues tend to be spread very, very thinly around the world. But since her home base is New York, and since I go to NY once a year and we…
Read MoreThe Edgars award winners for 2008 are at http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html I had a grand time at the Edgars banquet, especially since I wasn’t a nominee so there was no nerves and quivers, just hanging with friends and catching up on publishing life with people in the business. But I’m tired and it’s after midnight, and I…
Read MoreShannon Byrne has posted some pics of Tuesday night’s launch party for The Blue Religion at Mysterious Books, some of which include LRK, at http://picasaweb.google.com/ByrneMediaGroup/BlueReligionBookParty (thanks to Sarah Weinman for the head’s up!) Wednesday was lunch with SJ Rozan, a meeting about a MWA project I may be getting involved with, and the annual Agents…
Read MoreWheee—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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreFor 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.…
Read More