Laurie R. King

The copy edit process can be looked upon as an intensified writing course: all the things one does wrong, sliced up with two colors of pencil. Sins of commission, sins of omission, repeated again and again until the weary editor sighs in despair. I’ve written nearly twenty books, a handful of short stories, and a…

So the options are: 1. He pulled on a hat and buttoned up his coat, then let himself out into the cool, silent morning, luminous in a way he’d only ever seen in this country. 2. He pulled on a hat and buttoned up his coat, then let himself out into the cool, silent morning,…

Since I’m so immersed in the copy edit, I thought I’d inflict it on you, as well. I’m going to give you three versions of a paragraph, one that follows Harris Stuyvesant, the American protagonist, as he wakes up in the guest house of a duke’s country estate following an evening of disturbing revelation, decides…

The original manuscript says: He hit out against the Major, and inadvertently won his release. The copy editor changed it to: He hit out against the Major and, inadvertently, won his release. This is the kind of question that takes me so long on a copy edit. Not the substantial near-revisions the editor gently requests,…

The copy edit for Touchstone arrived back on my desk Friday, a week earlier than they had thought. Which means that all the jobs I thought I had time to do beforehand—weed whacking, tax organizing, laying out plans for the wedding party in October—are now put back until the first part of September. For anyone…

Apologies for the oddities here recently, those of you who have tried to post comments. The amount of comment spam was driving me potty and we’ve tightened things up yet another notch to keep the idiots out, but I fear we went too far and omitted the rest of you as well. Ain’t modern life…

Thinking of BoucherCon? Crime, music, friendship, good food, a fabulous setting (there should be a law requiring every city to have a mountain watching over it) and, well, me. If you’re thinking of coming to BoucherCon in Anchorage next month (and you should, really you should) and would like to have a meet-up with LRK…

An article from the Telegraph that was brought to my attention by Piper on the book club concerns Harry Patch, the last Tommy of the Great War. Harry Patch survived the bloodbath that was Passchendaele, three months of human sacrifice in the autumn of 1917 that left half a million British soldiers dead or wounded,…

Not to bug my Mutterings friends with other parts of the King e-universe, but I thought I’d mention for the artists among you that the Virtual Book Cub is hosting an art competition. If you have a rendering of Mary Russell you would like to share with the world, take a look at the competition…

Q: A veritable avalanche of requests came in for the polenta recipe I mentioned a while ago, despite the fact that it’s summer and sweltering all over. Maybe my Australian friends can cook it now, and the rest of you remember it come January. A: The short answer to the question of how I cook…