Laurie R. King

It’s odd, but the past few days I’ve felt like three Lauries in one. The first Laurie is fighting summer traffic to hospitals, making a thousand phone calls to doctors and caregivers, overseeing the move from hospital to rehab center (Somehow the statement “My husband’s in rehab” evokes more Robert Downey with sunken eyes than…

THE ART OF DETECTION goes on sale today in England. This dawned on me yesterday, when one of my husband’s nurses mentioned the date and I realized that I’d intended to be driving across Europe today in the car I’d ordered, bound for England and a series of events there. Poisoned Pen Press are great…

I had hoped I would have better news for those of you in Europe who were hoping to have a LRK sighting this year, but my husband’s perilous state of health means I’m going to have to cancel the UK leg of the September tour, and probably cancel the Italian conference as well. And I…

Something I try to do with my novels is tie them in to a larger picture—O JERUSALEM pokes around the realization that, if the British had done things differently during the Mandate, we might have a different set of problems in the Middle East today; WITH CHILD confronts the terrible way we as a society…

Back at the beginning of the month, a pair of (anonymous) questions regarding craft came in: How much of a biography do you give secondary characters before introducing them into a novel? And, Do you write around themes, or do the themes emerge as you tell yourself the story? Both of these boil down to…

I’ll go back to the Q&A later, but I wanted first to say something about the letters I get. Because I don’t generally give out my email address, those who want to write me either have to take their luck with this blog’s comments department, or sit down and put ink on paper, address it…

Q: Melissa gets us going on a discussion of nuts-and-bolts: How does a publishing contract work? How much (if any) freedom have you lost as far as what you write? At what point are you locked into a story idea? Have you ever had to finish writing something that you wanted to take in a…

Let’s talk research—with three related questions: WDI (and thanks for the card) asks: How do you research speech patterns and dialect? I was struck with this while re-reading The Moor. I understand that “place” and “time” can be straightforward to research (at least in the obvious ways); but how the heck do you manage the…

Thanks, Kay, for asking: How do you approach a rewrite? Do all the suggestions come from your editor, or do you have second, or additional thoughts about the first draft? A: The last few times I’ve been asked to do a presentation at one writing conference or another, I’ve chosen to do one on The…

Q: L. Crampton weighs in with a question that may be a good place to begin: My wonder-about is, what role writing plays when the rest of your life is demanding, as July was for you. I tend to feel most ‘anchored’ when writing well daily, but when my mom was ill for a couple…