Writers are rewriters. Some of us are inveterate rewriters, incapable of leaving anything in its virgin state—novels, letters to editors, notes to the paperboy, quick emails to offspring. Some of us find that the chief joy in being a writer is that for once in your life, it doesn’t matter if you’re slow off the…

Recorded Books have been kind enough to send me some extras of their audio of Touchstone, to lay at the feet (and the ears) of my Faithful Readers—people registered on this blog, the LRK newsletter, Facebook, and two onto the Virtual Book Club. You can sign up for them all by following the links from…

San Francisco airport’s international terminal has two arrival portals. An incoming passenger treks in from the arrival gate, rescues her bags from the roundy-roundy, queues up to submit her passport to the polite but unsmilng scrutiny of the Immigration official, hands over the form that vows she is not bringing in apples or radioactive waste…

I apologize for the silence here, we’ve had some poor sad idiot target the site with what Google calls malware (sounds like something out of Tolkein) that gave everyone’s computers the heebie jeebies when they tried to see the blog, so I thought it kindest to wait (and wait) until Google’s bots got around to…

I am firmly convinced that if you gave one of those high school test questions with the drawing of a shape on it, and ask which of the four answer drawings best matched the back side of the original shape, writers would fall into two categories with their answers. The writers who got it right,…

Alas, the Curse of the Brits has hit me again, and my beloved Poisoned Pen Press (UK) is closing up shop. Sigh. This means that, if you want live in the UK and want copies of their edition books, you’ll have to scurry. They still have copies of THE ART OF DETECTION (hardcover and paperback)…

This hilarious entry appeared yesterday on Jason Kottke’s eminently followable blog. I’ll paste the bulk of it below for those of you who might have trouble seeing the small font– The American Family Association automatically replaces words like “gay” with “homosexual” in the AP stories they display on their news site. When an American sprinter…

This from the Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville, with thanks to the sharp eyes of VBC member Jessara, who comments, “Somebody around here has been reading Night Work, and the difference between fiction and nonfiction has eluded them”: A Jacksonville man went to grab a beer and brought home a painful memento from his night out.…

So, having got my life, house, and correspondence more or less up to date (which is pretty good considering 3 weeks away generally leads to 3 weeks’ catch-up) I picked up The Language of Bees and began to read. I always begin this first-read process swearing I will do it without a pencil in hand,…

Blackwell’s Books has been the center of Oxford for as long as I have known the city–the center of MY Oxford, at least. At various times there have been as many as five separate Blackwell’s shops within the few hundred yards of Broad Street, but now the Traveller’s shop sells nicknacks and the children’s shop,…