Happy National Library Week!   …that being why I’m in Detroit, celebrating with the patrons and staff of the Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Farmington, and Royal Oak libraries. Wednesday I got up at Oh God Hundred hours and drove to San Francisco, there to be locked into a plane with far too many other bodies…

Deep in rewrite territory now, I’ve worked my way through about half of The Language of Bees. So now, instead of dithering around with plot lines dangling, or with plot lines starting up with no warning because I thought of them as I was writing, the thing approaches life as a sequential story. I’ll wrestle…

My name is Laurie, and I’m a cartaholic. Yes, cart as in cartography, maps, those foldy things you wrestle with in cars and end up jamming furiously into the glove box. A couple years ago, Les Klinger and I were doing an event in Chicago, after which we planned on driving to the BoucherCon in…

Over at MJRose’s site, Susan O’Doherty recently posted the text of a talk she gave encouraging women to reclaim their selfishness. The entire thing is worth reading—yes, for you boys, too—but one line in particular caught me: “We’re not supposed to take time out for ourselves when there are others depending on us. That’s selfish.”…

I just received permission from my Hollywood agent to let you all know about the following letter she sent me recently: ** Dear Laurie, I know you said in that conversation we had last fall that you didn’t think Jeremy Irons would be quite right for the part of Holmes, but we have received a…

Last night the space station passed directly over our house. I happened to have been watching the local news that night when they told about it, so I was outside, and the sky was clear, when it came. My first thought, after squelching the idiotic urge to wave, was how fast the damn thing was…

The shiny new Mystery Writers of America web site is up and running, and you might want to skip over there and rummage around. The paint cans and polish rags are still at work, but there are author pages, author newsletters to sign up for, monthly book drawings–just saying, it’s worth a look.

I want to know why, if I can deduct the cost of my laptop, my travel, and my office space, I can’t deduct this: I have what I call a Mindless Pool (which the manufacturers call an Endless Pool) because you swim against a jet so you never need to think about turning around. Whenever…

First draft of The Language of Bees: finished. 302 pages of tripe: sprawling, flabby, pallid, and unappealing. It’s the job of the rewrite to transform raw tripe into something that could be ordered in a starred restaurant. (And actually, even with tripe there are nuggets of good stuff there, buried.) But I’m taking three days…

2400 words Monday; 1700 words Tuesday; 3273 words Wednesday (but who’s counting?). The smoke gently curls out of Laurie’s ears… A reminder that we’re drawing for two ARCs of the UK edition of Touchstone Friday, March 21. This is for UK residents only who send us a note at info@laurierking.com with the subject line UK…