I finished the page proofs on Wednesday afternoon, somewhere over southern Oregon, a thousand niggling typos and errors caught, who knows how many slipping through the net? Which by the way is something to keep in mind if you’re tempted to buy an ARC (Advanced Reading Copy) of Touchstone on eBay when they begin to…

…so where was I? No really, where was I? Conferences are busy times, with panels and meetings during the day and dinners and serious drinking and schmoozing at night. And page proofs are demanding things, 550 pages requiring very tight attention to every word, on the lookout for mistakes introduced by the typesetter (yes, there…

Wednesday night (sorry I didn’t get this up Friday) the governor of Alaska stood up in front of several hundred crime writers, declared that, in her position of chief law enforcement officer of the state, it was a crime to indulge in bad writing, and then proceeded to issue us all with a blanket pardon…

Writing may not be a lonely business—that particular claim is usually made by people who really want you to know how much they suffer for their craft—but it is certainly a solitary one. Which makes a conference like this all the more precious. I never see my colleagues in person except when I happen to…

Anchorage is just the most appealing town in the world. Not the most gorgeous, although its setting is pretty spectacular. And not the most sophisticated, or the most architecturally varied, but as personalities go, Anchorage has IT. Workaday and fun in equal parts, with an intriguing sense of wilderness all around it that is rare…

I take off for Anchorage this morning, for BoucherCon and friends–bags packed, Anchorage weather checked, To Do list down to the dregs. I’ll be posting during the conference, for everyone who has to stay Outside. See you from there.

As I said a while back, the last time I have to read Touchstone, and the last time I can do anything about Touchstone before it goes into print, is the proof page stage. These are the pages as they appear in the book itself, with decorations and page numbers, and it’s my last chance…

Well, this is just plain fun. Thanks to web maven Vicki V we now have t-shirts. And mugs and mouse pads and dog shirts and… http://www.cafepress.com/laurierking Thank you, Vicki!

My mother, peace be upon her, was a gardener. When she and my father retired and moved down to a house on the property my husband and I bought, the two acres of land around the old house filled her with joy. She shaped it, debated which kind of raspberries were better for our area,…

Back in the Dark Ages when I was a stay-at-home-Mom with a secret hobby (because really, the income generated by my writing was so far beneath minimum wage it couldn’t be considered a job) it was difficult to justify the hours spent at the task. I tended to sneak away and scribble as a slightly…