BoucherCon is underway! And I’m here, hitting the ground running (once the car had crawled the way through rush-hour traffic from Dulles to Baltimore—what can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time I booked it.) with a dinner at the fabulous Pratt museum and a tour of the collection of H.…

Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column is growing a collection of interviews he’s calling Writing 101, beginning (only appropriately) from the latter stages of the writing process, the rewrite. He and I conducted the interview at his house, so if you hear odd noises in the background, it’s his eight inch tall pug, impatient to…

James Houston, Karen Joy Fowler and I are in discussion, led by the inimitable Rick Kleffel, on KUSP this Sunday from 6 to 7 Pacific time. We’re talking politics, folks, and around here, that can mean anything. If you have questions you’d like the four of us to address, send them to Rick at: agony…

Ron Hogan over at GalleyCat quotes an anonymous person in the publishing industry concerning the sales of literary novels: “If you’ve sold between 4,000 and 7,000 copies, in hardcover, of your literary novel, you did a damned good job… If you sold between 2,000 and 4,000 copies of your literary novel, you sold pretty strongly.”…

David Montgomery— http://www.crimefictionblog.com/2008/09/the-confines-of.html —talked recently about the perennial question of crime versus literary fiction. In this case it was triggered by a Janet Maslin review of the new historical novel by Dennis Lehane, The Given Day, which Maslin describes as a “fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre.” One…

The audio posts of panels from last June’s CrimeFest are up, at http://www.crimefest.com/programme_2008.html . You’ll find LRK on Friday at 3 and Sunday at noon (the Saturday morning panel doesn’t seem to have recorded.) Let me know if the links work, or don’t, for you.

I wrote this post before Oprah announced her next reading club pick, but didn’t get around to putting it up until now. If you’re going to read THE LIFE OF EDGAR SAWTELLE you have my permission to skip this post because it gives stuff away. Like, the ending. *** I’ve been working on the ending…

I had a good birthday this week, starting at 9:30 in the morning when I hit the send button and The Language of Bees flew cross country and onto my editor’s computer. (This explains my recent e-absence, because 8 hour days spent juggling words leaves little inclination to play with them elsewhere.) Sending off the…

A flywheel is a device for storing energy: some machine or water flow or what have you gets it running and the wheel flies around, faster and faster, ready to transfer that energy into driving whatever piece of equipment one might require. A flywheel resists changes in its speed of rotation, and it needs a…

If you wander over to the BoucherCon program site at http://programmingb-con08.blogspot.com/, you’ll find my name quite a lot– October 9-12, 2009, Baltimore BoucherCon Thursday 11:30: LIVING IN THE PAST (Jethro Tull) Getting research right. Laurie R. King(M), Rennie Airth, James R. Benn, Charles Todd, Jeri Westerson Thursday 3:00: IT’S ONLY MAKE BELIEVE (Glen Campbell) Telling…