2024!

Welcome to 2024: New year, new calendar, new thoughts. I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions, but around this time last year, I said that I wanted to focus on what has come to be known as “Swedish death-cleaning”—a rather noir term for dealing with all that stuff your kids won’t have any idea what to…

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Jobs Can be Fun

Okay, I’ll admit it: these four Beekeeper’s Apprentice 30th anniversary celebrations I’m planning for next year? Yes, I suppose you have to call it all part of promoting the Russell & Holmes series, but honestly, I’m having just a ridiculous amount of fun with them. The speakers for the events are a kick, tying their…

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Celebrating BEEKEEPER, Four Times

If you don’t get my newsletter, you may not be aware that Team LRK is putting on four all-day celebrations of Thirty Years of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice during 2024. Each will have talks, demonstrations, fun & games, and exclusive giveaways.  And maybe even a touch of education. February 17 in Santa Cruz, CA, will include a…

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The BUZZ has a question

My newsletter, The Buzz, just went out–and there’s a survey in it asking if you’d like to come to one of the FOUR Russell & Holmes events being held next year. We’re in the process of negotiating with the hotels, so we need to have a rough idea of numbers. In case you didn’t get…

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The Wisdom of 71 Writers

I’m a self-taught writer, in that when it comes to fiction, I mostly learned by reading a million stories.  Naturally, I took the basic writing classes in school, and I do have a lot of How-To guides on my shelves, but I’ve never done any advanced courses in how to be a writer. So it…

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A Russell-King Twitter conversation

Saturday morning (or afternoon, or evening depending on your zone) Miss Russell and I will have a Twitter conversation that you, her reading public, may listen in on.  You can look at her feed or mine–@mary_russell or @LaurieRKing–and we’ll be using the hashtag #RussellKingChat. Some years ago, my friend and co-editor Les Klinger valiantly attempted…

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Laurie’s all over the place!

Tonight (Wednesday) I’ll be having a Facebook Live conversation with my good friend Les Klinger (in LA), for Murder by the Book (in Houston)—here. And I’ve dropped in on TWO blog sites for guest posts: I’m playing with my friends on Jungle Reds (Maine, Texas, CA, Key West–you name it), a bunch of women talking…

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Riviera Gold events

Well, this has been a week. Ten days ago, I wrote a post here about pouring bronze (a key element in Riviera Gold) but when I went to do a follow-up, marking a week before the publication date, well… I wrote about it on my newsletter this week (here, if you didn’t see it) so…

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Giveaways–You ALL Get…Me.

Prizes–you ALL get prizes! Well, not keys to a new car-type prizes, but me on your screen. And honestly, isn’t that every bit as exciting as a new car? As a reminder, we’re raising funds for the Bookshop Santa Cruz Keep Kids Reading program, to hand books to low-income kids at their school lunch program drive-by…

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The Quiet

The streets of the world are still, other than the occasional idiot who decides that the chance of driving 95 mph down the center of New York is just too good to pass up. Citizens look out their windows, astonished, as distant hills come into view, the waters of Venice and Paris are looking weirdly…

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