Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

LAURIE'S NEWSLETTER

Proof Positive

by 17 Comments

Because to the reader, a book goes from vague idea to hardback-in-hand, I’m doing a series of blog posts (no spoilers!) about the actual process for The Lantern’s Dance. (Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.)

I’ve just finished the proof pages—those pages where the much-marked-up manuscript is formatted to look like the actual final hardback. Previously, they asked me to approve the interior design, such as the title page—

And now here it is on the actual page, with the book’s nice stylish font.

They sent it to me as a pdf, with daunting instructions for editing pdfs. Yes, I know a pdf is absolutely firmly how a thing looks on the page, immutable and permanent…except not really. We’ll get to that in a minute.

My publisher has been remarkably patient with my fixation on paper edits, but in this case, here it is. So, naturally, I printed it off so I could make notes and feel in some kind of control.

Until I got to the first page, and found that, three lines apart, Russell snaps, then refers to herself as snappy.

I mean, really, Laurie? Are you blind? Well, yes, I am with words on the page, which is why I need to sit and read it aloud. One. Word. At. A. Time. Full-voiced, not muttering. Roughly 25 pages per session, with luck two sessions a day.

By doing a readaloud, I’m more apt to catch places where I, yes, repeat words, but also where I use two words that look completely different on the page but are going to echo against each other in the audio book. Or words that aren’t quite what I meant. Or phrases that clunk or mislead. Or paragraphs that meander, rather than march along, clean and crisp.

I also catch places where my last rewrite failed to correct some plot point that had been changed earlier, and waits to confuse any reader trying to pay attention, such as having someone stand up when they were in fact already standing at the window, or deliver a climactic comeback that got said two pages before.

It took me about a week, and then to tackle the dread Adobe Acrobat pdf editor.

Ah, no. Freebie version? Not really. Sign up for a trial week—okay, but my screen looks nothing like my publisher’s instruction sheet. And it lets me draw a line through words, but not delete them—no, now it lets me delete them, but I can’t actually add words.

In the end, I decided it was safer to put everything in as a comment:

Delete had (duplication)

Change he TO: Holmes

Change HOLMES TO: he

Question: should it be were, or was?

Etcetera, etcetera.

And I created a short e-doc for three or four places where the changes were a little complicated, and the poor editor charged with in-putting the changes might get a headache if I didn’t simply type out what the finished paragraph should look like.

Additions to the Thanks page, a last brief question—

            Should Twitter be changed to:  Twitter/X  ??

—and I’m finished.

Oh sure.

It asks me if I want to close out the tab, and since it won’t let me close the thing until I have, I do. (You can hear this coming, right?)

And the thing disappears. Gone, all the changes, four days of work.

I quietly close my laptop and walk away. And the next morning, I go hunting, and find a version that looks right, and although the request for download never does download anything, a button offers to invite someone to share. So I do. And mirabile dictu, the invitation arrives in her in-box. And apparently, all 295 comments come with it.

I hate e-edits, even on a Doc file.

But this does mean that I never have to read the book again.

That, my friend, is your job.

**

You can pre-order The Lantern’s Dance from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

Post-Final Drafts

by 11 Comments

This is one of a series of blog posts (no spoilers!) about the actual process of writing a book from the idea to the hardback in hand. In this case, the group effort behind the magic.

 

I’ve talked about how The Lantern’s Dance began, and about the ongoing process of working with my editor, but you didn’t imagine that was it, did you?

Yeah…no.

The so-called Final Draft does have the singular benefit of—once it’s red-stamped by the editor as actually being the final draft—generating a check from the publishing house, one of four the author gets before actual royalties kick in. (Perhaps I should talk about advances, one of these days? No, that may be too tedious.)

But it’s “final” only in the sense of the manuscript then being tossed to the Production team, to have their way with it. Part of Production is copyediting. And because my publisher loves me, it has (so far) permitted me to do paper copyedits rather than e-edits, which I detest to the point of considering retirement….

So, first they printed off my e-doc, with their additions to it, a sort of mock-layout for the book.

They added some of the material that goes at the front, including the book list, in case I have anything there to correct (as it happens, I did.)

Much of what the copyeditor does in a paper edit has to do with underscoring my various punctuation marks for the typesetter, to confirm the italics with underscores and that the “—”  is indeed what is called an em-dash, rather than a hyphen. (And no, I have no idea why they have to do this, since once I send the manuscript back, all my changes are then uploaded onto an e-doc—I told you my publisher loves me—and that is the master doc they all work from. As far as I know, the typesetter never sees a single piece of paper anymore. Hey, so far as I know, they don’t even have typesetters any more, and yes I could ask, but I do so cherish the image of small hunched-over men in greasy aprons plucking type from trays.)

Where was I?

Ah yes—the copyeditor.

Other parts of her input are more to the point. Here, she found a missing “a”, added another article to the title of Bosch’s painting and put it into italics, deleted the hyphen in “pale green”, and found a place where I used the word “magnificent” twice in the same line. And failed to catch it. Duh.

 Another thing the copyeditor does is go through with a fine-toothed comb looking, not for nits, but for specific quirks of LRK. The Style Sheet has words and names carrying over from previous Russell stories (shown in bold) but adds in words, names, and phrases (English, French, and Bengali) from this book in particular. She also laboriously goes through and notes down every single plot development, which I will admit I did not have the heart to read. I can only hope the process of distilling endless novels into CliffsNotes does not reduce the poor woman to a loathing for fiction in general.

This story also had what the publishers call an “authenticity reader.” When someone like me (a middle-class white American woman—who, granted, was married to a man born and raised in post-Victorian India) steps outside her own personal life experience and writes about—in the case of Lantern’s Dance—India in the Nineteenth century and French Indians in in the Twentieth, it helps a lot to have someone closer to the inside of things check to make sure I haven’t put my foot in it and dropped in an inadvertent insult, wince-worthy stereotype, or glaring cultural cliché. I talk about color and class/caste a fair amount in the book, and I found this reader’s comments tremendously helpful. She understood what I was trying to do, had no wish to dilute the story I was telling, and provided me with more effective ways of doing so.

Plus that, she liked the book, so clearly, she’s a discerning reader.

Next week: a bit about research.

**

You can pre-order The Lantern’s Dance from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

The BUZZ has a question

by Leave a Comment

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 this Buzz, or aren’t a subscriber (Why aren’t you? You might want to sign up here) there’s a link to the online version, HERE
Because 2024 is the 10th anniversary of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and it’ll be all about Russell & Holmes.

Not Just a Pretty Face: Cover Art

by 17 Comments

(Because what I do for a living often seems like magic—I come up with an idea and *POOF* the book’s in your hand—I thought I might do a series of blog posts (no spoilers!) about the actual process. (Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.)

In the publishing world, cover art comes before the book is even finished. My first draft was turned in April 1 (ridiculously short and incomplete—I talked about that here) and I had an in-depth editorial conversation on May 5 (the rewrite process, here.) But even while the book was in those malleable early stages, the art department was hard at work.

Now, a lot of publishing is in the how-the-sausages-are-made realm: you really don’t want to know. And what follows is probably firmly within that realm for most of you, since it’s all about the tiny shifts made in a cover from “Well, this is okay” to “Whoa, I love this!” But since this is a series of blogs about the minutiae of taking a book from idea to hardcover, today’s too-long post is all about what the cover looks like.

And trust me, as it is, I’m leaving a lot out. Including how many times I said thank-you to the art department.

May 19: I get a pdf attachment from my editor with an email, saying in part—

Excited to share two concepts for the cover of THE LANTERN’S DANCE. As discussed, we’re excited to try to find a bit of a new series look for Russell/Holmes, and here are two possible directions we could go. I think the second of these designs may prove more “repeatable” for a series look, but I do very much love the interpretation of the lantern in the first layout. Eager to hear your thoughts.

Zoetrope cover

Silhouette cover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 24: After printing off the seven images, studying them, and having a chat with my agent, I write back—

I personally like the zoetrope concept, however, I don’t think 9 people out of 10 will know what it is. And I agree that it’s a good idea to start up a new series look that can be adapted for the next few books. So let’s go with some version of the silhouette.

What I would like to see here is something that both looks rich and evokes the exoticism of the story. At the moment, the silhouette cover only says “France” and “historical novel”.

(I do like the font of the name and title.)

  1. The silhouette itself: can we make it more clearly that of a woman in a hat? At first glance, it looks merely like someone with a lumpy hairdo. Also, for some reason this outline looks very young and girly. Maybe it’s the perky nose? The super-slim shoulders? Russell is a tall, strong woman of 25, and this figure looks ten years younger.
  2. I would drop both the Eiffel Tower and the street scene. If we decide that one part or the other needs the texture of an image, we can think about what goes but isn’t quite such a cliche. And, would it weaken it to remove the two art deco lines? Or if it needs lines, maybe four, as a frame?
  3. I like the silhouette as the basic series look—or various similar-but-different versions of the silhouette—that could then open it up to an image from each novel for the identifier. In this case, the lantern would be great (although when it comes to images, you should search for praxinoscope rather than zoetrope.)
  4. Colors: as I said, I strongly feel that the colors for this will be really important, and need to evoke the exotic. Maybe it would be appropriate to play with indigo shades?
  5. I understand that we want the Russell & Holmes logo on the cover, but perhaps it could be smaller, and its placement depend on what shape the hat brim ultimately has? I’d rather see the logo reduced, the author name shifted up, and in the middle some interesting/evocative image specific to this book, such as the lantern itself (or the journal, or a sapphire necklace, or…)

July 12: PRH sends a set of six revised covers based on the silhouette, with a reminder that we do want to indicate Paris on the cover. (Apparently, readers like Paris.)

#1

#3

#2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 13: I send back my response—

Ooh, great colors. I asked for feedback from the focus group (Team LRK plus family)—their comments on the six different versions:

#1. (Favorite of 5 out of the 9) Tilted journal is great, blue necklace works; cheery colors of the sky

#2. Purple sky is great if we want to make it an “evening” flavor of book; one person noted that it makes it like Back to the Garden; glowing street lamps great; street lights on the right better?; people didn’t like the squared block of the journal

#3. (Favorite of 1 person) I’m not sure about the green—first I like it, then I don’t…

This version of the journal is better than #1 or #2—tilted, but shifted to allow the title to be read more easily

Going by the comments and my own preferences, I’d say:

Background color: I’m torn between the blue clouds and the sunset-purple. The one with the fresh sky says beach-read, the twilight one evokes mystery. Do any of you—or the others on the team—have any preference between the two?

But in general, consensus is:

Bridge/streetlamps rather than Eiffel Tower

The tilted & darker journal (as in #1)

Also the darker snap of #1—#3’s light snap draws attention to its anachronism (the ms has ties)

Shift the journal to the right, more like #3. Though maybe leave it the slightly larger size??

All of the words are clearer when they don’t actually touch the edge of the silhouette

I like the hair showing rather than the smooth silhouette

The jewel should definitely be blue

Maybe a shaded border like #5 and #3??

July 14: my long-suffering editor notes that the micromanaging author has requested—

One version with sky color of 1 (blue) and one with sky color of 2 (purple), both with Paris background lantern/buildings from 2.

Journal/jewel from 1 but with tilt of 3.

Lettering size and layout from 4

Silhouette from 1 and 2

Border from 3

July 18: four versions arrive, two with the light-colored sky, two with the purple.

#1

#3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I write that I’m liking the glow of the streetlamps on the purple one, and ask if they have any preference.

July 19: my editor responds—

I like 1 and 3, but I like the tilt of the diary more on 1 and I think 3 is very close color wise to Island of the Mad? But I’m happy with either!

What about if they push #3 as blue as possible, so it doesn’t look like the magenta cover of Island, and make the diary a tad smaller? The diary in #1 forms a line with the edge of the silhouette, which looks odd—but I agree, I like the tilt there.

July 19: this one arrives—

July 19: I write back in return with—

That color is great, and the placement of the journal—thanks!

I do think we need a bluer hat band, a little closer to that of #3—the darker version fades into the black too much.

And, one last suggestion that entirely depends on how tweakable the background is:  IF they can keep the right hand side as it is, but return a suggestion of those clouds on the left side of the figure, it would be nice. However—IF that makes the clouds on the right side wash out and lose their texture, then leave the sky / background as it is.

July 20: editor writes—

What do you think of the attached?! Do we have it?!

The Lantern's Dance by Laurie R. King

We have it.

And yes, I know, for some of those you’d need a magnifying glass to see the difference. However, I should add that I do love this cover, and furthermore, I don’t believe anyone in the art department either quit or was forced to take a leave of absence due to nerves.

**

You can pre-order The Lantern’s Dance from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

Feeling the Draft(s), First to Final

by 2 Comments

Because what I do for a living often seems like magic—I come up with an idea and *POOF* you have the book in your hand—I thought I might do a series of spoiler-free blog posts about the actual process. (Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.)

The Lantern's Dance

April 1: first draft sent. (I talk about the earlier stages in a previous post, here.)  I come to the end of the initial draft of Lantern’s Dance on the last day of March. At this point, it is 59,000 words—meandering, uncertain, occasionally repetitive words. This is the version I send only to the people who know how to read between the lines of a first draft and see what the book—with work—is going to be: my editor and my two agents, literary and film. With it I send a list of points that I already know I need to address, including the acknowledgment (lest my editor panic at the word count, which is that of a long novella) that it needs another 20,000+ words.

May 5: conversation with my editor.  We go over the points that I’d sent her, add in those she picked up, and decide the directions for the rewrite.

June 23: I send a progress report, saying:

I’ve finished the second draft (which has added 13K words) and have a jillion Postits for the third and probably final (is there ever actually a final?)  It’s looking pretty solid for sending to you in July, with luck the middle of the month.

July 5: I finish the 3rd draft, now 77,000 words, and wrote to ask if she wanted to see it then, or if she wanted to wait until I had gone through it myself to check my changes—and also, if I could send it to those of my team of Beta readers who didn’t mind looking at it even while it was still rough. (I always check my editor’s schedule, especially during in the summer, because people have lives and other commitments, and there’s no point in sending her something she won’t have a chance to look at for a month.) She agreed to delay while I went through it again, so I shot it out to Team LRK—again with a list of specific points I wanted them to look at. This is especially helpful for readers who aren’t professional editors: if no one asks you whether Damian’s motivations make sense or if the parallels drawn between the zoetrope images and the journal images are clear (that’s stuff in the book) would most people stand back and think about whether or not they do?

Their feedback is SO helpful, in all kinds of areas. Some of them caught things about one or another of the series characters I’d got wrong. Others gave me areas they found a tad confusing. Their questions and suggestions about the emotional balance of the story were incredibly helpful—and if you think that works, when you eventually read it, thank them. (They’re in the book’s acknowledgments, naturally!)

July 27: the almost-final draft goes off to the editor. I know that this isn’t going to be the final final draft, but I decided to get my editor’s feedback on the last 2 chapters before I tackled them. At the time, I was being told in no uncertain terms that the absolute, end-of-it-all, cutoff deadline to turn the final thing over to the copyeditor and Production was August 15. So we were pushing matters now. She and her assistant editor both did an amazingly fast turnaround (my apologies to any of their other authors who got no work out of them for those days) and—

August 2: she returns her notes and an e-marked manuscript, with notes to my list of points (the third such list) that I still had questions on. I am vastly relieved that she and I agree: there are three areas that require work, mostly in those ending chapters.

August 8: I send the FINAL draft off. It’s now just under 86,000 words. I get cramps from crossing my fingers….

August 11: I hear back from her.

Laurie!

I am so so happy with this final draft. See my notes attached, but I don’t have any further changes. I’m going to get this into production! I think yes, that pub date is confirmed.

And now? Now I’m waiting for the copyeditor to have her wicked way with the manuscript, changing all my periods to commas and removing all the ungrammatical but Russellian commas. With luck, she’ll catch any lingering artifacts of earlier drafts.  I may write a last Process blog about those last fine-tuning efforts. In the meantime, it’s back to crossed fingers…

**

Yes, you can pre-order those 86K words of The Lantern’s Dance from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books(signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

What IS in a Name, Anyway?

by 7 Comments

Because what I do for a living often seems like magic—I come up with an idea and *POOF* you have the book in your hand—I thought I might do a series of blog posts about the actual process. (Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.)

How do we writers name our babies? The ones on the page, that is, not the ones in diapers. How do I get to a title?

Looking back at this book’s history—I tend to email myself every day’s work, which means I have the record at hand—it started under the enticing title of:

Russell 18

That was during the first part of 2022, when the story was little more than notes and ideas that would either bounce around my brain for a while and then lose their momentum and quietly roll into the corner, or that would bounce around and hit another idea with a spark, and they’d join up like a pair of soap bubbles (a terrible mix of metaphors here, but you get the idea) and wait for another idea to bounce up and join them. By the time I actually began writing, in early December (the process I talked about last week in The Beginning) I knew some key things about it—which I’m not really going to talk about until we get a little closer to the book’s actual date, but I did know enough to give it a working title:

The Image Lamp

I’d thought of Zoetrope, since one of those is central to the book, but 1) since “zoetrope” is pretty firmly associated with Francis Ford Coppola, and 2) I’m not convinced everyone knows exactly what it is, Image Lamp would do. But I went back and forth over the word “lamp” (even though, strictly, it is more accurate than “lantern”) because if felt, er, lumpy, and a little nasal. By the end of January, I was calling it:

The Image Lantern

Bugles and fireworks, right? Well, my editor wasn’t convinced.

Here are some exchanges that took place between mid-December and the first of February, when I was told they absolutely HAD to have a title to put into the catalogue. The HER below is my editor at Penguin Random House:

(12/12/22) HER:  As for title, I do like the idea of using the zoetrope for inspiration, but THE IMAGE LAMP doesn’t feel very dynamic

(1/27)  ME: Since the whole story is constructed around the zoetrope that Russell finds, I really haven’t been able to come up with a better title than Image Lamp or Lantern. Sorry.

You want to have a conversation and see what we can brainstorm?

(1/31/23) HER:

            THE LADY IN THE LANTERN?

            THE LADY AND THE LANTERN?

            I like LANTERN better than LAMP, I think

(1/31) ME:  …except the title makes no sense, because there’s no lady in the lantern.

Also I’m not keen on “lady”.

(2/1) HER:

            SPINNING LANTERNS

            THE SPINNING LANTERN

(2/1) ME: What do you think of the word flickering?

            FLICKERING IMAGES

            THE FLICKERING LANTERN

            …Though the Art Dept would have to take care with the font on the cover so it didn’t look like a Fucking Lantern.

(2/2) She and I decide to have a conversation, for brainstorming the title. From that, we come up with a list:

I decide I like the idea of a dance.

I tell her I could tweak the description a little to play it up.

Then comes the question: with or without the THE?

            We agree we prefer it with the article.

(2/2) HER: We’re going to float THE LANTERN’S DANCE to the team.

(2/2) HER: Big thumbs up for The Lantern’s Dance!

Simple as that, right? Which just leaves me the minor matter of finishing the book…

**

Next episode in the saga of Lantern’s Dance: Feeling the Draft(s)

**

You can pre-order the end product of all these debates, The Lantern’s Dance, from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

Hitting “SEND”

by 1 Comment

I hit the SEND button–wahoo! First draft, hence short, untidy, and incomplete…but it’s sent, out into the editorial world.

Now I wait, and see what she thinks.

(*sound of chewing fingernails**)

I think I’ll reward the newsletter subscribers with the first page this weekend. Or if not reward, at least give them something to talk about. (If you don’t get The Buzz, you can sign up here.)

The Meet (his version and hers)

by Leave a Comment

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defence I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes (to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person.

It was a cool, sunny day in early April….

April the 8th, in fact. And the rest was history…as we know from The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.

But don’t forget, Holmes wrote about that meeting, too. And his was from rather different point of view….

So, who are we to believe?  The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, or “Beekeeping for Beginners“?

You decide.

 

Russell’s life onscreen

by 88 Comments

The other day, a charming appointment popped up on my e-calendar:

This was to remind me of a video conference with the English team working to bring Russell to the screen.  And despite smoke in the air, the occasional rolling blackout, and the inevitable problems of getting Microsoft to talk to Apple, we managed to meet up.

Once we’d linked up, I started the discussion by saying that I had a really important question for them.

They did look slightly alarmed—since this was a first meet with one and only the second for the other.  Good lord, you could see them think: do we have one of those writers on our hands?  The kind who starts out pushy and gets worse?

But no, I hope I’m not one of those writers.  Instead, my question was: “So, are you two having fun yet?”

And the answer I got was, oh yes indeed, they were—all kinds of fun.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether Russell & Holmes will show up in your living rooms.  I do feel very positive about the project, and these people certainly have the experience and resources to see it through. But to have people who clearly adore Mary Russell, who want to bring me in as a consultant on basic decisions, and whose enthusiasm was palpable—well, all I can say is, Mary Russell is in good hands.

A RussellKing Twitter chat

by Leave a Comment

Miss Mary Russell and I (her editor, of course) had a conversation on Twitter over the weekend, which a mutual friend kindly transcribed and rearranged so it goes from start to finish, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom for the start (as happens when you follow the conversation hashtag, #RussellKingChat ):

MRH: Good day, @LaurieRKing, so here we are for a conversation on twitter. Thank you for joining me.

LRK: Hello Miss Russell! I’m not very good on Twitter, but this is the way you wanted, so please forgive any errors…

MRH: I’m sure they will be few. I find Twitter the ideal way to communicate with my readers. It is at once intimate and affords distance.

LRK: I remember you had a conversation with my friend Les Klinger some years ago, which he greatly enjoyed.

MRH: I found it tedious.

For the rest, pop over to the web site page of Fun Stuff.

Enjoy!

If you'd like to hear about my upcoming events and publications, sign up for The Buzz, here.

Sign up!