Rants Archives - Laurie R. King

The Zinoviev email

November 1, 2016 by Laurie King 6 Comments

Dirty tricks and October Surprises are nothing new.

Four days before the 1924 general election, the conservative Daily Mail published a letter they claimed was written by a senior Russian Communist (Grigorii Zinoviev) to the British Communist Party. These were their headlines:

The letter made it clear that the socialist Labour government were little more than puppets of the Russians. The letter outraged and terrified the country, already in a state of red-terror. It contributed, at least to some degree, to Labour losing the election. Those undecided voters, you know?

Only problem was, the letter was a forgery. A fake. Possibly produced and definitely backed by the Intelligence communities of MI6 and MI5. (International and domestic, respectively.)

Any of this sounding familiar?

Um, like, you know?

June 22, 2016 by Laurie King 13 Comments

I love NPR. But sometimes, it puts my teeth on edge.
I don’t listen to a lot of radio, mostly when I’m driving somewhere, but my local station (KAZU, 90.3 FM, at CSUMB) keeps me company whenever I’m on the road in Santa Cruz county.

However, I have a complaint–not aimed at KAZU, mind you, but at the guest speakers on the national programs. People, please. When you have so many verbal tics you can’t get through a single sentence without a “you know” or a “like”, I change stations, no matter how interested I might be in what you’re saying.

Because I can’t hear you. All I hear is your uncertainty (…just…) and your need to affirm my agreement (right?) and understanding (you know?) before you can continue. You’re showing inexactitude (like) and hesitation (um) on a matter that you, theoretically at least, are an expert on and have carefully considered opinions about.

It’s not just radio, either, but public speaking of any kind. So please be aware, Dear Speaker, that I need more than your bio to be convinced that you’re someone whose opinion matters. Authority lies between the lines, and I need you to claim your expertise, to own your material, unencumbered by extraneous noises that chip away at my confidence in you. How do you expect me to believe you, if you’ve only let me see your own doubts?

It has to do with intimidation, I know. Whenever I find my speech taking on a ridiculous number of ums and likes, I realize I’m uncomfortable, and I need to pull myself together—because if I’m uncomfortable, my audience is, too.

To be clear: none of those questions, hesitations, or hedge-words are bad in and of themselves. Too many uses of “just” dilutes the message—but a precisely placed use can underscore it. “Sorry” may be a cringing attempt to disarm—or it can be the opposite, a verbal poke in the eye. The key is in the control. If those words are slipping in all over, then they’re burying the message.

This may be less true for a young audience. There’s an interesting piece—on NPR—about how young women have the right to talk this way, since deliberately changing their speech patterns to sound more, well, masculine can emotionally blunt their speech.

Which is fair enough—so long as you’re not trying to catch the ear of someone, you know, like (um) me?

Laurie King, e-dinosaur

November 9, 2015 by Laurie King 14 Comments

Well, friends, we’re one step closer to this:

To my great consternation, the 21^st century is nipping at my heels. All these years, I’ve done copyedits on actual pieces of paper: I’ll finish a book and send my editor a lovely clean copy, spa she can take up her pencil and slash it to pieces, adding questions (Oh, those dread little queries that cost me two days to set aright) and remarks (and Oh, how I treasure her Huzzah!s and Love it!s and her hearts) and changes small and large onto the pages. She then hands the whole thing to the copyeditor, who makes her own changes—in a colored pencil, so when the document comes to me again, I can tell their two comments apart at a glance. I am then given authority to accept, or to override (with STET, exclamation point optional) any of their suggestions, but it makes for a three-way conversation, with each of us suggesting our opinions in how to build a stronger book. (Some writers, I should mention, bitterly resent and battle any incursion on their prose. I am not one of those.)

However, the edit on The Murder of Mary Russell may mark the end of an era in more ways than the title’s (possible) significance: I got it back as an e-document.

Now, I’m not a complete dinosaur, so I’ve done e-edits before on short stories, but I loathe the process. (So does my editor, truth to tell. She’s very happy with the pencil-marks-on-dead-trees method, thank you very much.) E-edits are not only impersonal, and risky (I’ve had entire stories fail to register my changes) but they’re really tough to make sense of, either on the screen or a printout. Still, I’ve managed, grumbling all the while. But as I say, for going on two dozen books now, this has been a conversation, a collaboration, a last chance to rescue the book from unclarity and mediocrity. I need to feel the texture of the editorial process.

But I’m not enough of a diva to demand that the thing be sent back to the copyeditor so she can make her changes again in green pencil. I did bitch, and loudly—particularly because for some abominable reason, the thing came with both sets of comments—editor and copyeditor—in the same bilious green, which could not be re-set, so I couldn’t tell them apart without squinting at the attribution.

Once I had bitched and told them that no, I wasn’t going to do the whole thing as an e-doc, I then figured out how to shift the actual typescript portion on the page so it would give me some facsimile of normal-sized font, in spite of the comment-bubbles that took up the right-hand margin, then printed it out to wade my way through it. The first run-through always involves the more or less mechanical changes, accepting them or STETting them, and sticking a Post It wherever there’s a remark I need to deal with. After a few days, the thing looked like this:

It took me ten days or so, to get it to look like this

then this.

Finally, this not-quite-blind dinosaur tucked 500 pages of manuscript back into the Fed Ex box and sent it back. Yep, The Murder of Mary Russell is off my hands, until I get the pretty typeset Proof pages. When I get those, I’ll read the entire book aloud—and not sotto voce, either—to check for those annoying repeats and odd phrases that have persisted despite our concerted efforts.

[From Garment of Shadows, not The Murder of Mary Russell, in case you were wondering…]

After that….

Well, April 5 will be here before you know it.

Serving all your podcastian needs

December 6, 2014 by Laurie King 1 Comment

Podcasts, like audio books, are a great way of double-tasking your way through dull slices of life

whether it’s on the freeway or a treadmill.

There’s a lot of podcasts with my voice on them, floating around on the etherwebs, in which I and others talk about writing, or Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, or anything else on our minds. Most recently, when we were down at BoucherCon in Long Beach, Lyndsay Faye interviewed Les Klinger

and me for the Baker Street Babes podcast series, which since we’re all three good friends, was a whole lot of fun. I haven’t been as methodical as I should be in noting my various podcasts over the years, so I’ve probably have lost track of a fair number of these gems (if you know of any good ones that are missing from my page, please send me a link!) but still, there’s a bunch of podcasts collected together, over here.

Laurie King: helping you escape boredom since 1993.

Entertainments

September 20, 2010 by Laurie King 9 Comments

Movies used to have disclaimers to say that no animals were actually injured in the making of the film–they don’t bother saying that now because it’s simply assumed. Cigarettes are on their way out in films, with complaints lodged even when NOT having the character puffing away would be odd.
But what about crying children?
I was going to watch the much-hyped new HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” last night, even though I tend to get bored with complex crime stories. I was willing to overlook the odd casting of Steve Buscemi as ruthless gangster, and the difficult-to-swallow openness of this elected official’s criminal life. But then the working class character hit his pregnant wife in front of their kids, and I switched the television off.
Not because of the hit: I have no problem with on-screen violence.
It was the kid. Maybe eighteen months old, and the camera is focussed on her (his? too young to tell) reaction to the father hitting the mother.
A child that young cannot act. When a child that young looks frightened, that child IS frightened. When a child that young cries out in terror and starts to weep, that child needs to be taken in someone’s arms and comforted, not made to sit at a table and cry for a sound stage full of actors and a camera.
I understand that some countries have banned the filming of screaming children in commercial movies. Here in the States, we’re more concerned with animals and cigarettes.
I as an adult have no right to make a child suffer for the sake of my entertainment.