So now that I’ve finished with TOUCHSTONE, I’m finished with it, right? I can give it to other people and go sit in the sun eating strawberries and reading all the novels that have come out in the past six months, right? Well… Sure. Except it’s Edgars week in New York so I leave tomorrow…

TOUCHSTONE is finished. The world’s longest rewrite, certainly MY world’s longest rewrite, and I’ve sent it off to my editor just in time for the frantic last-minute business of getting off to New York. The first draft a year ago was 400+ pages, the second draft in December was slightly more than 500, this (final,…

Happy National Libraries Week! Kiss a librarian today! Or at least thank one.

My beloved publisher (now, how many authors do you know who would say that?) is playing with a new venture that you may want to get involved with. It’s called Booked for Breakfast, and designed to that every weekday morning, you start you day with a delicious and maybe even nutritious serving of fiction, five…

To order books from independents (mystery specialists or otherwise) you can either phone them up, or go to their web site. To order from three of my favorites, drop them an email: Seattle Mystery Books, as I posted yesterday: staff@seattlemystery.com My local guy in Watsonville, who is great if you want me to inscribe, or…

I want to talk to you a minute about your bookstore. Yes, you. You know that place you go on this very machine you’re looking at right now, where you click sideways and you’re either at a river in Brazil or among a whole lot of really strong women (tastes may vary) and you decide…

I’ve been thinking recently about my early days of writing, in the late eighties and early nineties before I was published and I had to carve writing time out of life. My kids were young. I started writing when my second child went off to preschool three mornings a week, although I did manage more…

Technical difficulties having to do with the number of working hours in a week and the inability of LRK to produce satisfactory clones has delayed the promised announcement for today. But fortunately, my excellent friends at the Seattle Mystery Bookstore have stepped into the breach, with the following hot news flash (and if you know…

I’ve just been writing the answers to a set of interview questions Picador are putting in the back of their new editions of Beekeeper’s Apprentice and Monstrous Regiment of Women next October, along with their suggested Reading Group discussion topics. The questions were actually fairly demanding, as interview questions go, and I had to work…

I live in the woods. I expect the pitter-patter of tiny feet, four at a time, and the occasional rattle -thump when those four-footed nocturnal visitors fossick through the pots for grubs. I only object when they move into the house, although even then, if they’re polite and don’t actually run across my feet or…