writing
Beekeeping for Beginners, and other points of view
A few years ago, I started playing with ways to work bits of third-person viewpoints into what are otherwise memoirs. Those don’t actually fit, of course, since “I” have no way of knowing exactly what “he” is thinking, even if I’m standing next to…
Read MoreWriting scared
I had another post ready for today, on Writer’s Wednesday, but then I received the first review for Pirate King, and I decided to talk about reviews instead. I’ve been lucky with reviews. I’m sure there are any number of loud and pointed complaints on my various books’ Amazon pages, but I take care not…
Read MoreSearch, and Re-search
Maybe the problem is, I need to embrace my inner A. S. Byatt. Her 2009 Booker Prize shortlisted novel Children’s Story is, in addition to being a gorgeously written book, a huge information dump of Life Among the Fabians at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Fairy tale publishing, politics, sexual mores, pedagogy, the chemistry…
Read MorePassivity
Good fiction is active. (I tell myself this as I slog through a first draft that feels about as active as mud. Mud can be active, right? Certainly anyone who has lived downhill from a mudslide would say so.) But yes, good fiction is active. This is why writers are told to avoid the passive…
Read MoreWednesday (oops) on Writing
Today’s subject is deadlines, and the breaking thereof. Not really, although I do mean to post on Wednesdays, and this week got away from me. Writer’s Wednesdays (or in this case, Thursday) here on Mutterings are my musings on various aspects of the writer’s trade and life. This week: a venture into e-publication. ** Last…
Read MoreCoincidence
Today is Writing Wednesday here at Mutterings, and the day’s topic is the role of coincidence in crime fiction. Some of you will guess by this that I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson. Her latest Jackson Brodie story, Started Early, Took the Dog, is the fourth in what is dutifully described as a series, following the…
Read MoreThe romance of research
An academic’s love letter to the stacks, to mark National Library Week. Now, I’m as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes…
Read MoreWednesday: on writing
Rather, on non-writing. One of the most frustrating things about being a writer is when you can’t. I’m not talking about being blocked by internal inabilities—“writer’s block.” I’m talking about what Lao Tse (he must have raised small children) called the “the ten thousand things.” I was spinning along just fine with the current novel—working…
Read MoreThe conference as tool
Wednesdays here on Mutterings are about the writing process, from nouns to e-readers. Today, since I’m in Santa Fe for Left Coast Crime, I thought I’d talk about the conference as part of a writer’s life. We’re a solitary species, we writers. Except for a few of us who work in tandem, and for those…
Read MoreClothes make the (wo)man
We are instructed not to judge a book by its cover, and yet we do all the time. I once had a publisher tell me he initially rejected one of my books because he disliked the US cover, although later he adored the story. And if a publisher falls for what a cover has to…
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