writing
BoucherCon revisited (I)
(BoucherCon starts Thursday in San Francisco—you can still register, or get day passes, including for Friday when I am grilled—er, interviewed by Dana Stabenow. I’ll post in the days leading up to BCon with memories about BCons past.) “Are you a writer?” Um, well. This was 1990, in London, and although I had been writing…
Read MoreIn love with Michael
I’m in love with Michael Dirda, damn him. Michael is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a number of dauntingly erudite yet gorgeously readable books about books. He writes equally stunning essays for the New York Times, the Barnes & Noble Review, and, well, pretty much any venue where the printed word is discussed. I’ve met…
Read MoreA writer’s tools
Once upon a time, the mother of a couple of young children decided she wanted to write a book, or three. But because she was, well, the mother of a couple of young children, she spent a fair amount of her time doing parental things like sitting and watching her son at soccer practice, and…
Read MoreI set off from home with the best of intentions, daily blogs from the road in the UK. However… A while back, I promised that I was going to start writing about “writers’ tools,” and the process I am going through at present is one of those: down time. Being a writer involves holding a…
Read MoreI have a Pirate King!
Well, friends, here it is: draft one of next year’s Russell & Holmes novel, Pirate King: I came home from the God of the Hive tour (which had also been a trip to Portugal/Morocco/France/England) in mid-May with 70 pages of Pirate King written, about half what I had hoped for by that time. And inevitably,…
Read MorePirates are “go”!
So, have you enjoyed our little break from All Things Laurie? Or did going cold turkey disturb your world too much? I hadn’t actually intended quite such a long break without Muttering at you, but it took me nearly a month after getting home from Portugal/Morocco/France/England/book tour to get my life in some kind of…
Read MoreWriting a god
The God of the Hive was not the book’s original title. My working title (and I won’t be giving any spoilers in this post, so don’t worry) was The Green Man, but how we got from one to the other makes for a long and complicated explanation that is best boiled down to: My editor…
Read MoreThe Language of Bees (cont.)
This is the final Tuesday of our Twenty Weeks of Buzz, and (appropriately) continues last week’s post concerning the nineteenth novel. However, I shall be putting up a bonus post next week on The God of the Hive, entitled, “Writing a god into being.” You might want to read the book first… The first Russell…
Read MoreThe Language of Bees
This is the nineteenth Tuesday of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz, when I post remarks about the writing process of a different book each week. This week we’re up to the 2009 title, The Language of Bees. One of the drawbacks of writing a series, especially for those of us writers who have a low…
Read MoreGod of the Hive, day one
Today is publication day for The God of the Hive. More than a year of labor from a lot of people, beginning with the author and going through a dozen departments in Random House, branching through a whole bunch of fabulous and committed volunteers who just love the books, the source of worry and the…
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