writing
Touchstone
Each Tuesday during the Twenty Weeks of Buzz, I post about a different one of my twenty novels, giving some bit of insight about the process of writing that particular book. This is week eighteen, so we’re talking about Touchstone, published in 2007. It’s called intuition, or ESP, or lucky guess. Malcolm Gladwell calls it…
Read MoreThe Art of Detection
Each Tuesday during this spring’s Twenty Weeks of Buzz, I post about a different one of my twenty novels, talking about how I came to write that book. This week, The Art of Detection, published in 2006 and winner of the Lambda Award. meets Sitting in a BoucherCon hotel suite with my editor, talking about…
Read MoreLocked Rooms
Each Tuesday of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz, I’ll be posting about a different one of my books, with remarks, reflections, and bits of information about how the book came to be. This week I discuss Locked Rooms, published in 2005. It started with a dream. I was giving a tour of a house—my house,…
Read MoreForeign airs
So the way it started was, last year I had a conference in Hawaii and my family badly needed a break, too, so I flew them out for ten days following my conference, even though I had a book I needed to work on. I told them—I told myself—that I would be working on the…
Read MoreCalifia’s Daughters, by “Leigh Richards”
Each Tuesday during our Twenty Weeks of Buzz, I’m posting about a different one of my twenty books, with remarks, reflections, and snippets of information about writing it. I’ll be discussing Califia’s Daughters this week, which was published as Leigh Richards in 2004. A lot of crime writers start out in the science fiction realm.…
Read MoreThe Game
Tuesdays of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz are given over to a look at each of my twenty novels, a week at a time, giving some tidbit of information or background about the book. This week, The Game, published in 2004. Click on the photos to enlarge. Kipling’s Kim is one of my all-time favorite…
Read MoreThe God of the Hive, portion the fourth
The final excerpt of The God of the Hive (only a month to go until pub date!) is up (via the book page), in which Mary Russell hides behind milk canisters, and meets a gun. Come back here to Mutterings in two days for my comments on the rewrite process of this chapter, and a…
Read MoreKeeping Watch
This is week thirteen of this spring’s Twenty Weeks of Buzz, when each Tuesday I post remarks about the background of one of the twenty books. This week, Keeping Watch, published in 2003. I wanted to write a man. Often the seed of one of my books is something that only has significance for me:…
Read MoreLRK, Fernando Pessoa, and coffee
I came to Lisbon to write. I got here Friday, following a lot of travel and those days of chaos that precede a long trip, and managed to check my email. Period. The rest of the day was travel and catching up with my daughter and son in law, who have lived here since October.…
Read MoreJustice Hall
Each Tuesday during this spring’s Twenty Weeks of Buzz, I’ll be posting about a different one of my twenty books, exploring how each book took shape. This week, Justice Hall, published in 2002. During the Great War, British men and boys as young as 17 arrived in France and were faced by this: Some of…
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