Laurie R. King

While the Republicans talk a good fight, the Democrats are on tenterhooks, waiting for a 2008 version of the Zinoviev letter to drop from a great height onto their heads. The Zinoviev letter was an early 20th century dirty tricks scandal (mentioned in Touchstone, in case it’s sounding familiar.) Four days before the 1924 general…

Eighteen months ago, I looked at the 2007 calendar and realized that I was not going to be published that year, for the first time since 1993. The mystery world tends to work on a yearly basis, with publishers happiest when they can schedule a regular offering from their authors. Not having a book out…

Saturday at BoucherCon a number of us left the convention. Not through protest, you understand, or because there wasn’t enough going on there (hah!) but because the event planners had decided to add a library outreach, and share the riches of the convention’s crime writers with the city residents. Back in June, Ruth Jordan (blessed…

I’m not finished posting about BoucherCon 2008, but I have to say that one of the high points of Friday was the business meeting. Now, before you picture LRK clutching a well-loved copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, it was entirely for selfish reasons that I enjoyed the meeting: vote was taken, and BoucherCon is…

Friday: Breakfast with Picador editor. Spend an hour at the IACW table thrusting hot-pink flyers in the hands of everyone going past and exhorting them to join. Cycle through the bookroom signing copies. Hook up with Hollywood agents. Go to business meeting, vote for San Francisco as 2010 site, passes: That means LRK is guest…

Thursday began with a squeak and ended with a squeal. When I staggered down to the hotel’s informal breakfast/snack/happy hour space for coffee to inject into my veins, I startled two Loyal Readers who weren’t expecting an individual they knew by photographs to materialize down the steps. Fortunately, I’d done my hair since doing a…

BoucherCon is underway! And I’m here, hitting the ground running (once the car had crawled the way through rush-hour traffic from Dulles to Baltimore—what can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time I booked it.) with a dinner at the fabulous Pratt museum and a tour of the collection of H.…

Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column is growing a collection of interviews he’s calling Writing 101, beginning (only appropriately) from the latter stages of the writing process, the rewrite. He and I conducted the interview at his house, so if you hear odd noises in the background, it’s his eight inch tall pug, impatient to…

James Houston, Karen Joy Fowler and I are in discussion, led by the inimitable Rick Kleffel, on KUSP this Sunday from 6 to 7 Pacific time. We’re talking politics, folks, and around here, that can mean anything. If you have questions you’d like the four of us to address, send them to Rick at: agony…

Ron Hogan over at GalleyCat quotes an anonymous person in the publishing industry concerning the sales of literary novels: “If you’ve sold between 4,000 and 7,000 copies, in hardcover, of your literary novel, you did a damned good job… If you sold between 2,000 and 4,000 copies of your literary novel, you sold pretty strongly.”…