Laurie R. King

Last spring I received the proposed cover art for Touchstone (which I would post here if anyone could teach me how to do that, but since no one has figured it out on this machine all I can do is link to it. Sigh.) The cover was flat-out gorgeous, eye-catching and evocative. That cover was…

In the past month, since finishing Touchstone, I’ve worked on the house. I’ve had it power-washed and had the shingles stained and the trim paint touched up, ditto the deck. I had a new section of deck installed so there are no steps in a circuit of the house, necessary for someone dependent on a…

In the discussion about Doris Lessing’s Nobel for Literature, pundits have weighed in on various aspects of her life and career, including the furious declaration that here is a woman who wasted considerable talent on (gack, spit) genre fiction. Oh, woe. But there’s another thing that came up that I thought more interesting, and that…

Today’s post concludes an interview with Madeline Hopkins, who copyedited the manuscript for Touchstone. Madeline Hopkins first entered the publishing world over a decade ago as a temp at a weekly thoroughbred racing magazine and worked her way through most of the facets of magazine and book publishing at a variety of companies in several…

Today’s post continues an interview with Madeline Hopkins, who recently copyedited Touchstone. Madeline Hopkins first entered the publishing world over a decade ago as a temp at a weekly thoroughbred racing magazine and worked her way through most of the facets of magazine and book publishing at a variety of companies in several different cities.…

Copyeditors are a writer’s last bastion of defense against typos, inconsistencies, and plot holes. The book’s editor is the primary reader, but she or he is generally looking at the larger field of battle: is there a slow part that could be trimmed? Are some of the characters flat? It the plot stale and in…

I finished the page proofs on Wednesday afternoon, somewhere over southern Oregon, a thousand niggling typos and errors caught, who knows how many slipping through the net? Which by the way is something to keep in mind if you’re tempted to buy an ARC (Advanced Reading Copy) of Touchstone on eBay when they begin to…

…so where was I? No really, where was I? Conferences are busy times, with panels and meetings during the day and dinners and serious drinking and schmoozing at night. And page proofs are demanding things, 550 pages requiring very tight attention to every word, on the lookout for mistakes introduced by the typesetter (yes, there…

Wednesday night (sorry I didn’t get this up Friday) the governor of Alaska stood up in front of several hundred crime writers, declared that, in her position of chief law enforcement officer of the state, it was a crime to indulge in bad writing, and then proceeded to issue us all with a blanket pardon…

Writing may not be a lonely business—that particular claim is usually made by people who really want you to know how much they suffer for their craft—but it is certainly a solitary one. Which makes a conference like this all the more precious. I never see my colleagues in person except when I happen to…