Laurie R. King

By the way, it being September (it IS??) the Virtual Book Club is now open for discussion of TO PLAY THE FOOL, the second in the Kate Martinelli novels. If you don’t know this book, it’s an extension of my BA thesis on the Fool, and features a holy fool who lives and works (if…

Now, here’s where the weird side of the writing life comes in. I have experts who have helped me make a (fictional, I assure you) bomb, repair a smoking Morris, and give my characters places to sleep on a train. But what about accents? On the off chance that we have an expert in the…

Had to laugh at the idea of the process coming easy to Laurie King on Meg Cabot’s blog (Hi Meg!) Hollow laughter, you understand? Sickly and trailing off into a deep sigh. Because you know something you never, ever want to do with a computer? Well, yes, that too, but with a piece of your…

Even a copy editor has to eat, and it’s summer, after all. So here’s a recipe that can go nicely with that Polenta recipe I gave you a while back, or by itself. And it’s a great way to use a few quarts of those gorgeous small tomatoes any gardener is drowning in, producing a…

The copy edit process can be looked upon as an intensified writing course: all the things one does wrong, sliced up with two colors of pencil. Sins of commission, sins of omission, repeated again and again until the weary editor sighs in despair. I’ve written nearly twenty books, a handful of short stories, and a…

So the options are: 1. He pulled on a hat and buttoned up his coat, then let himself out into the cool, silent morning, luminous in a way he’d only ever seen in this country. 2. He pulled on a hat and buttoned up his coat, then let himself out into the cool, silent morning,…

Since I’m so immersed in the copy edit, I thought I’d inflict it on you, as well. I’m going to give you three versions of a paragraph, one that follows Harris Stuyvesant, the American protagonist, as he wakes up in the guest house of a duke’s country estate following an evening of disturbing revelation, decides…

The original manuscript says: He hit out against the Major, and inadvertently won his release. The copy editor changed it to: He hit out against the Major and, inadvertently, won his release. This is the kind of question that takes me so long on a copy edit. Not the substantial near-revisions the editor gently requests,…

The copy edit for Touchstone arrived back on my desk Friday, a week earlier than they had thought. Which means that all the jobs I thought I had time to do beforehand—weed whacking, tax organizing, laying out plans for the wedding party in October—are now put back until the first part of September. For anyone…

Apologies for the oddities here recently, those of you who have tried to post comments. The amount of comment spam was driving me potty and we’ve tightened things up yet another notch to keep the idiots out, but I fear we went too far and omitted the rest of you as well. Ain’t modern life…