Arrgh!

I’m headed up to San Francisco today to talk to the great folks at the 826 Valencia writing project.  The goal of the 826 project (they’re also in New York, DC, etc etc) is to build the writing skills of kids ages 6 to 18.  I’l pause for a minute while you pop over and…

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LRK inc.

With the upsurge of e-readers, there has been an accompanying growth in the impulse to self-publish. I really have no problems with self-publishing. If I had any out-of-print titles, I’d probably put them for sale online. A lot of people love their direct, author-to-reader book sales. J. A. Konrath is one of the more fervent…

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Loving Ruth

Yesterday morning, news reached me that the woman who had picked me from a pile of obscurity had died.  92 year-old Ruth Cavin, the legendary Ruth, who started her career at the age of sixty and overnight seized the heart of the publishing industry; whose eye went to the essence of a book’s strengths—and weaknesses;…

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My thanks for a year

Well, that’s about done and dusted for 2010: anyone ready for a new year? I’ve never been much for New Year’s Resolutions—who needs to start a clean slate with a cloud of threat and incipient guilt over her head?  But taking down a heavily marked-up calendar whose dozen images you know by heart and replacing…

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To everything, a season

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. When I was new at this business of writing novels, I was also a young mother.  Which meant that if I had free time, I wrote.  If it was a school day, I wrote.  If it was a weekend and my…

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Laurie sticks up her head

I’ve been quiet here on Mutterings for several months, I know.  I didn’t realize that I needed a sabbatical from posting until I took a break, and it went on.  And on.  After five years here, I was feeling that I’d said it all before.  A sensation that’s bad enough when it’s connected with a…

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In 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…

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A 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…

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I 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…

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I 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,…

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