Any Time Now I Will Love to Write

I love to write.

I hate to write.

Let's start over: I love to create. I love to edit. I love to tell a story.

I love to have written book.

The writing part? Well, I'm pretty much on the hate side. Except for the times I love it. Which becomes kind of like a drug addiction. I'll work through days of hating it because I know—I just know—that I will love writing if for even just a few hours any time now.

Dangling carrot. The cocaine-high of effortless brilliance. The part where I get to play a kind of writing god where I create the world (in seven days? ha!), and I create the people and their backstories and their fears, and decide what fate has in store for them.

That's a lot of responsibility.

And even more work.

Writing my first draft is wild. They often begin like silk. The words flow. I can't possibly type fast enough.

"This is gonna be the fastest first draft (and perfect, by the way) in the universe. It's magic!"

Yeah, right.

Then comes the first speed bump. And the second.

I've found I write best when I have a bit of a roadmap—an idea of where I want to get to next. That doesn't mean that little bits of flotsam won't work through whatever filter I have in place and make its way onto my page. The magic part is... (are you ready?) I don't immediately delete those things that feel, at the moment, like dust-bunnies. Pieces of lint I'm eventually going to have to vacuum up.

Trusting the process is one of the key elements for a writer. My process can include a lot of deleting, but it can also include a lot of surprises.

"Oh, yes! I see the connection now between that earlier dust-bunny and this trigger for murder!"

Or:

"That dust-bunny sure set up a great metaphor for the overall theme of this story (which I rarely know about ahead of time): global terrorism!"

Which is part of the whole addiction.

You get my point. In case you haven't, it's to trust the process. Sometimes you've just got to let it flow.

Thanks to my Sisters in Crime sister, and good friend, Sheila Lowe, for encouraging me to write this post. You can read hers by clicking on her name. She writes an awesome series featuring a handwriting analyst. Which works really well for her because she is one. (And waving to Dennis Palumbo, whose fabulous book, PHANTOM LIMB, I finished reading this morning even before turning on the news. Yes, it's that good. And who, by the way, provided a beautiful endorsement for my last book, THE SACRIFICE.)

Check out another Sisters In Crime blog (and yeah, she's really my sister): Lala Corriere.

E-Book Reading

This quote was posted on the Sisters-in-Crime loop recently and I loved it:


"Technology is not a barrier to depth, to engagement, to the cultural discussion, and that perhaps we want the same thing from our reading as we always have, regardless of the form it takes.... The issue is not what we read on, just as the issue is not what we read. The issue is that we read, that we continue to interact with long-form writing; by altering the conditions of the conversation, e-books and e-readers have already served an essential purpose.... This, I think, is what e-books have to offer: the promise of immersion, enhanced or otherwise, just as their analog counterparts have always done."
--David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, in an essay that will appear in Sunday's print edition of the paper


If you're debating whether or not to get an e-reader, maybe you should wait. It doesn't matter . . . as long as you read.

Some amazing new books, as well as a large number of out of print books, are only available electronically. A Kindle is my best entry into their pages. The application is available free for dozens of venues, but I vastly prefer reading on my Kindle to reading on my computer.

For me? I love my Kindle 3. I gifted my Kindle 2 to my husband, who has yet to finish off his pile of DTBs (Dead Tree Books) to familiarize himself with the wonders and benefits of electronic immersion into words. I'm not worried. He will. And I will continue to read DTBs. Because I love them as well.

It's the words that are important. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. It's the stories. The worlds. The magic.




CR: Skin Deep by Timothy Hallinan on my Kindle

It's all better with friends.

When the Past Embraces the Future

This video is from the Sisters In Crime Summit trip to the west coast. It's their final installment until they get back to town and share the written report with the entire membership.

There's a wee bit from the CEO of Smashwords. I can't help but think there will be a whole lot more information in the written summary from this very hot publisher.

One of the ideas I had never considered about the benefit of e-publishing is a reader's access to backlist. Helen Sandoval, a member of the Northern California chapter of Sisters In Crime made the point that if she went to a bookstore, and they had book five in an author's series, but not one through four, how very cool to pop them into your Kindle or iPad or other e-reader. Everyone wins.






CR: Last night a movie rerun actually held more appeal to me than the book I'm reading. I will be giving the book another shot tonight, and I promise to kick my snarky attitude to the curb and open the covers with anticipation.

It's all better with friends.

When Technology People are also Book People

A lot of things are changing in publishing, and they're changing fast. I don't believe this is the death of the paper book, but I do believe books will be read electronically at previously unimagined levels. As the medium is tweaked and improved and made more and more user friendly, e-books will find even bigger audiences.

Sisters In Crime, an organization I highly encourage you to join if you haven't already, is on a "summit" trip this week, and the video clip below talks a little bit about their visit to Google and Apple in California. The president of SinC, Marcia Talley, gave me permission to post this video. I hope you find it heartening.







CR: I'm still reading the book I'm not entirely sure about, looking for the story.

It's all better with friends.