Yesterday, I daid that I had two things on my mind, one of them related to books, and the other not.  I never got around to the one related to books, so let me start there. I’ve got a lot of books in my office.  I mean a lot.   We’re talking a hundred or so,…

Here we go again–this is another post I started the day before and then couldn’t seem to get out more than the title.  But I’ve now got two problems, one having to do with books and the other not.  So let’s start with the one that doesn’t have to do with books. Lymare and some…

Several weeks ago, John sent me a link to an article–I tihnk it was in a British newspaper, but it might have been Australian,  I can’t remember–bemoaning the way elementary and high school students today are carefully shielded from competition, les their tender self esteem be destroyed forever. This is not the world I, or…

I actually started to write this post yesterday, and then things happened, and then it snowed.   It was a disappointing snowstorm.   We’d spent three days hearing about what an awful whack we were going to get, and being given prospective snow totals that seemed to go up every hour, and then when I woke up…

I’ve been wandering around for several hours thinking about Robert’s second comment to thie last post, and feeling fairly flabbergasted.   It literally never occured to me that somebody would want to know, before the book even started, how the plot would turn out.  In fact, I can honestly say that I’ve never done that in…

One of the comments yesterday or the day before asked why I write murder mysteries, which is not a question I get very often.  I know that sounds odd, and I even think it’s odd.  I’m not J.K. Rowling, or John Grisham, but I do get interviewed from time to time, and for some reason…

It’s about four thirty in the morning, and I don’t usually write posts this early, but I’m still in the middle of a very bad working week, so here we are.   I’m also in the middle of a very bad weather week, so that I’m sitting here wondering whether what’s going on outside my windows is…

Writing a book is a very odd thing to do, at least for me.  I say that in spite of the fact that I wrote my first one before I was eleven years old, sitting in the enormous upstairs room my father had built for me when he was expanding our house, at a metal…

I’d barely hit the button to publish yesterday’s post when it suddenly hit me–a Romantic sensibility might be behind attraction to various kinds of revolutionary violence, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary to an attraction to violence per se.   Or at least, one needn’t be a Romantic to find something vaguely exhilarating at being…

This is what I think of as “Christmas vacation,” even though, given the schedule for delivery of my books,  I tend to work right through it.   It’s Christmas vacation for my sons, though, so maybe that works.  Being Christmas vacation, though, I always think I need to hack through my TBR pile, and I’ve got…