Laurie King thinks of her nineteenth novel, Touchstone, as a “country house political thriller”— Jack Reacher meets The Remains of the Day. She has been blogging about Touchstone since its beginning, and this month she is on tour with the book, both in person and virtually.**
When I was a kid, my family’s chief form of entertainment was our local library. You’d think I would have decided early that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, but in fact, my life of being a reader didn’t morph into being a writer until I was well into my thirties.
I occasionally wonder if I would have started writing earlier if I’d ever met a real, live writer, but all those books I brought home, all those stories I drank in, might as well have been beamed down, dust jackets and all, by the little green men in the sky. Those author photos? Probably generated by the same art department that came up with the cover art.
But then I hit my thirties, and like a person who has lived in a foreign country so long she’s learned the language, I started to write. And because I was stubborn and I paid attention and I was lucky, my face was one of those on the books beamed down from the heavens.
And life opened up. If I had problems imagining real-life writers before I became one, well, the idea of an entire community of writers was far, far beyond me.
But that’s what I found. Scattered across the world, linking up at conferences and tours, blessed by the quickness of email, catching news of each other, not over the village well, but in reviews and PW and at bookstores. Some of my closest friends are people I’m lucky to see every year or so, at which time we slip back into friendship as if it were a daily occurrence.
As you might imagine, I keep a close eye on magazines such as Crimespree, both print and online. It functions like a Christmas letter from a really big family: Oh, so THAT’s what they’ve all been up to!
It’s very nice of Ruth and Jon to keep me in touch with my extended family.
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