Sara Paretsky's Blog, page 20

In Flanders Fields

I bought StreetWise today from Roarke E Moody, the vendor I know best.  Moody is a Vietnam vet, and a poet, and for the Memorial Day issue of the paper he wrote,

Naked-eyed toy soldiers take few shortcuts through hell.  We all had our own piece of hell.  In this mess of a war, in this distant land, it does not matter what you are fighting for…a patch of dirt, a piece of tail, war whores trapped in hell.

We were all there through the monsoons, through the doom and gloom–one and all, and all in...

Aging Gracefully

When I was a child, I was ballet mad, like many little girls.  We lived in a small town in eastern Kansas, and now and again famous troups would come to Kansas City and my dad would take me on the train to watch them.  Of all the dancers I saw, the one who most enraptured me was Alicia Alonso.  I never would have guessed when I saw her move so weightlessly across the stage that she was nearly blind, that she had spent a year in bed unable to move in hopes of correcting her vision–dancing...

Eleanor Taylor Bland

Eleanor Taylor Bland, 1944-2010.

Eleanor Taylor Bland, 1944-2010, died on June 1, and our world of writers, readers, humans, is diminished.

I first met Eleanor in 1992, when she published Dead Time. We bonded over concerns about depictions of women and African-Americans in crime fiction, and the fact that we both had full-time corporate jobs while trying to write and raise a family.

I later learned that Eleanor had been diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer in the 1970's, which she took  as a...

Air and Rice

I took a week away from the computer and it was very restful.  I'm trying to work out ways to focus more on my writing, less on anxiety and the quotidian, and staying offline was a definite help.  During my week away I read several books, including Anchee Min's Pearl of China.  The book is Min's tribute to Pearl Buck, about whom I personally knew very little–I didn't know, for instance, that she grew up in China and spoke several Chinese dialects with native fluency.  Min's tribute is part...

The Copy-Editor's Revenge

After writing in here about my editing woes, I thought I'd give Shakespeare's copy editor, channeled here by Rowan Atkinson, a chance to reply:

Hardball-Coming July 31 in Paperback

Hardball, which was one of 2009's  five "most mesmerizing mysteries," according to National Public Radio, will be out in paper on July 31.

As Granny used to say…

A friend of mine wrote recently, and said,  "'It's a great life, if you don't weaken,' as my grandmother used to say."  The images that conjured up were somewhat terrifying, but it reminded me of my own grandmother, who was definitely a low-comfort woman.  If you complained about–anything, she'd say, "From the day of your birth, 'til you ride in a hearse, there's nothing so bad that it couldn't be worse." My mother remembered a day in childhood when she ran inside, crying to my grandmother...

Towards a theory of writing

Thank you all for your good wishes on my previous post.  I'm back from a marathon weekend in Massachusettswith my independent editor.  We worked until two every morning going through the manuscript for Body Work, and all the flaws in it are now strictly of my own production.  While I was going through the text line by line, comparing what I'd written to how it had been rewritten, I realized I have a goal in my writing.

My desire is that the written word be transparent, so that the reader is...

Potholes in the Road

I've been bumping through a few potholes lately, which is why my posts are sporadic.  Minor ones–my husband was pickpocketed as he got off a commuter train in downtown Chicago.  A professional band of thieves–they had his credit card numbers distributed throughout the country within minutes–we got reports of charges as far away as Orlando, Fl.  Kudos to MasterCard for instantly sorting this out.  Kudos to my husband's dentist: my husband was en route to have a new crown made and the dentist g...

Riding Along

Last night I did something I should have done 20 years ago: went for a ridealong with the Chicago Police Department.  V I Warshawski has a prickly relationship with cops, but intense loyalty to her police officer father, Tony.  The Chicago police have been uniformly generous in their response to my work, even when it hasn't flattered the department, and even when I've gotten my facts wrong.  It's been high time that I learned enough about their job to write about them with deeper...