The Writing Life Too

Overcast skies this morning and temperatures much cooler. I’m trying to get myself organized to have a productive day—the Working Class Acupuncture clinic is having a yard sale and I’m going to donate some items so I need to gather them.

Meanwhile, since there’s still another month of summer and you might be heading to the beach for a long weekend, here’s a delicious list of mysteries you might have overlooked at NPR. I used to read a lot of suspense/mystery titles. As I was working on my books, Between the Lines and Bullies, Bastards & Bitches I realized that I wanted to use a wider variety of books as examples, so deliberately started reading a wider array of fiction.

In fact, for both of those books I read 100-200 novels in order to formulate and fine tune my concepts. And along the way I mostly stopped reading suspense. I was thinking about this and I realize that my tastes have changed and I was looking for a different kind of drama, but also that the whole genre simply seemed sort of stale to me. Too many of the mystery writers that I once loved didn’t seem to be treading new ground or upping their games. I also read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice fantasy series and it was hard to find a suspense writer who crafted stories with such thoroughness and imagination. (You might want to check out his website and blog—and oh joy! they’re casting the actors for the HBO pilot. I cannot wait…..) But now, looking at this list of intriguing mysteries, I realize that it’s time to revisit the genre and find new authors.