So the weather wasn’t perfect today, but it was nice. Not too hot, not too cool. The type of day where sitting outside is a true pleasure. Great lunch, crazy hummingbird dances, and the daily paper. And then we hit the sentence: It seems that under every mystery writer’s skin beats the heart of a novelist who yearns to transcend the genre. But it couldn’t stop there, oh no. There was another sentence: Writing about Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, who spin tales of crime in New York and Boston, respectively, New York Times critic Caryn James describes them as […]

Have we mentioned how important it is to understand this business of writing? Good, then we won’t waste anybody’s time with a short lecture on paying attention to the art and the business. You’re already doing that. At MoorishGirl, author Terri Brown-Davidson celebrates the release of her first, well, first published, novel (Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight) by looking at the journey she took to get there: This book has been issued as a “first novel.” What this means, actually, is that it’s my first novel published. Actually, I wrote five full-length novels before this one. All were my own

We’ve read several articles on the lawsuit filed against the U.S. Treasury Department on behalf of American publishers. What we have learned is that the law appears to be, in the words of a former boss, intentionally vague. Which is great if you want everyone to agree and pass it, but not so great when nobody can figure out what it means. Without getting too political, we want to note that countries under economic sanctions from the United States are often those countries where speech is particularly restricted. We would also like to note that storytelling — art — is

We can’t explain how it happened, but, when we were in Japan, we found ourself without anything to read. Clearly, someone miscalculated the number of books to pack — it is not a myth that you will find yourself awake in the middle of the night (and the Tsujiki Fish Market, while interesting, isn’t the tourist destination you’re lead to believe). We did make a vague stab at our traditional cure for reading withdrawal. Let’s just say the English-language selection at the bookstore-in-a-department-store wasn’t quite what we wanted. Something tells us we’d more successful now (not that we aren’t perfectly