Category Archives: The Writing

My blogger pal Erin Faye recently asked me an interesting question on Twitter.  When I sat down to answer her, I found I couldn’t do it in 140 characters.  Having just read DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND, she wanted to know if a restaurant in the novel, called Grillmarks, was a real place in New York, or if I was referencing a local restaurant in Florida by the same name.  The answer is oddly complicated.

Last week, I started The Wave: In Pursuit of Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey.  I found myself immediately drawn in, blown away by the utterly fascinating nature of her subject matter and her beautiful, impassioned writing.  I loved her last book, The Devil’s Teeth, and her newest is every bit as engrossing.

I read a great deal of non-fiction that winds up significantly informing my fiction writing.  I’m an information junkie, and gathering knowledge, as well as experience, is a key, if indirect, part of my process. Susan Casey’s new book got me thinking about some of my non-fiction favorites, and I wanted to share them with you.

Even with all my years as a reader, and as a writer, I wouldn’t claim to know what makes a book “great.”  There have been many books touted as such that have left me cold, and others that have escaped any serious note, which have moved and seduced me.  Even as my tenth novel DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND will find its way to shelves this August, and I have been reading voraciously since as long as I can remember, I only know what I like, what makes me feel, what transports me.

The theme of “the lost girl” is something I find surfacing in my work again and again. She turns up missing, murdered, abused, neglected. She’s helpless, powerless, unable to circumvent the horrible things that befall her.

Currently, I blog the way I take supplements, that is to say infrequently but with great earnestness and optimism. I enjoy the idea of blogging, the concept that I might muse about the issues I face daily – the writing life, the mother-writer balance, the joys and pains of my chosen profession. Notes from the Margin seems a fitting title for this undertaking, since what happens off the page is at least as interesting in different ways as what’s happening on the page – for me, anyway. But I admit to a self-consciousness about this type of writing. I think to myself: Who cares? When I write a novel, I’m offering entertainment, escape, information; I’m giving my reader something. But isn’t blogging like asking you to watch me floss my teeth? What’s in it for you?

When Dave Thompson, a bookseller at one of my favorite independents in the country, Murder by the Book in Houston, asked me to contribute to a forthcoming anthology, I jumped at the chance. HELL OF A WOMAN: An Anthology of Female Noir will be published by Busted Flush Press in December of 2007.

Edited by the very talented Megan Abbott, (Edgar, Barry and Agatha award-nominated author of THE SONG IS YOU, DIE A LITTLE and the upcoming QUEENPIN), this anthology about the women of noir fiction features promises to be a gem. I was thrilled to write about my favorite noir author Patricia Highsmith. Here’s what I wrote: