Michael is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a number of dauntingly erudite yet gorgeously readable books about books.  He writes equally stunning essays for the New York Times, the Barnes & Noble Review, and, well, pretty much any venue where the printed word is discussed.  I’ve met him a few times, he being a regular at the annual Baker Street Irregulars dinner.   And when I’m writing, he is rarely far from my mind, since I often dip into the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus to spark my interest in, and attention to, the words I’m using—and there stands MD, delivering pithy remarks about words from boring (“Just as sexy (q.v.) is the ultimate compliment, so boring is the most dreaded pejorative.”) to very (“among the few words that gains in effectiveness when repeated”) with stops at crapulous (“Writers ought to use these tricky words sometimes, not only to keep such useful terms current but also to lend a little panache to their prose.”) postmodern (“neatly suggests that its user is learned, widely read, up to date on the latest in literary theory, and, in general, really cool, not to say—ahem—edgy.”) and sexy (“be careful when using this revealing adjective: It allows others a peek into your unclothed psyche.”)

But this Dirda affaire is getting out of hand.  The most recent upsurge in our relationship (about which, I hasten to say, he is unaware—or…was.)  began with a reprinted article of his in Salon.com, a site to which I subscribe, for the pleasure of no ads.  I’m behind on my reading—both online and on the page—so when I spot something I like, I tend to scroll down a bit and discover things I missed when they first appeared.

Such as a review, of all things, of Pliny the Younger’s description of Pompeii, a review sparked by the eruption of our considerably less dramatic and more tedious Icelandic volcano that brought air traffic to a standstill.

The review was simply riveting: Pliny’s uncle (Pliny the Elder) died under Vesuvius, and the nephew describes the death, and his own experiences at Misenum, where—but no, I’m not going to repeat what the reviewer says so brilliantly, go and read it for yourself, and then come back:  Here’s the link.

I read the review, as I hope you just did, and having overlooked the name of the reviewer (a sin of which I am as guilty as anyone else, alas) looked back at the top and saw the name Dirda.  I should have known.  And so I followed the Barnes & Noble link over to that page, and found there a more recent Dirda review, of James Lees-Milne, The Life by Michael Bloch.   Which essay I greedily read, and then went hunting for others.  That took me sideways into a New York Review of Books piece on the Patricia Highsmith novels,

and into books about bar-crawling Roman emperors

and then a reminder of a delightfully eccentric memoir I’d read when writing The Game called Hindoo Holiday:

Ackerley’s holiday journal deserves an honored place in that literary subgenre of witty, opinionated travel books by sandy-haired young Englishmen. It belongs on the same shelf with such delicious armchair escapes as Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.

But I had to stop when I came across an essay entitled “2009: A Year in the (Reading) Life”

because I knew that if I entered that particular essay, I would never come out again.

Thank you, Michael, for adding to my 23 linear feet of already purchased to-be-read by bringing to my attention, or nudging me to re-read:

Pliny the Younger: Complete Letters, P. G. Walsh

James Lees-Milne, The Life, Michael Bloch

Another Self, James Lees-Milne

The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Lee Fermor

Highsmith, a Romance of the 1950s, Marijane Meaker

The five Ripley novels, Patricia Highsmith

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith

And lest I forget, if you haven’t read it, take a look at Michael’s memoir:

An Open Book, Michael Dirda.

Damn him.

(And his speaking manner is equally erudite and charming–which you can see at

watch?v=3MPSTMfAYVM

Start at the 3:30 point.)

My first pen (on the left) was a simple Waterman bought in Oxford on the high street pen shop (still there—it’s called Pens Plus.) With it I wrote The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and most of A Monstrous Regiment of Women. I used buff colored paper clipped to an oversized artist’s clipboard (as in the photo), comfortable whether I was at home, or sitting behind the wheel of the Volvo while the kids were kicking a soccer ball or tormenting the music teacher’s piano.
A pen is a personal, highly tactile way to write. A fountain pen has the definite advantage of being gentle on the hands and wrist, since unlike pencils or a ball point, there’s no pressure involved, just directing the ink’s flow. I could write for hours and hours, which is how I wrote then, and I never got cramps or carpal tunnel syndrome or even so much as a callus.
And that was the only way I wrote. Even letters, I would draft by hand first, then transfer onto the computer. For a while, I would buy myself a new pen for a new book—the wooden one (bought in France) is the one that wrote Folly. (Folly being about a woodworker…) But then I found the Namiki (which seems to have gone walkabout at the moment, so I didn’t add that one to the photo—no doubt it’s off attending some writing conference.)  The Namiki became my favorite, with its rare combination of a fine nib and an easy ink flow (Japanese characters, I imagine, requiring both) and I used that exclusively for a few years. All in all, I wrote nearly a dozen books in ink, until computers became small enough I could rest one on that same oversized clipboard and fool my brain into thinking it was still producing words with a pen.
I don’t tend to write first drafts with pens now, since the business of the rewrite and edit became just too cumbersome. I even cajoled my brain into writing letters on the machine, although I still need to see words on a page for any complex kind of edit. But I do use the pens still, when words are coming slowly, when I need to think things out in, well, a personal and tactile fashion.
When I need to think in pen and ink.

Here’s their link, the auction finishes August 1st, and the time and place (local to me) is to be worked out.

A journey that should be recognized with drama, import, or even just a brief acknowledgment of its globe-spanning scope has become an exercise in hauling easily damaged and irritatingly vocal freight from here to there.  Food and entertainment choices betray a desire, not to nourish or amuse, but to make the freight units shut up.

However, not even United airlines can change the essential loveliness and humanity of England.  I am here, and until I commit myself again to the gentle ministrations of the air industry, I am free of their cold and corporate embrace.

Today I drive from my family’s house in the western edges of London up to Cambridge, a journey of ninety minutes or nine hours, depending on the humour of the M25, London’s–not ring road, which was long swallowed by suburbs, but the city’s “orbital”, a massive, six-lane Saturn’s ring of a road that takes nothing but a hesitant granny or a stray nail to reduce it to a parking lot ten or twenty miles long.

What was I saying?  No! Adventure is not dead in the age of modern travel…

At the end of this (insh’Allah) will be the city on the Cam, and the treasure palace of Heffer’s Books which, under the excellent guidance of Richard Reynolds, holds an annual salon of crime called Bodies in the Bookshop.

A grand way to start off the God of the Hive Tour, UK edition!

I came home from the God of the Hive tour (which had also been a trip to Portugal/Morocco/France/England) in mid-May with 70 pages of Pirate King written, about half what I had hoped for by that time.  And inevitably, being gone for two months meant it took a third month to catch up and get my desk cleared for action, so it wasn’t until June 3 that I sat down to finish it—and to finish it before I went off on the UK leg of the tour in mid-July.

I’m a fairly fast writer, especially for the first draft which is mostly Just throw the damned thing onto the page. Unless I need to visualize precisely how things work or figure out some shadowy character, I don’t go back and do any rewrites or substantial additions, just push on after that elusive conclusion, hoping that my copious notes about research gaps, sub-plots to be developed, and characters to make more of in the early pages can be deciphered at the end.

My usual pattern is to set a minimum goal for the day—generally 1500 to 2000 words—and work maybe 6 days a week at that.  This time (for those of you interested in the nuts and bolts of this odd job I do) my word count between June 3 and June 27 shows six days of no writing (four of those I was away from home, two days I was reading what I’d already written.)   Only three days have under 2000 words (well, four, if you count the final day’s 1,924 words.)  Five days have over 3000 words.

Speaking personally? At 3500 words, smoke comes out of my ears and when I go down to start chopping the vegetables for dinner, I can barely make conversation. So that speed is for me quite high.

So, am I finished with the book?  Hah! she said, grimly.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first draft amounts to little more than an expanded outline, 300+ typescript pages of confusion, idiocy, outright contradiction, and the occasional small, very small snippet that will make it into the final version virtually unchanged.

But there are very few of that last.  For the most part, every page I produce will expand by a third, thirty chapters will turn into thirty-four or -five, people who just appear and start talking will be given some kind of introduction, and bare descriptions of facts received will become a discovery of that information instead.

As it stands at the moment, Pirate King is 270 pages of typescript (terrible, unreadable typescript.)  Figuring that I average around 250 words to the page, that’s 70,000 words.  And considering that a reasonable length for a crime novel these days is in the neighborhood of 100,000 words (The Game was 120,000, Touchstone nearly 180,000) you can see that I have a way to go.

But I have the bones of my story, skull to metatarsals.  And now that I have those bones, when I get back from the UK tour in August, I can begin to flesh it out.

So raise a cup of grog to Pirate King—or at any rate, the faint, ghostly foreshadowing of Pirate King.

Strawberries, pineapple, blueberries, and raspberries.

Ahhh.

I hadn’t actually intended quite such a long break without Muttering at you, but it took me nearly a month after getting home from Portugal/Morocco/France/England/book tour to get my life in some kind of order and the suitcases back in the closet.

And since then, I’ve been writing.

In two weeks the book has gone from the 70 pages of typescript that I did in Lisbon to a bit over 200 pages.  I’m beginning the last third of the first draft, grabbing at all the threads and trying to braid them into a story that makes some kind of sense.

This is a Russell book, my third in a row.  [Pause for cheers.]  I don’t normally like to do the same characters two years in a row, far less three, but my publishers asked me if I’d mind, and although I did in a way, in another way I didn’t.

Because it would force me to do something different.  [Pause for murmur of consternation.]

I’ve only repeated one year’s characters the following year a couple of times, and for one of those repeats (The Moor and O Jerusalem) the second one was already written, so it was just a rewrite.  With the other pair, The Game and Locked Rooms, they were miles apart—in setting (ageless India versus Prohibition-era  San Francisco), flavor (exotic romp v. dark and internal), voice (strictly first person for The Game, several chapters of alternate POVs with Locked Rooms) and, well, everything.  That made writing two in a row less noticeable.

Than came The Language of Bees, and because I thought people would throw things at me if I made them wait two years for the continuation of the tale, I dove into The God of the Hive.  Which would have been fine except my publisher really wanted another one, and I was faced with the problem of how to live with these characters for a third year without doing something really vicious to them.  I mean, I haven’t reached the point yet of Conan Doyle, pushing his protagonist off the Reichenbach Falls, but I could begin to feel the urge stirring in the back of my mind.

So I threw my mind a bone and told it to go fetch.

That bone was the idea of comedy.

Now, I think of the Russell and Holmes stories as somewhat comic to begin with.  The books delight in an undercurrent of silliness, while solemnly playing the Sherlockian game of treating it all as God’s Honest Truth.  What Dorothy Sayers called a county cricket match at Lords, where outright burlesque can only spoil it.

Except that with the next book, I’m taking a step closer to outright burlesque.  A rather large step.

It’s called Pirate King, and yes, it’s a reference to The Pirates of Penzance.  Russell gets dragged into the world of Twenties film, with a company making a movie about a movie about the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera.  And although I don’t talk about what I’m doing with a book until I’ve finished the first draft, I will admit that the book has a talking parrot.  And a number of unlikely people falling in love.

However, I’m determined to drive through the first draft before I leave for my British God of the Hive tour (watch for details here) in less than four weeks, which means spending my days at work.  Normally with a first draft I set myself a goal of 1500 words in a day, trying for 2000 but not worrying too much if it’s only 1250.  The past two weeks I’ve managed 2500 most days, and four or five days it’s been 3000.  Which amounts to either five hours of feverish typing or seven hours or more labored word production.

So you will, perhaps, excuse me for being a little preoccupied.  I do intend to return here more regularly very soon, starting a series of posts called “Writing Tools.”

Thanks for hanging in there, and if you’re curious about what’s going on day to day, I generally fling a quick post onto Facebook several times a week.

Happy summer reading!

Sometimes with family, you really luck out.  True, sometimes family saddles you with serial killers and moustachioed aunts with lethal halitosis, but sometimes, that sprawling entity known as family presents you with a gift.

One of my husband’s granddaughters brought an extraordinary man into our family.  I mean, we all knew he was a great guy and he’s a gas at a party, even before the juggling and the kites come out, but there’s nothing like a life-threatening illness to strip a person down to his true nature.

And he’s a gem.

His blog is here.  Anything I might add to his story would be an anticlimax.  He’s trying to raise a little money for the Lymphoma Association, too.  Send them a few dollars, to let Martin know you’re behind him.

Thanks.