Dear Reader,
I'm pleased to welcome today's guest author, Laurie R. King. She's the New York Times bestselling author of seventeen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, the Stuyvesant & Grey novels Touchstone and The Bones of Paris, and the acclaimed stand alone novel, A Darker Place.
Laurie writes...
Pen to Paper
Life piles up, when I'm working on a book. Which means that when I finish one and send it off to my editor, I then scurry around to do all the stuff that has fallen behind--paying bills, having lunch with a friend, replying to reader letters.
It's interesting, in this era of quick, shallow email, to see the hand-written letters that people send authors. Some readers just don't trust that I'll get their email. Others put pen to paper because the fervency of their affection can only be demonstrated in a physical medium. Others want to send a pretty card, or something hand-made, or a book they think I'll enjoy.
For these readers, a letter is less a form of communication than a declaration of community. Even someone who writes to correct my research often chooses an actual letter to show me they care. To show they've read my words and are responding to them with respect (even if it is a correction.)
This year, during that scurry-around time after hitting SEND, I went to clean a closet and discovered a box of letters written to and from my mother, back before the internet. Some are written in the looped handwriting of a young woman off to college. Others, on flimsy aerograms or envelopes with exotic stamps, trace my newlywed tour of the South Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island, the Australian Outback to highland Peru. Then some years later, letters from India, giving news of her young granddaughter.
I wonder what my mother made of them? She'd never been away from the West Coast, and only left the country once, in her sixties.
I also wonder what my own children and grandchildren have lost, with no box of letters to come across, written on paper smelling of wood-smoke and salt air, stained with perspiration and odd foods? Some clever historian needs to find a way of summoning the personal from our digital sea: the e-mails about life, rather than business; the photographs that speak of family and experience. How will history be written and memory be shaped, without those pieces of paper that begin, 'Dear Mom, I write to you from....'
I think I'll sit down and write someone a letter tonight.
The kind with a stamp.
-- Laurie R. King
Please do send Laurie an email welcoming her to our book club: [email protected]
More About Today's Author
Laurie grew up reading her way through libraries like a termite through balsa before going on to become a mother, builder, world traveler, and theologian. She has now settled into a genteel life of crime, back in her native northern California. Laurie has a secondary residence in cyberspace, where she enjoys meeting readers in her Virtual Book Club and on her blog.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
KIDSBUZZ: Click here to discover new books, "meet" the authors and enter to win.
A friend of mine was gently advised, when she wanted to write thank you notes to people who work for her, that several of them could not read cursive writing. It is not taught in schools these days.
Posted by: Sue Acosta | June 22, 2021 at 01:43 PM