The Writing Life?

The rest of my year is shaping up with a lot of writing-related events. Or is it?  

When I attend Left Coast Crime I try to arrange to give a brief talk about the Brubaker case.  (The nutshell version: This guy stole tens of thousands of publications from 100+ libraries and my university was the one that caught him, after more than a year of investigating.) Chris Dreith attended the chat I did this year and invited me to speak, via zoom, to the Sacramento chapter of Sisters on Crime on October 17, 4 PM Eastern time..  It's free to the public, if you are interested.  You can register here.

Then in November I will have a table at Open Book, an event sponsored by Whatcom County Library System.  If I'm lucky I might sell a few books there.  In any case it will be fun. I have attended it twice, but never as an author.  I always learn something there. 

 

 

Every month the Wolfe Pack has a monthly zoom discussion  of Rex Stout's books. This December  the subject is Gambit and I have been invited to talk about it because I wrote an article about it in the long-gone journal The Armchair Detective.  (My only published literary criticism, actually.)

I'm looking forward to all of these events but I recently realized: all of these are writing-related, but none of them are writing.

These days if you want to have what I will laughingly call a career in writing you have to spent as much time promoting your stuff as you do creating it.  The time I am spending perfecting my speech on Brubaker is time I am not spent putting words onto an electronic page.  

When I started planning to write this piece (which, ahem, is also not going to earn me any money) I thought it would be a complaint.  However...

Whenever I give a talk about the Brubaker theft someone always asks: Have you written any fiction about it?  I have always replied: No, I don't want to give that bad man any more room in my skull.

But this week I thought of a way to write a short story based on the theft.  So, sometimes the publicity machine can crank up the writing machine.  And so the great circle of life is maintained.  Hoping you the same.