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.
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.
