Well, hello there. Let me begin with apologies, and abject ones at that. I’ve just had a look at my most recent newsletter, and am reminded that I’d called it LB’s Blue Moon Newsletter, to acknowledge that I’d somehow lost the knack of regular communication.
That was in mid-September, two full months ago, and October did in fact end with a Blue Moon. (That’s what you call it when the moon is full twice in a single calendar month; it’s noteworthy only because it doesn’t happen very often. It isn’t, um, literally blue.)

Never mind.

I haven’t felt much like writing, newsletters or anything else. Like many of y’all, I’ve been busy sitting in front of the TV, trying to balance my news intake between election coverage and pandemic reports. Now and then I look at a newspaper to see who died, or pick up a magazine for an in-depth report on the impending extinction of all life on earth. When that ceases to amuse, I can always get back to counting flowers on the wall.

One partial explanation for my long silence has been a lack of any momentous news to impart. For the better part of a year I ushered quite a few books into the world, culminating in June with the publication of a new and controversial novel, Dead Girl Blues. That went well—better than I’d dared to expect, actually—but I haven’t written or published much of anything since then. There are a few future works barely visible on the horizon, and I’ll get to them, but first let me tell you about something I’ve been working on for over a quarter of a century.

Um, intermittently.

It was in 1994 that I found myself at Ragdale, the writers colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, with a mystery I’d stalled out on and two weeks left of my residency. I spent one of those weeks writing a short story and a couple of introductions, and then I plunged abruptly into a memoir of my beginnings as a writer, those early years in the late 50s and early 60s when I turned out a great quantity of pseudonymous erotica.

The next week was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. The words poured out of me. I’d be writing about something to which I hadn’t really given much thought in years, and a door would open in my memory, and I’d be caught up in some other recollection I hadn’t previously recalled at all. Almost before I knew it, eight days had passed. I’d written fifty thousand words, and it was time to go home.

I was exhausted, of course, but when I caught my breath a few weeks later I sent what I’d written to my agent, and he tucked it in as a small part of a four-book contract. For my part, I never looked at the thing again, and thought about it as infrequently as possible. After a few years I wanted to stop thinking about it at all, and toward that end I repaid the advance and got out of the contract. (For the memoir, that is; the three novels were duly written and published.)

Than last year, while I was assisting Terry Zobeck with his comprehensive bibliography of my work, I remembered the memoir and, mirabile dictu, managed to unearth it on my hard drive. And braced myself, and read it. And found it surprisingly cogent and literate, and wondered why on earth I hadn’t hung on and finished it back in the day.

And so this past February I sat down at a desk in Newberry, South Carolina, and got back to work on A Writer Prepares. (That’s what I’d decided to call it early on, an echo of Stanislavski’s classic text, An Actor Prepares. I haven’t found a better title since then, but who knows? Something may come to me.)

The work was challenging; 1994’s torrent was 2020’s trickle. I was a man of 81 taking up the pen of a man of 56, both of us trying to recall the thoughts and acts of a kid in his early twenties. My memory, which I’d been able to count on in 1994, was now a lot less sure of itself. And my energy was diminished; I now found it a considerable task to read fifty thousand words in a week, let alone write them.

Still, it was going reasonably well.

Then Covid.

I flew home to New York, worked on the book for a while, then stopped. I had a novel to publish, other concerns to demand my attention—and, with the pandemic changing the world and killing some friends of mine, precious little appetite for writing anything. I set the memoir aside, and essentially forgot about it as the months passed.

Sometime in September I picked it up again. And it’s moved along since then in what a disciple of William Archibald Spooner would ever so aptly render as stits and farts. I work for a few days, then I stop. Eventually I resume. My goal—perhaps I’d be better advised to call it my intention—is to wrap it up by year’s end. The original 50,000 word text has grown by a third, and it’s entirely up to me when to declare it completed. Another couple of thousand words should suffice.

Still, they won’t write themselves, will they?

Once it’s done, I’ll most likely publish it myself. I can’t think that any commercial publisher would foresee much in the way of profit or prestige in bringing it out. And a publisher would quite justifiably want some editorial revision, and as I’ve barely been able to find the energy to complete the damn book, I find the notion of fixing it daunting in the extreme. (Might further work make A Writer Prepares a better book? Maybe, but not necessarily. In Barry Malzberg’s fine novel, Herovit’s World, the protagonist argues that rewriting his work would rob it of the spontaneity that is its only virtue. And I believe it was William Goldman who defined revision as “washing garbage.”)

And time’s a factor. A man who dares not buy green bananas, and whose core audience consists in large measure of readers in similar circumstances, is not keen on waiting a year or more for a book to come out. If I’m able to finish the creature by the end of the year, I should be able to publish it in May or June.

And there will be a time when you’ll be able to order it, but that time is not now. And that’s a bit disconcerting, for me if not for you, because it’s the opportunity to solicit orders from y’all that allows me to justify the time and expense of newsletters. You click on a link, and I get a sale—and, if I’ve supplied an Amazon link, I also pocket a wee commission on the sale. (When enough of those commissions mount up, I can go to the corner deli and buy myself a sandwich.)

Fortunately, there are a few items newly available. I’ll number them, and you can go down the list and see if anything appeals to you.

1. Hunting Buffalo with Bent Nails. This is my collection of assorted nonfiction, now presented in a magnificent hardcover edition from Subterranean Press—limited to 500 signed and numbered copies. Ken Laager’s cover is a thing of beauty, and the publisher’s commitment to quality will make it a joy forever. It’s available now for preorder, exclusively from Subterranean Press, and although the web page shows the ship date as February 2020, that’s a typo. February of 2021 is the actual date, and it’s not that far off, is it? If you want the book, you probably ought to preorder it now.

2. Here’s a handy audible.com link to all my audio titles with the most recent listed first. I’ll call your attention to Barbara Nevins Taylor’s sensitive reading of A Woman Must Love and Theo Holland’s latest Evan Tanner adventure, Tanner’s Tiger—and, from Tantor Audio, two anthologies voiced by Peter Berkrot and Teri Schnaubelt, At Home in the Dark and The Darkling Halls of Ivy. You may want to scroll through the whole list; I’ve just done so myself, and I was not half chuffed to see what an abundance of riches is available at the click of a mouse. 137 titles! (There is, alas, one that has nothing to do with me, though I can see how the search turned it up. It’s called Krueger’s Men, and the author is one Lawrence Malkin, and the subtitle identifies it as The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19. It actually sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? Ah, the world is a strange place, and so is the internet, but I have a feeling you already knew that…)

3. Ein Einbrecher zum Verlieben and Der Einbrecher, der Ted William verkaufte. The first and sixth Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries have now been rendered into German, and I’m happy to be publishing them. Sepp Leeb has updated his original translation of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, while Stefan Mommertz provides the first–ever German rendition of The  Burglar who Traded Ted Williams. The cover art is the work of my Goddess of Design and Production, Jaye Manus, who has found just the right way to let readers know Bernie’s adventures are closer to the cozy end of the crime fiction spectrum. How better to do that than by putting a cat on the cover? While the links are to amazon.de, both books are available as ebooks and Taschenbücher on most platforms worldwide. And yes, more German translations of unser liebenswerter Einbrecher will follow in due course…

4. Library Bindings. I’ve been an enthusiastic self-publisher for quite a few years now. Early on that meant ebooks and nothing else, but then I was able to add paperbacks—and now almost all the books I publish are in both those forms. Within the past year I found I could bring out hardcover editions as well. These, listed as “case laminate” by my supplier, are in a form most often called “library binding” because it was originally developed to meet the needs of those institutions; instead of a removable paper dust jacket, the cover art is printed directly on the book’s durable hard cover.

So far I’ve made only a fraction of my self-published books available in library bindings. Here’s a list with links, because some can be hard to find: The Liar’s Bible, The Liar’s Companion, Write For Your Life, Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel, The Crime of Our Lives, Resume Speed and Other Stories, Catch and Release, Random Walk, Defender of the Innocent, At Home in the Dark, The Darkling Halls of Ivy, Generally Speaking, The Burglar in Short Order, A Long Line of Dead Men, A Stab in the Dark, A Time to Scatter Stones, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Keller’s Fedora…and, most recently, Dead Girl Blues.

The links are to Amazon, but the books are available as well from other online booksellers, including Barnes & Noble. Bookstores can order from Ingram.

One happy result of publishing library bindings has been the strong response from libraries. Accordingly I’ll be getting out a targeted mailing to librarians—if and when I find the time and energy and summon up the will. As to whether more of my titles will get this treatment, well, we’ll see.

Most things these days take me longer than they used to, and it’s taken me far too long to draft this newsletter, so I’ll stop now and get it on its way. If I ever finish A Writer Prepares, and if I’m ever able to give you the chance to order it, rest assured I’ll let you know.

Eventually.

Cheers,

PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you yourself have received the newsletter from a friend and would like your own subscription, that’s easily arranged; an  email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.

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