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Reading Parker...
Between coming home yesterday and going to sleep, I polished off Robert B. Parker's second mystery novel featuring the character of Sunny Randall, Perish Twice.
Parker has a beguilingly simple style of writing: each chapter is a kind of self-contained whole that seems awfully short. I'm thinking of typing one out, just to get a feel for the length of a "Parker" chapter, and to get an impression of what it feels like to write one.
This is a more complex story than I remember in most of Parker's mysteries (including the Spenser and Jesse Stone books), although the book's back-cover blurb, to the effect that any of the situations associated with the three women she's helping could lead to a fatal conclusion, seems a bit, um..., strained.
Then again, the one relationship of the three - those being with a client, a friend, and her sister - that could lead to Randall's getting killed is more than adequate for the job. The plotting is fairly intricate, and layered revelations of who is (or was) who in the story sort of remind me of Ross MacDonald's The Instant Enemy.
* * * It's been a fairly long time since I've written for publication outside of a fairly narrow circle (e.g., the article for the ATA Chronicle and my column in the quarterly publication of the ATA's Slavic Languages Division, The SlavFile). The other day, I sent a query off by e-mail to this one publisher, and received an answer to the effect that e-mail queries were not accepted!
"In this day of electronic everything," I asked myself, upon reading the response, "why would a publisher not accept e-mail queries?"
The only answer I can come up with is that perhaps the publisher doesn't want to have to deal with umpteen gazillion ill-formed queries from wannabe writers, preferring instead to deal with a great many fewer queries (even if ill-formed) via snailmail. Does that make sense?
Another possibility is that the publisher really isn't "tooled up" to do business electronically, preferring to go through the whole assignment/editing/production cycle the "old fashioned way," but this just doesn't sound credible. (I remember once dealing with a computer publisher like that, except that it soon went out of business. Duh.) I mean, if they really are computerphobes, why publish e-mail addresses for their staff?
Nope. It has to do with discouraging the wannabes; nothing else makes sense. So - echoing the musings of Harry Callahan - do I print out my query, flesh it out some more and send it to them via snailmail, or go on to something else? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I really don't know. But being as this query I have is a doozie, and that the article would blow the editor's mind once she sees the final product, I've got to ask myself one question: Do I feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?
Cheers...
Parker has a beguilingly simple style of writing: each chapter is a kind of self-contained whole that seems awfully short. I'm thinking of typing one out, just to get a feel for the length of a "Parker" chapter, and to get an impression of what it feels like to write one.
This is a more complex story than I remember in most of Parker's mysteries (including the Spenser and Jesse Stone books), although the book's back-cover blurb, to the effect that any of the situations associated with the three women she's helping could lead to a fatal conclusion, seems a bit, um..., strained.
Then again, the one relationship of the three - those being with a client, a friend, and her sister - that could lead to Randall's getting killed is more than adequate for the job. The plotting is fairly intricate, and layered revelations of who is (or was) who in the story sort of remind me of Ross MacDonald's The Instant Enemy.
"In this day of electronic everything," I asked myself, upon reading the response, "why would a publisher not accept e-mail queries?"
The only answer I can come up with is that perhaps the publisher doesn't want to have to deal with umpteen gazillion ill-formed queries from wannabe writers, preferring instead to deal with a great many fewer queries (even if ill-formed) via snailmail. Does that make sense?
Another possibility is that the publisher really isn't "tooled up" to do business electronically, preferring to go through the whole assignment/editing/production cycle the "old fashioned way," but this just doesn't sound credible. (I remember once dealing with a computer publisher like that, except that it soon went out of business. Duh.) I mean, if they really are computerphobes, why publish e-mail addresses for their staff?
Nope. It has to do with discouraging the wannabes; nothing else makes sense. So - echoing the musings of Harry Callahan - do I print out my query, flesh it out some more and send it to them via snailmail, or go on to something else? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I really don't know. But being as this query I have is a doozie, and that the article would blow the editor's mind once she sees the final product, I've got to ask myself one question: Do I feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?
Cheers...