Archive for September, 2009

Because this is my first real attempt at writing something i can actually finish, I’ve decided (for the first draft at least) to use this nifty formula I foudn somewhere. Because here’s the thing: one complaint or criticism of mysteries, police procedurals, etc is that they are formulaic: the structure, at least, does not vary […]


What on earth…? Well. I started in on Murder at the Mercantile one day and the character of Minna morphed into someone else. Well, thought I, I guess she’s different in this book… I kept going and realized that, no, she’s somebody else in a whole other book. And she’s like this, and she has […]


Conversation

26Sep09

The response comes at midnight… Every dog has his day. He lays himself out full length (every day every day every day…) | below him she stands on a kitchen chair with a broom. | The rug against his face, he feels her anger through the floor — ragged echoes of the music he turned […]


No one could starve on this road the way you would. Wild grape vines scramble up the trees, late peas reach over the trellis. Pumpkins strain at the leash. And I think about the net of your attention, how plucking at intersections with such precision moves you so freely — and we are all pins […]


Carrion Crow

11Sep09

Watching you fly through fields left fallow kicking up cornstalks from last year’s harvest, your black overcoat in the wind very like a bird. This is the way it is as your fingers cross my palm and I step into your office the arrangements we make the lure of business.