I am back in Texas and finally turned around after traveling nearly 40,000 miles in the last four weeks.  Crossed both oceans and saw the sun rise in time zones 9 and 13 hours away. This is not conducive to a lot of writing and my word production slacked off toward the middle of last week while I was enjoying the wonders of amazing Beijing.  I did manage to exercise daily, so that's something, I reckon.  intend to stop being such a slacker, this very weekend, now that I've had a couple of decent nights sleep. I'll try to blog a bit more, too.

The hard part about revising a book so that it will be ready to send around to your agent or editor is, trying to make it better without busting something.  This is easier in the age of computers and cut-and-paste than it was back when everything was produced in long hand or by typewriter, but the writer still lives in horror of spoiling something in the process of trying to improve the writing or pacing.  My friend Hershel Parker has written the definitive work on how writers, including Twain, Crane and other giants of literature, came close to destroying their own work in the process of rewriting it so that it would sell or, perhaps, to meet the whim of an editor or publisher.  Hershel's book is FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS and it should be required reading for all writers and editors.

Still, in the case of my work, the book that emerges from self-editing is almost always better than the book was before.  Sometimes, a book can even benefit mightily from sitting in a drawer for a few years, letting it age in the writer's head. That's the case with the one I am working on now, which I first finished in '06.

Beethoven said, genius is the art of taking pains.  I don't know about that, but I do know that taking pains is the only way to make sure the rewriting and self-editing process doesn't do more harm than good.

Apparently, all of the Macmillan titles, including WHERE ARMADILLOS GO TO DIE, have for the time being been pulled from Amazon.com over a pricing dispute.  The struggle over the future of the publishing business has already been affected by the iPad and the thing isn't even available for purchase yet.  All Macmillan books appear to be available online through Barnes and Noble.  For those who live in Houston and want the best mystery book-buying experience available in the physical world, Murder By the Book is open on Saturday's and they've got signed stock!

This evening I was thinking about color agnosia, which is a disorder inflicted on people who have suffered damage to a particular part of the brain. Its victims have lost the knowledge of color, even though their retinas still register different wavelengths of light.  As a result, their brains perceive a world of black, white and shades of gray.  Like television back when I was a kid.

I suddenly realized, that's the perfect metaphor for use in the scene I will write tomorrow morning, in my current work-in-progress.

It is not just perfect. It is poetic.

A neuroscientist once told me that creativity is seeing the underlying connections between seemingly unconnected things.

I do love these little "Eureka" moments.