Life comes in snippets. Here a week’s worth:

Ten years ago I was walking in the woods at the family farm and found a strange looking rock. I surmised it might be a meteorite. It was heavy for its size and one side had a black shiny crust, caused, I figured, by its entry into the atmosphere. I intended to get it checked by an expert. But for ten years I left it in my mother’s flower garden. Last Saturday I finally brought it to my house. My father-in-law thinks it’s a huge hunk of foundry slag worth nothing. I’m holding out for a meteorite worth thousands. One of these days I’ll find out for sure . . . . While were on the subject of my in-laws, a while back my mother-in-law, Rose, told my wife, Carol, that her sister-in-law, Erma, had an article about my books, given to her by her daughter-in-law, Kathy. I figured it was some little blurb in the local paper. I finally got to see it this week. It’s a column from The New York Times Review of Books, by the paper’s mystery reviewer Marilyn Stasio. The column is about new mysteries by Anne Perry and David Levine. She writes, “Certain books come to mind whenever that little voice whispers in your ear, “Oh, lighten up!” The mysteries of manners that M.C. Beaton sets in the Cotswolds and laces with the acerbic wit of her village sleuth, Agatha, Raisin, are always good for a nasty laugh. Somewhat sweeter, but also restorative, are the Morgue Mama whodunits of C.R. Corwin, whose small-town snoop, the longtime librarian at a Midwestern newspaper, has yet to miss a dirty trick.” Now isn’t that cool! Not a review of the new book, just using my work as an example for an entire genre! She gave my last Morgue Mama, Dig, a very good review. So I’m waiting to see what she says of The Unraveling of Violeta Bell, out next week . . . . Speaking of that pending release, it’s time to start my daily tracking of sales on amazon.com. Let’s see, as of 9:30 a.m. Sunday, it’s no. 124,666. The paperback of Dig is out now, too. It’s no. 77,413. The paperback for The Cross Kisses Back is 49,542. The best I’ve ever done on amazon is 1,280. That was in 2000 for my novel, Serendipity Green, the day after it got a great News York Times review. It is now no. 3,463,248 in hardcover and 811,654 in paper . . . . Speaking of amazon.com, they are at the center of new controversy regarding print-on-demand (POD) books. As of April 1, they are requiring all publishers that sell POD on amazon to use their printing services (BookSurge). Publishers see this as a dangerous powergrab and you can bet there’ll be legal action. I read a blog that documented how lousy BookSurge’s printing is, with pages falling out all over the place . . . . Wife Carol has decided that we need a fence around our back yard. So, this week, we had a steady steam of fence companies come out to measure the yard and give us estimates. We need this fence so our two wonderful dogs neither eat the neighborhood kids nor run away. They were “free” dogs through a pet rescue. They’re costing us thousands. When we travel, we spend more on their “pet resort” than we do on accommodations for ourselves . . . . My father-in-law, the foundry slag expert, is back in the hospital, this time with pneumonia. He’s going to be fine. Not so sure about me. For two days now I’ve been eating my meals in the hospital cafeteria. Today I had a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings, coleslaw and lemon pudding . . . . In other food related matters, last week I designed my daughter’s new business cards on my computer then went with her to Kinko’s to have them printed. Afterwards I suggested we have lunch at the new McDonalds. It’s one of the groovy new ones that looks like a Starbucks inside. She said okay and then promptly took us to Panera Bread. “Hey,” I protested. “This is better for you,” she said unapologetically . . . . Of yeah, I got some writing done this week, too. I’m working on my new non-mystery novel. In the first chapter I had about 4,000 words of continuous backstory that I knew sometime I’d either have to cut or sprinkle in later. This week I did some cutting and a whole lot of sprinkling. I’m quite pleased with how it worked out . . . . I love writing backstory. Someday I’m going to do a novel called Backstory. And that’s all it will be – interesting crap about characters’ lives that has nothing to do with the non-existing plot . . . . My new non-mystery, by the way, will have a 1923 scene where a Model T full of rum-runners goes through the Lake Erie ice and everybody drowns. I seem to remember reading once that during Prohibition that actually happened from time to time. But I could not find anything online or at the library confirming it. Then just this Saturday Carol and I were at Borders and I found a local self-published book called Great Lakes Crime that has just what I’ve been searching for. A eureka moment . . . . Last week we discussed the new Harper Collins imprint that will cut authors’ advances, stop paying slotting allowances to big-box bookstores, and emphasize online sales. The entire print industry is changing fast, books, newspapers, magazines. Obviously we writers have to fret about these things, but we need to remember that our job is to write good stories. Because there always will be a market for good stories no matter what the technology. That’s one reason why I put so much time and effort into research. I want to tell a good story. I also want to accurately portray whatever world I’m writing about. The older I get, the more fanatical I get about this. I tell my students that a writer has a moral responsibility to get the zeitgeist right, the spirit of the time right . . . . On my way back Sunday afternoon from visiting my mother, I saw a guy out mowing his law! On April 6! The bastard!