Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Hiatus

The post explaining it all is here, but this is the short version:

• I started a new gig as the News Editor for Publishers Marketplace, the first time I have had something approximating a full-time position in almost five and a half years. And it's keeping me rather busy, as it should.
• Typepad is a horrible back-end platform and I have been meaning to ditch it for years. (In fact, Moveable Type in general also sucks.) One day, the long-sought-after, much-needed upgrade to Wordpress will happen, and with it a complete rethink of what the site ought to be.
• I still keep up with the crime fiction world, obviously. I can't not do that, especially since it dovetails significantly with what I most love to read and the latest developments in the publishing industry. But I don't have the desire right now, and haven't for a long time to be the uber-chronicler I once was, which I think should be patently obvious to anyone who's showed up here the last year, if not more. Luckily there are many, many fine online establishments who have taken the slack, picked it up, and run with it. The Rap Sheet, of course. Jen's Book Thoughts. Detectives Beyond Borders. Spinetingler. Crime Always Pays. Crimespot.net by virtue of aggregation. And the great Jiro Kimura's The Gumshoe Site, which I firmly believe will be the last crime fiction website standing, outliving everybody. 
• Seven years is a long time. I was 24 when I started Confessions, and I'm in my early 30s now. My entire life changed because of this blog, and I'm grateful and humbled a blog could take me from graduate student-hood in forensic science to a bookish-minded journalist and freelancer who got fiction published every now and then.
• Which brings me to the "put up and shut up" reason of putting Confessions on ice: to spend more time on fiction. I've been somewhat productive in the last few months, though also aware that my writing process and method differs from several years ago. If I have to put my extra time into writing projects, fiction gets first dibs.

So thank you all, so very much, for reading, commenting and listening. I appreciate it more than I can possibly express. And it's not like I'm hard to find.

Ruth Cavin, R.I.P.

Ruth Cavin, the legendary crime fiction editor for St. Martin’s Press who was instrumental in the founding of the company’s Minotaur Books imprint, died Sunday at the age of 92. Mike Shatzkin has an amazing tribute, and I’m sure there are much more to come (and when they do, I’ll link accordingly.)

Regrettably I never met Ruth, though I suspect we literally crossed paths at conventions, book parties and the like. But there was certainly an aura around her, for several key reasons: through the various contests the imprint ran (with the PWA for a debut PI novel, with Malice Domestic for debut traditional mystery, with the Tony Hillerman foundation for debut crime novel from the Western states) she championed new writers, as well as those who might not otherwise find a home within the publishing industry. People like Steve Hamilton, Bill Crider, Robin Hathaway, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Donna Andrews, Elizabeth Zelvin, Meredith Cole, and John Maddox Roberts owe all or part of their careers to Cavin.

Cavin was also a role model for anyone who thought being of AARP age meant one’s career prospects are finished. After all, she didn’t even begin her stint as a book editor until she was in her early 60s - and St. Martin’s didn’t hire her until she was about 70! Shatzkin’s description of Cavin as “the Grandma Moses of mystery editors” could not be more apt.

Now that she has passed away, that leaves an irreplaceable hole in Minotaur Books. No doubt many of her authors will be assigned to new editors, or have already been assigned. But the institutional memory of how to edit crime fiction, directly from Cavin and also from those she followed, has dimmed a great deal, and that light will not shine as brightly ever again.