Michael Di Lauro

In the late seventies, my cousin and I, along with a gang of jazz aficionados, began frequenting a Montreal spot called The Rising Sun.  Into the mid-eighties, the club, a tired firetrap kind of place that you accessed by walking up a claustrophobic staircase lined in what looked like shag carpeting, was still the go-to… Continue reading What Jimmy Heath told me about Charlie Parker

Persistence is key. Unflagging devotion. Stiff-upper-lipped, hardheaded goddamn doggedness. That’s what an author needs in order to no, not finish a book, but instead, to submit query letter after query letter. Yeah. Fun. I have this recurring dream. It goes like this.

They say Edgar Allan Poe wrote on parchment paper, and then pasted the sheets together to make a scroll. That seems messy, and tedious, to me. But pen and paper was all that was available, I suppose, and those rather uncomplicated tools produced an end-product (like Poe’s scrolls) that was, at best, fussy and hard… Continue reading Tools of the trade

Man, I thought writing the book was the hard part. But eight weeks after starting in on it, I finally completed my query letter. Sent off a batch of queries today too. And all of that stuff up there? Man, it ain’t easy. But now comes the trickier part. Yeah, I’m talking about the rejection… Continue reading You can’t handle rejection!

Writing is the easy part. Not sure where I read that. Not sure who said it. Come to think of it, maybe it was me. The thing is this. When the writing’s done, the heavy work starts. And that’s where I’m at. Looking at all the heavy work I need to do. Starting with “the… Continue reading Pitching

What’s the world record for time between two novels? The answer to that question is, I don’t know. But I suspect I’m in the running. Fourteen years is a long time. But fourteen years after publishing my first book I finally my second novel, Rock Kills. Why fourteen years? Hey, how much time have you… Continue reading Laggard