Library Journal gives Eric Stone's newest release, GRAVE IMPORTS, a Starred review, writing that it is "a fast-paced thriller that turns into a deeper social novel...a mystery plot with some substance." Gayle Lynds says it is a "wild and riveting ride," while Laura Lippman wrote that his last book, LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD, was "a stylish, fresh take on classic noir themes."

Tayler Bloom: You begin your book tour for GRAVE IMPORTS soon. Tell me about it.

 Eric Stone: I love book tours. Most of my fellow writers, especially the ones with a lot of books out, think I'm nuts. But I love touring and I love driving and I combine the two. On my first book tour I drove nearly 10,000 miles around the country. I'm going to do about the same this time. So first off, there's a whole lot of scheduling that needs to happen far in advance. Bookstores, especially ones that have a lot of events, often book those events as much as six months in advance. So I work out where I want to go, the logistics of getting there and then start contacting stores way in advance. On my first book tour I got to know a lot of booksellers, so I book those ones myself. The publicist who works with my publisher, has been booking the others, but we've had to carefully coordinate our efforts because of the dates and times and in my case, driving times. First we contact the stores - or in a couple of cases, other venues - to tell them about the new book that's coming out. Then we send them advanced reading copies of the book. Then I follow up with a call or an email suggesting a date that would work for me for an event, and I tell them a little about what sort of event I have in mind. Then if they say yes I plug it into the calendar. Since I've worked as a photographer, I also love putting together posters for events. So about a month before each event I send out a poster or two to the store with one of my photos and the book cover on it.

      
Tayler Bloom: Tell me about the presentation you'll be giving during your tour.

Eric Stone: It's a rare writer who can keep a crowd entertained all by themselves. I'm not a bad reader, and I seem to get plenty of laughs when I talk at bookstores or libraries or wherever, but there are now so many writers out there, flogging so many books, that you've got to do something, anything, to stand out from the crowd. I take pictures. And I also have a love for odd, foreign pop music. And I've learned to use PowerPoint. So I put all that together and created a presentation of photos of the places I am writing about, along with pop music from the place. It gives me a way to talk about the book in a fuller context, and gives the audience something more to look at than simply me standing there yammering at them. I do get a lot of questions from people though about when is the coffee table picture book version of my book coming out. I've passed that along to my publisher. I don't think there are any plans for it.

Tayler Bloom: Prior to writing books, you were a journalist. What lead you to that profession and where did it end up taking you?

Eric Stone: I was the kind of obnoxious little kid who put together neighborhood newsletters and things like that. One of my first jobs was with an underground paper in the '60s in L.A. I got a BA in journalism and had the misfortune to graduate in 1974, at the height of Watergate when everybody wanted to be investigative reporters. Competition for writing jobs was fierce. I'd always enjoyed photography as well, so I snuck into journalism that way. I eventually got back into writing by doing freelance travel pieces about places that magazines couldn't afford to send both a photographer and a writer - like Timbuktoo and Central Borneo. Eventually some of my Asia stories got me noticed and I was offered a job as an associate editor of a financial magazine based in Hong Kong.
        At first I thought financial writing was going to be dull, but I did want to try living overseas. Over the next 11 years I lived in Asia, and covered topics ranging from business to politics, the arts to sex, sports to crime. I ended up running my own small publishing company and after it went bankrupt I was in demand as a publishing consultant.

Tayler Bloom: What was it like running your own publishing company in Asia?

Eric Stone: After I'd been in Asia for seven years I got offered a job by a big publishing company in Bangkok. They wanted me to be the founding editor of a business magazine for the Mekong River area. I turned them down, but it got me thinking about what I knew about starting up and running a magazine.

        I started looking around for an underserved topic. I hit on the idea of sustainable economic development. It was 1993 and the height of the Asian economic boom, so I started Prospects magazine - a very glossy business development magazine. The whole thing worked pretty well for two years until it ran out of money and I had to shut it down.

        What I learned from it was pretty much what anyone who goes into publishing learns - with a few rare exceptions. It is best summed up by the old joke: "How do you make a little money in publishing? Start with a lot." The company ran out of money and the last issue of the magazine came out in September 1995. Of course, once I'd run a publishing company that went bankrupt, I was suddenly in demand as a "publishing consultant." I guess people figured I knew what not to do. At least one publishing company I helped start, in Singapore, is still going - 14 years later - so I guess I did learn a thing or two.

Tayler Bloom: What led you away from journalism and towards writing fiction?

Eric Stone: I was in Asia at a particularly exciting time, 1986-97, the real height of the Asian economic boom. Then in 1997 and '98 the economic crisis hit, the party came to a crashing halt. I had also got to what I felt was the point of no return - either stay and become a permanent expatriate, or return to the U.S. and try to recapture a sense of home. I went home.

        The first year was a very difficult transition. I spent most of that year doing consulting work for different publishing companies interested in Asia. After a year, one of the companies offered me a job as editor-in-chief of three financial magazines based in San Francisco. It was the height of the dot com boom and they had money to spend. I took the job and it was awful. They lacked editorial independence and sales decisions always trumped editorial. After about a year the dot com boom began to go bust and the magazines began to go down with that ship. I'd had enough anyhow, so I quit.

        I'd always wanted to write at least one book, and I came across the transcripts of an extensive interview I had done before I moved to Asia. The guy had been a major league baseball player in the 1940s, and a gangster in the off-season. In 1949 he committed a murder, got caught and then became famous in the 1950s playing baseball in prison. Rereading the interview, I thought it might make for an interesting book. The whole thing snowballed into a biography called WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL.

       Once the first book sold, I thought I'd like to try and write a novel, since I've always loved fiction, especially crime fiction. Flushed with enthusiasm, I wrote my first novel in about three months. It was based on a story involving a gold scam in Indonesia, that I had covered as a journalist. I sent it to a friend who is a writer to see what he thought of it. It turned out that he also worked as an editor for St. Martins and he offered to buy it for the publisher.

        I got so excited by that, that I quickly wrote another one - this one based on a true story involving Russian prostitutes in Macau, near Hong Kong. I sent that to my friend before the contract was signed on the first one. He liked that one even better and thought it would be a better start to a series. So that book became my first published novel, THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD. The second novel in the series, GRAVE IMPORTS, is coming out at the end of this September, and it's also based on a true story - in this case involving the trade in stolen Cambodian antiquities.

        So far all of my fiction is based on stories that I covered, or know well, from when I worked as a journalist in Asia. I was always much more of a feature and analysis writer, than a hard news reporter, so I think the eye I developed for detail and quirky elements that help to inform and broaden a story, and to put it into a bigger context, have a huge impact on the way I write fiction. I like stories that deal with big, international issues, but by focussing on smaller, personal matters. I think the type of journalist I was, is what led me to that.

Tayler Bloom: What sort of research is involved in writing your novels.

Eric Stone: When I'm basing a novel on a true story, I don't want to delve too deeply into the real story for fear that it will inhibit the fiction, or it will bog down into reporting, rather than story telling or action. Book four in my series will mostly be set in Shanghai and I intend to spend six weeks to two months there next year for research. THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD presented a problem because it ended up in Vladivostok, Russia and I've never been there and didn't get the chance to go there for research. But I found photos of the places, street maps, guidebooks and also found two expatriates living there who I could email to ask questions. Two people who read the book and who had lived in Vladivostok told me they couldn't believe I'd never been there. I was very pleased with that.

Tayler Bloom: What advice would you give those authors just starting out?

Eric Stone: Write what you're enthusiastic about. Sure, you need to try and sell it and certain things sell better than others. So find a topic that has a chance to sell, that you are enthusiastic about.

        Write what you know. That doesn't mean you have to know it all personally, that's what research is for. You need to be the authority on your story, your characters, the setting.

        Write so that it makes sense. This is especially true with fiction. When I was a journalist all I had to do was write the facts. No matter how bizarre, illogical or peculiar, if I stuck to the facts I could get away with it - "sure this doesn't make any sense to me either, but that's the way it happened." You can't do that with fiction. Fiction needs to be more logical than fact. Even the wildest, most speculative science fiction needs to have strong, internal logic.

        Get it done. The worst thing a writer can do is to constantly attempt perfection. Just write the thing, with all its imperfections and problems, write it all the way through to the end without tweaking it while you go along. Then, when it's done, that's the time for tweaking it, perfecting it.

       Find at least one, preferably two or three, good readers who will be brutally honest with you. Leave them alone to read what you've written. Keep your mouth shut when they tell you what they thought - even if they are totally tearing your heart out. Take some deep breaths, a drink and let it all rest for a day or two. Then calmly, rationally, consider what they had to say and make use of the useful parts.  

Thank you for your time today Eric!

Visit Eric's website at www.ericstone.com

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USA Today and New York Times bestselling author, Jennifer Crusie, is known for her romantic comedies, but there's a solid mystery behind more than one of her stories. 

Tayler Bloom: What about the publishing industry has surprised you most?

Jenny Cruisie: That it is such a crapshoot and everybody's guessing with fingers crossed. Somebody once said that publishing isn't a business, it's a casino, and that's so true.  If you can't take risks, ride the wins and losses and roll the dice again, publishing will make you insane.

Tayler Bloom: How do you create and maintain the furiously fast pace of your romantic comedy novels?

Jenny Crusie: After the first draft, which is completely off the top of my head, I work like crazy on structure, making sure that the acts in my novels grow shorter, that the turning points arc in tension, that each beat of each scene increases in tension, and a dozen other things.  The first draft is pure creativity, but after that it's creativity and craft, which is what Bob Mayer and I are talking about in Crusie-Mayer Writing Workshop we're doing now at www.crusiemayer.com

Tayler Bloom: What advice would you give writers aiming for a comic tone in their own novels?

Jenny Crusie: Don't aim for a comic tone.  Write the stories you need to write in your voice and the voices of your characters. If that turns out to be funny, you've got a comedy.  If it doesn't you're writing something else. Embrace that.

Thank you. Visit Jennifer Cruisie's website at www.jennycrusie.com