Today began with a visit to The Town Book Store, an independent bookstore celebrating 75 years of bookselling in Westfield NJ.  At a time when so many independent book stores are struggling to keep their doors open, The Town Book Store succeeds by meeting the needs of its community.  And today, apparently, the community "needed" to meet an up-and-coming mystery writer signing copies of his latest murder mystery.  My thanks to the staff and to the patrons at the Town Book Store for making the visit so much fun.

And then, when I got home, I stopped at the semi-annual warehouse sale at JR Trading Company.  JR Trading Company is a dealer in remaindered books.  Their warehouse is just down the road a bit.  And twice a year, they open up the warehouse to the general public.  I avoided the urge to buy one of everything, coming home with The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler, Shipwrecks, "a thrilling tale of murder and retribution set on the wild seacoast of medieval Japan" by Akira Yoshimura and Depraved and Insulting English, a book of "words to offend and amuse" by Peter Novobatsky and Ammon Shea.  Words like ankyloproctia.  Bdelloid.  Caprylic.

A whole alphabet of offense and amusement awaits.  I've got me some reading to do.

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the event that turned me into a writer of murder mysteries.  So, you've seen this before, but I'm inclined today to revisit the issue of creativity and the question, Where do story ideas come from?

I have, from time to time, floated the suggestion that creativity is the capacity to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at and see something different.  And that capacity is, I think, at the heart of the question of story ideas.  We have all been taught after countless years of schooling to focus, to ignore all the distractions that life affords us, in order to zero in on the important question.  But story ideas, and creativity, rely on a different process, on something which is the converse of focus (or maybe the obverse, I never do remember the difference between converse and observe, or, for that matter, inverse) but anyway it relies on the capacity not to focus, but rather to maintain a sort of diffuse awareness of the universe in all its eccentric glory. 

Which is why story ideas seem to come to us when we're half-asleep, or in the shower, or, in my case, on a back road in the NJ Pine Barrens in the hour before the sun comes up.

When Cassie takes her re-built '67 Ford Mustang out for a pre-dawn drive in the Pine Barrens, she finds dead deer, en masse, appearing mysteriously in the roadway.  Seven years ago, when I took my pre-dawn drive through the Pine Barrens, nothing so extraordinary happened.  Except, for a writer, the most extraordinary thing of all.

Later this week, I'm scheduled to make that pre-dawn pilgrimage once again.  And the timing is perfect because the universe has been dropping hints recently about what just might be the first Eggs Bebedict Mystery.  

So take your pre-dawn drive, as it were, through the Pine Barrens, and let the universe reveal itself to you.  And then go write about it.  And if you happen to be participating in nanowrimo this year, don't worry about your word count.  The universe is a pretty big place.  It's got some pretty big stories.

I've been reading Wild Ducks Flying Backward and came across the phrase "user-friendly weirdness with humorous overtones."  Tom Robbins wasn't, but he might as well have been, describing my week-end in New Orleans.  "User-friendly weirdness.  With humorous overtones."

The French Quarter is the oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, dating back to 1718, a non-stop party comprising the neighborhood east of the Mississippi River, bounded at the south by Canal Street and the city's Central Business District and at the north by Esplanade Avenue and  the residential neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny. And just between the quarter and those residential neighborhoods at the northern end lies Frenchmen Street, four blocks of "best kept-secrets," of bars, and cafes, small shops and one, very small, hotel.  There is major craziness at the southern end of the Quarter, just a short walk from the major tourist and corporate hotels.  But at the northern end, a pretty decent walk from the large tourist hotels, the craziness is more local, more homegrown, better understood as the "user-friendly weirdness" of the native artists, musicians, writers and romantics who inhabit Frenchmen Street.

On Saturday, Frenchmen Street was home to the New Orleans Book Fair, celebrating the best of the local authors and artists, puppeteers and bands, booksellers, book lovers, gypsies, tramps and thieves.  And a carbetbagger or two, from up north, in town to celebrate books and eat crawfish.

At nine o'clock Saturday morning, I was helping to set up at the Cafe Negril, one of the many venues on Frenchmen Street that had agreed to host the bookfair.  Removing Friday night's drum kits and beer bottles, setting up tables and stringing lights to supplement the bar's dim lighting.  It was a wonderful place to spend the day, there at my table in the Cafe Negril, chatting with book lovers and selling a few books.  And at five in the afternoon, just across the street at the Apple Barrel, another small bar on Frenchmen Street, where I was scheduled to do a reading.  One Johnny Walker Black on the rocks and I was ready to read my short story, The Sound Bite  and sell a couple more books.

On Sunday, I drove eighy miles to Baton Rouge, for a book talk at the Jones Creek Library.  Baton Rouge was fun.  Not "user-friendly weirdness," not "french quarter craziness," but fun.  Nice people interested in talking about books, interested in talking about my book.  And one elderly gentleman, nattily attired in tie and sweater, a retired professor from LSU, by way of Yale, an eighty-nine year old doctor of meteorology, who came to talk to "the man who was at the library to talk about the Pine Barrens."  He bought a book.  And he brought me a gift.  A copy of his dissertation, completed nearly 60 years ago, when he studied the effect of fire on the growth habits of the pitch pines in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

And in between the New Orleans Book Fair and the Jones Creek Book Talk, there's been jazz and blues, crawfish and catfish and redfish, beers, bloody marys and whiskey.  Muffelatas.  Beignets.

I'll post pictures later this week.  In the meantime, I'm thinking about one more creole dinner.  The It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder 2009 Book Tour is off to a good start.