Attending Forensic University.

What Libby Hellman says about it is so much more complete and better than anything I'd write anytime in the next two weeks (you guys know how far behind I always am) so I'm linking you to her blog.

Let me say, though, that it was great to be at a conference with a bunch of writers where we weren't discussing publishing industry woes (which are real and huge, but against which we, the writers, have limited weapons) or creating characters, choosing settings, developing a plot, etc. (which are important issues and endlessly fascinating to us, but about which there's very little new to say. The sessions in this conference were about information. Interrogation tactics, self-defense, real crime scene investigation, poisons, the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence... this is stuff I can use in working up characters, settings and plots to try to write a book enthralling enough to maybe get around publishing industry woes. Major thanks and kudos to Joanna Slan, Michelle Becker, Sisters in Crime's St. Louis chapter, and Sisters in Crime itself for a great weekend.

And it didn't hurt that Qiu Xiaolong invited me to his house for a home-cooked dinner, where he and his mother-in-law made vast quantities of food, including red-cooked pork, pot stickers, pea shoots, and garlic shrimp.