Now that I'm back from vacation, I'm catching up on my reading. The Washington Post featured Baltimorean Laura Lippman last week in The Writing Life column, and it's an interesting read for her fans -- and anyone fascinated by the process of writing. She describes her on-again, off-again relationship with protagonist Tess Monaghan and the realities of the publishing business.

Excerpts: [Tess] has literally kept a roof over my head and even thrown in the kitchen of my dreams. I spend more time with her than almost anyone in my life, with the possible exception of my spouse. She is the childish thing that too many adults are duped into putting away: a very satisfactory imaginary friend. ...

The conventional wisdom is that writers must choose between series or stand-alones. Only a handful of crime novelists get to do both, and, for some reason, I'm one of them, at least for now. When other writers ask me how I managed this feat, I fall back on a joke: The trick, I tell them, is to not be too successful at either.

The more accurate answer would be that a writer who wants to balance a life between series and non-series books needs them to be equally strong, like complementary muscles, lest one throw the other out of whack. ...