Writers have different ways of working. I have friends who write one draft and send it to their editors. It’s finished, done, off their plate. I envy them. My first and second drafts aren’t fit to be seen by anyone except a handful of readers.

I have just finished the third draft of the 10th Calvino novel – Paying Back Jack. But is this the finished book ready for the publisher? Like my other novels, this one will go through another set of revisions. Four to five drafts to finish a novel is my average. Part of the reason, in my case, for multiple drafts, as I write a draft I find many new possibilities to develop the story and characters. An organic development arises from the writing process. It is at this stage, for me, where the pure joy of writing happens. Connections, events, snippets of dialogue, and motivation emerge from the white heat of writing inside a fictive world. I never know what will happen next. I never know the ending. In fact, I never know the opening of the book I feel works until I have finished the third draft.

I try to layer the narrative of my novels. There are often many different events happening that have, at first blush, no apparent connection, but slowly as the story builds the interrelationships start to appear. When I change a point of view, add a character, better understand the motivation of the characters, it is bound to have an echo through the entire story, and that requires second and third drafts. In the later draft I concentrate on how to best integrate the new material so that it enriches the story. Often during this process I eliminate out whole sections of the book. That hurts in the same way of ripping off a bandage. But it last only for a moment. The reality is if something isn’t working in the story, it has to go. In the current draft I tossed out an entire chapter. And large parts of a dozen other chapters disappeared with a press of the delete button. The discarded section had to go; they weren’t working to move the story forward. I had no choice; they had to be marched into the courtyard, put against the wall, and the firing squad did their duty.

The metaphor for writing fiction isn’t all that different from what we know about the universe. 96% is comprised of dark matter and dark energy. No one has any real idea what these “things” are or how they fit with the 4% of the visible solid universe of stars, planets and galaxies. Writing that first draft is when I know about 4% of the story. The other 96% remains a mystery, which is only revealed to me as during the second, third and fourth drafts. At that point there is an overall coherence, inherent logic, and the world inside the book, though as strange as dark matter and dark energy, is comprehensible and mirrors the familiar but with enough odd angles, sharp edges, and sudden turns, so that a reader will be off balance just sufficiently as to keep on reading.

On the other hand there are writers like Robert B. Parker who writes three or four novels a year. He was interviewed in The Telegraph, and said this about his writing: "I do first draft. I don't revise. I don't reread. I send it in. They edit it - and it's valuable if they do, or I'll end up spelling 'cat' dee-oh-gee… heh, y'know, sloppy. But they don't make any significant changes." Parker's longest running character, Spenser, is a tough-guy private eye named after the author of The Faerie Queene.”

In terms of inspiration, Parker says, "I said to myself quite consciously: what would Chandler do here?, if I didn't know what to do. People talk about money corrupting a writer. Poverty corrupts a writer. Money frees you. When I realised people would pay me, I stopped worrying about whether I was doing it like Chandler, and I started to go my own way. "

From time to time someone comes up with a list of crime fiction writers. The purpose is to compose a Who’s Who of the crime fiction world. Such lists are inevitably controversial and, indeed, it might be said that the very idea is not a bad way to pump up circulation. The most recent example of crime fiction list making is the Telegraph which on 23rd February published their list under the title: 50 Crime Writers to read before you die.

Such a list is bound to uncork the opinion bottle in the vast crime fiction universe. Why choose 50 writers as opposed to a 100? There is no real answer to that. There is always a cut off. Given reader attention and space in the paper, 50 writers apparently fit the bill.

What criteria was used by the Telegraph? Apparently it was based on “love.”

“We wanted to compile a list of writers we had, jointly and severally, loved. We wanted to include writers like Dash Hammett, who brought something new and exciting to the genre; like Elmore Leonard, who turns an old trick in it with incomparable style; and like Poe, who invented it. We did not, except incidentally, take into account popularity.”

Only religion and politics is able to duplicate the emotional responses that an all time greats list can fire up. The readers of the Telegraph have left hundreds of irate comments, asking where is Donna Leon, Rex Stout, Ellis Peters, John D. MacDonald, P.D. James, John Harvey, Peter Robinson, Navada Barr, Tony Hillerman, J.A. Jance, Thomas Harris, Michael Connolly, Harlen Coben, John Sandford, Lee Child, Jeffrey Deaver, Nelson De Mille, Tess Gerritsen and David Baldacci and on and on.

So who is the best crime writer of all time? Mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all? Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and in terms of crime fiction writers, the Telegraph proves a deep reserve of loyalty amongst various readers.

A drawing was held in Bangkok on 19th February at 3.27 p.m. local time (a lucky number for those wishing to buy a lotto ticket) for the grand prize winner of the bookstore photo contest Authors are prone to wonder how well their books are distributed. From the response to the contest as well as from emails, there is no question that my publisher and their distributor have done an outstanding job in getting copies of THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX to bookstores throughout the United States.

The winner of theSpecial Edition of A Killing Smile is Chris Coles.

Chris is a well-known artist of many paintings in the Bangkok Noir series.

Here’s the photo submitted by Chris Coles:

With Facebook or Bebo (if you are in UK) pages have mushroomed. Millions of people have pages. I have a Facebook page (though sadly with deadlines I have little time to update it). In recent years, government agencies, insurance companies, employers, lawyers, and investigators are discovering that there is “dirt” to be mined in the pages of these online sites.

Since most people feel as they sit in front of their computer screen typing away that their confession is for a few friends, they open up and say things they would never say at dinner party. For example, you write about how much you drank last night as you staggered to your car to drive home. You write a love letter to someone online. And before long you have an online romance going to the boil. You write about how your workplace is hell and your boss is a craven, blood-drinking third-world dictator. You feel better having got that off your chest.

One thing to remember: What you’ve posted online can be (and increasingly is) read by your wife or girlfriend, employer, neighbor, friends, police, prosecutors, and agencies trolling for people violating the law. What you write on line can come back to haunt you. When you make a statement against your own interest courts view such statements as highly relevant as people normally don’t say bad things about themselves unless the statement is true. This is the legal presumption. The burden falls on you to show your statement should be ignored.

If you are applying for a job, a grant, a fellowship, or seeking a loan, remember the people who makes the decision may be checking you out online.

There is a good article addressing these fears in The Independent, Facebook can ruin your live. So can MySpace and Bebo…

“In America, the monitoring of social networking sites for content that may interest employers and officialdom is now so routine that software is being put on the market that will automate the process. Sure enough, software to try to defeat the snoops is also emerging – offering the prospect of a privacy "arms race" in the years ahead. ReputationDefender, for instance, offers the embarrassing personal information equivalent of credit reports, claiming it can help expunge from the online record material you regret revealing. Michael Fertik, the firm's CEO, said demand for their service is now "ridiculous", with hundreds of UK clients already.

“The first Facebook or Bebo divorce case cannot be far away. Divorce specialist Elizabeth Allen, head of family law at Stephens and Scown, Exeter, said: "Social networking has much more scope for trouble because of the public element. It's got the potential to be more explosive. It's just like airing your dirty laundry. We've had divorces that have been due to Friends Reunited in the past and that will be replaced by Facebook with the next generation. Now most people who would never have written a love letter to someone are writing it all down and sending it because they somehow think it's different."

“As well as unwise posting of content, there is also an unknown but large number of people whose privacy has been compromised, or their identities stolen, as a result of their own naivety combined with the security vulnerability of the social network sites, and the willingness of others to exploit that. Last month, for example, a hacker downloaded half a million private pictures from MySpace and made them available on the file-sharing site BitTorrent.”

Over the weekend The Vancouver Sun selected The Risk of Infidelity Index as one of 6 books chosen by the editor. “Our review of an earlier one said it had ‘a gumshoe swagger and a charged atmosphere reminiscent of such Asian-set films as Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously.’”

On Wednesday 20th February 2008 look for the announcement of the winner of a special edition of A Killing Smile. Everyone who sent a photo of a friend, relative, or bookstore employee holding a copy of The Risk of Infidelity Index is eligible.

On Sunday 24th February 2008 I will be speaking before the Pattaya Expats Club. The event starts at 11.00 a.m. at the Grand Sole Hotel, Second Road Pattaya. Here’s a link http://www.grandsolepattaya.com/location.htm for location details and http://www.grandsolepattaya.com for information on the hotel. I will be talking about writing in an Asian context. The title of the talk is: “The Ghost of W. Somerset Maugham: Or why there is no vintage gossip.” I’ll be discussing the nature of “truth” and the connection between how truth is perceived depending on a number of cultural factors. If you are in Pattaya on the 24th of February, please drop in as you don’t have to be a member of the club to attend a Sunday meeting.

Interim report on the 3rd draft of the new Calvino novel. I am on schedule to finish the third draft in 8 to 10 days. My work day begin in the morning with reviewing the previous days pages, then lunch. I return to my desk and begin the process of shifting, deleting, modifying, rewriting the text. After dinner, I go through the next pages of the second draft, looking at reader notes, and rethink whether the scene advances the story. Whether the characters are acting consistently, whether their motives for acting are clear, and whether background narrative is adding to a well-rounded story. This goes on seven days a week. I stop for lunch and dinner and workouts at the health club, then back to the isolation tank.

That is the title of a recent article in the Financial Post 12th February 2008 by Karen Mazurkewich. Her aim is on the sexual indiscretions of expat men posted abroad. She writes:

“Infidelity happens around the world, but for expatriates on assignment in Asia, the combination of cultural isolation, career-obsessed spouses and a pervasive sex industry adds further pressure to a marriage. The city of Hong Kong has been called the "graveyard of marriages" and exclusive Bangkok nightclubs targeting foreigners, such as Pent Exclusive Club, have been dubbed "weapons of mass destruction for families" by local journalists.

An specifically about the night scene, Mazurkewich observes:

”The temptations in Asia are greater than elsewhere. In cities like Taipei, Beijing, Hong Kong and Bangkok, the sex industry centres on business districts and hotels. A single man will almost always receive unsolicited calls in his hotel room, and local bars like Pent Exclusive Club in Bangkok have developed an exclusive clientele by inviting university-educated women seeking foreign or "fareng" (sic) husbands to flirt with the men at the bar.”

The article has churned up a number of controversial views on Thaivisa forum The consensus on the forum was the author didn’t do her research.

Mazurkewich’s article is nicely balanced against a recent review titled One Man’s Odyssey into ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ by Elizabeth Gilbert. Rolf Pott takes aim at this best-selling trans-global travel. What Pott’s does is switch the gender of the hero in Eat, Pray, Love from a woman to a man, and asked whether such a book would have received the same acclaim. In other words, if the books had been written by a guy about a guy (rather than the woman) who dumps his spouse, and takes up with women as he travels through Italy, India and Bali, there would have been massive outrage. Assuming anyone would publish such a book in the first place.

Potts then asks: “Do you think American women would embrace this book and turn it into a bestseller? Or do you think American women would react with hostility at such a self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist narrative? No doubt it would be the latter reaction—and I would be reduced to dodging rotten fruit at book readings.”

There is a lively comments section that follows Pott’s article. Also have a look at the reviewers comments on amazon.com as they review Eat, Pray, Love. The reviewers show widely different takes on the book. A woman’s spiritual quest that includes much bedroom time is somehow viewed as self-discovery. If it were a man, as Pott’s suggest, then this narrative with its theme of searching for a woman is by its very nature exploitation, not discovery. Abusive rather than self-revelatory. A corruption of a tormented soul as opposed to soul on the road to enlightenment. There is a double standard. One jury for men, another for women, applying different rules and standards, and reaching vastly different outcomes.

Having read both Rolf Pott’s piece and that of Karen Mazurkewich’s article, you can’t help but conclude that the gender divide is alive and well and each side selectively chooses their targets of opportunity. In The Risk of Infidelity Index, Vincent Calvino enters the world of Bangkok expat housewives and by so doing takes the reader into the anxiety and fears experienced by many such women. It is interesting that Mazurkewich’s research missed RISK in her research into this field. Not that it would have necessarily changed her mind but it might have broaden her perspective.

I have been blogging less this week. The main reason is that I am working on the third draft of the new Calvino novel. The progress is slow but sure and I expect to have the draft finished by the first week in March. I envy the writers who can write five pages, revise, move on, and then at the end of the book, hit the save button and send it off to the publisher. I pull apart the text of each draft and rewrite substantially. It’s like performing an autopsy of an unknown species, each time you look at what should be a femur and find out it is sticking out of the head, you know it is time to go back and look at the skeleton again. The main thing is to make certain that the skull is connected to the backbone.

The Risk of Infidelity Index was reviewed in the Houston Chronicle, P.G. Koch wrote: “In time the book's vague, gossamer mesh of a plot will prove dangerously tight, with the elegant Khun Weerawat at its center. And presumably the faint whiff of misogyny/xenophobia one senses is just part of Moore's pitch-perfect Bangkok, from its churning after-hours melee of insistent yings to its hard-drinking farangs (foreigners), to the scary duplicity behind the ever-present Thai smile.”

Amazon,co.uk has a listing for the Atlantic Books paperback edition of The Risk of Infidelity IndexThe publication date is listed as 1 June 2008.

News reports indicate an end to the writers strike in Los Angeles may come as soon as Friday. That would be welcome news. Anyone with a book in development by a production house knows that not much will happen until the writers are back at their desk with a new contract. That includes the film deal for the Calvino series by Keanu Reeves’ production company and Steve Samuels.

Over the years, some of original titles in the English edition have changed. The reprinted English editions with different titles from the original include: