The joint American Society for Indexing – Indexing Society of Canada annual conference was held June 16 through 18 in Chicago, Illinois at the Conference Chicago at University Center, which I attended. The keynote speaker on June 17th was Larry Sweazy, indexer and award-winning author of mystery novels, including See Also Murder, who spoke about the writing and indexing life. The main character in this novel, a murder mystery, is Marjorie Trumaine, an indexer who lives in the 1960s in North Dakota. He said he chose this time period so that she would use index cards.
The second book in this series is See Also Deception. He has also written six Texas Ranger novels. He started writing love poems when he was young, then had short stories published.
In addition to writing novels, he works on 30 to 40 indexes a year.
He said he does not outline his novels. He said when he starts a novel, he does not know who the killer is. He writes to find out. He calls himself a “pants-er,” one who flies by the seat of his pants. In indexing as well, he jumps right in and starts on the first page, and does not preread or mark up the pages.
He said writing mysteries is like indexing, because you turn chaos into order. The bad guy gets what he deserves, he said.
He maintains consistency in his characters, and said he knows their education and family tree. He said he knows what’s in the character’s wallet.
He keeps a strict schedule, working on a certain number of pages of a novel a day and then indexing for the rest of the day, perhaps 75 pages of a book.
In future blog postings, I will discuss other sessions from the ASI & ISC Conference in Chicago. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com