I don’t know about you, but for me writing is the hardest thing in the world. I have nothing but admiration for the storytellers whose works and words we mystery readers follow so avidly. They make it look so easy – and every once in a while, I imagine that it is.

   Because maybe they’re human like you and me, and they spend their days struggling to put the words on the computer screen in the right order, and not only that, but the right words in the right place and at the right time, and if the wrong word is used, it just throws everything out of whack, like a single grain of sand in a well-tuned BMW engine.

   I’ve been writing reviews of mystery fiction since the early 1970s, when I was the “Courant Coroner” for the local Hartford paper, and every once in a while I’ve run out of words, and I’ve had to quit for a while. This latest consecutive streak of books reviewed has been going on for nearly seven years now – and do you know what?

   It’s still a struggle to put the right words down and in the right order and with the right punctuation. Case in point. I was reasonably happy with my comments on the John Whitlatch book I recently reviewed – until I read them the next morning.

   You probably haven’t noticed – and I sincerely hope not – but I’m constantly tweaking and changing little things here and there on this blog until either (a) I get it right or (b) I concede defeat – in a good sense, that is. I can only hope.

   But every once in a while, I look at something I wrote and say to myself, for example, what is really he trying to say here? Or could he possibly be more convoluted than this to get his ideas out? And look at what he says here. If changes are going to be made, they’re going to have to be big ones this time. Case in point. After considerable inner struggle and debate, I’ve revised the Whitlatch review and I’ve posted the result and I don’t think I will read it again for a week. (My fingers are crossed when I say that, though.)

   My opinion is the same, and some of the words are the same, but some of them aren’t and the punctuation is different too.

   Next up, a review of Death Turns the Tables, by John Dickson Carr. It’s turned out to be a tough book to comment on, and I’ve been putting it off for a couple of weeks now. I’d better get to it, before I forget the story altogether. (This has happened before.)

   I wonder what I’m going to say about it.