06/03/2024
Today I've been poring over some of Ann Rules' newsletters that she mailed to her readers (Ann called them ARFs, or Ann Rule Fans). Many thanks to Facebook friend Lee Ann Ford Smith for sending them to me. I also have my own archived newsletters from Ann from the late '90s because I subscribed when I was still a newspaper reporter and when I was writing my first book, The Killing of Tupac Shakur. I'd reached out to Ann back then via email and she and I chatted. I'm folding in some of those early interactions with her, as well as statements from her newsletters, into the biography I'm writing about her. Some of you may already know that I got to know Ann the last three years of her life - we talked on the phone about our pets, her books, and Ted Bundy. Besides our telephone chats, I interviewed Ann at length several times, and I wrote a piece about her which ended up being Ann's last interview, which was published by Forbes. The status of her biography I'm writing is that I'm finishing three sample chapters, required for book proposals, as well as finishing the rest of the proposal - invariably a bear for authors to write but necessary. But it's all falling into place and I'm getting closer to sending it off.
