Welcome to my blog
Today is the publication date of my novel The Room and the Chair. I spent six years reporting and writing it. Sometimes I feel the reporting days were my sweetest days. In the summer of 2006, those days were spent in Afghanistan. I was wandering and roaming, not exactly setting up interviews or scheduling appointments. Something I got to know well were Afghanistan roads. Some were brand new--a stretch between Herat and the Iranian border was pitchy new macadam. Some were dirt and ruts and dust clouds--Kabul to Bamiyam. I was reminded of the road from Kabul to Jalalabad the other day when I opened The New York Times and saw a Dexter Filkins story about it. One of the problems he mentions is with overloaded trucks, which I saw all the time. Here's one of my photos, right on the Kabul Jalalabad Highway.
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As Filkins wrote, these tend to tip over. The story also reminded me of the accident I had, on that dirty dusty road to Bamiyan. The jeep I was in flipped and tumbled down a ravine. It looked decent considering. I was banged up but basically uninjured. There's a very different accident, although it's also in Afghanistan, in The Room and the Chair. 
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“Turning Secret Intelligence into Fiction” - Interview in The Wall Street Journal
This interview appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal:
The Wall Street Journal: When did you start writing fiction, and why?
Lorraine Adams: I had been covering international terrorism. I had done some stories on the 2000/1999 millennial bombing plot, and was asked to do an anatomy of a counter terrorism investigation. I got to know a lot of Algerian refugees and stowaways. As I tried to fashion an investigative piece about them, I found the investigative stories were less interesting than the stories they were telling me about their lives… I felt like there were so many conventional, formulaic ideas about who would do these things… Before I knew it, I was writing a novel.
WSJ: The plot of "The Room and the Chair" is incredibly intricate and jumps all over the place geographically. How did you come up with it, and did you map it out in detail before you started writing?
Ms. Adams: I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal
Chapter 18 - To Exercise my Depleted Fury
This is a feature on my blog that I thought might be interesting for readers of The Room and the Chair. Because my novels are reported creations, they begin as travel expeditions. Early on they morphed into photography safaris. I started taking pics as a way of taking notes. But some of the photographs got into my imagination so forcefully they became scenes in the novel. I wanted to share the images that inspired passages in the novel. If you haven't read the novel, these photo essays will be mighty confusing. For those who do read it, I hope it won't mar the way you picture the scenes in your head.
Five: Edited Scenes of Adventure
These photos depict scenes from chapter five. "The funeral included religious and social events at various locations. He was most curious about those at the cemetery."