Regardless of when someone first discovers the writing of Robert Parker, they almost always reach a similar conclusion: the only thing that exceeds his genius is his mastery of the novel form. Few writers–if any–blend the elements of character, narrative and humor more expertly than the true heir to the Raymond Chandler legacy.

Parker is the master of the detective driven mystery novel. A study in persistence, he writes page days a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. His bibliography includes more than sixty books encompassing the worlds of three different recurrent characters. The most well-known is Spenser, a well-educated but tough as nails hard-boiled private detective who quotes passages of Yeats, cooks gourmet food, and wears custom made shirts to accommodate his large neck and shoulders muscles.

His influences include Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Mystery and fiction writers alike consider him a tremendous presence, a literal force of nature. Parker considers himself a writer first ( before being a mystery writer ) and advises other aspiring authors to stop waiting around for inspiration to strike and find it by sitting down before the empty page.

And on January 19, 2010 at the age of 77, Robert Parker sits down at his desk one last time.

His body is gone now, but his voice, spirit and stories live  on, delighting readers and writers alike. Every mystery writer worth a damn in the last thirty years owes something to Parker, whether they recognize it or not.

Here’s to you, Robert B. Parker. You’re a hell of a writer. Thanks for Spenser. Thanks for blazing a trail so brightly other writers could dream to follow. Thanks for being what every writer wants to be.

And most of all, thanks for showing writers what they could be.

Here’s my plan for the new year:

1) Divert 90 percent of the energy and time spent on Facebook and Twitter in 2009, back into this site.

I will continue to use both mediums and others that may emerge, but I definitely fell victim the comment trap last year to extreme detriment. Posting pretty much anything on Facebook or Twitter will elicit a comment. Silly as it sounds, this really mattered at one point for me.

Websites, even really successful ones, net a paltry number of comments relative to their readership, but that is not a shortcoming of its design. That is the design. Most people lurk. If someone is moved to comment, they do. So it goes. If you want quick note of sympathy, it’s easy enough to find on Facebook. Sometimes that’s an appropriate solicitation. Other times, it’s a distraction.

To me the most important edge of a journal based web site over FB and Twitter is the persistence of the entries and the categorizations of material. Related entries appear in some kind of context and remain for people who might want to find them days, weeks or months later. This is very difficult on FB and Twitter, which hinges on right-now-oh-my-god-I-just-missed-it. All too often that turns into gee-what-the-hell-was-I-looking-at-anyway?

See Facebook and Twitter are made for  sharing personal details with your friends and family, which is great, but seriously how many feeds and status can one person follow before feeling like a zombie staring into a ceaseless stream of text? Even when you really like the person at its source. The ultimate arbiter of material: randomness. And that’s fine. For a little while.  Sooner or later I find myself wanting more. Maybe I can’t get everything I want, but I can at least put out more of what I’m looking for into the Universe.

In the end, I’m a writer–not a tweeter. While I have no expectations about competing with the comment machine that is Facebook and Twitter by concentrating here–I will always need a mechanism for sharing a thought longer than 140 characters and not subject to a usage agreement that tends to shift with the global warming vs. global cooling debate.

2) Finish a draft of the oft mentioned but unfinished manuscript that began in December 2006 by July 2010.

Four years is enough time. Seriously. All that matters at this point is having something down, even if it looks like pig vomit spewed across the page. I spent way too much time trying to “get something right” that was never even close to being done in the most elemental terms. So I’m finishing this draft even if I spend all of my vacation days, nights and weekends to do so. Which might be what it takes, actually.

3) Promote The Last Track.

More on this very soon.

January nearly half-over and still no resolutions! Perhaps that constitutes slacking. Ah well. No time like now for starting over, I guess.

Usually my resolutions accompany a year in review, but this late in January it seems redundant, and writing a really thorough one will  take away from actually completing yet another entry, so what follows is the condensed version of 2009:

1) After many attempts found a home for The Last Track. In February ( next month! ) it will be available for purchase. On my birthday, so better yet.

2) Learned a lot about the review process from the marketing person and my own solicitations for blurbs.

3) My boss proved several times how cool he is. Can’t go into details, but suffice to say there are in fact decent managers in business and they really make a difference in job satisfaction.

5) And finally, probably the coolest thing that happened was the review that came back from a Purple Heart stationed in Kirkuk, Iraq. Of all the blurbs received so far, theirs is one of the most meaningful and will appear–and as long as I have anything to say about it–remain on the back cover.

So that’s what happened in 2009. Onto 2010 . . .