A couple of days ago it was my birthday. Having a birthday in February is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it's a nice break in what is arguably the most depressing month of the year.  On the other hand, if birthdays depress you then you feel just that bit deeper in the hole.  It is not that getting a year older depresses me, but around this time I'm not at my best.  I feel I'm in some kind of creative, emotional and even spiritual deep-freeze, a period of stasis where my life has come to a standstill. The new year never really starts for me until March or April.

This year, I'm happy to say, has been an exception for the most part. Preparations for my upcoming book are keeping me busy and I've been trying to come up with creative ideas for promoting it.  Also, I'm working on revising a novel, so there has been a lot to occupy my thoughts with little time to feel sorry for myself.

The icing on the birthday cake, so to speak, came actually the day before the big event when I received a phone call saying I had won the One-Page Screenplay Contest  I had entered in 2008.  The contest is a continuing one put on by WILDsound  in Toronto.  The winner gets their screenplay made into a short film that is posted on the WILDsound web site and shown at some film festivals.  I was also interviewed for the WILDsound podcast.

I am also trying to book live readings to promote Fatted Calf Blues.  I will be having a book launch in Charlottetown on April 23 and so far have two readings in Montreal in May and two in Hamilton in June. The details for these readings are posted on the home page of this web site and on my FCB Facebook group page.  

Things seem to be happening fast and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a tad overwhelmed at times, but I look out my window and see the frozen white expanse of Foxley River and think that in a few months I'll hear that tell-tale crack when the ice starts to break.  In the meantime, an early thaw seems to be taking place even closer to home.

The craft of fiction is the craft of perfecting a great lie.  The art of fiction is a kernel of truth (hopefully) within that lie.  

Unfortunately, I sound like a wannabe Oscar Wilde, but those two statements reflect how I see writing stories.  Not that these statements are original thoughts.  No doubt I heard them, or something like them, written or spoken elsewhere, although I couldn't tell you by whom.  The question that has been nagging me these days is: where do the two -- the craft and the art -- meet?  

I once saw an interesting film called Storytelling, where one of the characters, a creative writing teacher, says "Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction."  (I once used this quote as the basis for a poem).  The context of this statement relates to a story one of his female students has written.  The story is a recounting of a humiliating sexual experience she had with this particular teacher. The teacher says that the story is not bad, but not great, to which another student says, in the story's defense, that it is true.  The teacher's response  "Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction"  can be seen as some kind of lame defense for his sexual encounter with the student.  Or maybe it's a comment on how memory is selective at best. Personally, I believe that memoir or autobiography should be classified as a form of fiction.

That quote immediately resonated with me.  In it I recognized a universal truth. Perhaps the innate need for all of us to tell stories.  But in telling stories, in crafting fiction, do we have a certain responsibility to the truth?  I heard someone once say that good fiction carries with it a facsimile of truth.  The reader has to believe -- or suspend his/her belief -- that what lies on the page is real.  

Writers achieve this in different ways.  Some do it through research, particularly if they are writing historical fiction, although most genres of fiction probably require some amount of research. Some do it by trying to create a feeling of immediacy in their prose, evoking the five senses wherever possible, so that the reader believes he/she is experiencing what is on the page.  

So, what is the actual kernel of truth that is found in these well-crafted lies?  Some illumination of the human condition? Something that tells us we are not as different from each other as we believe?  Maybe it's the understanding that (to paraphrase the famous Jack Nicholson line) we can't handle the truth.  We prefer to be lied to.  We'd rather have the comfort of knowing that it's "just a story."  Maybe, without knowing it, we indulge in these entertaining illusions so that we might know ourselves better.

It's been quite a week.  On Monday I attended a day-long workshop given by the Writers' Union of Canada  called “From Desk to Bookstore: Making the Leap to Writing as a Career.”  It was a very good workshop and covered a variety of topics: getting published in magazines and books for both fiction and non-fiction (very different  because non-fiction involves much more querying and story pitching than fiction), agents, the editor/writer relationship, contracts, etc.

Although I learned quite a bit, I was also able to contribute some information, including a couple of web sites that are excellent resources for publishing in magazines.  One is www.placesforwriters.com which lists links to web sites for magazines in Canada and abroad, as well as offering updated calls for new work and contests.  The other is Duotrope's Digest, an ingenious search engine where you fill in the on line form with details like the genre and length of your submission (as well as other particulars) and -- Voila! -- you are immediately presented with a list of magazines and links to their submission pages.  I have published most of my work using both of these resources.  They are indispensable to any writer.  In the interest of giving credit where credit is due, I should mention that both of these web site were brought to my attention by J.J. Steinfeld, a fine fiction writer and poet in Charlottetown. 

As much as I enjoyed the workshop, I have to admit its title gave me pause for reflection.  I never really imagined writing to be my career.  As a matter of fact, although I have been writing on and off for most of my adult life, I rejected the possibility of making it my career.  At the risk of sounding somewhat pretentious, I would have to say, if anything,  I saw it more as a "calling" rather than a "career."  I guess by that I mean writing was something I came back to every so often, mostly as a way to vent frustration, in the course of trying to discover who I was and what I should be doing with my life.  In that way it seemed to be choosing me, rather than the other way around.  It wasn't until 2001, when my wife and I decided to move to Prince Edward Island, that I made the conscious decision to focus solely on my writing with the hope of eventually making it my livelihood.

So, in making this choice, was I also making the transition from "calling" to "career"?  I'm not sure what it is about the word "career", but it somehow implies a sense of conformity and also a limited shelf life.  After all, doesn't one eventually retire from a career?  Whereas "calling" carries a different kind of weight, a sense of destiny that suggests a life-long commitment.

This week I also had the opportunity to reconnect with one of my high school teachers.  His name is included on the page of acknowledgements in my book.  When I was his student I asked him what one needed to do to be a writer.  He looked at me soberly and said that to be a writer one needed to suffer.  Sounds a bit harsh and I have to admit his reply frightened me.  In retrospect, I believe he was telling me that I had to go out and experience life, the joy as well as the suffering, before I could ever write in earnest.  It's only now, when I look back on my life, that I realize that was exactly what I did, that all my years of drifting from job to job and trying to discover my place in life, were somehow preparing me for the writing life.  In my own circuitous way I was answering the call.  Careering toward my career, you might say.

But the big news of this past week is that I finished the last round of copy editing before Fatted Calf Blues goes to print.  I reread the fourteen stories for what felt like the millionth time and listed the last of the changes I wanted to make.  By all rights, I should be sick of these stories, but in reading them I tried to imagine how other readers might see them.  In a way I was able to experience them with fresh eyes and gain some perspective on their strengths and weaknesses, as well as my own.

So this is it.  It's out of my hands now.  The next time I see my manuscript it will be a bonafide, honest-to-goodness published book.  In the meantime I am dividing my time between devising strategies for promoting the book and revising the novel I have been plugging away at lo these many years.  No matter how you see it -- calling, career or crap shoot -- a writer's work is never done.

First of all, a confession.  I stole the above title from myself.  Way back in 2004 the first workshop I ever did was the Maritime Writers' Workshop at UNB in Fredericton.  I applied to the workshop for financial help and received some from a benefactor to whom I had to write a letter of thanks.  At this workshop I rediscovered my love for public reading and decided to write my thank you letter in the form of an essay in which I realized that reading my work to an audience could be construed as selling myself to them.  Hence the title.  As I wrote in the beginning of that essay: 

It’s a dirty, dirty word. The S word. Selling. It makes one think of everything unsavoury, from unscrupulous travelling hucksters who sleep with farmers’ daughters to ruthless day traders whose only point of reference is the bottom line. For most people there is no chicken soup for the soulless conglomerate.

Maybe a better title for this entry would be "Rebirth of a Salesman" because here it is 5 years later and my first book of stories, Fatted Calf Blues, will be published by Turnstone Press in April.  And once more I find myself in the position of being a salesman.  I have already set up a book launch on April 23rd at the Confederation Centre Library in Charlottetown.  I have also, with the help of Thelma (my wife, web mistress and right arm), created a Fatted Calf Blues group on Facebook and recruited a fair number of members (with hopefully more to follow after the book comes out).  In the future I am planning to create a virtual book launch with videos of myself reading from the book, to be posted on Facebook, Youtube and anywhere else that will have them.  But most importantly, I expect to hit the road and do a few live readings this year, on and off PEI.     

But of course I'm not doing all of this planning and plotting alone. My publisher is going to do what they can to get me into writer's festivals, send out review copies of the book and submit it for any prize and award that it might be eligible for.  Turnstone has been very supportive with helpful suggestions on how and where to promote the book (such as contacting book clubs).  It's surprising where a salesman's leads will take him.  

I suddenly understood that the people who were able to effortlessly sell newspaper ads or time-shares did so because they actually believed in what they were selling. And now I had something to believe in too. My talent. Myself. 

Now that I think of it, I've been selling myself since I moved to PEI in 2001 and started to write in earnest and send my work out. Part of the creative process includes sending your work out.  If you are serious about your writing then you always have an audience in mind, even if you don't know who they are but if you persevere, one day you may just find yourself having to get out there and meet them face to face.  I'm looking forward to that.