Jodi DeLong is a freelance writer and blogger in Nova Scotia. She is a longtime contributor to Saltscapes magazine, the Halifax Sunday Herald and the Atlantic Co-operator, among others. Her new book Plants for Atlantic Gardens: Handsome and Hardworking Shrubs, Trees and Perennials (Nimbus, 252 pages) is a comprehensive catalogue and inexhaustible resource for anyone in Atlantic Canada who has a penchant for kneepads and gloves and loves to commune with the soil. Considering that is easily more than half of the Maritime population, I predict that this book will become a bestseller in no time at all.

When it comes to gardening, I must confess that I have neither a green thumb nor a black thumb, but rather am all-thumbs, which is why I leave all things horticultural and herbaceous to my wife Thelma. As well as harbouring a fondness for plants and flowers, she is also a dab hand at growing fresh vegetables that grace our dinner table every summer. She and I agree that the book is meticulously laid out with comprehensive bullet points at the beginning of each genus section.

Thelma found the information on the toxicity of certain plants toward humans and animals especially helpful and enlightening, never having had that pointed out to her except by a dermatologist after a strange rash appeared on her arm one spring! She was also heartened to discover that someone as accomplished as Jodi faces gardening challenges like everyone else.

What differentiates this from other gardening books is Jodi’s conversational style and advice that are both down-to-earth and personal. Conveying a hard-won wisdom, Jodi imbues the plants with personalities that capture the reader’s sympathy. The photos are beautiful and of top quality but kept in good balance with the text.  She understands that telling the story about the plants is more important than showing a lot of pretty pictures. Most of all, Thelma felt the book gave her a palpable sense of optimism that her own garden will one day be everything she hopes it could be.

What follows is a Q & A I did with Jodi. The book has already been the subject of many reviews and articles, written by people who are probably more adept at gardening than I.  Since much of that ground has been covered, I decided to take a different angle and asked questions based more on writing than gardening.

Steven Mayoff It is clear that you have done an amazing job researching your book. How long did it take and can you offer some insight into how you actually went about it. Did you divide your time equally between the library (or internet) and being out in the field?

Jodi DeLong Although I only formally signed the contract with Nimbus in January of 2010, bits of it existed on my computer for a year and more before that. But the bulk of the drafting was done between January and July of last year—along with, I might add, all my regular work, since I am self employed and had to carry on paying my bills, feeding the family, and buying plants.

Most of the research is a mixture of my own experience and that of other savvy gardeners in the region, people I’ve learned much from over the years. I also have a very excellent library of gardening books, and could draw on them and a few reliable websites, especially when checking the latest classification for a plant’s genus or species, and the prevailing wisdom about plant heights, hardiness, and such.

SM Many fiction writers and poets are also avid gardeners. Do you think there are parallels between these two activities? Is there some common satisfaction you get from gardening and writing?

JDL They’re both highly creative, of course, and they develop in the same way: a seed is planted, whether a literal, physical seed that goes in the ground, or the germ of an idea. Some seeds take off, prosper and bear much fruit, while others are more or less weeds. They don’t all grow at the same time, or develop into something large and long lasting, but they can be satisfying regardless of the size of plant or the size of writing project.

When I need some thinking time, I head to the garden to do chores, and while puttering, often an article or an idea is working itself out too. It’s always been that way—as a student, I’d head for the woods and wild spaces around my home, or around my campus, if I didn’t have access to a garden to work in. In the winter, of course, I have to rely on tending my indoor plants for such inspirational periods.

SM You have an enviable Internet presence, which is something all writers are now being encouraged to cultivate. You are a blogger extraordinaire with many followers and you also show up often in the Facebook and Twitter communities. Do you have any preference when it comes to social networking tools? Is there one that is more user-friendly or easier to connect with followers than any other?

JDL Here’s the thing. I was online before most people even knew what the Internet was, back in the days of 300 bps modems, bulletin board systems, newsgroups, Anarchie and Gopher and Mozilla and such. Also, I prefer writing to talking, though some might be surprised to hear that. So I was comfortable with the computer keyboard as a means of communicating more than 15 years ago, and wasn’t intimidated by what I saw as the necessity to learn about blogging, and about the power of social media as a means to many ends.

So I embrace what I consider to be the big three: blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, each of which has a different role to play. I blog as an extension of my professional work, primarily gardening and the occasional book reviews; Facebook is partly social, partly promotional for myself and for other writers—I love to cheer on my colleagues!—and Twitter is a great way to brainstorm, share links to information, market ourselves as writers, and sometimes, just poke fun at the world around us.

There are many other options out there for social networking, and some will fade while new ones germinate. The trick is to choose the ones that meet your needs and stay with them, not chase down every shiny new gimmick that pops up alongside the highway.

SM Aside from gardening, do you write on any other non-fiction subjects? Have you ever written fiction, poetry, etc? 

JDL I’ve written fiction occasionally for fun, but it’s not my forte, and I am far too pragmatic—I need to make a living doing what I love, and to do that, I write non-fiction. Much has to do with gardening, but also I write about agriculture in its many forms, nature, Atlantic Canada, profiles of people and businesses. I do review Canadian fiction, as many Atlantic Canadian writers as I can, and a variety of non-fiction titles (usually gardening, nature and science, occasionally something regional and historical).

SM You have given workshops on writing for magazines. Having taken many workshops myself, I think they offer a number of benefits for writers of all levels. What have you gained, if any, as an instructor?

JDL The biggest benefit I have gained is the enormous satisfaction of seeing several of my students really grab on to what I’ve been able to share with them, and to see them parlay that into something for themselves. It’s an honour to be able to pay it forward, because I have people who have encouraged and assisted me, and it’s just natural to encourage others whenever possible. 

SM What writers influenced or inspired you? 

JDL They aren’t all garden writers, but they are people who are or were passionate about writing—it’s not something they do, but something they are.

Fiction writers like Jack Hodgins and Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod and David Adams Richards. They grip me with their vision and their exquisite use of language.

Garden writers who don’t talk down to their readers, such as the late English writer and gardener Christopher Lloyd, the frankly brilliant Allan Armitage, and the ebullient Canadian garden writers Larry Hodgson and Sonia Day. These garden writers are frankly encouraging and make you want to pick up a trowel and get your hands dirty.

And some of the most influential and inspiring writers in my world are also people I’m honoured to call friends: Allan Lynch, Sandra Phinney, Silver Donald Cameron, among others. Each has an utterly different style and voice but all are passionate about this craft or sullen art that compels them forward each day. Each has been hugely supportive and generous with their wisdom, not just with me but with many others. They inspire me to do the same.

Last week my laptop died. One minute I was listening to the BBC and doing a crossword puzzle (my usual Saturday morning activities) and then the next minute - pffftt! - the screen went black. Luckily I had recently backed up everything. All the same, I did lose a few pages of a scene from the play I'm working on. As freaked out as I was at first, I figured I could basically remember the gist of what I had written. Hopefully starting from scratch might even improve on what I originally had. That kind of optimism could only be generated by the kind of deep despair I found myself in. 

A new one was immediately ordered and Thelma, seeing how lost I was, offered to let me use her laptop until the new one arrived. Although I did use it, mostly for the usual diversions - Facebook, Twitter, news, crosswords, etc - I didn't want to do any writing on it. The exception was editing a piece of writing that my mentee sent me. It would not have been fair to make her wait until my new laptop showed up, especially since I wasn't entirely sure when that would be.

In light of that uncertainty, I decided to rewrite the scene I had been working on in longhand. Perhaps decided is the wrong word. I did go so far as to choose a pen and one of the many half-filled (or half-empty, depending on what day it is) notebooks that are lying around my office. I even wrote a heading for the scene and a brief description of where it took place and who was in it. Aside from the usual laziness, it's hard to say why I couldn't continue. Many writers do their first drafts in long hand and then subsequent revisions are written on typewriters or computers. That seems a reasonable enough process. Maybe that's why I can’t see myself doing it. Writing isn't a reasonable activity for me. There's nothing orderly about it. I always seem to be groping blindly through the cluttered attic of my thoughts. 

I also don't like writing prose in longhand because of my bad handwriting. The idea of having to decipher what I've written and then transfer it to my computer turns something in me cold. I used to write poetry in longhand, but at some point switched over to the computer. I prefer experimenting with line breaks on the screen, rather than have a page full of scratched out lines. I know there are many writers who feel that visceral connection that comes with physically moving a pen or pencil across real paper. There seems to be a direct link from mind to hand to paper. I used to feel that connection, but now my writing fix can only be consummated by two fingers (one on each hand, to be exact, the forefinger on my left hand and the middle finger of my right hand) tapping on a keyboard. 

Some writers feel more connected to the keyboard because they can write faster with it. They say their fingers can keep up with the speed of their thoughts. That's not necessarily the case with me. My hunt and peck style (sometimes more like search and destroy) is all I need to get down my plodding thoughts with plenty of time to spare. I often wonder what I would do if there were no more laptops and I had to write solely with pen and paper. I have no doubt that I would be able to adapt or go crazy. But for now the mind to finger to screen connection is what I need to take me into the visceral zone that makes writing worthwhile. Oh yeah, and that scene I lost? The rewrite is much better than what I had before.

Last week my story collection, Fatted Calf Blues, won the PEI Book Award for fiction. It felt like vindication for the snail-like but steady progress I've been making since I moved to PEI in 2001 to devote myself to my writing. Along with a commemorative tray made by an Island artist and a cash prize, the award is also a nice little profile boost for a book that is over a year and a half old. The ceremony itself was subdued and intimate, which was nice in one way, but also a bit of a shame in another.

The best thing about an award like this is the opportunity for the literary community to blow its own horn, not just for the winners but for the shortlisted authors as well. Unfortunately, there was no short list publicized for the PEI awards. The bigger literary awards, such as the Giller, the GGs and the Writers' Trust, always publicize their short lists (and sometimes long lists) well in advance as a lead-up to the awards themselves. It is a great platform from which publishers and authors can promote themselves. In the case of the GGs, readings by all the short listed authors are organized and publicized. 

The PEI Book Awards are given out every two years. The reason for that is the dearth of published books that come out of our small literary community. Two years allows for a larger pool of books to choose from. All the more reason to really milk it for all its worth. It would be heartening to see them take a page from the week-long festivities granted to the PEI Music Awards and show a little pride in our local literary community. 

In an earlier post this month, I aired my sour grapes re: a lack of fanfare for the ReLit Awards, for which Fatted Calf Blues was short listed. Well, as they say (or should say): When life deals you sour grapes, make Manishewitz. I Tweeted, Facebooked and emailed my good fortune for all I was worth. At some point I actually worried that I was just shy of spamming and expected a volley of emails, tweets and comments that said: "Enough already!" 

Instead, I got very sweet and supportive messages from good friends and passing acquaintances alike. And therein lies the real reward of getting an award.

Any good salesperson knows that you sell the sizzle, not the steak. I doubt that's what Gaspereau Press had in mind when they refused to give into pressure (being both an award-winning creator of hand-crafted books and a publisher) and mass produce The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, the 2010 Giller Prize winner. What they did do, whether by fluke or by design (I'm betting on the former), was create more buzz for this book than winning the prize alone could do, and that's quite a feat. The fact that consumers could not readily buy the book in their local book stores dramatically spiked e-Book sales of the title. I'm sure Gaspereau didn't bank on that delicious bit of irony either. Apparently, they are in negotiations to make some kind of distribution deal, so maybe they are bowing to pressure in some fashion. I do hope that somewhere in all this hubbub a compromise can be found that serves both art and the marketplace.

Back to that irony about the spike in e-Book sales. Most people who bought e-Books probably will not go on to buy a hand-crafted edition of The Sentimentalists. I'm going to assume that their predilection for e-Books means they wouldn't have done so anyway. The slow craftsmanship of what Gaspereau does (and by all reports does very well) flies in the face of the strike-while-the-iron-is-hot furor surrounding the win of any major prize. Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the Gillers, was quoted in the Globe & Mail as saying that Gaspereau “...have to decide if they’re printers or publishers.” 

While it might not be fair to Johanna Skibsrud to have production of her book held up because of Gaspereau's exacting standards (I would be equally frustrated in her place), is it any fairer that Gaspereau Press be asked to decide on what they are? The fact is they are publishers who print their own books. They've made a conscious decision to rebel against the mass production of books to eke out a living as artisans. I know it's heresy to suggest such a thing, but why can't the marketplace bend to them a bit? 

What's wrong with making people wait for what they want?  The risk is that if you make them wait too long they won't want it any more, but if you make them wait long enough you could create a bigger demand. It's that kind of delicate balance that inspires creative strategy. One thing is for sure, winning the Giller Prize has created some growing pains for Gaspereau Press. They may have to rethink their mandate and how to make it best serve art and commerce. I think that's called maturity.

I have finally started working on the new draft of a play that I meant to begin in August.  What have I been doing over the past three months? Well... a lot of revising: a novel, a couple of short stories and a number of poems. I won't deny that my procrastinating on the play was influenced by a certain amount of trepidation. I had written two drafts of a one-act and this is the first draft of a full-length version. Sure, I still feel a bit intimidated by the idea of writing a full-length play. I also feel somewhat liberated by the time I spent away from it, although having a bit of insight on how the writer's brain works, I know I was never too far from the play even when I was working on poems or fiction.

How does one form of writing influence another? For me, the common denominator always seems to be narrative, even in poetry. But there are aspects of poetry that show up in prose and scripts, for instance the topography of words on a page. Scripts (both film and stage) have a fairly standard format that owes a lot to white space, not unlike a poem (to my mind anyway). When I first tried my hand at writing prose I used the idea of poetic stanzas to inform how I created paragraphs. And I can only hope that the compression of language that is so important in poetry somehow contributes to the economy of prose in my fiction and dialogue in my scripts.

How the narrative forms of fiction and scripts influence my poetry is another matter. Even if my poems aren't telling an outright story, I believe the mounting intensity of accumulated images can be a condensed form of narrative. This theory is supported in a sense by the notion that scenes in a story (whether it be prose or script) can be seen as miniature versions of the larger story. The accumulation of these scenes, growing in intensity as the narrative unfolds, gives us the bigger picture of what the story is about.

What does any of this have to do with procrastination?  I suppose that putting off one thing in order to work on another creates a natural order that supersedes whatever my "rational" mind thinks I should be working on at any given time. I guess it's part of the writer's instinct: that little voice I always end up listening to. It hasn't steered me wrong yet.

I confess I don't know very much about NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, except that an unnaturally large number of people are participating in it and have been doing so since the late 90s. Apparently they all have to write a novel in the month of November. Maybe it should stand for National November Writing Moratorium. I don't know why November was chosen to be the month and I don't really care.

I don't really understand the reason for these kinds of writing initiatives (the Three day Novel Writing Contest being another). Writing a novel is a difficult and serious business. Why would you want to make it even harder by imposing such a short deadline? I do understand the motivating factor behind deadlines, especially self-imposed ones. I also understand that failing to make these deadlines (which has been my experience at least half the time) is beside the point. The idea is to get yourself writing. Ahh, I see now. That's what NaNoWriMo is all about, getting people writing. I suppose it's the same way that the Harry Potter craze was lauded because it got young people reading.

The thing I remember about that is whenever you asked a young person what they were reading, the answer was inevitably “Harry Potter.” I was very pleased to see them reading, but somewhat disappointed that they seemed to stick to the same thing. I kept hoping that Harry Potter might be a starting point to get them reading other things. Perhaps that did happen in some cases. Perhaps I missed the media frenzy about the eclectic tastes that young people were developing in their reading habits.

Trying to keep an open mind, I can see the usefulness of NaNoWriMo in that it would help one quickly get down on paper that pesky first draft, which is arguably the bane of most novelists. They are shitty to write and even shittier to read, but at least you've got something on paper (or computer screen or cave wall or whatever) and can now commence with the real task of revising, revising, revising. As the cliche goes: novels are not written, they're rewritten. Still, I wonder whether NaNoWriMo takes this idea into consideration. The idea behind it seems to be don't think about it, just get it down fast. There are those writers who do write hot for their first drafts, but I'm not one of them. I'm a plodder. I like to take my sweet precious time over the words that I set down, erase, revise, fret over, rethink, and go back to what I originally had. What NaNoWriMo seems to willfully ignore is the luxuriousness of the creative process.

This lesson hit home recently in the course of my duties in the PEI Writers' Guild Mentoring Program, where I am mentor to a writer who is struggling with a first draft of a children's book. The program lasts until the end of January and I realistically thought I could help her bang out a first draft. Her first writing assignment was an outline, which she completed with a full array of characters and events set down in point form. I then assigned her to write a first chapter and told her what elements I felt it should contain: a protagonist, a description of her world, what her dream, goal or desire is and an inciting incident (a film writing term that means: the event that gets the story going).

She did a great job, for a first draft, and I assumed she might want to push on to chapter two. I was delighted to find out that her writing instinct told her she should go back and take another shot at revising the first chapter. Rather than pushing ahead in an all-consuming rush to get it down, she opted to think about what she was writing and get that first draft as right as possible before she was ready to move forward. She listened to her gut instead of to me. As a mentor, I could not have been prouder.

I propose a new initiative called NoMoWriMo. The lesson I keep learning over and over is that writing is a lifelong struggle, no matter how quickly you get it down. It reminds me of when writers started using computers and word processors with all their time-saving shortcuts. Even back then I understood that there are no shortcuts through the creative process.

My story collection, Fatted Calf Blues, was recently on the short list for a ReLit Award, which was created by Newfoundland writer, Kenneth J. Harvey, to promote books published by small indie presses. I was very pleased to make it to the short list, but, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of fanfare surrounding this award. Perhaps it boils down to the fact that fanfare costs money and, to be fair, the motto of the ReLit is "Ideas, Not Money."  

Although I was aware that the awards would be given out at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, I didn't receive any kind of notice or invitation to attend the event. My publisher knew nothing about it either. In fact they didn't even know I had made the short list until I informed them. I didn't even know I had made the long list until a friend, who had happened to see it on the Quill & Quire website, let me know.  I understand that the low key atmosphere surrounding the ReLit is in keeping with that of the small indie presses it celebrates, but it still would have been nice if a bigger deal was made of it. 

But now here we are in the season of the Big 3 (the Gillers, the GGs and the Writers' Trust) and the fanfare wheels are being cranked up. The good news in all this is that this year the Giller noms are mostly small press books (which seems to be the case every few years). Not that I have anything against big press books getting attention. It's dog-eat-dog in the publishing world and these awards are a chance for industry types to get out there and cheer for whichever of their books have been shortlisted.

Oh wait, did someone say that all these awards are about promoting our literature to the public? I guess I forgot that part. Even that once great bastion of Canadian culture, the CBC, is doing their part with its Canada Reads competition. That one is supposed to actually reflect the opinions of Canadian readers, because it is they who suggest which 40 books get on the long list. Now that the 40 have been posted on line, the public can vote for the books that will make the short list. 

The wee problem (in my view anyway), is that people used to be able to vote for any Canadian book, while the rule this year is that the book has to be a novel (non-fiction, poetry and short story collections need not apply) that has been published in the past ten years. It was my understanding that the original impetus behind Canada Reads was to celebrate the history of Canadian literature (including non-fiction, poetry and short story collections), as well as being an opportunity to refresh the public's mind about certain forgotten books (such as past winners Rockbound and King Leary). Instead, the CBC, in its usual questionable wisdom, has turned this into another literary horse race. 

Maybe I'm just suffering from a case of sour grapes. Maybe I wish I was also out there on all the social network sites, pushing for people to be voting for my book. Maybe I'm just sore about being denied my share of the fanfare pie. I can't deny any of that. Writers now have to work as hard promoting their books as they do writing them. Having a platform, such as being on an awards shortlist, can be a great boon. I suppose the best thing I can do is wish them all well, forget about the fans and get back into the meaty fare of actual writing.  Now there's an idea that's money.

Once in an interview, Leonard Cohen said that the discipline of rhyming forces you to go through your inventory of words. This was a revelation to me.  Many people think (and I was one of them) that the idea is to find the right rhyme, when in fact great lyricists and poets are always searching for the right word.  Those who eschew the rhyming dictionary as being unsophisticated are most likely misusing it. After hearing Cohen's pithy statement, I realized the rhyming dictionary is merely another kind of thesaurus and an essential tool to any writer. 

I bring up rhyming because I have been thinking about how certain restrictions in writing, particularly writing poetry, can free you to go places you might not normally go. Lately I have been writing poems in a form called the pantoum, which is a series of quatrains (a stanza of four lines). Once you have composed your first quatrain, the second line becomes the first line of your second quatrain and the fourth line (of the first quatrain) becomes the third line (of your second quatrain). The second and fourth lines (of the second quatrain) are new. In the next quatrain the rotation repeats: second and fourth lines of the second quatrain become the first and third lines of the third quatrain with its second and fourth lines being new. This goes on for as long as you like. 

As thoroughly confusing as that is, here's the kicker: The first and third lines of your final quatrain must be the same as the second and fourth lines of your penultimate quatrain. The second line (of the final quatrain) must be the same as the third line of your first quatrain and the last line (of your final quatrain) is the first line of your first quatrain. Thus your poem has come full circle.

I expect most of you gave up half way through my explanation (there's no easy way to describe it) and I admit it took me a while to figure this out. I was helped by a couple of examples I found on Wikipedia: Pantoum of the Great Depression by Donald Justice  and Parent's Pantoum by Carolyn Kizer.

What you will discover is that the repetition of lines isn't strictly perfect. While you are allowed to use the line exactly as before, you are also allowed (even encouraged) to make changes to the line using punctuation, puns, shifting the order of words, etc. in order to alter the meaning and develop the poem's theme. This was the part that intrigued me the most. I recognized that within the form's narrow parameters there was a kind of freedom. 

A month ago I had had a meeting with Anne Simpson to show her some of my poems. There was one in particular that she liked that was a single page in length. She suggested that I could make it longer and explore the theme in more depth. I had no idea how to do that and was considering using each of its five stanzas as the basis for a ghazal (another form I have been exploring). But when I discovered the pantoum I had one of those aha! moments, that don't come very often. I turned each stanza of the original poem into a quatrain and used each one as the beginning of a different pantoum. My poem would be comprised of five connected pantoums. 

As soon as I did that I was surprised by how quickly (though not necessarily easily) I fell into the form. It reminded me very much of song writing. I realized that the variations on the repeated lines were creating the poem's music. That was quite a revelation. I am still in the revision process and although I feel I have indeed gone deeper into my poem's theme, the jury is still out on whether this foray into form poetry has been entirely successful. But I can honestly say it has been thoroughly satisfying.  

Nobody likes a quitter, or so they say.  I pride myself on finishing (eventually) most things I start, such as stories, poems, plays, etc.  And, of course, books.  It is rare that I don't finish a book once I have read the first page. There have been books that I have slogged through, such as The Shipping News, which took me the first hundred pages before I actually got into it.  There are books that I have seen through to the last page, more out of stubbornness than interest.  But I feel a sense of personal failure when I give up on a book. This happened recently with A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  

From the first page I didn't care for the writing, first person/present tense, which adopted a highly stylized, haphazard quality. The obvious desired effect was to put the reader in the mind of the addict narrator. Nothing wrong with that.  Immediately, I was reminded of the controversy when Oprah Winfrey championed the book as a harrowing memoir of drug addiction and recovery, only to later publicly vilify Frey on her show when she discovered that some of the "facts" had been embellished.  So when I saw for myself how stylized the writing was, I could only think how naive Oprah had been to take the narrative as verbatim fact.  For that reason I decided to be patient and give Frey a chance to tell his story.

This book was recommended to me by someone who knew that I was writing a play on addiction and recovery.  That was another reason I patiently waded through the unnecessarily repetitive prose, hoping to glean some insight into the mind of an addict.  On that score there were some interesting passages and moments when my sympathy was on the narrator's side.  But half way through the book I decided enough was enough.  It's hard to say exactly what straw broke the camel's back.  It seemed to be an accumulation of things.  More often than not, the prose style got on my nerves rather than drawing me into the narrator's world. The story itself also became annoyingly repetitive: first he wants to get better, then he decides he'll leave the centre and get high,then something (or someone) happens to change his mind, then he decides to stick it out and on and on.  Obviously this is true to life in the pattern of recovery, but as a story I  have to say I just stopped caring. 

Some may argue that this is a true-to-life memoir, that Frey is writing from his own experience, fudged facts or not. As a fiction writer, who often draws from his own experience, I believe the facts shouldn't ever get in the way of the truth.  The great thing about fiction is that it is a lie. The better the lie, the more we want to read. If, when we close the final page and put the book aside, we actually retain anything of what we read, whether it's something in the story or the way it was told, I would say that is the truth of the story.  

Still, I feel some guilt in giving up on A Million Little Pieces. On the one hand, Frey's story just didn't keep my interest. On the other hand I can't help but feel that if hung in there just a few pages more my patience might have been rewarded. Ridiculous, I know, considering I stuck it out for half the book.  Or is that what is really bothering me? Misplaced trust? Either way, it was clearly time to turn the page.

I recently attended a reading by poet and novelist Anne Simpson, whom, I am proud to say, I know.  In the middle of the reading she stopped to take some questions and was asked by a student about whether she had ever turned any of her poems into songs.  She answered that she had not and began to speak a bit about the difference between poems and song lyrics when she suddenly called my name, knowing that I have written both song lyrics and poems, and asked me to weigh in on the subject.

I was sitting at the back of the room, liking to be as inconspicuous as possible, and so was rather startled to have the audience's attention turn to me. I remember my mind racing for an answer and my wife tells me that I handled myself well (as a good and supportive wife should, although I well know she would have no qualms in telling me if I screwed up royally). Essentially I said that poems and lyrics are two very different animals. No matter how accomplished a lyric may be, it will always be merely one half of that entity called a song.  When writing a lyric, one is always aware that there is another component to come, which is the music, unless one is setting lyrics to an established melody. A poem, on the other hand, must stand on its own and somehow engender its own music, which can happen in a number of ways.

In the following days I thought more and more about the difference between these two disciplines, in particular the different ways in which a poem creates its own music. First of all, there is language and the musicality of words. The best example I can think of is the poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose incredible lines seem to leap from the page. In fact the musicality of his language was sometimes a target for criticism and some have said his poems have more music than meaning. I don't agree with that. In a way it reminds me of the film Amadeus, where the king tells Mozart that his composition has too many notes. Both seem to be criticisms for their own sake and not very well thought out.

After Anne took questions she returned to her reading and asked if there was anything that the audience wanted her to read. I immediately put up my hand as asked her to read  the poem Clocks Of Rain from her collection, Quick. It is one of my favorite poems and I have heard her read it on a number of occasions.  As I listened, I realized that I could not have asked for a better example of a poem's musicality.  First of all, I must say that I think this poem is a departure from Anne's usual work (she may very well disagree with me on this).  Anne does not so much read the poem as she performs it. It is a poem about a car accident and is very intense.  There are many pauses in the printed version and orally these come across as disturbing silences. In retrospect, I am reminded of a quote about music (was it Stravinsky who said it?) that goes, roughly: The real music exists between the notes (incidentally, I used this myself in a poem). In that sense, the real poetry in Clocks Of Rain exists in those silences.  You would have to hear Anne's performance to fully appreciate it.

A poem also creates music in its juxtaposition of images. I seem to remember an interview with James Merrill, where he likened his juxtaposition of images as being like billiard balls knocking against each other. That definitely has a musical sound to my ear.  That's why the complexity of poetry, which in itself can evoke a rich musicality,  doesn't always work well as a song.  I know from experience that composers always prefer simple words to work with. When read on the page, many lyrics seem rather banal and simplistic, yet when sung reveal an inner richness of meaning and emotion.

It often is the case that lyric and melody are a unique marriage, a juxtaposition of meaning and emotion, knocking against each other in their own peculiar fashion. The example that springs to mind is the standard Blue Skies . The lyric seems to be clear enough (pun intended): Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see.  Yet, there's something odd about the music. If I knew more about the technical aspects of music I could describe it better, but there seems to be some minor notes (any of you musicians out there can take me to task on this) that give the song a sense of foreboding that adds a different layer of meaning on the lyric.  In a way, it reminds me of an Alex Colville painting, where things seem serene enough, but one somehow has a sense that something is not quite right. 
 
Last year I read at a reading series in Hamilton, Ontario called Lit Live. When it was advertised in a local Hamilton arts newspaper, the readers were listed with a small blurb beside their names. Beside mine it said that I was going to perform songs from my collection Fatted Calf Blues  (which, of course, is a story collection). Nevertheless, I really liked the typo and feel that it caught the essence of what I am always trying to do in my writing, which is to capture that sense of mystery - that indescribable something that cannot always be expressed by words alone - in the seemingly limited medium of language.

It's been a lovely Labour Day three-day weekend.  Things looked a bit dicey Friday night when we were preparing for the arrival of Hurricane Earl, in whatever form he might take. We were lucky that when Saturday rolled around we suffered very little.  The wind was strong and we got a nice downpour of rain (which our garden sorely needed).  There was a hairy moment when we found water dripping from a kitchen light fixture (on my mother-in-law's side), but that subsided when the rain stopped. A few small branches got blown off, but luckily there was no major damage. We didn't even lose our power (which usually happens to us). I know that many areas across Atlantic Canada were not as lucky and I hope things are slowly getting back to normal for everyone concerned.

After the previous week of muggy, uncomfortable weather, Earl left gentle cool temperatures in his wake.  Sunday was crisp and sunny and was spent having a sociable lunch with friends at the Dunes Cafe in Brackley Beach, where my dear Thelma bought me a small statue of Ganesh for my office. Today being Labour Day Monday, I felt some kind of labour might be in order and so a long-needed clean up of my office took place. We moved our fax machine (do people still send faxes?) into the basement and shifted the printer off my desk, giving me more room (for the Ganesh!).  The place where I spend most of my day looks more or less orderly.

An orderly work space, cool weather... I'm starting to get that autumnal feeling, that strange sense of renewal I used to feel when I was a mere shirt-tail tad getting ready to start to school. I'm hoping this feeling carries me into a more productive period. Not that I've been entirely idle, but ever since July I seem to have been finding one reason or another to not get started on the play I've been saying I will write since July. The need to do some research was the main excuse, but I think there is something else: that moment of panic in the pit of my stomach just before embarking on a new project. Facing the blank screen is one thing, but putting fingers to keyboard always involves a certain leap of faith, not unlike walking into a new classroom. It's nice to know that I don't take these things for granted and I hope I never will. All the same, I think I will savor the orderliness of my office before I step off the cliff.

I have entered many writing contests over the past nine years.  I actually won a couple, have been a semi-finalist a couple of times and racked up my fair share of honourable mentions.  I even got to judge a short story competition (for the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick) earlier this year.  It was an interesting experience to be on the other side of the manuscript, although not too different from how I imagined it might be.

Writing contests can be good things for writers, in particular the cash prizes, which can range from $200 - $2,000. There's also the bragging rights, especially if it’s a prestigious contest like the CBC Literary Award, which also looks good on a resume. 

But contests have many drawbacks as well. First of all, there is the cost of entering.  I'd prefer not to think about all the money I've spent over the years.  The average entry fee can run anywhere from $10 - $30.  The best bang for your buck is with the contests put on by small literary magazines, such as the Malahat Review or Grain, because the entry fee also gets you a year's subscription to the magazine.

If you are entering a screenplay contest it can be more, although they usually have multiple deadlines: early bird, usually around $30; regular deadline - $40; late deadline - $50 and the very late - $60.  Since these are often annual contests, I would say it is probably worth your while to spend time revising your screenplay and waiting until the next early bird deadline comes around.

I think the real drawback of writing contests is the lack of feedback for the writer, especially for those starting out. I know that editors are not exactly forthcoming when it comes to commenting on the manuscripts that come across their desk (volume of submissions and lack of time being the main factors). All the same, if an editor likes something but cannot publish it for whatever reason, he/she is more likely to write a couple of encouraging sentences in their rejection. This can mean all the difference to a novice writer who is still trying to find a voice. The one exception of a contest that does offer feedback is the annual Atlantic Writing Competition sponsored by the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia.

On the whole, I believe a writer's time is better spent regularly submitting their work to magazines.  There may not be much money in it, but building up a healthy publishing history will be useful when you want to send out your first novel or story collection to book publishers.  That said, there are a few competitions designed to kick start a writing career. 

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, which offers two categories, General Fiction and Young Adult, winners to be published by Penguin USA with a $15,000 advance.

Enfield & Wizenty, which offers publication and a $5,000 advance for a novel or story collection.  

The Metcalf Rooke Award, sponsored by Biblioasis, offering publication and a $1,500 advance, plus a regional tour, for a novel or story collection.

Scriptapalooza, a screenplay competition where semi-finalists and up have their scripts promoted for a full year.  

The best part is that, with the exception of Scriptapalooza, all these competitions have no entry fee.  Of course, there can be only one winner (runners-up notwithstanding).  Whichever way you decide to go: Good Luck!

Currently I am reading a book about Al-Anon called From Survival To Recovery: Growing Up In An Alcoholic Home as part of my research for a play I have been working on.  I had written two drafts of the play as a one-act and brought the last draft to a playwriting workshop with Daniel MacIvor at the Great Blue Heron Workshop in July.  Although my characters were recovering alcoholics, I hadn't done a lot of research into what recovery entailed, believing that my play was about something else entirely.  But discussions with Daniel opened my eyes to an aspect of my characters' experiences that I was overlooking.  That made me rethink what I was trying to say and brought me to the realization that I probably needed to write this as a full-length play.  It was obvious that I also needed to do some research.  

I have to admit that research does not come easily to me, although I tend to always recheck things on the Internet (facts, spelling, etc) even if I'm writing an email to a friend.  During the ten years that I was working (on-and-off) on my novel, research only occurred when I was stuck at some point.  If I was trying to describe a character's childhood in early 20th century Poland, I realized that I needed to do some surfing on the Internet to see what I could find.  Since I was writing fiction, my research was mostly to lend some kind of authenticity to my narrative.  Accuracy, on the other hand, was not necessarily guaranteed.  In my heart I always expect that if/when this novel is published, there will be a reader who takes me to task about some historical inaccuracy in my story.  Will it matter?  To some, yes, especially if they lived in Poland in the early 20th century or know someone who did.  To others, I expect (hope?) they will excuse a few factual errors if the story is compelling enough.

There are writers who do not do their own research, leaving that aspect of the work to paid assistants, unpaid spouses or (if they are famous enough) star-struck interns or students. My wife, Thelma, who also acts as my in-house tech support, webmistress and proofreader, can find her way around the world wide web much easier than I. She could probably take care of all my research needs if I asked nicely enough. Still, as inept as I am, I think it is important for me to do my own research.  Sometimes it comes as a nice respite from the uphill battle of trying to fill the blank screen.  More often than not, actively searching for something online has yielded an interesting bit of information that adds to my understanding of a character or takes their story arc in an unexpected direction. 

Most of my research takes place on the Internet, although the book I am reading came from a local library.  Even though I am going to do as much research as I can before starting the next draft of my play, I know at various points in the writing I will have to stop to check or recheck some bit of information so that I can at least restore my confidence that I know what I'm writing about.  What I once saw as continuous interruptions in the course of my writing, I now realize are lifelines cast into the murky waters of theme and subject.  The common dictum for writers is: write what you know.  But many writers (myself included) tend to write what they don't know.  We understand that if there is no journey for the writer there will be none for the reader. 

I have recently submitted two connected short stories to a magazine. The first story deals with a father-son relationship and is written in third person, past tense.  The second story deals with the son character at a crisis in his life 30 years later and is written in second person, present tense.  At the last Seawords writing workshop, Christy Ann Conlin gave us some interesting POV writing exercises, showing us how writing the same sentences with different points of view not only changes meaning, but also affects tone and style.

In the first story, third person allows me to present the POV of both father and son.  The tone is more expansive and takes in their relationship from a farther and more objective perspective.  From there I can move in a bit closer to show how one sees the other and the two characters' differences and similarities.  The story starts specifically from the father's POV, but ends with the son's, giving the story a generational arc. The ending also has a coming-of-age feel that segues well into the second story.

The second person POV of the second story makes it less obvious that we are reading about the same character.  Clues are eventually dropped that identify the character (his name doesn't come up until about halfway).  As I mentioned in an earlier post, the second person POV can be used as first person once removed, which is the case here. The effect is meant to be disturbing (confirmed to me by the reaction of some of my fellow workshoppers) and to emphasize the character's personal crisis: his feeling of disassociation from his own life. He has a bizarre experience with a ringing pay phone, where the person on the other line (a distressed woman speaking Yiddish) does not seem to hear him. This incident is used to play around with the idea of disassociation, almost turning the tables on him, and, ironically, connects with him on a deep emotional level.

I'm hoping that the magazine will accept either story, as they stand well enough on their own. But in a perfect world the editor would accept both stories and publish them back to back in the same issue.  The probability of that is very slim, but maybe I'll catch a break and the editor and I will share the same POV and be on the same page, so to speak.

Writing workshops, for the most part, are lovely week-long bubbles, basically summer camps for writers.  For me in particular they have been havens where I can get away from the soul-crushing realities of trying to carve out a career from something I do for love.  Paradoxically, they have also been places where I have made useful contacts as well as lasting friendships.

The Seawords workshop in Charlottetown, aside from having fine writing instructors, also boasts sessions with a bona fide literary agent all the way from Toronto.  Jackie Kaiser from Westwood Creative Artists was the resident agent at both Seawords workshops, counseling writers on the vagaries of getting published in the real world.  The irony that her sobering perspective of the business side of the writing game was available to us in PEI put a smile on my face.  You see, according to Jackie, admitting you live on the "gentle island" is enough to turn off any agent or publisher in Toronto.  I can confirm this with my own brief experience of being represented by an agent, who informed me that I lacked a Toronto presence (despite my considerable Internet presence, which seems to be de rigeur  for writers these days). 

The question that keeps popping up in my mind is to what degree should a workshop maintain its innocence and be only about the writing rather than the career?  Jackie worried that her honest and often bleak portrayal of the book industry, such as it is these days, was casting a pall on the overall good vibes of the workshop. On the other hand, her critiques of the query letters that some of us submitted addressed both writing skills and career aspirations. In general, I felt that having access to her brand of expertise proved to be invaluable.  Her presence, as far as I'm concerned, set the Seawords experience apart from other workshops.  

I assume that most of my fellow participants felt the same way, but it is also important to realize that not everyone who attends writing workshops is necessarily interested in a writing career.  Many already have other careers. I have met many doctors, teachers and, on one occasion, a minister.  Others are just there to satisfy their own curiosity about writing.  For those who want to network with professionals, there are many seminars and literary festivals specifically designed for that purpose.  At Word On The Street in Halifax I participated in an event called Pitch The Publisher, where writers can pitch their book ideas to a panel of publishers.  Opportunities abound for those who are seeking them.

The best one can do is to respect the overall spirit of whatever workshop one is attending.  There's usually something for everyone.

The writing life, for many of its practitioners, is a matter of either feast or famine.  Lately I've had a taste of the feast by being long-listed for a ReLit Award, making it to the semifinals in Scriptapalooza and becoming accepted in a mentorship program.  That, of course, doesn't stop the rejection emails from coming in to keep me grounded.  In my last post I mentioned the sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, which reminded me of the first rejection letter I ever received.  That's because it was from former Horseman, the late bp nichol. 

It was 1983 and I had just made my first attempt at prose.  It had started off as a memoir about a part of my childhood spent in Glasgow, Scotland. As I wrote, I realized there was much I couldn't remember and so I just made up stuff to fill in the blanks, thus my first piece of fiction was born.  I had recently read Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje and decided to adopt his prose style, which consisted of oddly broken sentences.  My version of that style didn't look or feel like any kind of short story I had ever seen. In fact I was too embarrassed to think of it as a story at all, so I sent it to magazines as a prose poem.  I didn't even know what a prose poem was. I thought it was something I just invented.  I sent it out with a few other more conventional poems to a few different magazines (knowing nothing about the protocol of submitting).  

What I received was a hand-written (and signed) rejection letter from bp nichol (whom I had heard of).  He was guest-editing the next edition of Poetry Toronto. He didn't like any of the other poems I submitted, but was quite impressed with Glasgow and praised it highly.  Unfortunately, he felt he couldn't publish a piece of prose (poem or not) in the magazine and wished me good luck.  I still have the letter to this day and will always cherish it.  In retrospect, this was my initiation into being a real writer.  I have received quite a number of rejection letters and emails praising the quality of my submission and rejecting it for publication, often in the same sentence.  Like many writers, I have a file of rejection and acceptance letters (I have long since stopped saving them) that I look through now and then.  

They say you have to develop a thick skin to deal with the constant rejection.  Maybe so, but it still sometimes stings, even after all this time. Rejection always seemed to be part of some kind of test to see how serious I was about being a writer.  My remedy for rejection is to look at what I had submitted, make any changes that I deemed appropriate, then send it out again, preferably that same day. I have to confess that I'm a bit of a submission junkie. It's those rare acceptance emails that give me something I obviously crave (acceptance, I guess). The actual publication often feels like an anticlimax. It is also good to view submitting your work as merely a part of the ebb and flow of the creative process, with rejection being a necessary phase of the turning tide.  Look who's getting all philosophical now.

By the way, that prose poem, Glasgow, was eventually published in the Malahat Review. My very first professional publication. They paid me $25.  I later realized that if I had had the guts to submit it as a piece of fiction I would have been paid more. Live and learn. Of course they never accepted anything I have submitted to them since.

The other day we were in the car listening to Lady Gaga's excellent song Bad Romance and its nonsense intro "Rah rah, ah, ah, ah, Gaga, ooh la la" (my favorite part of the song) got me to thinking about the fine tradition of nonsense lyrics in popular songs.  Whether it's Sinatra crooning “scooby dooby doo” or Sting crowing “da do do do de da da da”, words without meaning seem to tell us more about our language than anything Noah Webster could have catalogued.

In the fifties nonsense lyrics were a language unto themselves. I remember seeing a clip of Steve Allen, when he hosted the Tonight Show, reciting the lyrics to Be Bop A Lula in an effort to show how low the craft of lyric writing had sunk.  A prolific composer himself, Allen obviously had a personal axe to grind.  And yet, to my young ears, it sounded like a new kind of hipster poetry (Allen also famously played piano behind Jack Kerouac's poetry recitations).

Literature has a great tradition of nonsense with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, to name the most obvious.  I remember reading an interview with the poet W. S. Merwin where he talked about making up words in his poems, such as the verb "spartle", which I believe is similar to scurry. Personally I link my own fascination with nonsense words to my fascination with poetry, in particular the mystery of meaning. The problem that the general public seems to have with poetry is that they don't understand it.  In school it is taught to them like some kind of math problem that they have to figure out (or at least it was in my day). But my own love affair with poetry came about because I didn't necessarily understand what the poet was trying to say, yet the poems seemed to speak to me on a higher (or perhaps lower?) level than mere meaning.  Dylan Thomas (my favorite poet) was often criticized that his poems had more music than meaning.  I wonder if any composer (maybe Wagner?) was ever told that their compositions had more meaning than music?

Another good example is sound poetry. My only exposure to it was hearing a recording of the Four Horsemen (bp nichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, Rafael Barreto-Rivera), but it opened up my ears to the possibilities of nonsense and how the language can be stretched into a different kind of meaning. When I attempt to write poetry, which I don't do often enough, I try to connect to a part of myself that needs to express something beyond words, similar to a musician, I suppose, but using words. Maybe I should start to develop a nonsensical vocabulary.  There is already such a rich tradition to draw from whether it be The Four Horsemen or Lady Gaga.

Apropos to a previous post about my decision to stop participating in workshops, I have been named as a mentor in the PEI Writers' Guild's 2010 Mentorship Program. I submitted my name to the program with the belief that seven years of taking writing workshops (and of course my writing and publishing history) has equipped me with enough understanding of the writing process and hard-won wisdom to pass on to a young writer.  

Naturally this has given me pause to reflect on all the writing instructors I've encountered over the years.  My first was Richard Cumyn, an excellent fiction writer with a new collection (The Young In Their Country published by Enfield & Wizenty) coming out soon.  It was Richard who once demonstrated to me the hard work of revision by cutting 1,200 words from one of my stories (I had already cut out 800).  It was a harsh lesson (which Richard recently told me he feels bad about), but it helped me to see the difficult choices I was expected to make if I wanted to be a serious writer.  By the way, I never felt Richard was being purposely hurtful, but rather an agent of integrity, and that he believed in me enough to not treat me with kid gloves.  

Another fine mentor was Anne Simpson, with whom I workshopped poetry and fiction (she being equally accomplished in both disciplines). Anne had a way of lighting a fire under me that gave my workshop experiences a real sense of urgency.  When I brought her a few poems, she immediately zeroed in on one that she felt was almost there and gave me some interesting suggestions to improve it.  Then she told me I had to work on it that evening so it would be ready for me to read publicly the next night.  When I brought her a short story written in third person, she talked about using second-person in poetry and how it could bring a new perspective to fiction.  Her explanation that second person was merely first person once removed gave me a whole new perspective on the story.  Anne always pushed me to push myself harder, for which I am grateful.

There are other mentors I could name: Anne Compton and Sue Sinclair for poetry, Alistair MacLeod for fiction (twice!), Daniel MacIvor for playwrighting. All my mentors gave me the benefit of their unique talents and experience, but their most important gift was the spirit of generosity. I always felt as if they were treating me like one of their own, a member of the tribe.  If I can pass that much on to whomever I mentor, I'll consider my work done.

The latest post in my friend Carin Makuz's fine blog Matilda Magtree deals with the subject of how and where we sit when we write.  It's an interesting question.  Some writers thrive while seated on something hard like a kitchen chair or a wooden stool. I suppose the austerity of such a seat helps them focus their thoughts.

Others, like myself, figure if they are going to spend so much time at their keyboards, they might as well be as comfortable as possible.  I have two chairs in my office: a comfortable office chair at my desk and an armchair that flips back with an extending foot support.  Any chiropractor would most likely be horrified to see how I settle into the armchair in an almost supine position, with my lap top balanced between my abdomen and thighs.  I know it's a bad habit, but I feel relaxed.

This is where I normally surf the web, write emails, do crossword puzzles, etc, while the office chair is where I do more focused writing (such as this blog post), fiction, poetry, revisions, etc.  But it isn't a hard and fast rule. Depending on my mood, I might feel that spreading out in the armchair is more conducive to typing the first draft of a story or revising the umpteenth draft of a poem that's been fermenting in my hard drive for months.

And even when I'm in my office chair, I'm not necessarily sitting erect. Like my friend Carin, I often sit with my legs crossed or with one leg tucked stork-like under mon derriere.  Which begs the question, how do these various positions affect the creative process?  I tried sitting on an exercise ball once and all I could concentrate on was the ache in the small of my back.  I expect if I gave it a week or so the pain would have gone away and I would be happily balancing on it, to the benefit of my posture, while deathless prose rippled effortlessly from my fingers (as if that ever happens).

Many writers, due to severe back problems, write while standing. I like that idea, except for the fact that I often pace around the house or go for a walk while I'm thinking of something. If I stood while typing, I assume I would fall into a natural rhythm of walking away and returning to the keyboard. Would this reduce or increase my output? I guess I'll have to try it some time.

So, what's your position on writing positions?

By far the greatest challenge for writers is to describe a larger work such as a novel or feature-length screenplay in a synopsis. As anyone in the publishing world or film industry will tell you, it is an art form unto itself and takes almost as much work as the thing it is describing.  I have just uploaded my screenplay for Fatted Calf Blues on the Inktip web site where, for $60 (USD), it will sit for six months in hopes of attracting a producer or agent or manager.

But before I could upload the script, I had to come up with a log line, one or two sentences that encapsulate the story in such a way as to make the prospective producer want to read the - Outline!  That has to be no more than a page and must tell the story in more detail, but not so much as to confuse them, because the outline will become the essence of their "pitch" to backers.

First off, I have to give props to my new pal, Patti Larsen, first for steering me toward Inktip and for giving me some valuable help on my log line. The cool thing about Inktip is that I can check in and see how many people have read my log line and outline.  Every six months I have the chance to rework my log line so as to attract more readers.

As for my outline, well, it looked good to me. My wife also thought it was good (and I value her opinion). Inktip (and other film insiders) suggest showing it to as many people as possible, just to see if it is a coherent story. Distilling a 100 page screenplay into a single page, as much of a pain in the ass as it is, can be quite beneficial to a writer, as you get to see the essence of what you have written. If you are lucky enough to get a meeting with a producer, you will have to "pitch" your story in no more than ten minutes. That's about one page worth of story with a minute or two to spare.  It's good practice.

And I get to do it all again with my novel.  At this past Seawords workshop, Toronto literary agent Jackie Kaiser critiqued query letters that we submitted before the workshop.  A query letter, either to a publisher or agent, must have an introduction, a synopsis of a few paragraphs and a bio.  The letter can be no more than one page, although two is acceptable.  The introduction and bio are easy (for me anyway). It's the synopsis that is killer.  My novel is 370 pages long and I get a measly three or four paragraphs to wow the prospective publisher.  During my personal writing time I revised (and revised and revised) my query letter, and was very lucky to have Jackie look at it. She sent me a marked-up copy and now I will be working on that.

A 370 page novel in a few paragraphs. Distill my beating heart?  Maybe I should have titled this post "Abridged Too Far."

As anyone who has read my blog (you are out there aren't you?) knows, I do a lot of workshops.  I have been averaging two a year since 2004. That's a lot of workshops. I believe they are worth doing for many reasons: you get a chance to improve a piece of writing; you meet writers and make many useful contacts; you get to spend the week in a lovely literary bubble, etc.

If you’ve attended a workshop then you’ll know that they are basically summer camp for writers, but I have come to think of them as being my education.  In July I attended my sixth consecutive Great Blue Heron Workshop, where I received the Ultimate Participant Extreme Writer Award.  I was greatly touched. It is the closest I will ever come to receiving some kind of diploma.

And so I have come to the decision that I am graduating from the world of writing workshops. It's not a particularly easy decision. I know that when I receive the brochure for the 2011 GBH and it says that Michael Ondaatje (or whoever) will be giving a workshop, I will be quivering inside and ready to send my application in. But I won't.

Instead, I have been looking for opportunities to impart some of my hard-won wisdom to beginning writers. I have submitted my name to an upcoming mentorship program here on PEI and applied for a writer-in-residence opening that will be coming up in Newfoundland. I have no idea whether I'm actually qualified for either of these positions or if I will get them, but it feels as if I have turned a corner in my life as a writer and this is a new path I should at least try to follow. We'll see where it leads me.

Because of my status in the Scriptapalooza competition, I’m also exploring other avenues of getting my Fatted Calf Blues screenplay read. One of these is Inktip, a website where you can upload a screenplay to be read by producers. I am still investigating how to make this website work for me, so I’ll post more as I learn about it.

It's been a while since I last posted.  In fact, since last year I have been quite derelict in my blogging duties, which I plan to rectify.  But I also promised myself that I will keep things short and sweet (or acerbic, as the mood strikes me).

Did two workshops this year.  In July it was the Great Blue Heron in Antigonish, where I did a playwriting workshop with Daniel MacIvor.  I took a one-act play called Hair Of The Dog, which is about a fifty-something recovering alcoholic who decides to have a bar mitzvah as a way of connecting to a higher power.  By the end of the week I realized that I needed to expand it into a full-length play, so that is what I will be doing for the rest of the year.  

In July I attended the Seawords workshop here on PEI.  My instructor was Christy Ann Conlin, with whom I got on like the proverbial house on fire (apt because her partner, James, is a volunteer firefighter).  We had a great group and I made some friendships that I think will last well beyond the workshop.  The other instructor was Erika Ritter, who I also got to know a bit. A funny and engaging woman, I look forward to staying in touch with her.

I will have more to say about both these workshops in future posts.

There has been some eventful writing news as well.  My screenplay adaptation of my novella Fatted Calf Blues is a Top 100 Semifinalist in the Scriptapalooza competition.  Although it did not advance further, the good news is that all the screenplays, from semifinalists up, will be promoted for the next year by Scriptapalooza.  I assume they will get sent around to film industry insiders in LA, which makes this competition unique.

The other huge news is that my book Fatted Calf Blues has been long-listed for the ReLit Awards, which are specifically for books published by small presses. It was a shock to see my book on the list because it came out in April 2009 and I assumed it would have been eligible for the 2009 awards.  When it wasn't on that list I just assumed it had been passed over and that was that. So, even if it doesn't go further than this I'm pretty happy that the book got some recognition a year and half after being released.

In 2009 I won the WILDsound One Page Screenplay Contest where the prize was having my script turned into a short film.  They did one better and made two films and now you get to vote which film is better.  Go here to watch both films and cast your vote.

Been a while since I showed my face around here, so it's nice to see that not much has changed. The last time I checked in I was about to head off to the Great Blue Heron Workshop.  Normally when I go to GBH I take an Acadian bus to Antigonish, which is a four hour journey and entails changing buses at Amherst and again at Truro.  This year a pal of mine, Liza (or just Za, whom I met at the Seawords workshop at Brackley Beach here on PEI last year) was driving there and taking the ferry to boot (Yay!) ,so I offered to help out with gas and we rode together.  Much more pleasant than the bus and Za is a fun traveling companion, very easy going and interesting to talk to.  I actually ended up paying for us to get on the ferry, which is cheaper than the round-trip bus ticket, so it all worked out quite well.

As usual, GBH was a great week.  I was in Alistair MacLeod's fiction group (my second time working with him).  He actually remembered me from last time, remembered one of the stories we worked on then, and even remembered (much to my embarrassment) that I had inadvertently commented (half-jokingly) that he had “control issues” with his characters.  We had a good group of writers and our sessions together were pleasant and fruitful.  My one-on-one session with Alistair was also very encouraging.  He liked the story I was work shopping and had only a couple of minor suggestions for improvement.  He even asked if I would submit it to The Windsor Review (of which he is the Fiction Editor).  I've been published twice in that fine magazine.  After I've done my revisions on the story I may submit it to The New Yorker (which I try every now and then, being the cock-eyed optimist that I am).  No doubt I will be rejected by them yet again and will most likely end up sending it to the WR.  I guess that sounds like I'm settling for second-best or something, but I don't mean it that way at all.  I just think it is important to submit my work beyond the normal purview of my publishing experience.  I'd like to think Alistair would agree with me on that.  Of course, I would be more than happy to have my work appear once more in The Windsor Review.

In the middle of our week we had a free day and I had arranged to do a reading at Frog Hollow Books in Halifax.  They had recently moved from their location at Park Lane Mall to a new store nearby on Brenton Street.  It was a very cool and funky little space. The owner, Heidi, was very welcoming and had a nice little set up with Fatted Calf Blues displayed prominently.  Three people I know showed up and it was nice to catch up.  I read a couple of stories, which garnered the attention of some of the walk-in traffic and resulted in a couple of more sales.  I was really hoping that I would be able to go back and read at Frog Hollow some time in the future, but I am sorry to report that they are closing their doors permanently (after 25 YEARS!) near the end of August.  A very sad state of affairs indeed.  

I also brought copies of FCB to display at the Great Blue Heron book table and actually sold around eight copies.  

When I got back home it was time to get down to brass tacks and finish my novel so I could get it to my agent before the end of her reading period (after which she is very busy).  That is the reason for my recent absence from this blog.  It was quite a haul, but I did finish the draft a few days ago and then had to read it over to clean it up as best I could and make a few revisions.  Let it not be said that my agent wastes any time.  When I was done I emailed it to her at midnight and the next morning had got some early feedback on my first chapter.  There were some compliments and some criticism, accompanied by a heavy edit of the chapter attached to the email.  I thought the edit was quite good (my agent has many years of experience as an editor}. Now she is reading the rest and I expect to hear from her shortly, no doubt with some other changes that need to be made.  

Other than that, I'm looking forward to tackling the pile of books that I've been ignoring while I've been writing the novel.  Of course, I have a number of other writing projects on the back burner.  I think the next thing I will work on is a screenplay adaptation of my short story, The Most Important Man In The World (the opening story in Fatted Calf Blues) for a short screenplay competition. After a novel, writing in a different format that I can finish relatively quickly will be a nice change of pace.  A change is as good as a rest, as they say.

Before I get this entry started, I must rectify an omission I made in my last entry.  When I wrote about my time in Hamilton I neglected to mention that I stayed for two nights at the Inchbury Inn, which is a wonderful bed & breakfast run by Doug and Solange Trudel.  Those of you who read this blog know that I tend to stay at B&Bs when I'm traveling and have written about many of the terrific places I've stayed at.  I am happy to say that the Inchbury Inn ranks right up there with the best of them for comfort, affordability and all around hospitality.  The inn is really Solange's baby and she runs it with great care.  Her breakfasts are delicious and her friendly demeanor brightened up the mornings.  If there was anything I needed, she and/or Doug were always happy to help out.

My last night in Hamilton was spent at the home of writer Jean Rae Baxter and her playful terrier Robbie.  Jean has published a few books and is connected to the Hamilton reading series Lit Live, which is how I came to be billeted in her home.  On a free afternoon I had, Jean was happy to drive me around Hamilton to show me some of the sights. We also took a drive to nearby Dundas for the the buskers' festival. 

Since returning home from Toronto and Hamilton, I have been pushing ahead with my novel.  I am under the gun to get this draft finished in time to send it to my agent, whose reading period ends in September. So I have roughly six weeks before the just-under-the-wire deadline and I have to say I'm feeling the pressure.

That said, I am off to Antigonish, Nova Scotia next week for the annual Great Blue Heron Writers' Workshop.  This will be my fifth consecutive year there, which makes me think I should be getting some kind of diploma or something.  I will be in Alistair MacLeod's group (this being my second time working with him) and, as usual, I am expecting a terrific week of literary socializing and work.  Being at GBH, or at most writing workshops for that matter, is much like being at summer camp for writers.  Writing, being the solitary activity that it is, means spending most of the year holed up in my office, so it is always refreshing to meet up with other like-minded souls and share our similar obsessions.  Just call us word nerds but don't call us late for last call.

This year GBH is offering a free day during the workshop week, which happens to fall on Friday July 3rd.  I'm taking that opportunity to make a day trip to Halifax to do a reading at Frog Hollow Books, 1459 Brenton Street (their brand new location), at 2:00 p.m.  Hope to see you there.

The big news with writers around the world is the Google Book Settlement.  If you haven't heard, Google has the rights to digitize published or out-of-print books from before January 5th, 2009 and will make them available on the web.  Writers can claim ownership of their works by going to www.googlebooksettlement.com and setting up an account.  They will receive a one-off settlement of at least $60 per book and will then be poised to receive future profits from Google's efforts to sell their works as downloads or print-on-demand.  Just how much the writer will make off each download or p.o.d. is unclear.

The writer also has the option to opt out of the settlement when setting up their account on the web site.  Opting out won't necessarily stop Google from digitizing their books, but they then will have some kind of grounds on which to sue Google. Good luck with that.

Writers are being advised to stay in the settlement, the wisdom being a crappy deal is better than no deal at all.  But we don't know what the deal is yet so here's hoping...

When I set up my account on the web site I searched for my upcoming book, Fatted Calf Blues, that won't be available in stores until April 15.  Lo and behold, there it was on the web site.  Of course I won't be getting any $60 one-off deal, but who knows what the future holds.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it was on their site, since it has been listed on various book selling web sites such as Amazon and Chapters/Indigo since January.

A little more disconcerting for me was to find a poetry chapbook I self-published in the late 1970s called With My One Free Hand, which is catalogued in one of the Dalhousie University Libraries. How it got there is beyond me, considering I lived in Montreal when I published it.  Since Google has approached pretty much every library to digitize books, I shouldn't be surprised to see my modest first effort pop up on their settlement web site.  Nevertheless, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Borg sucking up every scintilla of human existence.  I know that sounds alarmist, but I'm a writer and prone to dramatization.

But here's the real thing that's bothering me.  I'm not particularly proud of that chapbook.  I was in my early twenties when I wrote those poems and was eager to see my name and my efforts in print.  While I can excuse youthful exuberance, frankly those poems embarrass me now.  In fact, they kind of embarrassed me then too.  I remember when I first got them back from the printer, I was at home having lunch when my father came into the kitchen.  A copy was sitting on the table and I pointed it out to him.  To my surprise he sat down and read the whole thing -- all ten pages of it! --  right then and there.  I watched, mortified, from behind my sandwich as he slowly turned the pages with a serious expression.  What felt like hours, but was more likely fifteen minutes or so, passed before he put it down and proclaimed in a sober voice: "I think I understand what you’re trying to say."  Then he got up and left.  I suppose it could have been worse.

I don't even own a copy of that chapbook.  Now that my first book of stories is about to be published, I keep hearing from friends who still have a copy of that chapbook.  I cringe a bit, but feel relieved that only a select few will be able to see my sophomoric scribbling.  At least I used to feel that relief until this whole Google thing.  Now everyone might be able to see the freaking thing.  Typical writer's vanity, you say?  Guilty as charged.  I remember reading that, before his death, Mordecai Richler was trying to buy up every copy of his first novel, he was that embarrassed by it.  No such luck here.  I don't know if anyone will ever want to see those poems or how much money Google will pay me for making them available to the public.  I'm pretty sure, though, that, no matter how much, it won't be near enough.

I recently submitted an ad to The Buzz, Prince Edward Island’s arts and entertainment newspaper, to promote my upcoming book launch at the Confederation Centre Library on April 23rd. In the ad I referred to myself as "Island writer, Steven Mayoff."  It made me wonder if I had the right to call myself such.  I'm not from the Island, although I have been living here since 2001.  I have been writing since high school, but it wasn't until I moved to PEI that I focused on my writing in earnest and began to send out work on a regular basis.  I believe I can say with all sincerity that I came to PEI to establish myself as a writer.

But anyone who lives here knows that if you weren't actually born on the Island you will always be considered "from away", no matter how long you live here.  I suppose I could have used the phrase "Resident Island Writer", but that seems to undermine the commitment I've made by moving to PEI as the place where I am establishing my identity as a writer.  The interesting thing is that I am quite content with my "from away" status, even though I expect to live on PEI for the rest of my life.  I believe a writer should be something of an outsider and that part of his/her integrity benefits from being on the outside looking in.  In a way this made PEI the perfect place in which to launch my writing career.  You could say I feel very much at home being from away.

There is no denying how much PEI has influenced my work.  The moment I moved here I was struck by the beautiful landscape and immediately began incorporating it in stories and poems.  In my upcoming collection, Fatted Calf Blues, the stories have both rural and urban settings.  The first story, The Most Important Man In The World, is set on a streetcar in Toronto.  The sense of isolation in the streetcar proves to be a crucible for extreme human behaviour.  Living on an island is a bit like that.  In fact, isolation seems to be a factor in most of my stories, both urban and rural. Perhaps an argument can be made that everyone on PEI -- those from "here" and those from "away" -- have something of the "outsider" in them. In that case I feel justified in wearing the title of "Island Writer" and will continue to do so with pride.  

I dropped my laptop a couple of days ago (I can practically hear the collective gasp).  I was in Charlottetown, taking advantage of the free wi-fi in the Confederation Centre and had been packing the laptop up when it slipped out of my hands ("Oooohhh nooo!" I can hear you cry).  So naturally I took it to The Little Mac Shoppe, the only authorised Apple service centre on PEI.  It looks like I need a new hard drive and I’ll be getting a larger one, which is nice.  It is still uncertain if they will be able to retrieve the info from my old HD.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Although I try to back up my work as often as possible, I never think of backing up my emails or my address book.  I can't really ponder the possibility of losing that stuff at the moment. I'm already a bit freaked out by the whole thing and I'd prefer to try to think positively.

Thankfully I had backed up in early February, so I didn't lose too much work. In fact, I have been preoccupied with setting up readings for myself in Montreal and Toronto, so I haven't really done much work on my novel.  I suppose procrastination has turned out to be a lucky break for me, although, in my defense, I have been obsessive about Googling bookstores, libraries, various media, reading series, colleges and universities and anywhere else I think I might have a shot at reading in public.  As it stands now Fatted Calf Blues will have an official launch in Charlottetown on April 23rd and a Montreal launch at Casa del Popolo in Montreal on May 4th.  My other Montreal gig is at the Visual Arts Centre on May 13th.  So far the only Toronto reading is at the The Press Club on June 3rd, then two readings in Hamilton (where I will also be leading my first workshop, but more on that in an entry-to-come).  I'm still looking for a venue for a Toronto launch.  I'm hoping for the Drake Hotel, although there are other possibilities.  The full list of readings is on my home page and will be updated as dates are confirmed.

The whole process of setting up readings for myself has pushed me to make connections with the literary communities of PEI, Montreal and Toronto.  As much as some writers complain about having to promote themselves, I'm finding this aspect of being published quite useful and interesting.  I tend to think of it as a natural extension of the publishing process, as much as publishing is a natural extension of the creative process.  It is certainly a nice antidote to the hours one spends alone writing (although I like that too).  But in retrospect, I see the dropping of my laptop as a kind of punctuation to that process of self-promotion.  A full stop.  And something of a wake-up call.

At first I felt cut off at the knees (and still do to some extent), but now I realize this is my opportunity to get back to the novel.  While my computer is in the shop I am using Thelma's iBook.  Of course she has been very good about letting me use it whenever I need to, but I am very aware of using somebody else's machine.  It is a weird, tentative feeling and it will be interesting to see how it might affect my writing.  Sometimes I wonder if I should switch to longhand (I've tried that before), but it has now hit me where I live (so to speak) how much my laptop has become an extension of myself.  What once felt like a luxury -- being able to move paragraphs around, researching on the Internet, etc  --  is truly an integral part of my creative self.

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.

Here we are at the end of the first full week at the beginning of 2009.  I have to say it's been a sluggish start, but then again that's how it is every new year.  In fact, for me the new year doesn't really start until March when the first stirrings of spring make themselves felt.  April will be particularly auspicious for me because that is when my first book of stories, Fatted Calf Blues, will be released by Turnstone Press.

These days I have been struggling to return to my novel (I was at it great guns last October and November, then hit a bit of a wall in December) while trying to make some preparations to promote Fatted Calf Blues (researching writers' festivals and other potential gigs).  I did manage to set a date for my book launch, which will be at the Confederation Centre Library in Charlottetown on April 23rd at 7:00 pm.  But on the whole I feel like I've been spinning my wheels.

Then imagine my surprise when I discovered (thanks to my wife, Thelma, who keeps me apprised of these things) that Fatted Calf Blues can now be pre-ordered (for a substantial discount) at Amazon.ca and Chapters.Indigo.ca.

Spinning wheels or not, I guess this thing is starting to roll.  CHEERS!

Well, the year is almost up. And not a moment too soon.  There are a lot of things I could write about for my last entry of 2008, but I think all those subjects have probably been covered already.  So I'm going to make a personal request.   

I recently entered a One-Page Screenplay Contest and became one of ten finalists.  All ten screenplays were given live readings and the videos of these readings have now been posted on-line.  The screenplay that gets the most votes will be made into a short film.

So please have a look at the reading for my screenplay, The Dim Sum of Its Parts, and vote for it, thus making my cinematic dreams come true.

Other than that, party safely this new year's eve and all the best in 2009.

My publisher, Turnstone Press, sent me the cover for my upcoming book of stories, Fatted Calf Blues, to get my opinion. I have to admit I loved it on first sight. It was not what I had expected, which was definitely part of its appeal. In fact, earlier on I had been asked if I had any suggestions for a cover image. My initial idea was a cow skull, like a Georgia O'Keefe painting,  which, paired with my title, appealed to my dark sense of humour. 

But the image that my publisher chose - a chrome exhaust pipe jutting up from an eighteen-wheeler - is a fitting one. The title story takes place at a truck stop in Manitoba and some of the characters are truckers. The whole sense of life reflected in the chrome exhaust pipe that the photo depicts seems apt. It is a striking image that I think will garner some attention. Whether it actually helps sell the book is another matter.

I buy books mostly from the remainder bin in the larger chain stores or at second-hand shops. I usually buy them based on the author - either someone I have read before and enjoyed or have read about and am curious to find out more. Or I buy them based on the title, from having read a review or recommended by a friend. But it is rare that I have ever bought a book based on the cover design. It may very well have happened, but my memory is either failing or too embarrassed to provide an example. 

Which isn't to say that I am immune to the allure of a good cover design or haven't been influenced by one. That was more the case when I used to buy record albums back in the day. And to a lesser degree CDs, later on in the day. Album art has since been lauded for its own aesthetic worth, but it has also been immortalized as being intrinsically connected to the music inside. When you think of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band  you immediately envision that immortal history of pop culture collage on the front as well as the kaleidoscopic music inside. Unzipping the blue jeans on the front of the Sticky Fingers  jacket (revealing a pair of tighty whiteys inside) is as much a part of the music listening experience as hearing Keith Richards' opening chords to Brown Sugar.

Maybe it was the size of the record album that made the cover art so appealing. CDs don't really do the trick for me. Perhaps that is why the cover for a book, while important, will never reach the status of art in itself. Who remembers the cover for the first edition of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz  or Under The Volcano? And even if you do, chances are the copy you buy today will not feature the same cover design. This is especially true if the book has been made into a hit film. Then the cover will feature whatever image helped sell the film. The book then becomes, in a way, subservient to another medium. A way of saying, "If you liked the movie you just might like this lesser facsimile of typed words on a page." 

But I'm one to talk. I've already written a screenplay of Fatted Calf Blues. And if it actually gets made into a film I may just see my original concept of a cow skull on the poster. And, God willing, maybe even on the cover of a future edition of the book. 

These days I am waist deep in editing the stories for my fiction collection, Fatted Calf Blues, which will be published by Turnstone Press in 2009. I had heard that this could be a seemingly endless process. I have also been told that some editors have a knack for helping you take your manuscript to another level. I'd have to say that both of these statements are true in my current experience. My editor at Turnstone is Wayne Tefs, who has written a number of books himself. I don't know how common that is in publishing houses, to have a published author as an editor. Possibly it is more common in the smaller independent presses. But so far it is working out for me. 

Wayne's initial notes to me were marginal and had mostly to do with verbal tics, which are words or phrases that keep cropping up in my writing. Most writers have verbal tics of some sort. For example, I tend to often use the words "just" and "practically." I use them just in the normal course of writing, as I would when speaking, practically  without thinking about it. The process of weeding these out of my prose can be tedious, but having to scrutinize my work in so menial a fashion allowed me to discover other verbal tics that Wayne had not mentioned. It also gave me the opportunity to reassess and address story problems. I was surprised by how many changes I made through my own observations. The result is a new-found confidence in myself as a writer.  

But this whole editorial process is far from over.  Right now I'm taking a break from round 2. When I am done with Wayne, I will be working with Sharon Caseburg in copy editing, which deals with style and the look of the text. For instance, I tend to use North American spelling such as "organize" instead of "organise", which is the British spelling. But Turnstone's style is to use British spelling, so I will be combing the stories once more to rectify that problem.  During this whole process I have been using the tracking device in Microsoft Word, which I had no idea about before. Sharon has been very helpful (and patient) in explaining how to use it. Now that I have the hang of it I can see how it can benefit the early stages of working on a story. 

By the way, Sharon is also a poet. I believe everyone involved with running Turnstone are also writers. One thing she asked me to think about is questions for book clubs. I had no idea what she was talking about, since I have never belonged to a book club. But she showed me examples on the Turnstone web site. Basically they are questions used to incite discussions. Apparently having questions by the author is helpful when selling packages of a book to libraries or schools. I was stymied at first, but once I started thinking up one question I couldn't stop and ended up staying up all one night. The interesting thing about coming up with these questions is it makes you look at your work differently. You have to think about it more objectively, as if it is somebody else's work. And then you begin to see patterns emerge regarding themes, settings, characters, etc. I found it most illuminating.     

I'm happy to say that everyone at Turnstone Press, not only Wayne and Sharon, but Managing Editor, Todd Besant, and Associate Publisher, Jamis Paulson, have been encouraging and supportive. It's been a terrific experience so far.