I meant to do a comprehensive round up of news before February, but I never got around to it. This is because I’m disorganized. In my weaker moments, I allow people to believe I am disorganized because I’m a creative person and creativity and mess go together like left and right hands. I am, in fact, disorganized because I don’t care to be organized, because my life it pretty fun and pretty safe and if I miss an appointment, at worse I feel bad because I’ve put someone out, and I owe fourty bucks to the doctor (or whomever). Anyway, I wanted to put together a little essay about the direction I’m heading with my writing, what sort of books you should expect from me in the future, and where projects are at this moment. Unfortunately, projects never seem to start or wind up, they just sort of leak from one day to the next until they’ve been going on for months. Still, one has to pick a time to talk about them and now is as good a chance as any.
Someone once told me the first three days of the new year reveal how the first three months of the year will go. I’m pleased to say they appear to have been wrong. I am not, in fact, suffering a bilious stomach and a post-vomit taste in my mouth from too much drink the month before. Nor am I scrambling for cash like I usually am (that, I have no doubt, will change). In fact, the first two months of the year have been very good. I’ve been writing a lot, and that’s good because I like writing a lot.
Tenth Man came out in December, but only at the very end, and it’s had a profound impact on the way the year has gone for me. When it came out, it hit Prizm’s top ten list right away, and was ranked sixteenth in its category on Amazon, which was well beyond my expectations. I owe you all a very profound thank-you, and I’d like to remind everyone that feedback on the book, anonymous or signed, positive or negative, is welcome. It’s my first book, and I aim to learn from it.
We were in the interior of BC for Christmas, a trip which was relaxing and pleasant and long overdue. We returned to the coast, minus our luggage (because that’s the way of wintertime air travel), and I got to work almost at once. I spent almost all of January working on Field Guide, which is still in it’s infancy and needs not only another draft and at least another thousand words to turn from incoherent textual diarrhea into something resembling a novel. I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything from it. It’s really better for all of us if I don’t.
January seeped into February and I was still, to my chagrin and perhaps even irritation, still working on Field Guide. I had told Adam, “I’m going to write this book next week” and hadn’t exactly expected next week to stretch out for quite so long. There was nothing to be done. I found myself unable to hurry it up. The book took it’s time.
In the end, it turns out that I did two or three weeks more work on that manuscript than I have done on any other manuscript before. I suspect the reason for this is that I have stopped needing to get a novel out when I can manage to scrounge up time and money enough to have a seven-day span away from work. The job I have is pretty secure, very flexible, and pays me enough that I can work part time and not have to hustle to make rent. All of a sudden, I don’t need to focus so much on pushing the novel out and I can start to take pleasure in the words and the cadence and all that stuff. This is magic. I had heard, in English classes and from professional authors, that selecting words for nuance was a behavior common to writers, but I hadn’t witnessed it and consequently, didn’t really believe it. Now I do.
From Field Guide, I was introduced to my new editor, Kara, and we went right into the edits for Handbook. The manuscript I turned in this time must have been considerably cleaner than the last one, because there have hardly been any edits of substance. Where the third or fourth round of the edits to Tenth Man was so red it looked like dyslexic fourth grader’s Mandarin homework, the only edits of substance to Handbook have been tricky non-English words. I found myself, for the first time, being asked to consider the use of words that were completely beyond the scope of my understanding. That, of course, means nothing, so I’ll give an example.
One of my characters is the head of his family. He is called, by his subordinates and in polite conversation, by his last name, Hitori. His family are also Hitori. And his two sons, in some circumstances, are Hitori as well. I had been differentiating Hirtori the elder by calling him Hitori Senior, because this is a pulp noir book and it made me think of Mickey Spilane. Kara pointed out that it’s an awfully western thing to say, and she’s right. We agreed on calling him Hitori-chichi (“Papa Hitori”). But that’s irreverent and there’s no way his subordinates at work would call him that. Well, then, they could call him Hitori-sama, which would be considerably more polite. Except I have seen vitriolic and thundering ran leveled at anyone bold enough to use the title -sama in an English work. Usually accusations of being wapanese and “a weaboo” follow, along with general disdain. Obviously, this is not a title that’s going to work if it’s met with such hostility. So were were back to Hirtori, Hitori-chichi, the elder Hitori and the Hitori family. As the proofer said, “I don’t get this, and I don’t think other people will either.” Fair enough.
We’ve given Hitori senior a first name and we’re using it, in defiance of convention, and I’m keeping -chichi. I know I’m bringing the fury of snobs down upon me. There’s nothing I can do but brace myself in the cellar and hope it holds when the storm hits. The fact is, I am a huge Asianophile and admitting that and using -chichi will undoubtedly attract the most bizarre contempt from people who like Asian culture but are afraid to be seen as too into it. Incidentally, I’m also a massive Anglophile, but about this no one has ever said a word. No one troubles themselves if I call a character in a book Lord Grayson, even though it’s about as absurd as Hitori-chichi, considering I’m a Canadian and, being post colonial colonists, we don’t hold much with lords. Regardless, Lord Grayson will run under the radar, but I know I am going to find myself thighbone deep in vitriol for Hitori-chichi. Never mind the fact that I’m no more English than I am Asian. Never mind that on the west coast, Canadian culture is heavy on Japanese and Chinese influence and a not so much on the British.
So those edits, while they’re not big, are taking a lot of time. They’re ongoing and I expect to have them sorted out for the Ides of March. In the mean time, I’m working hard to not go have a look at Field Guide. I would like to get started on those revisions, but they’re going to be considerable and really should wait a while because Bamboo is now active.
I wrote Bamboo a long time ago and I was surprised when I got an offer for it, partly because I couldn’t really remember it, and partly because I no longer care much for the writing. When I wrote it, I wrote it as a joke. I wrote it in stories, fast, one weekly, over a Christmas break that was mostly devoted to eating Sarah’s home made English toffee and watching old samurai movies. Then I rewrote it as a novel. Then I rewrote it again and sent it off. When the offer was made for it, I had a look at the text. The first thing I thought was, Oh well, I never like writing beginnings (I don’t. I find them desperately difficult because I have so much to say and no time to say it in). The next thing I thought was, Oh no. The writing is terrible all the way through.
A while ago, I emailed Shawn at Prizm. I wrote something to the effect of Tenth Man had been a big learning experience for me and wanted the opportunity to rewrite Handbook, which was on Shawn’s desk at the time. Shawn wrote back, “Of course you can. And never feel ashamed to ask to make something better.”
Knowing, as I do, that editors are all looking for the book, and hoping, as I habitually do, that Deena at Drollerie might be both as patient as she is kind, I emailed her a request to do rewrites. When I got the OK, I booked time off work. I wrote for four days solid, (Maybe five. It’s quite hard to be sure.) then I went back to work for two days, then hit the book again for another two. It’s beautiful now. It is the very best writing I can do at this point, and I am very, very proud of it.
It was a marathon to rewrite, though. I believe I may still be exhausted. My arms have not yet recovered, but they’re improving. I don’t know when those edits are coming in, but certainly not until March. That means I have, oh, five days where I can clean house, bake break, have long baths and do my physio exercises like I promised my therapist I would.
It also means I have a little time to look forward in my schedule to my travel plans. I’ll be going to Cranbrook to talk at Mount Baker Sr Secondary, my high school, to talk to the writing class. I can’t tell you how profoundly frightening this is to me. I have no ability to understand teenagers, mostly because when I was one, I was busy trying not to be one and I never really got the feel of it. It could be worse. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been asked to broker a Middle East peace deal. Still, my heart does a little flop every time I think about it.
And then there will be Keycon, which should be great fun, and a chance to stay in a hotel room in a strange city and make all kinds of assumptions about Winnipeg based on what I can see from my window and how far away the airport is. I do love making snap judgments. I still haven’t heard anything more about Keycon, except that Kelly Armstrong will be attending. She’s going to think I’m stalking her. She was very nice to me last time we met, at VCon, but I suspect she’ll find me more creepy and less endearingly hopeless this time. I have an amazing ability to run into the same person again and again. For a while I thought Michael Jackson and the Queen were both following me, but that’s a whole other post.
I’d very much like to be able to have two books with my name on them in my luggage when I got to Keycon. That’s the lovely thing about small presses – when one starts getting emails from one’s proofer, it’s close to publication time. I promise I’ll post cover art and more as I know about it, and as more events crop up, I’ll post about them here. Till then, I’ll keep up the small posts, which, I know, are poorly thought out and tend to get repetitious, but I’m addicted to blogging now so I’m afraid you’re stuck with them.
