when books disappear

I've been thinking about the strange luck and wonderful luck Bone and Bread seems to be having in terms of coverage leading up to its release, and I want to try and get done some of the thoughts that have been swirling around over the past couple of weeks.  Since I'm about to leave for the airport to head to Toronto for the launch, now seems as good a time to post this as any!

Part of what enables the kind of fearlessness and lack of self-consciousness necessary to writing is the ability to forget that anybody is ever going to read it.  It also helps with keeping expectations low, which I think is important for the writing life.  But some of the coverage and general interest from people I know is forcing me to swerve out of this admittedly somewhat delusional course of thinking.  And it brings me to some unnerving destinations...  

Already spotted in the wild... (Indigo in Montreal)

Will anyone actually like it?  Will people's expectations be so high that they're bound to be disappointed?  This is a completely immobilizing type of thinking to have while writing, and one that I would say is not generally recommended.  But now that the novel is making its way out into the world, and there is absolutely no way to change anything at all, I'm occasionally seized with stomach-churning bouts of uncertainty.  Why didn't I think about what people like reading?  What if it's too /sad/complicated/political/emotional? Why didn't I write something else...something funny, or about a man??  Or a dog or a war or or or or......

Then I breathe and remember there's nothing I can do.  Some people -- people whose opinions I value deeply -- have read it and liked it.  Not everyone will like it, and that's okay.  Even if almost nobody likes it, it isn't even the end of the world as long as I can keep writing.  (I suppose whether I can keep publishing is a somewhat different matter, but one that it is probably equally unproductive to consider.)

So many books are released every season, and all of those books represent years of work and sacrifice on the part of the writer, and additional careful work and effort on behalf of the editor and the publisher. Most of them have already achieved certain standards of excellence.  I don't know what the acceptance rate is at literary publishers, but I would be surprised if it were very different from that of literary magazines, which often hover around 1-2% of work submitted.  So most of what makes it out into the world in the form of a book has already been vetted again and again, by people whose lives revolve around literature.  People who know what they're doing.  And there are so many excellent books/movies/tv shows/articles/responsibilities competing for our attention.  It kind of feels like a special kind of magic any time a book makes it through the maelstrom of the daily media barrage and the craziness of everyday life and finds its way into the hands of a reader.  Any time I meet somebody I don't already know who has read my short-story collection, it feels like nothing short of a miracle.  And I'm grateful.

People compare books to children all the time, and although I know there are lots of obvious reasons why it isn't a perfect analogy, there's still something to it.  All the books on the marketplace are special to somebody, there are good reasons for buying and reading all of them.  They're all different and unique and contain a world of their own...but chances are that most of them won't stick around forever, or even for very long.  Most books go out of print sooner or later.  Some get released, receive excellent reviews, then disappear.  Some get released, receive almost no reviews, then disappear even faster.

All of this is to say that I'm grateful for this chance that Bone and Bread seems to have.  I hope it finds its readers.

See some of you tonight!
xo

My novel has a face! Well, two, actually...

Since it’s now up on both the Anansi website as well as on Amazon,  I think I’m allowed to share it:

The cover for my novel!

I can’t tell you who designed it (because I don’t know), but I think they’ve done a lovely job.  I worried, at first, that it doesn’t look very literary as a title, but it’s what’s inside that will have to carry that weight, anyway. 

I’ve always claimed to prefer covers without faces on them because I feel that they overdetermine things somehow, but these faces – well, these faces are pretty amazing.  They don’t look exactly how I imagined the sisters Beena and Sadhana Singh in the novel, but it’s pretty close, especially their expressions and the complex way they’re looking at each other.  If readers end up picturing them this way, that’s just fine.  And don’t you find that even when there’s a close-up photo or a drawing on the front of the book, characters always take on a life of their own inside your head, anyway?   I know exactly what Sara Crewe, Harry Potter, Esther Summerson, Fanny Price, and Emily Starr really look like…outside of illustrations, film or television adaptations….or I feel like I do!

It’s pretty surreal to see something you’ve invented start to take a physical shape in the world.  And eerie, too, to think of all the hours and hours (and years and years) I’ve spent working on it distilled into a single image that people will see (if I’m lucky) in the 11 seconds it apparently takes to make them decide whether or not to pick it up in the bookstore. 

Following the White Rabbit

I have a story out in the current issue of dANDelion magazine. I'm proud to be in this great magazine, especially this issue which also features the artwork and writing of astounding (and highly prolific) friend GMB Chomichuk.

The story that appears in the journal has an interesting origin in that it the bastard offspring of another story, which I will call Story X. I suppose it's not unusual for one story to emerge out of another abandoned one, although I haven't tended to do much reworking in this way. If something isn't working, I'm usually happy to just leave it aside. But Story X is an unusual case -- a White Rabbit of an idea that I kept chasing with no real idea of where it would lead.

Inspired one day by the strangeness of seeing an Esperanto recruiting table set up in the lobby of the university building I worked in, I started reading more about the language with the idea of writing a story. I've always had a soft spot for Esperanto as my high school Latin teacher had a peculiar contempt for it. Somewhere in all this reading, I stumbled on the fact that Esperanto was declared the official language of an interesting and short-lived micronation named Rose Island. Rose Island had declared its sovereignty through the production of a number of stamps, and I was determined to work some of this material into a story.

I had a couple of isolated sentences related to this idea tucked into a notebook for months, and while I was at the Banff Writing Studio, I decided to finally cash it in and dash out a draft. Story X was a narrative about a love triangle involving a girl named Maude, who meets an Esperanto enthusiast named Jericho (at the above-mentioned info table). Maude, however, is unenthusiastically engaged to a young man named Paul with casually racist parents. Full of trivia about Esperanto, including all my favourite bits about Rose Island, and the story was pretty scattered. I was lucky enough to have two of the mentor writers read it (it was fairly short, after all), and Mentor S had a lot of useful things to say at the sentence level, but she found some plausibility issues with the whole Jericho-Maude storyline. She also didn't find much of interest in the Rose Island details.

Mentor G had an amazingly thorough ("eviscerating" might be the right word here) take on Story X which made me slightly embarrassed to have shown it to him, but gratified at the same time to have a brief taste of his considerable and instructive editing skills. We had a conversation about the story in which he admitted (conceded?) that the Rose Island stuff might be interesting, but dryly suggested that if I wanted to use the material somehow, it might work better as a "short film." (Um, harsh! Ha.)

Rose Island stamps with Esperanto text.

Everything S and G told me was right, however, and the Rose Island material was definitely not properly integrated in Story X. Jericho was too weird, and I had awkwardly squeezed in a description of a couple of stamp albums. Later that summer, though, I hit on the idea of actually writing a story about a stamp store, which would give me the perfect excuse to talk about the micronation and the Rose Island stamps at greater length. (The Esperanto aspect I left by the wayside.) Although only tangentially about the stamp store, it turned into one of the long stories in my collection, and my favourite among all of them, if only because it was such fun to write. (Maybe because it was so long in the making, the story basically wrote itself, very quickly.)

The Maude-Paul storyline of Story X I expanded into its own story, which I think I submitted to a journal that gave it a gentle rejection. And the Jericho-Esperanto part of Story X evolved into "No Word for It," the story in dANDelion.

So, though Story X wasn't a great hit, it was a super little dry-run/seedling for three other stories, two of which are now published in some form. A White Rabbit chase that multiplied ideas like rabbits!

how to become a (published) writer

When I decided to start a public blog, I spent some time thinking about what its focus should be, and I have to admit it wasn't initially obvious to me that it would end up being (at the very least tangentially) about writing. Generally, I've tended to blog mostly only about cleaning my apartment, and other things that fill me with an unwarrantedly large sense of accomplishment.

But lately I've fielded a couple of questions from friends and family about how to go about getting published, so I thought I would share my recent response to a friend of a friend asking on behalf of her friend's (!) father:

Q: "Do you mind my asking how you went about getting your book published? A friend's father might be interested in publishing something, but they're not sure where to start. I know we could just google it, but I was wondering if you'd be willing to share your story."

A: What kind of thing is your friend's father interested in publishing? All I can really talk about is my experience with Canadian literary fiction (rather than mass-market fiction or non-fiction). Generally, it goes something like this:

1) Send stories to literary journals (places like the Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, the Dalhousie Review).

2) Once you have some sort of publishing record, you can query publishers with a sample of your manuscript. Big publishing houses (Random House, Penguin, etc.) do not usually accept unsolicited submissions (i.e. sans agent), so you would basically be writing to small literary presses (like Goose Lane, Coach House, etc).

3) If they want to see more, they'll tell you..and at that point, you send it!

You could also skip step 1, but it will help with grant applications and building credibility with editors and agents. Also, in step 2, you could also query literary agents to try and represent your manuscript. If you have a novel (rather than a short-story collection or poetry, which most agents will not represent), this might be a good choice. Also, the time in between sending stuff and hearing back from people is usually a minimum of 2 months and anywhere up to 8 months or longer...so you need to be patient. But please keep in mind I'm not an expert on any of this! It's all based on hearsay and my own limited experience.

Hope this helps!