I just finished a meeting with Michale Cnudde, the gentleman whose novel I’ve been editing. I’m done editing! I’ve handed the all-important flash drive over to him to approve changes before we start formatting. Then I format it for epublishing while Tristan Tinder does the cover and formats it for print through Island Blue.
On December 4th, I published a collaborative novella that I’d done with my friend Mason on Feedbooks.com under a Creative Commons license. I had no expectations about readership: I thought it’d be really cool if we got a hundred downloads by the end of the year.
It’s a bright, shining new decade. In the past ten years we’ve had an economic collapse, Facebook, and the first lesbian kiss on TV. It’ll be interesting to see what the next ten bring forth.
Today is the first time in 456 years that the Winter Solstice and a lunar eclipse fall on the same day. From about one to two in the morning, all across North America, we can watch the moon fully eclipse.
After adventures with formatting and finding artists and the interesting process of getting on Duotrope, we are live with the first issue of Theory Train! It’s exciting, because it’s the first for-profit venture I’ve helped launch. We started in September, putting the whole thing together. Adam put together our website, Michelle got us listed on Duotrope, and I handled submissions. Meetings by Skype were our primary mode of communication, and it made for very odd one-sided conversations for anyone who happened to be in the same room as us.
I just watched The Social Network, the movie about the founding of Facebook. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the dotcom boom, where the dream was becoming a billionaire overnight by coming up with some clever new idea.
And the heroes of the new millennium are drunken twenty-somethings really handy with code and ideas. I really like this idea, of the transmutation of heroes from the Justice League to their animators and the people who maintain their fansite. Inventing something technological is the easiest way to change the world these days, as evidenced by Gates as much as Zuckerberg.
Wednesday was the launch of issue 8.2 of Island Writer, and it went wonderfully. All of the editorial staff were able to be there and we had a packed room with all the contributors and people there to hear the readings.
As an excellent follow-up to writing about a science fiction future, I read an article today about Russia’s Doomsday device, Perimeter. I was first shocked that they had one – the most familiarity I have with one is watching Dr. Strangelove in high school. But it exists, and it’s active, and it continues to be upgraded to this day.
It probably says a lot about my social group that “how should we end the world?” is not a question that even makes me blink anymore.
Last Wednesday Robert Wiersema came to talk to the Victoria Writers’ Society about writing in the real world and his new book Bedtime Stories. He will be touring the Island and the Gulf Islands for the next eight weeks. His wife will drive, to protect society. In the book, father and son bond over bedtime stories, since father is a big reader – a writer, actually – but the son is dyslexic. Despite the similarities to Wiersema’s own life, he reiterates often that his main character is not him. They may both get up at 4am to get in an hour and a half of writing before facing the day, and both write everything longhand in fountain pen before typing it up, and both have sons the same age. But the character is not him. “Chris is not me. I want to be very clear on these things,” Wiersema says with a smile.
The very funny Wiersema never plans what he’s going to say . . . ever. Which has gotten him in trouble on more than one occasion. He doesn’t specify the occasions, but talks of surreal moments in his career as a writer. “Some days are strange. Some days you stay after work getting your picture taken for the Globe and Mail lying on the floor with the book open on your chest like publishing it has killed you.” He nods at the VWS audience, “some days you give speeches you’re in no way prepared for.”
His topic for the night was “writing in the real world,” so he elaborated on how and why he got into writing. He started by as an English Literature student, commenting that “there are few things more arrogant than a second or third year English Literature student, especially one with creative writing pretensions.” Working in a bookstore was one of the two more important things in his career as a writer – the other being getting together with his wife. Working in a bookstore exposed him to what people actually read, not just what was considered part of the CanLit canon. “That was a great moment for me as a writer, realizing that there was value outside of what was considered normal.”
He then posed the question, “What part of your real life gives birth to the writing?” For him, it’s fear. What kick-started his first novel was he and his wife getting pregnant. He realized that he was going to be a father, and thirty. He was happy, then terrified, then wrote Before I Wake in three months in a white fear of “what’s the worst that can happen?”
As a last point, he said, “If you take nothing else away from this, take this. This is the double underscore point. Write what you know is bullshit. Write out of what you know. If you have a happy marriage, don’t write a happy marriage. Write about someone else’s happy marriage, or about someone’s bad marriage. . . . Give your characters their own tragedies.”
He finished with a reading, then entertained questions he promised to answer entertainingly; a promise he fulfilled. As a writer and reviewer and bookseller, Wiersema has a lot of insight into the local book world.
An interesting note from the question period is how he got his agent; he already had a reputation as an honest reviewer who didn’t pull his punches, and that got his name moderately well known, and known for integrity. That came up particularly glaringly in my notes as I’ve been writing this, as this is the first time I’ve let a speaker know I’ll be writing about them for my blog.
Eileen Young 