WELCOME!

Writing is a solitary pursuit--the imagination guiding the hand moving the pen. I'm pretty old-school, valuing the work of good editors and the revisions process before letting my words go public. But life is short, right? And sometimes, just sometimes, we need to spout off.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

tick tick tick...

Forty-five minutes to 2010. Let's hope this is a more peaceful year for everyone. A year of possibilities, open doors, new ideas, overcoming obstacles, figuring out ways of adapting to the world as it's become that work for all. Ah! Utopia. Not. But let's just say I'm hoping everyone out there has something they're looking forward to. Catching the BIG fish. Taking a trip. Taking the plunge, trying out something (good) they've never done before. For everyone in book publishing and print journalism, let's keep an optimistic spirit. People will always need stories and info, right? In the coming months I'm looking forward to seeing my novel Glass Voices coming out in Germany, under the title Glasstimmen. I've just finished another round of revisions on a new novel entitled I Send You a Kiss, and have pressed SEND to my wonderful agent. Here's hoping there's a publisher out there who will be as enthused about a fictional treatment of the life of sculptor Camille Claudel as I have been the past four years. And meanwhile, as we enter the deep freeze of a Maritime winter, also known as the best time of year for writing, I have to figure out how to say "I do" to a new project, my next novel. This craft of ours amounts to obsessive compulsive disorder, but there are worse things we could do. Anyway, here's to a year of doing what we really want to do, of getting down to it, or up to it, and not taking No for an answer!

Happy New Year!

After a feed of Nova Scotia lobster (hope it didn't come from Halifax Harbour) here I sit sipping an Italian red and messing around with technology. Embrace it, right?
In the book world we authors keep being told we have to flog and blog our books and talents and market ourselves or else die in the dinosaur hell/haven of print.
Words are like the starlings that swarm my frozen garden, after the tiny blackened rosehips out there--flocks and flocks of them pecking the ice-spiked grass. Survivors, they are; tough (tougher) than we Canadians. (Why do we live here, again? she asks, after a stroll by the ice-caked Arm in the kind of cold that makes the trees creak.)
Sad news today as yet another indie bookstore went down.
But we writers, like starlings, are an optimistic lot.
So as long as we can keep pulling down words, this is what we do. Joyfully, and with grace (we hope).
Happy 2010 to everyone out there who loves the written word, wherever you may be,