Shortlisted: Banff Mountain Book Awards

The Cardinal Divide: A Cole Blackwater Mystery has been shortlisted for The Canadian Rockies Award in the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival. The award is presented annually to the best book about the Canadian Rockies entered in the Mountain Book Festival. The Mountain Book Festival is held at the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture November 5^th and 6^th.

To be nominated for this award, at the Banff Mountain Book Festival means a lot to me.

I went to the very first Mountain Book Festival, when it was still the poor cousin of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. That was 16 years ago: I was living in Lake Louise at the time, penning columns on mountain life and the mountain environment for the local newspapers, and dreaming that someday I might have a book to display at the nominations table.

I met Chic Scott at that Book Festival that first year, and we began what was a short-lived tradition of a cup of tea or coffee together to talk about climbing, skiing and writing. It’s been ten years since I sat down with Chic to talk shop; he’s nominated for the same award this year – as are friends John Marriott and Graeme Pole – so I hope maybe we can all meet to share stories about writing, photography and the mountains we love.

The landscape is the protagonist in The Cardinal Divide. The craggy ridge of the Divide itself is always there, as the soon to be deceased mine manager notes in the prologue of the book: “He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide’s jagged back. In his minds’ eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his life of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.”

(A very real place: The Cardinal Divide)

And while the book is a murder mystery, it’s about very real issues and a very real place; issues that for more than a decade as an activist in Alberta I struggled with, and that for 30 years have been vexing many people across North America: How do we protect a place that we love from the overwhelming forces of single-minded progress? How do we bridge such a cardinal divide within our communities, when one group of people look back to short term exploitation to prosper while others look forward to sustainable solutions, back lack the means to implement them?

The Cardinal Divide doesn’t answer these questions, but set among the murder mystery is the story of a community’s connection to a powerful place. In asking the question we’re one step closer to an answer.

It’s a great honor to be nominated for this award.

Final Cover

First, a hearty thank-you to all of those who voted for a cover for the forthcoming Cole Blackwater mystery The Darkening Archipelago. It was clear that the first option resonated with reviewers, so we opted to use this image of troubled waters and misty, foreboding islets. I also received a lot of feedback that the vertical orientation of the text simply didn’t work. Too hard to look at on the shelf, you said. I appreciated this advice, and passed it on to the talented team at NeWest Press, and they redesigned the cover with your comments in mind.

My thanks also to Alexandra Morton, friend and wild salmon advocate, who provided a few dozen amazing images of the setting for this book, the troubled Broughton Archipelago along British Columbia’s wild and convoluted coast.

The Darkening Archipelago is a murder mystery with a serious theme: the story is a race to keep both human souls and wild ecosystems from falling into unending darkness. I believe that the cover represents this well.

So here is the cover of The Darkening Archipelago. I’m very pleased with it, and I’m excited that in the next couple of days I’ll take a final look at the books edited text before returning it to NeWest for design, layout and printing. The book will be available early in the New Year! Of course, feedback is always welcome.

Stay tuned for more updates. You can read a synopsis of this the second book in the Cole Blackwater environmental mystery series by clicking here.

Pick a cover for the Darkening Archipelago

Two weeks ago I submitted the final draft of the Darkening Archipelago’s manuscript to NeWest Press for publication. The Darkening Archipelago is the second book in the Cole Blackwater Mystery series and is set in BC’s rugged Broughton Archipelago. Cole Blackwater and Nancy Webber are back, and are attempting to unravel the mystery of a first nation’s activist gone missing while investigating a virulent strain of sea lice that threatens to devastate wild salmon stocks in BC. A full synopsis can be read here.

NeWest has provided me with some possible cover options. The design for The Darkening Archipelago is similar to that of The Cardinal Divide (see below); but instead of a stylized image we’re going to use one of a few beautiful photographs provided by my friend and colleague Alex Morton. I’d like your feedback on the cover, and to know which cover option you think best suits the book.

Recall that the general tone of this second book is very dark, both for the protagonist Cole Blackwater, and for the entire ecosystem along BC’s coast, where salmon are the life blood and are threatened by salmon farming with a precipitous demise. Please use the poll on the right hand side of the page to mark your preference, and the comments section at the bottom of the page to elaborate or make further suggestions on the cover of the book.

The Darkening Archipelago is scheduled for release in early 2010.

(Cover One)

(Cover Two)

(Cover Three)

(The Cardinal Divide cover, for comparative sake)

Synopsis of the Darkening Archipelago

The Darkening Archipelago is the second book in the Cole Blackwater Mystery Series. Set amid the convoluted knot of islands known as the Broughton Archipelago, on British Columbia’s jagged mid-coast, the novel joins the often heated debate over salmon farming and the demise of wild salmon stocks.

Eight months after a harrowing brush with death in Oracle, Alberta in series’ first book The Cardinal Divide, Cole returns to his dark and sometimes violent life in Vancouver. While Cole and newspaper reporter Nancy Webber were able to unravel the primary mystery surrounding the brutal murder of Mike Barnes, the manger of the coal mine destined to destroy the fabulous Cardinal Divide, greater mysteries remain. For Cole, the dark secret that surrounds his father’s untimely death in the family barn while Cole was visiting for the first time in twenty years drives him further and further into his seething rage. For Nancy Webber, who unwillingly finds that long forgotten feelings for Cole rise to the surface again, getting to the bottom of Cole’s family history becomes both a professional and personal obsession.

Now Cole has learned that his good friend and former client Archie Ravenwing has gone missing and is presumed drowned in a storm in the Broughton Archipelago, where he was a salmon fisherman and elder in the tiny First Nations community of Port Lostcoast. Cole flies to Port Lostcoast for a traditional potlatch to celebrate Archie’s life, and soon learns that his friend was unraveling a troubling mystery surrounding an outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of sea lice. These tiny parasites are a direct result of massive salmon farming operations in the Broughton Archipelago, and the strain that Archie had discovered could spell the end of wild salmon along this wild stretch of BC coastline.

Cole and others in the community of Port Lostcoast begin to wonder if Archie really was swept overboard in a spring storm, or if his death may in fact be linked to his troubling discovery. In a community rife with suspects who wanted Archie out of the way of “progress” Cole must face his own dark demons while confronting the mystery of his friend’s untimely demise.

In the end it’s a race against time: to save an innocent whose own knowledge of the mystery of the Broughton Archipelago puts her in mortal danger; to unravel the secrets that Cole holds locked in his heart about the night of this father’s violent death; and to save the wild salmon who are like an electric current bringing life to an entire ecosystem. The Darkening Archipelago is a race to keep both human souls and wild ecosystems from falling into unending darkness.

Writing the End of the Book

I had lunch with a friend in Toronto recently. He’s a literary agent. He’s one of the best in the business, and represents more than 350 of Canada’s brightest lights in literature, theatre, art and culture. I was there on other business, but we did have a few minutes to chat about my own writing career, and the news he delivered brought no cheer to my bookish heart.

According to my friend, book sales are down about 40% across Canada. This is part of a trend that pre-dates our current economic slump, and therefore will likely not respond when the economy starts its languid recovery.

It seems that I’m writing at the end of the age of books.

For those on tenterhooks for me to cut-to-the-chase (a rarity) here it is: I love writing books, and want to keep doing it. So how, in the age of Twitter and Facebook and Kindle and E-Readers, can an upstart like myself make money crafting stories more than 140 characters in length? Jump to the end of this posting to add your comments.

For the rest of you:

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my Dharma – my purpose in life – is to write. I’ve been scribbling most of my life. When I was a teenager I used to slip out the back door in the middle of the night and perch under a street lamp and write the most ghastly, angst ridden poetry. I’ve penned stories for my collage newspaper and for The Globe and Mail; sold more than one hundred and fifty stories to dozens magazines and papers and had two books published; all the while trying to hold down other meaningful work to afford luxuries such as a mortgage, child support and premium beer.

So this news sucks. At least, it seems to.

And I’m trying to figure out what to do. I think a lot of writers are.

I’ve always said that the writing part of being a writer is easy. I’ve never had much trouble getting the words out. I’ve never experienced writers block. I have often suffered from a scarcity of time to write, and more often from a lack of focus or discipline, but my challenge hasn’t been writing: my challenge has been to make a living writing. The last time I tried was in the mid nineteen nineties and it was slim pickings’ around the Legault household, let me tell you (domestic beer….).

Making a portion of my living as a writer is important to me. It’s a symbol that my writing has value to others; it’s a symbol that people are reading my writing and that they are willing to support my writing with their hard earned pay. Earning at least part of my income as a writer will allow me to keep writing for some time to come.

There’s a lot to be said for the notion that I should just keep writing regardless of who wants to pay for it. If it’s my purpose to write, then I should let nothing stop me. There’s also something to be said that the need to be read has a good deal to do with my ego. While both arguments are true, I’m exercising my basic human right to ignore them.

I’m not a big trend spotter. I still have a pair of “dad-jeans” in my closet. But here are the trends that I see in writing and publishing: first, books are being replaced by digital media. E-books are a part of that, but blogs, citizen journalism, and all manner of social networking sites are providing content where professional writers, journalists and novelists once plied their trade.

Secondly: online, content still seems to be king, but it seems to be getting shorter and shorter.

I recently signed up for Twitter, which until a couple of weeks ago I thought would make me look like a complete twit. I have a hard time taking anything on which one tweets very seriously. But there it is. I have three followers, and I’m pretty sure they are just a “pity” group; you know, the people who choose to follow me because I picked them as the people I wanted to follow.

One friend suggested that Twitter was like Facebook, but with less crap, and shorter postings. To me, Twitter seems like a microcosm of what is happening to content, and I’m trying to figure out how I can compress what I’m trying to say with my life into 140 character Tweets. (For example, last week I sent the manuscript for my next novel – The Darkening Archipelago – to my publisher. At 610, 654 characters (110,000 words) I would have to post 4,362 tweets to convey this books content to the Twitosphere. My three followers might protest. At least their dissent would be brief.)

Digital media contains much promise, and some considerable peril, for writers. I feel like a messenger without a medium.

The digital book market today is where the digital music market was five or ten years ago, but without the promise of Napter to force a solution, though Google might provide the necessary incentive for more publishers to recognize the trend. E-Readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader could be to books what the iPod was to music, but they have yet to catch the imagination and wallet of the general public. The promise is great: who didn’t want one of those crazy reading tablets that Captain Jean Luc Picard had on Star Trek the Next Generation? But Captain Picard didn’t have to tot his around in rainy Vancouver, or worry about running out of power in the middle of a plot twist. He didn’t read in the bathtub much, though that’s unsubstantiated.

And what will happen to Libraries and book stores if books vanish? Will the great books stores of my life go the way of Sam the Record Man?

Then there is the story of the Cushing Academy, a prep-school near Boston, Massachusetts, that is replacing its collection of 20,000 books with 18 Kindles, three giant flat screen computer monitors, and a coffee shop. The headmaster explains that he’s replacing the schools meager collection of books with millions becoming available online.

I just don’t know what to make of that.

My literary agent friend explained that I’m a writer between mediums. Books are dying and digital media has yet to catch hold. We’re struggling how to monetize this new format.

But monetize it we must. As a lifelong environmentalist, I know we can’t keep printing books on paper, even if it is ancient forest friendly. I can’t write environmental murder mysteries on an environment that has been murdered.

And monetize it we must: if anybody but the biggest names in literature are going to keep writing books, then we have to find a way to pay them. If we don’t, we’ll all just be blogging about what we did on the weekend with our kids.

I’ve always imagined myself to be a pretty modern person. A little stogy, but also on the cutting edge. Ok, maybe not. But I want to be. And it looks as if I will have to be, if I’m going to write books for a living. I just don’t know what my books will look like when I finally trick a big publisher into accepting my stories for print.

So I turn to you: tell me what you see as part of the trend in digital publishing: how are writers going to make a living? What is the future of books? What can we do to actually get out in front of this transformation of the written word?

Ups and Downs

I had hoped to be writing a note about the forthcoming publication of the next Cole Blackwater mystery at this time, but it seems that book publishing in Canada has not been exempt from the vagrancies of the global economic flu. My publisher wrote recently to inform me that they are putting off publishing The Darkening Archipelago, the next book in the Cole Blackwater series, until the spring of 2010.

This is a disappointment, and I’ll admit not just because I wanted to see the DA in print. What I want is to see the next book after the DA in print, and soon. I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and waiting for books already written to be published feels somehow constricting.

The simple fact is that writing just about anything creative, from my short essay-like entries on my blog Running Towards Stillness, to penning the Cole Blackwater books and other bits of fiction, is what brings me the most professional happiness and satisfaction. To be able to do this more regularly, without having to shift my attention to so many other professional matters such as fund raising and consulting, I need to actually earn a living at it.

It’s a dilemma that many aspiring writers face.

And so publishing The Cardinal Divide has had its share of ups and downs. People who have read it seem to really enjoy the book. Some of them write me to tell me so, which blows my mind. Connecting with a reader who has enjoyed the book brings tremendous satisfaction.

Doing readings for the book hasn’t. I flew to Saskatoon in the dead of winter to read for four people! There were five in Calgary. Mind you, I enjoyed talking with the people who were in the room, bless their hearts. I would have liked a bigger audience, buying more books is all.

All that said, penning Cole Blackwater stories is very satisfying. And I can promise you three books, though who will publish the third book is yet unknown. I know that takes a little suspense out of the process for you as a reader. Spoiler Alert: Cole doesn’t die at the end of book one or two. But I make no promises after that. The first three books are really written as a trilogy where Cole must not only confront the external challenges of mining, fish farming and urban development, but also the internal battle of fear and anger that threatens to consume him. How that turns out for Cole is part of the mystery.

Enjoy the Cardinal Divide, and know that the Darkening Archipelago is on its way, if delayed a few months. Hopefully the adage is true that good things come to those who wait.

CBC All Points West Interview

Recently I had the chance to do an interview on CBC British Columbia's afternoon drive-time show, All Points West. This was a kick off to Mystery Month. You can hear the interview here (if you have REAL Player) by scrolling down until you see the Cardinal Divide's cover.

Talking about Writing

Since the Cardinal Divide was released I’ve had the opportunity to do two readings, one in Canmore, Alberta on November 13^th, and the second in Calgary on December 17^th. It hardly qualifies as a break-neck pace for a book tour: my style is more opportunistic. Until someone comes along with a publicist and event organizer in tow, I’m going to pick the low hanging fruit.

Neither reading was to a sell-out crowd (Cole hates sell-outs….), but both were fun! I want to thank Joy and her staff at Café Books in Canmore, and Chris and the gang at the Alberta Wilderness Association (who went way beyond the call of duty with the masking tape outline – see below) for hosting the events.

The reading was fun, but as Edward Abbey liked to muse, writers like talking about writing as much (or more) than they like writing itself, and so gabbing with friends and book lovers about the books, the writing process, and what’s next for Cole Blackwater was a great.

In January I’m off to Saskatoon to do a reading, and at some point before the tulips come up I’m going to have to pull something together in Victoria.

(an intimate group at the AWA office in Calgary)

(Chris at the AWA office took the theme of the evening to the limit)

The First Review

My former editor, from the time when I wrote a column for the Canmore Leader, penned a review of the Cardinal Divide for the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Its well worth a read!

Also, please note that the book launch has been moved from Wednesday the 12th to Thursday the 13th of November. Apparently Fortis is shutting down the power on Main Street in Canmore that night to do some work...So we're on for Thursday at 7pm at Cafe Books.

Two Boxes of Books

Walk through a book store as an author and you become humbled. Each shelf is stacked with hundreds of books, each having been crafted over many years – some a lifetime – and finally published and put there for the public to hopefully buy. Walk through a bookstore as an aspiring author and you become humbled, and something more: frustrated? If all of these folks can do it, why not I? Meek? All of these books – hundreds of thousands, if not millions: what difference does one more make?

About ten days ago I received two boxes of books from NeWest. My allotment of ten offered by the publisher, and a score more that I bought with my second advance cheque. I eagerly opened the first box and lifted out a fresh copy of the Cardinal Divide. It was a wonderful experience. The book looks great, feels great, reads great. I couldn’t be happier with the job NeWest has done.

What difference does one more book make? Maybe none. Maybe some. Maybe a whole lot. But to me it matters because all of my adult life I’ve been writing and now for the second time I can take pride in the act of creation of something unique. Of all the things I've done in life to make a living, this beyond all else feels as if its what I am here to do.