Start Again

Since 1994 I have been trying to publish books. Many different books. Any book? No. A good book. A book that explains what I feel to be true in the world. A good read. A compelling story. Something that will make people laugh, think, cry, stay up really late at night eating something fattening.

When Arsenal Pulp Press, in a moment of delusional weakness, said yes to Carry Tiger to Mountain a year and a half ago, it was a dream come true. I thought, this is it! Easy street, here I come! Don’t mistake me, I didn’t think I’d actually make money. I’m not so naive as to believe that a writer of the application of ancient Taoist proverbs to modern business and activism would actually pocket much of a pay-check. But I had hoped it might be a foot in the door in the publishing industry. I do, after-all, have a dozen or more book ideas on paper and in my head.

As William Faulkner once said (we have similar troubles), he could paper his walls with rejection letters. Me too. If you could use emails to do the deed. I long ago stopped saving the PFO letters. Now I'm amassing a pretty impressive file of no-thank-you's for Blackwater.

What is the moral of this sad tale? Keep on. Start again. Back on the horse, etc.

So today I start the next round with Blackwater. Unsuspecting literary agents, publishers, be warned.

Sigh. They said no. As a small publisher, they had a two year backlog of titles. They promised to send some notes about the book, which would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.

So back to square one. I think I'm going to focus on finding an agent now.

I suppose I thought that once I had one book under my belt, the second one would be easier, but not so. I really shouldn't have been surprised. Publishing in Canada is a really tough business, and I'm a really unknown writer. But letting this get me down won't get me any closer to publishing Blackwater, so I'm just going to cowboy up and get busy.

Nothing yet. Friday comes and goes and, not unexpectedly, I don't hear from the publisher. It's a small press I'm courting (the publisher answers the phone himself) so my guess is that they are pretty busy. Monday, maybe? I'm practicing patience, and non-attachment.

Waiting. In late August I submitted the manuscript for Blackwater to a small, Canadian press with a mystery/crime imprint. I asked that they get back to me by the end of September one way or another. After that, I said, I would start shopping the book around to other agents and publishers.

I followed up with them yesterday, and was told that they were giving it serious consideration, and would have an answer by Friday!

I’m trying not to get too invested in the answer. If they say no, there is always another. It took me three years to find a publisher for Carry Tiger to Mountain. More than a dozen if you count back to when I first started pitching book ideas (like a major league hurler warming up, just throwing everything I could get my hands on).

So Friday. Waiting.

Blackwater finished at Hollyhock

A few days ago I finished Blackwater, sitting in the Library at Hollyhock, on Cortes Island. During my six days there I managed to edit from cover to cover the entire manuscript, input all the changes, and give it a once over for formatting and layout. Not the most glamorous part of the writing process, but necessary none the less.

Today I shipped the manuscript off to an agent for a look see. I likely won’t here back until the end of August or September.

While at the Hock, I managed to get to work on the next project.

I had intended on picking up Becoming Sand, a novella that I wrote in 1997 about Pacific Rim, lost love, transitions, and the inter-tidal zone, with the intent of adding another 150 pages to its existing 100. But two things kept me from starting on it: 1) I read what I had written on the plane going to Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and it really, really sucked. Well, most of it really sucked; and 2) what didn’t suck was so hopelessly sad, that I couldn’t face it right now. My intent in writing Becoming Sand was to pen something that felt like Blue Rodeo’s super-sad songs, complete with a lot of pedal-steel guitar. What I got was some really awful writing, with a really sad story buried beneath it.

Well, I just can’t deal with that right now.

So instead, I’m going to continue to focus on Cole Blackwater. He’s a sad dude too, so that makes me happy, and the second book in the Blackwater globally-syndicated series will be a pivotal one in terms of the development of the defining moments of Cole’s life. It’s called the Darkening Archipelago, and is set in the Brighton Archipelago, where clashes between salmon farming, wild salmon fishermen, first nations and activists are creating real world drama that Cole will find himself wading neck deep into. While on retreat at Hollyhock I was able to get 18 chapters outlined, and did a lot of the work to develop the plots and subplots. I’ve got another ten, maybe twelve chapters left to sketch out, and then I can start writing again.

Once again, Hollyhock provided the ideal location for thoughtful reflection on a creative endeavour, and I am forever in their dept for the amazing work that they do. For those who are looking for a place to spend time writing, painting, drawing, or just working through some ideas that need a peaceful backdrop to come to life, consider Hollyhock for your inspiration.

Back to the beach

Life is hard, but I will suffer its indignities in the pursuit of my art.

Yesterday afternoon I bussed it down to Cardboro Bay to sit on the beach at Gyro Park to begin the third (and hopefully final) edit of Blackwater. I arrived around 4:30 pm, the sun still high in its arc across the painfully blue sky. A gentle onshore breeze kept things just cool enough for comfort. I read for a couple of hours, before hoofing it home.

I started this habit when editing Carry Tiger to Mountain last August. Every afternoon for a week or so I sat on the beach for a few hours, reading the manuscript straight through. Reading it in paper form is really the only way to get a feel for the writing in it’s entirely. It has to feel like a book to read like one, I argue.

Now with Blackwater I’ll try to continue that tradition. I’m going to head up to Hollyhock for a few days over the weekend to sit and read, edit, to think about, and sketch out the sequel to Blackwater.

Life is good.

Over the weekend, Cole Blackwater emerged more fully into the light.

Cole is the reluctant protagonist of a work in progress, simply titled Blackwater. This book, in the works for a couple of years, but really the subject of my writing since Carry Tiger to Mountain was released at the end of April, is a environmental murder mystery.

Cole took one more step closer to publication as Kathleen – my partner and editor – completed her first full review of the manuscript. I’ve now incorporated all of her feedback into my draft of the book, and will give it a final review before presenting it to a literary agent in the coming weeks.

The book now stands at 409 pages in length, with 119,000 words.

I feel really good about it. I like the pacing, and the characters are developing nicely. Some, as Kat has pointed out, are a little one-dimensional, so some work remains there. And I need to dress up some of the writing in places where it remains flat. But in general I feel strongly that Blackwater is a solid book. I only hope those in the publishing industry feel the same.

But beyond anything else, I feel like this book has deepened my passion for writing. It has been so much fun to pen this mystery, and to weave in the work that I have done for the last 18 years.

So now what? Well, print the novel, and read it cover to cover.

And then, start on the second Blackwater mystery, tentatively called The Darkening Archipelago. I have five or six more ideas for stories in my head, which adds up to months and months and months of more delicious writing.

Mock Orange

My writing shed is under the spreading branches of a Mock Orange tree. It stands a solid dozen feet tall, and its branches spread as wide. When our home was purchased in March of last year, we had no idea what this dense, just then leafing shrub was. In early June the first flowers began to appear, in ones and twos, and by mid month, the tree was festooned with flowers beyond counting. They perfumed the air, not ostentatiously, but with grace. Subtly. Delicately.

On late spring evenings that aroma wafts into our bedroom window, dousing my sleeping family with its fine scent. It is mildly intoxicating. It sends me reeling. I am very sensitive to fragrance.
The place where I write and work is an eight by twelve foot shed. The previous owners of our home used it for storage. It was rough. A plywood floor, battered drywall and gaudy florescent overhead lights. There were business cards for ammo and gun shops thumb tacked to the walls. But at least it was wired, and it was structurally sound. In February I gutted it. It took the better part of a week to find space for all of the stuff that was stored in it. Then I pulled down the ceiling, tore out all but two of the ceiling spanners, and patched or replaced the drywall. My friend Martin put in a new window. The old one was three feet long and a foot or so high. Really just a portal. The new one is five feet across and four feet high and offers a picture perfect view at the Gary Oaks and poorly kept lawn in the front yard.

A new pine ceiling, new wiring, heat, new lighting, telephone and internet lines (which involved Martin spending more time than he would have liked under my house), paint (Tibet blue and a light/blue grey contrast wall and trim) and carpet. By April I was able to move in.

The Mock Orange reaches out over the roof. The walkway from the house to Tumblehome – my name for my little space, taken from canoeing lore – is littered with mock orange petals. With the approach of July, the blossoms are fading. Another year slips from my grasp. It’s like trying to catch the falling petals. By August the petals will have vanished, and the Mock Orange will have no fragrance at all.

But tonight, as I work my way through another round of edits on Blackwater, a delicious, cool breeze assuring a fine sleep later, my writing space is scented with the Mock Orange blossom. It’s very fine to be alive in this trees embrace.

Blackwater passed another milestone today. I finished the first round of edits on the manuscript! This included filling in a couple of gaps – chapters that I had skipped over while writing the original text – as well as making sure things were reasonably consistent throughout. You know, character names, places, time lines. Turns out I had three different names for the dude who gets killed, and that just wouldn’t do.

This was as enjoyable as I expected it would be, and I feel really good about this book. I like the characters and think the plot is good. But most of all, I’ve really enjoyed the process! It’s been a joy to write. While Carry Tiger to Mountain was a necessary book, it was hard. It was a good sort of hard, the kind of hard that makes you a better person, blaa blaa blaa. But the writing was intellectual and emotional and at times, gut wrenching.

Blackwater, on the contrary, as been easy. The characters took on lives of their own. Their dialog with each other came easily. Additions that I made to the plot suggested themselves.

The book stands at a solid 425 pages, and 125,000 words long. During this editing process I added almost 15,000 words, which included writing the better part of chapters six and seven from scratch. It’s in these chapters that Cole Blackwater meets the man who eventually gets killed. In the first go round – which predated this recent spasm of writing – I had a hard time figuring out who this character was. I mean, he gets his head mashed in, so what did it matter? But of course, it mattered a lot, because every suspect had to have a motive based on his personality and actions. But last week while working on this on the ferry, coming back from doing a reading of CTTM, this character just let himself out of my head, and onto the page. Nice. The way it should be.

I got to add a lot of prose in this round, some of it pretty darn purple. Cole of course is motivated by nature, and so I had to have him pondering the fate of the ill-fated Cardinal Divide in order to give his motivation some depth.

And unexpectedly, I found a layer of mystery about Cole’s past that I hadn’t really developed in the first round of writing that I think makes the book so much more tense.

I short, I loved writing this book.

So now what? Well, I’m incorporating a round of revisions from my editor extraordinaire, and then I need to find Blackwater a home. Stay tuned.

This morning I finished the first draft of Blackwater.

Since launching Carry Tiger to Mountain on April 27th, I’ve found new energy and enthusiasm for writing. I might also be the season, the dark days of winter have passed and spring is in full bloom. Whatever the case, I’ve been up almost every morning at 5am to write for two or three hours before starting my “day job” consulting. The result has been amazing. Since April 27th (about one month) I’ve written 17 chapters, 75,000 words and 278 pages. My one day record was over the May 24th long weekend, when on Sunday I wrote 31 pages and almost 8,000 words. Previously I had written the first 6 chapters. Only the prologue and first chapter are anywhere near polished. I’ve really been just writing as quickly as possible (because I'm a romantic, I call this puking the words onto the page) and not worrying about how good the writing is, or if things are even spelt correctly.

Blackwater has a long history. The protagonist, Cole Blackwater, emerged from a name some friends of mine in Utah gave to me a long time ago – Glint Longshadow. This was the name that my friends from Tex’s Riverways gave me after fetching my friends and I at the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers post a 21 day canoe trip on the Green River. I guess I had the thousand mile stare going or something.

Cole emerged during a trip Kathleen and my older son Rio took to Costa Rica two and a half years ago. During our time on the Caribbean Coast, I sat and read five mystery novels in a short order, drank a lot of beer, and started kicking around the idea of Blackwater. I sketched the characters in my head first, and then, on the long flight back to Canada, I wrote biographical sketches of each character, and the premise of the mystery.

A few months later I pinched my sciatic nerve, and this forced me to abandon a ten day backpacking trip on day four. Kat and Rio were in Winnipeg, so I drove to the Columbia Valley and hung out with my friend Mark Holmes (who illustrated Carry Tiger to Mountain) and wrote the outline for this novel. It took about four or five days of writing 6 or 7 hours a day to get the 35 page outline done, but doing this has made this current burst of writing possible. Without this outline I’d be always wondering if I was getting the plot right. With it, all I’ve had to do is refer to it once or twice a day, and just write.

Now, the real fun begins! Starting tomorrow I’m going to dive into the second draft, polishing the writing (checking the spelling…sigh) and adjusting times, dates, names, plot lines to ensure they are consistent. My goal is to have this phase done by the end of June so that I can print a draft for review by my editor extortionate (Kat) in early July.

Follow more updates here.