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.

Substantive form, The Back Story Part 2

While The Cardinal Divide had taken shape in a few days late in 2003, it was several years before it found any substantive form. During the winter of 2004 I managed to pen the first six chapters of the book, but I lost my momentum and the book languished for a while. I didn’t stop writing, I just stopped typing. I do a lot of “writing” in my head, playing with the characters and mapping out story ideas while I’m running or walking in the mountains.

An injury in the summer of 2004 was a boon for the book. I pinched my sciatic nerve (playing with Lego with my nephew) and had to bail halfway through a 250-kilometre backpacking trip. I swallowed a fist full of Advil, found a bottle of gin in the freezer, and drove to the Columbia Valley to hide out at my friend Mark Holmes’ place. I used the remaining six days of my down time to write an outline of the entire book.

Which then sat untouched for more than a year and a half.

In April 2006 my first book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: the Tao of Activism and Leadership, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press. The year previous was consumed with the writing, editing, and marketing of that work, so Cole Blackwater was again put on the backburner. When Carry Tiger was set loose on the unsuspecting public, I found new energy for Cole Blackwater. In just over a month I penned 17 chapters, 75,000 words, and 278 pages. My one-day record was over the May long weekend, when on Sunday I wrote 31 pages and almost 8,000 words. Many, many tea bags were sacrificed to accomplish this feat.

I like writing first drafts, but to me this is a mechanical process. The detailed chapter outline written at Mark Holmes’ place two years before made the first draft easy to compose. With a detailed outline, the first draft is just a process of adding the filler to the plot. Much good narrative emerges and the general gist of the story forms, and from time to time I experience the pure bliss of creativity. But it’s the second draft where I find the real magic of writing. Here I can concentrate on the subtleties of character development and add prose to landscape descriptions. The second draft is my favourite part of the writing process. It’s the next seven or eight drafts I could do without….

The Back Story to Cole Blackwater, Part 1

The Cardinal Divide was born of too much beer and not enough sun during a two-week vacation in Costa Rica in 2003. It was November and it rained nearly every day I was there. The lawn surrounding my tiny cabina became a shin-deep lake and red ants by the thousands invaded the airy hut, giving me something to do with my vacation time. Between bouts of fruitless struggle to prevent the formicidae invasion and mopping up after storm surges, I sat on the deck, drank cervaza Imperial, and read half a dozen damp and worn paperback mystery novels bought or traded from local vendors.

It wasn’t my first foray into the mystery genre. Tony Hillerman’s Skinwalkers was a gift from my colleagues at Grand Canyon National Park in 1994, and I read it on the inhumanly long journey home from the southwest that spring. For years I associated long cross-continental plane trips with Tony Hillerman books: stories just long enough to get me from Calgary to Toronto or back. My friend Paul Novitski gave me a Nevada Barr mystery in 2001, and I read a bunch of her excellent Anna Pigeon mysteries that year as well. I love James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series. But on the Costa Rica trip, I read The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Saunders and became hooked on the genre.

I started to think about what I might have to contribute to the mass of murder mysteries crowding the shelves of used bookstores. I’ve been writing since 1988, seriously trying to get published since 1993 or so. I always imagined myself as a composer of literary essays on the relationship between people and nature, or the writer of a desperately sad, tragic work of fiction in which the protagonist reveals something core to the nature of the human condition before succumbing to a broken heart.

While I didn’t see myself penning a mystery about a mine, I have been trying to stop mines from being dug in beautiful wilderness areas for the last twenty years. In 2003 the effort to stop the Cheviot Coal Mine from being dug on the northern side of the Cardinal Divide, just east of Jasper National Park, was one of the most important environmental challenges in Alberta. I had first become involved in this fight in 1995 when, as a freshman member of the Board of Directors of the Alberta Wilderness Association, I heard Ben Gadd and Dianne Pachal talk about the new plans for the mine. The Cardinal Divide had been much on my mind since I had first walked along its gently sloping, sinuous summit some years back.

Sitting on the porch of my cabina in Costa Rica in 2003, knocking back Imperials, I started to piece some thoughts together: Could I find a way to tell a story about a cherished, beautiful place in a way that might appeal to someone other than an armchair activist or closet environmentalist? Could I do it so that the novel didn’t simply rant against coal mining, but actually told a good story?

I remember something my friend and fellow writer Greer Chesher once told me when I worked for her at Grand Canyon National Park: “You have to have a plot.” Fiction can’t simply be a new, shiny vessel in which to carry around my polemic. As an activist, I’m always searching for new ways to interest the public in an important issue. As a writer, I’m always looking for a new story to tell while delivering a poignant message.

As I sat there, watching the Caribbean Sea, I let the issue, the landscape, and the story slowly congeal in my head.

The flight back was long and, late at night on the silent plane, I sat with a tiny notebook and jotted down the names of the characters: Cole Blackwater, Nancy Webber, Dale van Stempvort, Mike Barnes…. I wrote down the events of the fictional opening crime, and then I crafted the story around the truth that would make the book a mystery. By the time I had defrosted my aging Toyota pickup at the Calgary airport at 2 am, The Cardinal Divide filled two dozen pages in my little notebook. It would occupy my mind, and keep my fingers moving, for the next five years.

Next: Cole takes substantive form

Your ideas wanted

Got creative juice? I’m looking for new ideas on how to get books into the hands of readers. I want The Cardinal Divide to be a commercial success, but know that the odds are stacked against it. It’s Canada, after-all. That being said, there are so many new ways to put literature, and social change motivated literature, in the hands of the masses, that I’m brimming with optimism. I’d like your ideas, please, gentle reader. What thoughts do you have on how to publicize The Cardinal Divide? New ideas? Old ideas with a new twist? Please fire them my way. I’m going to send a few free copies of the book to those who provide the best ideas, so make sure you include your email address.

Four Days Early

I got word this morning that The Cardinal Divide will go to press today (Tuesday, August 26), a full four days ahead of schedule! A testament to the diligence of small but feisty NeWest Press, and the fine staff they employ. It’s pretty exciting to know that the book is now out of my hands. It’s also a little terrifying. There are no take-backs once the book is printed. You live with the mistakes. So in a month or so and Cole Blackwater will be lurking around book store shelves, and I'll get to live with the consequences. No matter: as Edward Abbey and the British Foreign Service both said: Never apologize, never explain....

Character Flaws

On Sunday afternoon I had tea with Don and Mildred Kerr. Don is the nice man who as a volunteer board member and editor for NeWest Press called me back in November and left word that The Cardinal Divide would be published. We had never met face to face, so I was thrilled to make tea and serve Jenn’s mom’s famous peanut butter cookies.

We talked about stories. Don is a lover of plays and theatre, history and poetry and the author of some fifteen books. He’s also a founder of NeWest Press. Mildred is a retired social worker who has collected stories one person at a time over her forty years working with people in need of assistance.

No surprise, our conversation circled around to The Cardinal Divide and the second book in the series, The Darkening Archipelago, which Mildred had just read in manuscript form. I mentioned to Don that I’m working on a historical mystery series where the protagonist, a North West Mounted Police officer, suffers from a gun-shot inflicted disability. Don said, “of course he’s disabled. Just like Cole Blackwater.”

Cole is of reasonably able body, but Don quickly pointed out his predilection for fighting and of course, I instantly took his meaning. Cole is injured. We just can’t see it as readily as we might in Durrant Wallace, the one-legged Mounted Policeman.

It’s the flaws in these characters that make them interesting. John Cardinal, in Giles Blunt’s excellent four-book series stole mob money from the lock-up to pay for his daughter’s collage education. Dave Robicheaux in James Lee Burke’s books is a recovering alcoholic who makes a habit of mashing in people’s faces as he bulldozes through New Iberia, Louisiana. Edward X. Delaney in Lawrence Saunder’s The First Deadly Sin finds himself torn between tracking down a serial killer and watching his wife slowly die in the hospital. These challenges, these flaws, these all-too-human challenges make the protagonists interesting. And so long as we as writers don’t trip over the fine line between fascinating and offensive, readers of mystery series tend to pick up the book as much for the characters as the plot.

The reason I recently read Ian Rankin’s Exit Music had nothing to do with the mystery that DI John Rubus had to puzzle out, and everything to do with my curiosity about how Rubus would actually exit the series.

Cole has his flaws. Some are predicable. He drinks. A boxer, he’d rather punch his way out of a corner than get backed into one. He’s a passionate, but somewhat incompetent father. His business is going south, fast. And he’s got dark secrets. Why did he have to leave Ottawa after having such a promising career? And what happened on the family ranch in the Porcupine Hills when he stopped there to visit his parents on his way west?

It was fascinating to sit and talk with Don and Mildred about Cole as if he was a somewhat annoying acquaintance that we can’t quite figure out, but who we always aggravate too at a party. As if he were actually human.

My hope is that the plot of The Cardinal Divide will carry the book, but that Cole will lodge in reader’s imaginations. My hope is that readers will find Cole Blackwater interesting enough that they would want to hoist a jar with him at the Cambie Hotel. My hope is they’ll like him just enough to buy the book, and read the second instalment in the series to find more about what makes Cole human.

Lost: The real Cardinal Divide

Pulling together some back of the book material for the publication of The Cardinal Divide, I was recollecting that when I was introduced to that landscape in 1995 by Ben Gadd and Dianne Pachal, various factions were conspiring to dig a twenty-two kilometre long open-pit mine along the north side of the Divide, back toward Jasper National Park. I went there on an Alberta Wilderness Association field trip and fell in love with the sensuous curve or the earth, and for many years afterwards, lobbied for its protection. I even recall sitting with then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans David Anderson, pleading the Cardinal Divide’s case, but to no avail. When powerful forces are bent on the destruction of a place for profit, citizens groups and the wild creatures that inhabit our wildlands are easily overlooked.

So it has been with the real Cardinal Divide. While the Divide itself is protected from development in the Whitehorse Wildland Provincial Park, the area immediately to the north and west of that hight of land is not. In the novel, Cole sits on the crest of the Divide and looks north and west to where the real world ghost town of Mountain Park is located at muses about its uncertain future. In the real world, news from the folks monitoring the mining operations is that this region has recently been destroyed by road building and open pit mining for the real Cheviot mining operations. Five open pits are planned by Elk River Coal for the region, with two already complete. Massive road building operations have been underway for several years.

This view, from the crest of the Cardinal Divide, is just a memory now.

What ever purpose the novel The Cardinal Divide serves, it won’t stop Elk River Coal from mining in the Mountain Park region, and defiling the supurb view from this rare and precious landmark.

Dating

Word came down last week regarding publication dates for The Cardinal Divide. The book will go to the printer on September 1^st, and should be available at bookstores shortly after October 1^st.

NeWest is toying with an official launch around the middle of October. Release events in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary and Canmore are in the works. Check back in a few weeks for details!

I won’t say that this is overwhelming. It’s not. I passed overwhelming on the road to publication of this book a long way back. But it does feel extraordinary. This book has been five years in the making. As the date of release draws closer, it’s all beginning to feel less ephemeral. It’s starting to feel real.

Cover Stories

The Cardinal Divide now has a cover.

The cover has a story.

Someone who doesn’t know anything about selling books once said that “you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Tell that to the millions of people who buy books every year. Stroll through a book store and let your eye wander over your favorite sections. What attracts your eye? What makes you want to pick a book up off the shelf? The title? The name of a favorite author? A name you recognize from a radio or TV interview? But as likely as not, the cover design will attract your eye.

The cover of a book says a lot about what’s inside. The cover reflects the mood of the book. It reflects the genre. It reflects the tone of the book.

The first cover design for the Cardinal Divide left me feeling disappointed. The title and my name were both in the current vertical arrangement, but the size and font left them nearly impossible to read. The colour was pretty drab, and there was no blood red image. I feared that possible readers would not be able to discern what the book’s title was, let alone pick it up off the shelf to read the back cover.

I love working with the book’s publisher NeWest Press, and didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, but I also really want the Cardinal Divide to sell well, and want to be proudly able to promote the book myself, something I just couldn’t do if I didn't like the cover. I asked Julian Hall and Jason Meyers for help, and got some great ideas.

But this really became clear when Jenn and I were on the ferry last week, sailing back from being in Alberta to Victoria. We sat in the bookshop and just let our eyes range over the books. Jenn asked, "what attracts you?" We made a list. I provided some feedback to NeWest based on this.

Because they are a great little press, NeWest took this feedback seriously, and sat down to redesign the cover. The end result is much more striking. Still vertical, too reflect the idea of a “cardinal divide”, the new colour and starkness of the blood red landscape really speaks to the tone of the story.

I’m going to be very proud to promote this book.

The Cardinal Divide

A quick update on the publication of The Cardinal Divide. We've settled on this as a title, first. And second, the publicaiton date is November of 2008, which is great, great news! NeWest has been great to work with, speeding along the publication process. Its likely that future posts will be about early marketing and readings!