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!

Rumours of Publication

News came this weekend that Blackwater, now under the working title "The Cardinal Divide Deception" will finally and at long last be published.

Over a year ago (November 6th, 2006 to be precise) I sent a previous version of the manuscript to NeWest Press. I got a call from one of their editors on Friday, maybe Saturday (he left a message) saying they wanted to publish it.

It took a long time. A long time. The book was conceived in Costa Rica in November of 2004. I remember sketching the characters out in a note book on the flight back between Houston, TX and Calgary, AB. I wrote a few chapters that winter, and then the complete outline the following summer while laid up with a pinched sciatic nerve. I finally got down to writing the whole damned thing after moving to Victoria in 2005. The current version is number 6 - six nearly complete front to back edits or re-writes. And there will be at least one, or maybe two, more before we're through.

After so long, its almost hard to believe this is happening.

When I write these mysteries I feel that I am truly in my element. They are easy to write. They flow. I write the first draft of them in a matter of months. Though there are many things I love to do, writing these books about the scruffy Cole Blackwater is certainly part of my Dharma - what I am meant to do. I don't judge it. Sure, they are mysteries. And yes, each has an important message. What is important is that when I am writing them, it feels more they I am simply the portal through which the stories emerge into this world.

Pushing aside tears, telling the people who are most important in my life that this was happening was a real gift.

If there is a downside, its that its going to take two more years for this book to hit the shelves. That feels impossibly long. But I'll bite my tongue for now and see where this goes, and be grateful that this dream is finally coming to fruition.

The Cardinal Divide Deception

So Blackwater has a new name: the Cardinal Divide Deception. Just too much negative conotation with blackwater - what being murderous thugs who do the US military's dirty work in Iraq and all.

And it has been fully edited and sent off to Cormorant Press for review. Check back in say, 6 or 8 months to see what they have said.

And now there are three

It took much, much longer to pen The Lucky Strike Manifesto than I had expected. Back in January I had set as a goal to use two quiet months from my consulting practice to churn out the next two novels – in very rough draft form – in the Blackwater Mystery series. Darkening Archipelago came together quickly. But then my phone started ringing off the hook, and I took on three new clients, and my writing time shrank to the early morning hours. I started getting up at 4 a.m. as often as I could to make up for the lost time. Then I moved at the beginning of March, and that physical and emotional change also took its toll on my writing time.

All that being said, I finished a very rough draft of The Lucky Strike Manifesto yesterday. It’s a much meatier book than the first two. At 470 pages, and 122,000 words its longer, and the plot is much more complex. As with the first two books, I love the characters, and am excited about the opportunity to talk about some of the important issues of our day without having to beat people over the head with the message. The book deals with poverty and homelessness in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and with mental illness as a strong, important sub-theme.

Now I’m going to do edits on all three books, and continue my effort to connect with a publisher.

Darkening Archipelago takes shape

In a flurry of spastic tapping that surprised even me, I finished the first draft of the Darkening Archipelago on Tuesday morning (February 20, 2007). In 28 days I wrote 310 pages and 90,000 words.

Inspired while revising Blackwater, the first in what I believe will be a series of environmental and social justice murder mysteries, for the Arthur Ellis Best Unpublished Mystery Award, I set a goal of writing first drafts of books two and three in the series by the end of March.

Revising Blackwater involved moving the important chapter where Cole learns of the murder of a leading proponent for the mine he has been hired to stop from a place 1/3 of the way into the novel to the very front. It also involved moving a scene from the prologue to a climatic scene further on the book. Doing this got me really jazzed about the characters and the story, and excited about the next two novels. I strengthened some characters, worked on dialog, and touched up some personalities that were a little rough around the edges. It was great fun!

There was some other forces at play. My other work as a consultant was quiet. There was money enough in the bank to pay the mortgage for a couple of months. And with the turning of the seasons back towards the light (Candlemass occurred half way through the writing of the Darkening Archipelago) I was able to resume my early morning writing. As an author, its important to recognize the conditions that allow for creativity to flow. Seizing those opportunities - even paving the way for them - is critical to the art form.

For the next week I'll be doing a preliminary edit of the Darkening Archipelago, then it will be onto book three, The Lucky Strike Manifesto.