Category Archives: Uncategorized

Congrats to Terry Fallis, author of the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for The Best Laid Plans, and the news that his fifth novel, Poles Apart, rose to #1 on BookManager’s Canadian Bestsellers List as of November 1, 2015. Good on ya, Terry!

ScreenCraft is dedicated to helping screenwriters and filmmakers succeed. It was founded in 2012 as an independent script development consultancy, servicing independent producers and distributors by evaluating and developing projects for production and acquisition.

They’ve been running several contests revolving around short stories and film/TV/short film scripts for a few years now, with rolling deadlines throughout the year, cash awards, and the chance to meet high-profile bigshots in the industry.

Click here to see the 9 categories you can enter, with the Screenplay Fellowship and Short Story Contest now accepting submissions until December 10 and 19, respectively. Any questions for them, click here.

To be, or not to be, that is not the question. For bibliophiles today, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy has become:

To read or not to read, that is the question:

Whether ’tis Nobler in mind to suffer

The Slings and Arrows of an ebook,

Or to take Arms in the comfort of a physical book.

For me, the issue has become deeply personal – and vexing. Although the Huffington Post recently offered 11 Simple Reasons The Print Book Naysayers Are Wrong, it’s a little more complicated than that for authors. You see, as someone who earns royalties on the sale of both versions, I get, on average, approximately 10 percent of the list price from online sales and a figure slightly higher from bookstore sales. With the Kindle version of A Father’s Son, I earn 70 percent of the list price. It logically follows that as a writer, you might reasonably expect me to be a champion of ebooks.

Oddly enough, I’m quite the opposite. I’m an ardent supporter of the physical book no matter how cumbersome it may be to lug around and despite the fact that it’s more expensive to purchase. A world without brick-and-mortar bookstores is like a world without laughter emanating from parks and playgrounds; blooming flowers devoid of any fragrance; Band of Brothers minus Damian Lewis, damn it!

In any event, the long of the bottom line of the short is that reading in any medium is a good thing. Period. Bar none. End of conversation. Book clubs are way sexy. A History of Reading is a fantastic book. Chewing the fat about one’s favourite novels and all-time best characters is a good, good time.

That being said, should you wish to buy the ebook version of my novel, I will NOT – in way, shape or form – hold it against you. Ever. Period.

CBC has some advice to offer you. Actually, 100 people have some suggestions on how to be a better writer through a very cool, very engaging “word cloud.”

As the CBC’s Books page states:

Over the last two years, Canada Writes has collected a whole bunch of wonderful writing tips from Canadian poets, novelists, practitioners of creative nonfiction, and writers of children’s books. So pick a word, find a tip, and try it out!

Click here to check out the innovative new tool and get readin’ (then writin’)!

Plus, for all aspiring and established writers out there, don’t forget to enter the 2016 CBC Short Story Contest in any or all of the following three categories: fiction (1,200-1,500 words), creative nonfiction (1,200-1,500 words) and/or poetry (400-600 words; in verse of prose). You can submit as many entires as you like online ($25 per submission), but the deadline is 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, November 1, 2015.

My good friend and fellow non-curler extraordinaire Karen S. posted a thought-provoking article/diagram from The New York Times that matched current political candidates for the White House with the book which best represents them. Never one to shy away from having fun with books, I thought I’d take up her non-verbalized challenge to do the same with our most recent federal candidates for PM.  (I would have said “political candidates for 24 Sussex Drive,” but it’s now our country’s unofficial ghost house for Halloween.)

So, without further ado, I bring you Canada Reads 2015: The Political Edition.

(In pictorial order)

Stephen Harper: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) meets How to Fail: The Self-Hurt Guide (Aaron Goldfarb)

Tom Mulcair: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette) meets Manifesting Change: It Couldn’t Be Easier (Mike Dooley)

Justin Trudeau: Dude, Where’s My Country? (Michael Moore) meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

[Honourable mention to Budding Prospects: A Pastoral by T. Coraghessan Boyle and The Men’s Hair Book: A Male’s Guide To Hair Care, Hair Styles, Hair Grooming, Hair Products and Rocking It All Without The Baloney by Rogelio Samson]

Gilles Duceppe: What Looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day (Pearl Cleage) meets Why Won’t They Listen To Me? (Dr. Janet Lapp)

Elizabeth May: The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth (Charles Wohlforth) meets Lioness Arising: Wake Up and Change Your World (Lisa Bevere)

Bueller? Bueller? Frye? Frye? (Ed. Note: Was I the only person to say WTF in that scene when, in a big public high school class, there were exactly zero students with a last name between BU and FR?)

In a recent article on the good ol’ Onion’s website, they definitely touched a nerve in yours truly with “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All,” which made me laugh and cry in turns. It may have been a piece of satirical writing, but it hit a little too close to home for many of us bums from the slums who call the trenches of literary warfare home. Or, for that matter, anyone who has given a speech or delivered a lecture to a public audience, only to find that if friends and family don’t qualify as “public” then you have exactly no guests at your event.

Ouch!

For me, I’ll never forget my first book signing in the spring of 2003, an event in which 20-25 of my closest friends and enemies showed up, some with blank cheques, others with dazzling stilettos – and not on their feet. At the end of the evening, a friend who’d been (wo)manning the book sale desk came up to me and said, rather sheepishly, “You sold seven copies of your book tonight. I’m really, really sorry.”

I was able to do the math quite quickly because I am a math rock/superstar (if 20 people were to buy one copy each, then I would have sold how many books?) and then came to the conclusion that my frienemies were inherently evil people.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast. Maybe it’s okay when your worst book signing event is the one in which your closest friends attend. Perhaps it’s fine when nobody but former students show up to your public speaking engagement. And possibly – very possibly – the one in “one is enough” is sufficient when that person is you, you love what you do, and you’re not doing it for any other reason than the purpose at hand. Not for greed or revenge or fame or to score that wicked hot babe sitting in the front row and who is most certainly bedazzled with your good looks, panache and your excellent sense of style, as evidenced by the top-tier palazzo wide-leg rayon gaucho capri pants you’re wearing.

Nope.

You’re doing the event because you believe in yourself, and if those chairs remain empty, screw ’em all. You’re a mobile party of one, not five, and you don’t need no one to make you feel good ’bout what you’re doing. No way, Jose. You don’t even need  a hug to feel better.

‘Cause you got your mom for that when you return home to the basement apartment you rent out from her.

I like this piece by Oakland, California literary agent Andy Ross entitled “My Stern Lecture to a Client” for two reasons. First, it dispels the myth that once you sign with an agent it’s all sunshine and rainbows. It’s not, says Mr. Ross. It’s a still a crapshoot. Hedge your bets and remember his sage wisdom: Once the manuscript goes out to a publisher, hope for the best, but expect the worst. Shit happens. Life can fall apart in the blink of an eye. Fortunes can change for the stupidest reasons. Books get published every day by authors who’ve had a lobotomy and can’t spell their name correctly. Alternatively, books don’t get published every day even though they’re works of art that could electrify entire nations.

Then there’s the money, advances to authors for the publication of the physical and electronic book versions and the optioning of rights for movie purposes. How much will this be? asks the excited author to his or her agent. Who the hell knows? Can you predict the temperature in your city exactly 576 days from now to within a few degrees? As Mr. Ross says to clients about this issue, “I’m an agent, and I don’t have secret alchemical wisdom. I can’t turn lead into gold.”

Maybe he should read The Alchemist? Who knows. Not I, says I.

And there’s no better legend about this whole racket going on in the publishing worlds of New York and London (and Toronto, New Delhi, Sydney and Auckland to a lesser degree) than the story of John Kennedy Toole, author of  the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces and the inspiration behind my own short story, A Novel Idea.

Toole finished his now famous/infamous second novel in 1963. Upon his return to New Orleans from Puerto Rico, where he’d recently been discharged from the U.S. Army, Toole began editing his manuscript. Eventually, however, he gave up on finishing his pièce de résistance as he succumbed more and more to his mental illness. By 1969, Toole would be dead, a 31-year-old English professor who had driven out to the middle of nowhere, stuck a garden hose in his exhaust pipe, and fallen asleep in the driver’s side seat, never to wake up again.

An only child, Toole’s mother Thelma was devastated. It wasn’t until 1972, however, that Thelma Toole found a carbon copy of the final draft of her son’s book and began the excruciating process of trying to get it published. She failed the first time. And the second. And again and again, ad nauseam. For seven straight years she failed. Nobody would listen to her pleas until a college instructor in New Orleans named Walker Percy gave her the time of day. As he later put it:

…the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good

In 1980, Louisiana State University  published a limited print run (500 copies) of John Kennedy Toole’s now-beloved  novel at Walker’s behest. A year later, it would become the third – and most recent – posthumous winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s since been published in 22 languages and is now in its 30th edition.

The lesson here is clear. You may have to kill yourself to get published. You may have to relinquish the idea that you’ll be able to enjoy any material success or emotional fulfillment in this lifetime for the sake of literary posterity. But if you have a dedicated mom who’s got time on her hands, you might just win the Pulitzer.

Hope for the best, expect the worst. Amen.