I still get interviewed about Twitter. It’s an odd thing, really, I mean most days Twitter feels like it’s on the outs, but then some big news thing happens, and where do you get your news? That’s right. Twitter. At least I do. (The image above is from someone’s Twitter stream and it’s the best thing I saw that day but has since stopped being the best thing I saw because it’s no longer “that day” but still…I’m not pregnant.) Anyhow, the Q&A is pretty good. And when I say pretty good I mean I don’t sound like an ass. My bar is set low. Like real low.
And it feels awesome (literally – the matte finish is silky). It’s odd to hold your own book and to not have read it. But the French version of Waiting for the Man will be published next month (it launches this week) and I’m kind of thrilled by it. Mostly because as a Quebecois the idea of the translation, and that it was translated locally (as opposed to France) was, and is, important. Les Editions Marchand De Feuilles is a lovely, smart, fiercely independent local publisher. And the translation, by Daniel Grenier (who is a crazy good writer to begin with), is amazing, at least the parts I’ve read. So this book is mine and it’s not mine. The team behind a translation is different, wider, perhaps more anonymous. But the result, one hopes, is the same: more readers, new readers, another conversation, a new dialogue.
The paperback version of Waiting for the Man is out now. Or will be soon, depending on where you live. If this interests you, walk to your local bookstore and buy it. If they don’t have one, ask them to order it for you. Or, of course, you can purchase it online.
Sure, it feels odd in this day to have a paperback version of a book published 18 months after the original, or published at all, and I hope this version does find an audience that the hardcover or the e-version or the audio version (oh, there’s that as well) didn’t find. There’s something almost quaint to the idea, but in the end it’s just another product, now new and improved, with a new cover (also by the great Michel Vrana), a fancy Giller longlist logo, a Q&A with me, some thoughts on stuff that inspired me to write (or inspired me while writing), and questions, for book clubs, I guess, but perhaps just to get you going on your own thoughts about the story, though surely you don’t need something to ask the questions for you; you’re smart enough on your own. You got through my book! Someone should buy you a drink. And respect your space. And not ask so many questions.
You write a book. A while later it is published. A lot of other books are published at the same time. You do some publicity. You travel and read for strangers. You appear in some media. Strangers talk about your book in places you have never been. And then it stops. Your book is on all the shelves it is going to be on, in all the libraries it’s going to be in, the world has moved on, because there are more books to stock, more books to buy, more to read, always more. And that’s fine with you, because you have another book to write. Because there is no cure for writing, you just do it, you don’t think about why, and so the old book becomes, quite literally, “old,” perhaps not forgotten, but of the past.
I remember reading from Waiting for the Man once and thinking “I’m never going to read from this thing again.” I hope that’s true. The last two times I’ve read in public have been from my first draft of the next thing.
This past week, a reminder that your past is there, always, stuck to you, like a shadow. First, a box of this:
That’s the paperback of Waiting for the Man. It comes with something called “BackLit” – so a discussion guide, a Q&A (with me), a list of the things that “inspired” me to write (both pre and during). The book is now available as a hardcover, in e- versions, as an audiobook, and now in paper.
And then, a day later, I received this pdf:
That’s the French version of the book, out this October, published by a great little publishing house in Montréal Les Editions Marchands de feuilles. The translation is by Daniel Grenier (who has a book of his own coming out soon as well). All in one week.
Here’s a zoom in on the cover:
So this book, something I’ve long now seen in my rearview mirror, is back. It still lives. Like the old dudeGilgamesh finds at the end of his travels. The original pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Do we create things to attain immortality? Is that what art is? Or “art”? Or Art? Are we so different from those cave dwellers from thousands of years ago? Or do we just need to create in order to prove something? To be consumed. That we’re delicious. That we exist. That we’re alive. Or were. (Until you consumed us, you monsters.)
A taco is a rental. Delicious, sure, but a rental nonetheless. Fleeting. Sometimes more fleeting than other times.
So. The first draft. It’s percolated. Enough. I’ve left it alone for a few weeks now. Almost a month. I have ideas. I really do.
I have cuts to make. Lots of them. I have things to add. New things. Surprises. More things. Less things. Red things. Blue things. Starred things. Stuff.
I’m surprised by, overall, how ok I am with where the story ends up. The journey isn’t necessarily satisfactory, but the end kind of works. At least I still think so.
No one has seen it. I was asked if I’d started showing it and I said no, and the thought of someone seeing it, in this state, was a bit revolting. I think I tasted metal.
But I have read passages in public. Twice. And I didn’t die.
I never show a first draft of anything. Second draft, yes. Not first.
I recently wrote about that time the Habs won the Stanley Cup (it used to happen on a fairly regular basis!) and I was in Saskatchewan on my way to Banff but the piece was really about The Smiths and The Queen is Dead and what that song did to me and does to me still.
What else? I have parted ways with my agent. My old agent, the one who placed Waiting for the Man, retired and I was handed over to a new one and well, the writer-agent relationship should be worth more than that. I think my first novel was my (old) agents’ last. Life is a flat circle, to paraphrase Rust Cohl, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Steve Perry and Lynard Skynard and just about everyone else….seriously, who hasn’t said that life/time is a flat circle/the wheel of life, yadda yadda yadda? It’s like a tautology or something.
So, yes, I’m agent-free and looking for an agent. There are leads. They want to see what I’m working on, but I’m not showing it to anyone yet because it’s not ready. The wheel of life, man. Flat. Like soda that’s been left out way too long. Or beer. Rust would have preferred beer.
Well, no. At least they’re renewable. I believe this paper is certified or something. It’s “good” and not old growth. I can only imagine what the “carbon footprint” of my laptop is. And my iPhone. And iPad. And TV.
At least I don’t own a car.
More photos of the physical nature of my first draft. I’m about to start on my second. Consider this procrastination. Actually, all of my online musings are “procrastination.” Or “release.” Or, perhaps, “sanity.”
And then the end of the first part happens and you remember it’s the easy part and now the hard work begins. Because it is hard. Very much so. But a milestone is a milestone. It deserves to be acknowledged. If only because the work changes now, shifts gears, the work comes from a different place inside, even though the real end feels far away, still, because the road is dark and full of mystery, and if I don’t watch myself I’ll end up writing about Red Riding Hood being a metaphor for writing and that’s stupid because we all know it’s a metaphor for puberty and that’s stupid because really it’s about the innate male fear of female sexuality.
A few years back, well maybe 18 months back, so somewhere in that netherworld between a few “months” and a few “years” back, a video-journalist (I know! What a world!) from LaPresse+ (the iPad version of Montreal’s LaPresse) did a story on me. One of the major weaknesses of LaPresse+ (and perhaps its only one at that, this is a very smart, very well thoughts out – and very well backed – play in media that acknowledges that paywalls suck) is that you can’t share stuff so easily. Irony, yes. So I’ve never posted the movie. Now here’s a low res version. Posted by the journalist in question, Maxime Bélisle. Enjoy.
We’re sharing stuff. Lots of stuff. My last book was partly about this (and that last book is out in paperback this summer – preorder now! And if you don’t like reading, you can get it as an audiobook too!). Not completely but more than one review talked about the “age of oversharing” or something like that (and a lot of people have, just link here, here and here). As an aside, you know that we are on the cusp of the Oversharing Backlash, I’m going to call it this from now on, because every action has a reaction, right? Whatever. It’s called social media because you’re supposed to be social. If your idea of being social is trolling people non-stop you have big problems. When I was growing up, those people were said to be “acting out” and usually getting their asses kicked in the school yard. Usually they came from bad homes and/or situations and were dealing with their issues by, um, acting out. Now, these people can troll folk all over the internet without ever getting out of their ratty pyjamas.
I’m not here to write about trolling. I’m here to say I’ve gone way beyond 100k words in the first draft of the new book. I’m not a counter but that’s maybe me talking about the past me because I’m noticing now, and I’ve been keeping track. Of my word count. A few years ago I would never have done this. But we evolve, you know? And evolution doesn’t mean a straight line.
It’s not the same word as progress. It never was. It just means change. It means something is different from before. And a first draft is just that, a first draft. It might suck (and it usually does) but then you build on it until it stops sucking. It’s your first attempt at telling the story that’s inside of you. One hopes that you get some good stuff out, but a first draft is not a guarantee of quality, it is just you throwing up all that crap inside of you and sorry for that image.
All of this to say, there are places one could see what I’m doing. If one chose to do so. Like if you have a list of the 100 things you want to do and you get them done, amazingly, and then you wonder what’s next…
On my Facebook author page, you can track my progress by pages. This doesn’t mean much. It just means I’ve typed and this is how much I typed on a given day.
Over on ello, I am pasting some passages from the first draft. Apparently ello is still a thing and not just acting up.
And every once in a while, I turn on Periscope while I’m writing because. Just because. (I have no clue why, in other words).
I have no timetable for the future here. Well, that’s not true. But there’s a lot that has to happen before this book is finished. Some of it is out of my control. I’m just going to work on this thing until I think it’s finished. Or at least ready to unleash on the world.
I believe I’m three quarters of the way through the first draft of my new novel. If I’m following the outline (which has become more like a well-thought out list of well-thought out suggestions rather than an actual set of, you know, instructions that I’m supposed to heed), then I’m three quarters of the way through the first draft and the temptation now is to not think too hard about what I want to do or fix and just get through the first draft and then think about editing. A first draft is about bleeding. Editing is about stanching the wound; cleaning up the blood.
I have been posting some drops of blood on ello. I mean, no one’s going to see it, right? Then I posted a Meerkat (can we stop for a second and think about the idiocy of social media nomenclature for just a second? Twitter still sounds stupid. When I hear a journalist on television talk about a “tweet” I don’t laugh, not anymore, but I cringe just a little bit). Anyhow, here’s a screenshot from the Meerkat session. It was of me typing. That’s it.
Fun, no? (And let’s just stop here and acknowledge how great it is that “horny guys” are already looking for other “horny guys” on Meerkat. Sex is like water: it gets everywhere and it gets there first.) And, yes, it would appear that I am “watching” myself on Meerkat but to be honest, the tab was open on my laptop. I wasn’t watching myself. I was typing away. Really.
What else? I’m leading a workshop in Montreal next Saturday about social media and writing. I’ve been asked to judge a microfiction contest (though at 500 words, they are pushing the limits of the term “micro”). The poster’s nice:
I went to southern California with the family and recharged. I spotted my book at the great Skylight Books in LA. We hung out in Joshua Tree and I drank a lot of cocktails by a pool in Palm Springs. We drank in the sun more than anything. After a winter that has tested the patience of the most winter-hardened among us, that warm SoCal sun was something else. I mean, sure, the entire Southwest is suffering through a drought and all and might run out of water at some point (or not), but HUMANS DON’T PLAN AHEAD. (I also note that none of the water apocalypse stories in the media point out that maybe the Southwest has too many people – I keep reading about how water intensive almonds are but there are a lot of people living in a desert and at some point that’s going to catch up to you especially if the new normal for weather is less rain and less now for the mountains….and, let’s face it, the real problem is that all the overpopulation folk have uglywebsites and you don’t win the PR war with stuff that looks like garbage…)
And now it feels like the homestretch for the first draft of this thing. It’s big, even though, in the end, it’s really a portrait of a family. I described it to a friend (over Twitter!) as being about “a family and about change. And boogers. And art. And self worth. And cheap figurines. And mid century modern furniture. And old industrial chimneys. And gentrification. And dicks. And venture capitalists. And meatloaf. And bikinis.” It’s probably the best description I have for it so far. I imagine that’s what I’m going to have to tell the agents on my next agent search. Because, yes, I’m going to search for an agent again (though, to be fair, some contacted me immediately after the Giller longlist announcement but I don’t have one because I don’t really have anything to show, not just yet). Because my previous agent retired. So I think my next agent is going to have to be young. Or at least not ready to retire just yet. And awesome.
And finally, Waiting for the Man is coming out in paperback (there’s also an audiobook version now – here’s a preview). I think the cover’s kind of sweet if you ask me. It’s out later this year, in August.
