Hope Is The Light of A Smoke-Streaked Sun
Honest, heart-breaking, and beautifully written.
The SiWC Hangover
I’m just back from the Surrey International Writers Conference, known by attendees as SiWC: the best writing conference in the world! And so it is.
Still reeling with the hangover, I feel energized…so electrified with new ideas, I don’t know where to start. Those of you who know me have seen this before when I talk writing. It’s passion courting possibility. Four days away from the cave, mingling with the story tribe and receiving injections of inspiration, tools, solid craft techniques, kindness, and brilliance, can have that effect.
So, this post is a short debrief. As I flip back through my notebook and memories here are a few highlights:
Thursday. Manuscript Critique Class with Jack Whyte. Not only did I discover that I have weak noun-pronoun relationships and miss details (Hallie Ephron confirmed this later in a Blue Pencil) but what’s happening in my head doesn’t always make it to the paper.
Cardinal Rule. Do not confuse the reader.
Fixes. Practice the craft. Hire an editor who doesn’t live in my head with the characters.
Good news: These were first draft pages. There is hope. There is always hope.
Other Rules. Never commit boredom, start with the weather, break the spell, or f*ck with the formatting formula.
Always remember the ideal reader is sitting in “Stygian” blackness and knows nothing. The story must make absolute perfect sense and you must provide all necessary detail.
Thank you Jack Whyte for telling the truth and making us better writers.
Friday. Holy Smokes! I stand up and turn around after the opening keynote and there stands a friend from Ontario that I have not seen in twenty-two years!
Let the magic begin! Lynne Murray, I can’t believe it’s you!
Lynne and I shared some crazy times in the early nineties in Ontario, and both found our way west.
We were writing then and we’re writing now.
Thursday. Query Letters with Nephele Tempest, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, Carly Waters, Kari Sutherland, Gordon Warnock, and Laura Zats. Imagine sitting in a room with agents who tell you exactly what they want in a query and how to create it step-by-step. These very approachable and supportive professionals provided specific information related to attitude, approach, formula, and detail. Where else can you get this kind of information? I took notes. If there’s anything specific you want to know, contact me.
Advice from agent, Dongwon Song: “Ambition is the inciting incident of your career.”
Advice from agent, Laura Zats: Voice is what makes a reader connect and fall in love with your work. Style is Craft (words, cadence, technique) but Voice is Personality.
Friday: Literary Masque. Such fun! These are some of the women from my dinner table. I have no idea what the women at each end of this photograph actually look like.
Saturday. Self-Publishing Virgins with Meg Tilley and kc dyer
Self-publishing is complex and tricksy.
These lovely women shared their personal stories and passion.
Important points. Get your cover professionally created. Pay for a professional editor (both copy and line) and formatter. Make sure your book looks pro.
Saturday. Writing the Body (How to Use Physicality and Sex in Fiction) with Jen Sookfong Lee
Everyone likes a sex scene. Unless it’s bad. Use visual cues so the reader can follow without cocking their head to try and sort what’s where. Limit sex scenes. They can be energy suckers. Use sensory detail, setting, pacing, and break it up;) Lack of sex or yearning for sex can be as intense as an actual connection. Twitter users, follow Jen BLOODFANG Lee @JenSookfongLee
Saturday. Making a Living Indie Publishing with Angela Ackerman, Elena Aitken, Steena Holmes and Eileen Cook
What happens after you write your book? You have to sell it. How? With all the books out there, how do you break out, get visible, and make sales?
This workshop was SO useful. Personal stories plus industry strategies, tips, and resources. Start by clicking the links in this title. They will lead you to fantastic resources offered by four successful Indie authors/publishers. Connect with Angela Ackerman for writing resources. Just wait until you see her thesaurus lineup. Check out Elena’s Indie Romances; Steena Holmes, who offers online writing courses and a free branding course; and writer/freelance editor Eileen Cook.
I came away with a list of websites and percolating ideas…like this:
Join my STREET TEAM. You will get an advanced reading copy of my next book (Hollystone Mystery #3: TO RENDER A RAVEN) in exchange for honest feedback. If you’ve read TO CHARM A KILLER and TO SLEEP WITH STONES, what do you think will happen in Book Three? What would you like to see happen? I’m writing it now, so I’m open to suggestions;) Contact me.
Sunday. How Do They Do That? with Diana Gabaldon. No, this was not a workshop on writing sex scenes. Diana offered techniques for creating clear lyrical writing. Style. And if anyone has style, it’s Outlander creator, Diana Gabaldon.
P.S. Diana does offer an ebook on writing sex scenes: I Give You My Body…How I Write Sex Scenes Just sayin’
Sunday: According to Plan with Eileen Cook and Crystal Stranaghan. These two savvy writers lead us through writing a business plan. I now have a list of SMART goals, and learned that I must invest as much time and effort into marketing my work as I do creating it. Whether you are an Indie author/publisher or have a contract with an agent or trade publisher, you still need a plan.
Marketing is not an INFP thing. It requires conversations outside your head. It’s left brain work. But, along with Donna Barker, Eileen and Crystal run The Creative Academy so there are support groups for authors like me. Bookmark it.
One of the most amazing things about conferencing is meeting up with old friends and making new friends. You never know who you’ll meet. In the last workshop, the woman sitting beside me gave me her card and invited me to her writer’s retreat beside the sea in Nova Scotia. Yeah, that’s right. Nova Scotia. That little province that tops my list of preferred places to live. Phew.
Monday October 23…The Day After SiWC
Searching for Estrada
It is a glorious fall day–Canadian Thanksgiving–so I wore my new hikers up to Buntzen Lake to test them out on the trails and search for Estrada. (I love these Keens!)
When you take a three-month hiatus in the middle of writing a book you can’t always pick up where you left off. Buntzen Lake is where the Hollystone witches do their rituals and it’s Estrada’s favourite place. I knew if I could find him anywhere, it would be here in these woods.
I discovered Buntzen Lake twenty years ago. It’s a beautiful park located in Anmore, B.C.
When we left Ontario, with all of our possessions in a trailer and drove west, Anmore Campground was our end point. I saw it on a map, and it seemed like the closest camping spot to Vancouver. When we arrived, we rented a storage locker and unloaded our U-Haul. That campground became home for several weeks before we found our first suite.
The park itself hasn’t changed much, although developers are cashing in on the beauty of this land and its location. Run by BC Hydro, it’s a gorgeous playground with many hiking trails and launch facilities for watercraft. The campground is still there, as is the small Anmore store where you can buy ice cream and rent canoes and kayaks.
To Charm a Killer
The off-leash dog beach at Buntzen Lake is where Maggie Taylor is writing her Macbeth essay and playing with Remy, her black lab, at the beginning of To Charm a Killer. When the dog hears Dylan’s bagpipes in the forest, he takes off. And that’s how Maggie first meets the Hollystone witches and gets caught up in their charm.
Remy stopped digging and sprung from the hole. Hackles rigid, he pivoted to face the forested mountain at their backs. Bagpipes? Scottish bagpipes? The music of Macbeth? Here? In the forest above Buntzen Lake?
A shiver struck Maggie as her dog bolted. In his haste, he leapt off a stump, cleared the chain link fence, and disappeared through the trees.
Chasing after him, she hit the top bar with both hands, vaulted over the fence and raced into the forest. “Remy!”
Writing is a fascinating process. Everything you encounter gets stored in your research data banks and may eventually appear in a book. This beach, where we took our pup many years ago, became an anchor setting in To Charm a Killer.
Maggie Taylor lives in a log house at the end of Hawk’s Claw Lane–a laneway nestled up against the park. When she moves to Ireland with her mother, Daphne and Raine, two of the Hollystone witches, rent the house and adopt Remy. So, the log house continues to be an integral setting in books two and three. A VIB (very important baby) is born there on the back deck, but I can’t tell you who. Not just yet.
Despite her parents, Maggie knew that she was fortunate to live in this place. Their home perched between two bodies of water close enough to walk between: Buntzen Lake and the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes the inlet was rank with decaying sea creatures and slick fetid muck that could suck down small children and gumboots; while other times, the water flowed deep, charged by the invisible force of the tides. Bordered by beaches, boardwalks, and parks, it attracted boaters and paddlers, along with salmon-chasing harbour seals and bald eagles.
Shadowed by the Coast Mountains and groves of giant red cedars, their yard was shaded, yet brilliant with blossoming rhododendrons, planted by Shannon in one of her gardening frenzies years before. Anchored by the log house that John had built for them with his own hands, the Taylor family lived in tenuous tranquility at the end of Hawk’s Claw Lane. Their lives were so well constructed that Maggie had told only two people—who absolutely required an explanation at the time—that her father suffered from a severe head injury and required medication and constant monitoring to keep up the façade.
She had told no one that she was the cause of that injury. Once uttered, that truth was irrevocable and could unleash forces over which she had no control—forces that could change her life forever.
But it’s their high priest, Estrada, who loves Buntzen Lake the most–and it’s where I found him today, as I knew I would.
At the signal tree, they veered off a grass-flecked game trail between massive ferns. Buntzen Lake simmered below, a smoky emerald in the growing dusk. Ancient granite mountains encircled the water; their snow-tipped spires still harbouring scattered traces of last winter’s storms. Pine spikes jutted like slivers from the distant peaks, split only by immense mottled rock that gaped through the trees—faces of mountain spirits and Old World giants.
The Horror in Resolution Cove
It’s a busy week for reviews. Two of mine are in the Ottawa Review of Books and feature the same author. Tyner Gillies.
The Watch and Dark Resolution are set in Resolution Cove, a small town along the BC coast, and feature Constable Quinn Sullivan.
Read my reviews here.
I met Tyner several years ago at the Surrey International Writers Conference which, I must say, is THE BEST writing conference happening in British Columbia. We connected again on Twitter last year and I noticed that he’d published two books. Naturally, I wanted to read them.
One of the cool things about Tyner is that he’s been working as an RCMP officer for the past fourteen years, yet he still manages to write novels. Horror novels. That he understands evil and good is apparent in his books.
Tyner Gillies with author Robert Dugoni (SiWC)
The other cool thing about Tyner is that he’s got style. You’ll see it in his books and you may see it during a conference if you’re lucky.
A Review to Inspire
An excellent review of my book, To Sleep with Stones, came out today on the Ottawa Review of Books! It couldn’t come at a better time. I’m halfway through the sequel, Book 3, and just about to hunker down into draft mode again. To be inspired is to be filled with spirit and a great review is a superb booster.
Thank you Gail M. Murray for writing the review.
Thank you Ottawa Review of Books for publishing it.
And a shout-out to Kat McCarthy at Aeternum Designs for a custom cover.
Wilderness Dweller
This woman, Chris Czajkowski, is one of my heroes. For thirty years, she’s lived off the grid alone in the wilderness with dogs for company, built her own cabins, and written her books. I thought of Chris tonight as I was reading Farley Mowatt’s classic, Lost in the Barrens. I saw her present at Sechelt Writer’s Festival years ago, and I wondered how she survived the raging forest fires this summer.
Here you can read her experience living through the wildfires in northern BC.
I see she has a book tour in BC this fall. If you can make it to any of her readings or presentations, please come out and support this amazing woman.