Collected Work had 3 events over the day for the national event to promote buying from local physical bookstores. This is the second year.
I made it to the mid-afternoon novelist panel and readings. There was a lively Q&A. Here are some of the questions and responses:
Am I too old to start?
Peggy Blair said, no, she wrote the first time creatively in her 50s. She’d quit as a lawyer and her university daughter demanded to know what she was doing next because she can’t just do nothing. Off the cuff Peggy said she was going to be a novelist. The daughter eye-rolled and said she wasn’t then demanded to know novel about what. She picked Cuba out of the air. 3 weeks later, she had the novel written. 150-some rejections later she still had a novel but no publisher. Her story on the route to publishing is up at OpenBook Ontario as well as in newspapers in the UK, Australia and more.
Do you use your own life in your creative writing or create a divide?
Missy Marsten and Sandra Nicholls remarked on how it is often the start of writing to write from self and then once that it done, you are freed to write anything. Some start with memoir, some with poetry and then once you are past the backlog of your own experiences you can go wild and crazy.
What do we do when someone recognizes themselves in our writing, whether we’ve unconsciously added something real or not?
Scott Fotheringham passed on the tip he received that if you reverse the gender of the characters, people wouldn’t draw themselves into the characters. It’s remarkably effective.
Missy Marsten added that although one of her characters in her previous book and going thru a divorce, and she went thru a divorce, it’s a different divorce. It isn’t a reliving but how different characters would respond to the same thing.
The panel was asked, how do you decide what the characters do?
There was a conscensus that the characters decide. They block the plot and won’t be moved against their wills. They develop lives of their own. One of the panelists quipped, yes, what we’re saying is we all have schizophrenia.
Sandra Nicholls who has a couple poetry collections read her new novel And the Seas will Turn to Lemonade about academics forming a commune.
Missy Marsten was reading from her first novel, The Love Monster (Vehicule, 2012), seems charming. It is about an alien living on earth who falls in love with a human, one who happens to be named Margaret Atwood, but not that Margaret Atwood. I get the impression of a lot of characters and lively writing. She read an excerpt of the awkward moment at work: how to navigate so your femaleness is not to be brought into question when a former coworker brings her new baby into the office and you don’t get the omg-melty effect.
Michael H McCann wrote Marcie’s Murder most recently. He said he’s wanted to be a writer since he was little. He writes police procedural crime fiction. His is novel with a strong female character, 5′ 3′ and martial art expert, cop. She is working with Lieut. Hank Donaghue who is accused of murder. He read a bit about chauvinism in the workplace being called out. McCann has a blog where he notes he saw “name up in chalk”.
The Rest is Silence (Gooselane, 2012) is the story of a man leaving an armageddon-bound world to create a subsistence life in a rural area. YA author Jess Ross with of Dawn Patrol (Orca, 2012), surfer novel for boys who don’t have things of interest to read.
Peggy Blair holding up and doing a dramatic reading from her crime novel, The Beggar’s Opera already in translation to German and Norwegian. It is now out in English with Penguin as well. In it Inspector Ramirez has an incurable dementia that makes him hallucinate interactions with the ghosts of victims of unsolved murders.
There were 17 left when I got there.
Alas, I spent too much time looking at books and that bonus was all gone by the time I chose.
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