Category: Writing practice

Late summer updates: Sending out queries, open mic, a new zine, and more

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Well, the skies here in Vancouver have been grey (or yellowish) with smoke from wildfires, and we’ve had more heatwaves, and today our prime minister called a federal election, which means I might have have to turn off the radio and social media for a while. 

Which might be a good time to do some more writing and editing, I guess?

Howe Sound, near Vancouver BC, August 2021

Querying, an open mic, and a novel excerpt 

Lindsay Wong, the current Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence, is hosting an open mic/author reading on Thursday August 26th — and I’m excited to say I’ll be one of the readers. I hope you can drop by! (Yes, it will be via Zoom.)

In mid-July I took an excellent course with Lindsay* on writing query letters, and then (after some more revisions of my first few pages) I spent some time reading up on agents who might be interested in a novel set in 1986 Vancouver, about dissociation and gaslighting, female friendship, and rock and roll. 

Finally I sent that query — for How Does It Feel to Feel — out to an agent who sounds great. It’s a start!

And then last week, I also put together a zine version of an excerpt from that book, called Bidwell Island. 

Stay tuned: I’ll be posting more here about how you can get a copy if you’re interested.

How Does It Feel to Feel after the latest revision

Zine making

For me at least, it sounds very simple and yet is frustratingly fussy to make a so-called literary zine. Because these days I don’t have the time or patience (or easy access to a photocopier) to do it by hand, I don’t have to figure out the fancy folding and layout and page ordering details I would have in the old days (although fortunately there are excellent resources for it!) — I do everything in Pages (the Apple word processor), export to PDF, and take my PDF over to a print shop. And yet it still takes me ages to get that file ready.

The first part is to figure out just how long your piece of work should be, or how many pieces you need and how long they should be. There’s no “right” length, really — or rather your right length depends on how many pages you want to print, and what size your font and margins will be, how much space you need for your images. 

So I take a guess at the word count I want, and then fuss around for quite a while with different fonts and margins, trying to see what works. 

And you also have to remember that the page will be a different shape than what you see on your screen — not the default 8 1/2 by 11 that most of us work in in North America, but the shape of that sized paper folded in half. I’ve made zines before where I didn’t take this into account and then after I printed the pages out the margins looked very wrong. (My completely close-enough-for-rock-and-roll solution this time was to lay out the pages for A5 printing. I hope I’ll remember next time.)

Then, your page count has to be a multiple of four. This includes your cover, the back cover, the verso, etc. For Bidwell Island I decided on 12 pages — which works out to 8 pages of actual text and images.

Oh yes, the images. I figure out what I want, and then I figure out what I can actually draw, and what should reproduce somewhat successfully. Then I draw and ink my pictures, and paste them into my Pages document. Even though I’ve made theoretical space for them already, this always leads me to a lot more fussing around with line breaks, page breaks, etc. etc. (Because I am absolutely untrained, this means I just move things around and make minor adjustments until things look okay to my eye.)

And last of all, I constantly, constantly remind myself that it’s a zine. It’s not supposed to be perfect. 

Bidwell Island printed zines

*If you are a writer and get a chance to take a class with Lindsay Wong, I encourage you to do it! She is wise, kind, and very frank.

Morning writing regime: I came for the discipline, and I discovered a refuge.

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Sylvia Hotel

For about fourteen months, I’ve been writing for an hour* every weekday morning before work, and for a few hours every weekend. 

Looking around at the friends I have who are lucky enough to still be working during this pandemic, I see folks adopting pets, hiking the local mountains, getting into shape, renovating their houses (or moving, or both), and perfecting or developing skills (including recording songs, baking, and making exquisite cocktails; one is even becoming a tie-dye master). 

I haven’t accomplished anything that’s very visible.

Cypress Falls, West Vancouver

Instead I’m escaping into an imaginary world from 7:30-8:30 every morning, and then dipping back into it here and there through the day, when I go for walks, do the dishes, drive somewhere, or just have a few minutes to think.

Unlike the chaotic real world — where the news is full of conflict, disease, hatred, and cruelty, and social media is puking up conspiracy theories and disinformation (alongside glimmers of the only connection most of us are getting with others these days) — the world of my own stories has patterns and threads that make sense — and if they don’t, I can reorder them, recreate them, even tear them out and throw them away.

Although the two novels I’ve been revising and rewriting for this long pandemic year are quite dark, with themes of domestic abuse and dissociation, the world that I go to when I work on them is as lush and complex as any universe in any game. It’s also as strange and surprising as any dream. 

And like a lucid dream, where you can switch on superpowers to fly away from a monster — and unlike real life — I can give my characters a way out. And in a novel, I’m learning this means building them long complicated escape routes, and watching the characters find their way.

Cedar

Way back when I was a writing student at university, I remember instructors wrinkling their noses at the idea of “writing as therapy.” What they meant (what I think they meant) was that if you are writing something for someone to read, it’s about telling a story that works for the reader. On the other hand, when you are writing primarily for therapy — for instance, in a journal — then it’s only for yourself. So there are no rules: you don’t need to revise, or worry about structure, or story arcs. 

And in the context of a writing program, one was clearly better than the other. So in my mind, for all these years, so-called “good” or “real” writing, and writing as healing, have been very separate.

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When a writing friend and I signed on for this morning regime together, I thought it was an excellent and very practical idea, expecting that I would get work done as these writing hours accumulated. I also hoped that I would make big improvements to the mostly finished but very flawed manuscripts I already had — maybe even making them good enough to submit to publishers.

And that has happened! But over this past long year, it has surprised me — and given me great joy — to discover just how much the work part of writing, the unravelling and reweaving, the tearing down and rebuilding, the standing back to look at the overall shape of the story, has also helped me to live through these months.

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*According to my own rules, this hour of writing can include new writing, revising, or editing. A lot of is has been revising.

All photos by the author.

Update, July 2021

So many writers are saying this so much better than I ever could. Here’s just one of the quotes — this one from Rebecca Solnit — taken from Charlie Jane Ander’s forthcoming book, Never Say You Can’t Survive.

It’s due to come out next month and I’m really looking forward to reading it.

Source: Charlie Jane Anders