novel Archives | Tove Black

The 3-Day Novel Contest and other updates, and moments of joy and compartmentalising while the world is on fire

Posted on 2023-08-022023-08-03

Good intentions and all that: since January I’ve been meaning to write a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which gutted me, and then intending to write reviews of some other not-quite-so-gutting but still beautiful/difficult novels I’ve read and loved since then — and even some very good nonfiction.

The Ministry for the Future feels much more important than other books, for obvious reasons.

Here at the western edge of Canada, even though we haven’t experienced the terrible smoke this summer that other places have (yet!), even if we aren’t quite going from flood season to fire season yet (where we used to go from rainy season to less rainy season), it’s close enough that the worry is always there in the background.

Things can get worse. Things will get worse.

But I’m trying not to worry all the time. And of course other things have been going on too.

I’ve been taking courses at the local art university. Partly because as a kid it was my dream to go to art school, but more practically, I decided it was time to develop some basic illustration skills and then apply them to zine-making. The classes haven’t been super applicable to what I’m doing with zines so far, but they have been excellent anyhow.

And for one of them I did a big project using text from that novel I keep talking about, How Does It Feel to Feel.

How Does It Feel to Feel: Drawing by Tove Black, with text from a novel-in-progress

I also have a story coming out very soon in a literary magazine, and I’m very excited about that. I will post details and links once it happens!

3-Day Novel Contest news

And as of today, as far as I know, my novella Lonesome Stars is still shortlisted for the 2022 3-Day Novel Contest.

So I’m enjoying this moment, this space between the good news of being shortlisted and the announcement saying who has won.

And the 3-Day Novel Contest is special. I’m always surprised when something of mine gets accepted, or shortlisted, or wins something — but this news surprised me in a particularly funny way, because when I first saw the title (Lonesome Stars) in the announcement, I couldn’t recall anything (nothing at all!) about the book. I vaguely remembered the 3-day novel I wrote in 2021 (it’s a prequel to the novel I’m working on right now, set in an alternate version of Western Canada), but I was drawing a complete blank on what I had done in 2022. Lonesome Stars — what the heck was that? It sounded like a small-time1990s indie musician’s idea of a somewhat alt-country-inflected band. Which of course is what I intended when I wrote it, as I realised when I went back through my files and found my Scrivener document. (And I reread it; to my huge relief it wasn’t terrible.)

The thing about the 3-Day Novel experience, at least for me, is that all the times I’ve done it (4? 5?) I’ve spent that Labour Day weekend in state of altered consciousness. In 2021 and 2022 I drafted up an extremely short and sketchy outline the day before, so I would have a very rough idea of where I was planning to go. Then I aimed at writing 10,000 words a day — and for those three days I didn’t talk to anyone or leave my apartment — except to get takeout, and maybe the occasional walk around the block to try to get unstuck.

When I was younger and tried it, I did “finish” my novels and I loved the full-on experience of writing them, but I didn’t have the discipline or knowledge for them to have any kind of shape or structure. Now, after taking a lot more workshops and doing NaNoWriMo several times, it’s easier for me to get a lot of words when I need to, and for them to make more sense. But the 3-Day Novel Contest experience is still all-consuming, and the whole weekend had the kind of intensity I think some people look for when they sign up for spiritual retreats.

And yet what I didn’t really expect was how successfully I walled off that weekend of writing from the rest of my life. I wrote for all those hours for those three days, and even did a quick review every evening so I would have the threads of the story in my mind for the next day. Then, after I submitted the novel to the contest folks, I completely put it out of my mind. COMPLETELY.

When I reread the manuscript a couple of months ago I couldn’t remember a single thing about what was going to happen next to the characters, although as I went through the scenes I kept thinking, oh yeah, this person, and oh yeah, this part.

I guess it’s not totally unlike life outside of writing. It’s a little bit like that sensation of going back to a place you haven’t seen since you were a child, and had forgotten about — and then stopping and looking around, suddenly haunted by very specific and vivid details.

Anyhow, I am enjoying this moment.

Thank you to the wonderful 3-Day Novel people for reading and considering Lonesome Stars.

I’m so proud and happy to be on this shortlist.

On memory and place

Posted on 2022-04-242022-04-24

It’s happened to everyone: you go back to a place that was once very important to you, and find that it has transformed somehow while you were away.

It is smaller, or run-down, or just underwhelming. And you feel pangs of nostalgia or disappointment — maybe mixed with a sensation of accomplishment or even wisdom, because you see that you have grown up, your perspective has widened. You’ve learned things in the years that have passed.

And hoping for this, sometimes — when I’m feeling especially strong, or defiant — I drive past places where especially bad things happened. And I can report that over time, and with practice, they have become more ordinary. The malevolent sparks that used to fly off of them have faded, and from the inside of my car they mostly just look like buildings, the way they probably do to everyone else.

(I haven’t stepped inside those particular places again. Years and maybe even decades have passed since the people I remember moved away, so maybe they wouldn’t feel like houses of horrors anymore. But even if someone were to invite me in (unlikely), I know I couldn’t go inside, and the force that would stop me from doing it feels just as strong as the force that stops me now from walking through their closed front doors.)

Less often, I go into a space where a nightclub or bar I knew used to be, places where I sang with my old bands (and watched many more). When that happens I always feel disoriented, and swivel my head around, trying to picture how it used to be. Where was the stage, anyway? Where did we put our gear? Who were the other bands we played with? There were so many hours, and so many details, and so many other people, and so much of it is completely lost to me — so now I sometimes find old posters or newspaper listings for shows I have no recollection at all of playing.

Which is what I was expecting a few days ago when I went back to the dorm where I lived from September through April in my first year of university.

“Interior, U.B.C. houses, Typical student room, Totem Park Residences, University of B.C., B.C., Canada, 40-60s.” Source: HipPostcard

This dorm is the setting of a novel I’ve been working on for quite a while now (How Does It Feel to Feel — in what I hope are the polishing stages now), and in my own imagination it has become very real to me again, even after my long absence.

As I wrote, I could picture the layout of the floor very clearly, and how many rooms there were, and where the shared bathrooms were, and the stairways, and the elevator. I could even picture the walk to the dining hall, and the wall of mail slots, and — less distinctly — going past the common rooms on the main floor, spaces I probably only went into two or three times, for mixers — the kind of dance parties that happened in those institutional-looking spaces, soulless boxes even with the disco lights. (And thinking of that now, I am certain that they had worn parquet floors.)

And because I could picture it all so clearly, I assumed I was wrong. But when a kind student (the daughter of some friends) let me come up to her floor to look around last week, it turned out that I was right.

The stairway was the same. The H-shaped floor plan was the same. When I looked down the hallway the row of doors was almost identical to what I remembered. Although —as you’d expect — the old stained carpets have been replaced, and there is different paint.

And (of course!) there is no sign of the pay phones that were literally and metaphorically at the centre of the floor when I lived there.

I didn’t stay long, but it turned out that the spaces I remembered and thought about the least had changed the most. The dark common rooms on the main floor were opened up and bright. The dining hall, from outside at least, actually looked cheery — which is not the way I remember it.

Maybe the strangest part: it didn’t feel weird to be there again, even after more than thirty years, even though the place was so important to me as a young person, and is so important to this story I’m telling.

A dormitory floor plan, this one from the New England Conservatory.

Change of direction

Posted on 2021-02-102021-02-10

Well, plans have changed.

About a year ago, I had the idea of printing up a limited number of copies of my novella-length fairy tale, The Jewel Bride. I was thinking of something chapbook-like, on fancy paper.

But like so many projects, what sounded like a totally manageable idea turned out to be more complicated and time-consuming than I’d expected, especially with a full-time job, and, you know, life things.

And then when the pandemic happened, I decided I need to stop and be more realistic about what I could get done.

So in the spring of 2020, working from home, with so much of the world shut down around us, I committed to finish revising a novel I had set aside after 2019’s National Novel Writing Month.

And good news! That novel is almost ready to send out now, and its working title is How Does It Feel to Feel.

The book is set in Vancouver in late 1986, but the name comes from a noisy and psychedelic-tinged song by The Creation, a British band from the mid-’60s. (I know there were at least some Vancouverites listening to the Creation at that time — but more about that later.)

I’ll be posting more about Vancouver from that period, and a bit more about the story itself, right here.

Stay tuned!