Picking out a signing pen

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My husband can go in and out of an office supply store in 5 minutes. Not me. Yesterday I had the luxury of time, and I walked all the aisles, lingering. I did have a list -- printer inkers, storage boxes (for packing away Mistress of the Sun notes), stick-on dots (for coding the research books on my shelves), and, most importantly, a good pen for signing my books.

When my first book was published, Richard gave me a beautiful Waterman fountain pen, which I treasure. But it proved challenging to use as a signing pen: it sometimes blotched, stained my fingers, and it could leak in-flight. Also, and most importantly, I had to carefully blot the signed title page before closing the book. In the beginning, when I had only few books to sign, I welcomed a time-consuming process. Now, when I'm signing as many as 40 books, I need to be more efficient.

Recently, I stopped into a Chapters/Indigo store in Toronto, and offered to sign my books. I did not have a pen with me, and I was quickly offered a Sharpie. Well. Not that elegant, but — "They don't blot," the clerk told me. "Which is why we use them." The other nice thing about a felt-tip marker, I later thought, is that you are given notice when it's drying up — not like a fountain or ball-point pen that can quit mid-signature. Making a mess in a $30 book is not a good thing.

So I lingered long at the felt-tip marker section. It wasn't an independent office supply store — the wonderful type of store where you can test the pens on a scrap of paper provided — so I purchased a selection, and headed north, to Petawawa Stables, where I had my horse to visit ... and a book to sign.

I've known Dawn and her mother Yvonne since before I began writing Mistress of the Sun. I used to take riding lessons there, and my horse, Finnegan, is wonderfully looked after there during the winter.

I was delighted to sign Yvonne's book, a gift to her from Dawn. I had tested the markers in the car: the Sharpies, a medium tip, were too fat — a fine-point would be a better choice — but the blue Staedtler (1.0 Medium) worked quite nicely ... if only I didn't have to buy a set of eight in assorted colors to get that one blue.

I'll be in New York soon, with time, I hope, for one of my favorite past-times: lingering in the aisles of an office supply store.

Photo: Finnegan and me, taken by Dawn Townshend at Petawawa Stables.

What next?

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James Macgowan has published an article in the Ottawa Citizen, "After the End," asking writers what they do after a novel is finished. I'm in that space now (and starting to feel a bit too much at home in it). I was somewhat pained by Alan Cumyn's claim that the novel is never really over, reassured by Andrew Pyper's "cut adrift" feeling, and totally related to Scott Gardiner's getting onto all the chores that were ignored in that all-consuming last push to finish. Gail Anderson-Dargatz's answer was romantic and charming:

I have a confession to make: I have an "affair" with my next project before I finish the first, just so I avoid many of the feelings of separation that come when I "divorce" my main novel project and move on. And I do go through real separation at the end of a project, with many of the accompanying feelings of grief, anger, exhaustion and general stress, before finally coming to an acceptance that yes, the relationship is over and it's time to move on. After all, I've spent the better part of five years with this novel. Moving on to that new project before the old "marriage" is over means I have something exciting to look forward to, a place to redirect my focus, so I don't stay in the doldrums as long. So a little fling is a good thing. I think those feelings of separation as we move out of a project are necessary in giving us distance from it, so we can move into the editing process with a new perspective. It's very much like that moment when you see your old love on the street (after the divorce is over) and you can see the guy for who he really is, and can judge him accordingly, without the fuzz of love to distort your perceptions.

It took me a moment to realize that this is exactly what had happened with Mistress of the Sun. I'd finished The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B., and decided to have "an affair" with Louise de la Vallière's story before returning to the very long marriage of the Trilogy. After finishing the Trilogy and writing an early draft of Mistress, I took a detour into the life of La Grande Mademoiselle -- whose story I may well write about now. It reminds me that writing is more of a meandering journey where nothing really is wasted.

The wonder of Penelope Fitzgerald

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Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore and The Blue Flower are on my list of all-time great novels, but what I love best about her is that she didn't start writing until her late-50s.
To quote from the Guardian book blog, "The quiet genius of Penelope Fitzgerald":

Fitzgerald was a wonderful writer, and since her death in 2000 her reputation has continued to soar. Despite a late start (she began writing her first novel when she was almost 60, composing it as a diversion for her dying husband), she gained immense popular and critical acclaim during the last 20 years of her life. She won the Booker (for Offshore), and became the first non-American to win the National Book Critics' Circle award (for The Blue Flower, which many consider her masterpiece). In the eight years since her death, an increasing number of readers - including AS Byatt, Frank Kermode and Hermione Lee - have begun speaking of her as the greatest English novelist of recent decades.

I heard Penelope Fitzgerald interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on the CBC radio show, Writers & Company. I was struck by her account: her first novel was a mystery. Accepted for publication, her editor asked her to cut it by half. She did so, and continued to do so, for every book she wrote. A good lesson, that.

Podcasts I couldn't do without

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I subscribe to three podcasts. I listen to them while doing excercises, the dishes, the laundry, driving. They are all writing-related, and I highly recommend them.

Writers on Writing: interviews with writers and agents on the craft and business of writing. As a writer, a reader and a teacher of writing, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett knows the subject well. The interviews are invariably inspiring and informative. I just listened to a wonderful interview with script doctor John Truby and have ordered his book, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. (Click here to listen to the interview.) I really like Truby, and this sounds like the perfect book for me right now.

The other podcast I love is put out weekly by the New York Times Book Review. It's snappy, short, informative and entertaining.

My third favorite I used to listen to on the CBC every Sunday afternoon at 3:00, usually as I made soup. My life is not so easily patterned these days, and so I appreciate the freedom of being able to listen to Eleanor Wachtel's Writers & Company whenever I please.

Book Launch 2.0

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This short video — Book Launch 2.0 — is going around the publishing industry like wildfire, I'm told. It's priceless.

Keep calm and carry on

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In the new Chapters/Indigo on-line community, Gail Anderson-Dargatz posted about The Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival website series on BC writers' rooms. She noted that her writing room is a hallway.

I don't know how she does it!

I have not one but two perfect offices, I confess. This is the one in Mexico. My office ("bunker") in Ontario is every bit as nice: smaller, but overlooking woods and meadow. If only cubic feet equaled writing output.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz pointed out that the Guardian has a series on writers' rooms as well. I love seeing writers' offices. I especially loved the poster on Sarah Waters' wall: "Keep calm and carry on."

How to begin

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A reader writes that she wants to write a book. She has a story in mind, but she doesn't know how to begin.

How to begin? This is a hard question to answer, but I'm going to try ... in part because this is where I am myself right now: back at the beginning.

I could start by saying something about focusing on the story — dreaming about it, walking with it — not even thinking about that looming scary thing: a novel. Anne Lamott wrote about this in Bird by Bird, an excellent book on just this thing — beginning — and I would suggest reading this book first above all the others. Another good book at this point is Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. She talks about the importance of dreaming, as does Butler, in From Where You Dream.

But for me, when I was beginning, I wanted a "how-to" system. I needed to know the nuts and bolts. I wanted steps to follow. "Dreaming," would not have helped me then. I had the good fortune to find a book that outlined the procedure of writing a novel, aptly named How to Write a Novel. The author described how to write down thoughts on index cards, and then sort the cards, grouping them into scenes. This I could do. A novel: no. A stack of index cards: yes. That book unfortunately appears to be out of print, but another author, Ken Atchity, describes a similar system in A Writer's Time. It gave me what I needed to write my first novel.

And now? Now I'm back to dreaming. I'm typing my thoughts onto the computer this time, but soon, I plan, I will transfer each onto an index card and begin anew.

To town and back

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It has been eight years since I've had a book out, and the entire process has changed. We don't see galleys anymore, for example, and much of the promotion is through the internet. Before, when I had a reading, I would make up posters to put up around town myself, or mail off for others to put up. Now I'm thinking of making up a poster that can be downloaded and printed from my website.

Some things never change, however: and that's the need for a box of my books in the back of my car. I went into town today — gas, bank machine, drug store, grocery store, flower shop ... — and I was asked several times for my book. (The town is small, 600 at last count, and bookstores nonexistant.) I'd forgotten about this part of the process, this ever-so-sweet selling of books out of the trunk of a car, a tradition every writer alive has been part of. I think of Grisham, driving around the country, peddling his novels to bookstores. I think of Dickens. It wouldn't have been a car but a horse-drawn buggy ... but without a doubt, he would have had books with him.

Collecting books, collecting book lists

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After my mother died, it was poignant and sad to look through the scraps of paper she kept in a drawer by her reading chair — notes of titles of interest, books to get. The writing becomes more frail with time, and in the last years of her life, she was unable to read at all.

Coming back to our home in Canada after being away all winter, I am struck by all my books — my wonderful research library, my To Be Read stack, nicely awaiting me by the bed — as well as by all my lists of books. Granted, much of this has to do with building a bibliography, seeking out all the possible titles available on whatever subject I'm writing about — but in truth, I recognize that I'm a collector of titles of books to read as well as of books. There are not enough hours remaining in my life to do justice to even a small fraction of them (I'd better begin a short list), but that doesn't seem to matter.

And all this to say: I read an article on Readerville Journal this morning which lists novels about travels into Mexico. I want to note it somehow, but I resist the urge to print it out — and so: here it is.