I just agreed to do the Hamilton Pagan Pride thing. September 13, 2008 in Gage Park, Hamilton, Ontario.
Check out the official website; looking at the previous years it seems to be a great event. It sees over four hundred people every year. Coming from apathetic Montreal, those kind of numbers stun me.
Now I really, really need to lie down.
Yeah, yeah, stuff going on, burnout, pain, headaches, blah blah blah.
You do not want to hear about my life.
You want to hear about… Henri’s life.
(YouTube; very safe for work. Unless you are a liberal arts-type and a cat lover, in which case you may be shamefully overcome by giggles. Via CuteOverload.)
The thirty-five month post has been published. Enjoy!
Michelle West writes an excellent parallel between writing books and mothering here.
A belated Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. My day began very early, waking up with a jump at the crash made by a small boy dropping a play tea set on the floor next to the bed ( “Oh hi, Mama, I making you tea!”), moved through brunch with the Preston-LeBlanc clan (complete with smoked salmon, mimosas, a heaping bowl of fresh strawberries, and waffles), and ended with an afternoon with HRH’s parents and excellent steak.
Michelle Sagara talks about being a reader (as opposed wearing her writing hat) and not particularly caring about how long it took someone to write something, or if writing’s their career or something they do at night and on weekends:
But confusing my concerns as a writer with my concerns as a reader is something that I don’t do. There are books that feel interchangeable, and I read these for fun and light entertainment, although I admit I often confuse them in the muddle of my brain (and attribute the titles to the wrong authors because I am sometimes stupid like that); there are books that no one but the author could possibly write (anything by John Crowley comes to mind instantly). I am happy for both; I do not privilege one over the other because I don’t have to; as a reader, both are there, and I pick up the one that suits my mood and my needs at the time.
And Elizabeth Barrette talks about ways in which you can support your favourite authors beyond buying their books (because how you buy those books matters, and all the other stuff has an impact too):
Readers love books, and most readers have favorite authors. You wish they would write more. You may also wish for them to be happy and prosperous.
Well, authors have to put beans on the table. For some, that means writing whatever sells. For others, that means squeezing in time to write around a day job doing something else. Maybe they get paid a fair rate for their work, with a decent contract; maybe not. Often the end result is that they don’t put out as much writing as you or they would like.
Here’s the key: YOU can do something about this. You are the audience; you are the consumer. Your choices an individual, and the behavior of you-all collectively, can make a tremendous difference in the livelihood of your favorite authors. The more profitable something is, the more time they can afford to spend doing it. Do you value that reading material they create? Does it teach you things that will save you time and trouble, or things that are just fun to know? Does it give your mind a much-needed vacation to places you love, in the company of characters you enjoy? Does it lift your spirits, rouse your sense of wonder, or at least remind you that your life could suck a whole lot more than it does? If so, consider the following list of things you can do to support your favorite authors. […]
Finally, over at SFNovelists.com Mike Brotherton talks about the common sense steps involved in reviewing books, namely, match the reviewer to the book (although there’s more that follows from that first point):
Guideline 1: Reviewers should stick to reviewing the kinds of books they like.
Look, I think nearly every book published is a good book. Editors and publishers aren’t stupid. There are certainly a lot of books published I think are crap, but some of them have audiences. Large audiences. People LOVE some of the books I HATE. I shouldn’t review those. I’m not the target audience.
And that’s okay.
It’s infuriating as a writer to see someone leave a comment somewhere, or, worse, a complete review, about how much your book sucked when it is clear that they don’t like the kind of book you’re writing. I had this happen with Spider Star. Someone wrote how awful the sample chapters were on a forum, and, when pressed (guilty), admitted that [the books] read like Jack McDevitt and that they didn’t care for McDevitt. Personally, I do. So…
Guideline 2: Reviews should describe what the book is like, and not just represent a visceral reaction of the reviewer. […]
Check them out.
I just cut an entire six pages because they didn’t fit. I’d feel better about it if I hadn’t spent hours writing them months ago in the first place, and a good forty minutes rewriting them in the cafe on Monday.
I didn’t go to work in the cafe after all this morning. Even the smallest movement is painful, and I’m in a no-people frame of mind. Dissolving into tears in the car after dropping the boy off was a marked sign that editing in a public place wasn’t going to work. So I came home, which was depressing in itself. I’m now halfway through the printout of the manuscript, and on page 40 of the file. The latter is a rather unreliable guide to progress, as it no longer matches the pagination of the printout (which makes for some puzzled flipping when my scribbles on page Z say to ‘move to page X’ and page X of the file is now Z+9).
It’s been a frustrating morning, on top of the already low mood.
But this was in the parcel waiting for me at the post office, one of the two I missed on Monday when I was working in the cafe. And I’m kind of glad the upstairs neighbours aren’t home because I’m listening to it at a rather loud volume. It’s both beautiful and depressing. I can hear every shift Sutter makes and the movements of her bow arm (not because of poor recording or shoddy technique, but because of her phrasing and the stunning acoustics of the church in which it was recorded), and I wish I could play like that.
I’m going to go heat up a piece of last night’s lasagna and then come back and slog some more.
This morning, I drove home from dropping the boy off in white-out conditions. It’s cruel, after a lovely warm and sunny weekend. Wasn’t this supposed to be rain? The first few flakes began falling and the boy said, “Why the snow?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think we should tell it to go away.” From the back seat there came a very clear and deliberate, “SNOW, GO AWAY!”
Thank goodness for a lovely recording of The Lark Ascending on CBC that played on my way home. I always think of Pasley when I hear it. Otherwise I’m so irritated by the CBC these days. They’re disbanding the CBC Radio Orchestra — the last surviving radio orchestra in North America — and they’re changing the Radio 2 format yet again so that it’s no longer going to be a mainly classical station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly revamped it to feature more jazz and folk and so forth, with which I’ve not been thrilled but have tolerated (although the radio gets turned off at 6 on the dot because I cannot stand what the evening programming has become). Now, however, they’re formally announcing that they’re going to go more mainstream, and cancelling the existing shows. This was done to net a larger audience, but it’s backfiring already: the backlash has been dreadful, and they’re going to lose droves of current listeners (like me, hello, who’s been a faithful listener for decades). If they did market research, they certainly didn’t think of asking their current audience what they thought of the idea. I’ve been meaning to write about this since they announced it and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put my resentment about this dilution of content and commitment to culture into words. This isn’t what I wanted to say, either, but I have to say something at some point.
I am stiff and achy and want to be in the better mood I was in this past weekend.