Bright, blue sky autumn morning here. Leaves are turning, which is always wonderful. Watched the Yankees lose in extra innings last night (it would be so easy to cheer for the improbable Orioles if I hadn’t been born a Yankee fan and my mother wasn’t cheering for them so hard!). Also watched a feisty VP debate showcasing very different styles, over and above very different views.

That made me think (segue alert!) of styles in social media. I hope it is clear I am joking when I ‘blame’ people for my being on Twitter now, or shifting the Journal to this sleeker format. I am too stubborn to really be made to do these things against my will. At the same time, my ambivalence as to aspects of online interaction is real. I have a horror of being bland, and my friends know am not afraid to be silly/whimsical at times (puns!) but people vary so widely in their expectations or imaginings of a writer (for example) that getting elements of ‘the real person’ can be disconcerting.

So I was very serious on Twitter as to my contempt for the Taliban shooting of a 14 year old girl in the Swat Valley, and I have been wry about Paul Ryan and his ‘mistatement’ about his marathon prowess – and his two explanations that followed: 1. He ’rounded down’ from 4 hours+ to 2 hours and 50-some minutes and 2. He confused his own time with his brother’s. As someone with a sports background (and two brothers), I find these both hilarious and disturbing and I used the discovery that Laura and I were in Berlin last week during their marathon to do a riff on it, featuring my own (utterly fictitious) decision to enter and run. (Two hours, 21 minutes, my usual barefoot technique.)

But both of these posts, of course, take things into the ‘real me’ and into humour and politics … and that will inevitably not work for every reader. (One person wondered if my account had been hacked.) On the other hand, way back when (more than 12 years ago now!) I resisted Deborah Meghnagi’s urgings that I let her start up Bright Weavings because I found author-sites too self-indulgent, hyperfocused on their books. So it appeals to me to cast a wider net with social media, including this journal.

We’ll see how it plays out. I do plan to have the journal remain a window in to the way books are made and eventually to let readers who are not in the cities I visit get a bit of the flavour (I’m Canadian, it isn’t flavor!) of a tour.

State of play right now is this: Catherine Marjoribanks, my really splendid copy-editor is at work on River of Stars right now, turning it into a book of seafood recipes and … er, she’s doing her necessary, hyper-vigilant thing with name forms, punctuation, and other critical elements. She also makes a full character list, from which I will prepare the list of major characters.

I get this version back in about two weeks and then begin being harried by the equally important Sandra Tooze, who is in charge of production at Penguin Canada (who are handling this for everyone). Sandra needs me to turn it over faster that I ever want to turn it over, because I use that upcoming read through as my last chance to polish, not just to check what Catherine proposes, and I am just a tiny bit obsessive about the novels.

(Both these women did ‘guest posts’ on the Under Heaven tour journal, which can be found on Bright Weavings (link at top of this page) in the Forums.

In the meantime, in about four hours I meet with my friend and colleague Martin Springett, who always gets an early read of the books, as he is doing another map for me. He needs to deliver around when I finish with the copy-edited pages, so the map can go in the ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which are slated to go out in January. (More on these in a later post.) Martin also did a guest post last time around, by the way.

Finally, a photo, to take advantage of what WordPress lets us do. I could do another piece of art, but this time I’ll link a shot taken during my talk/signing in Prague last week (for their release of Under Heaven).

No ‘Kanadsky’ jokes allowed! The bookstore is enormous, by the way, largest in central Europe they told me. On my left is the marketing manager from Argo, my Czech publisher. He introduced me, and translated – which may be why he looks stressed. It is a hard job.