So, when your editor chooses to add #borntojudge to her tweet saying she’s ready to deal with the photos entered in the ’50 Shades of Kay’ contest, it makes you pay attention. In the end, I said, ‘we’ve been together too long’ as the two of us were in startling agreement. Nicole did send this note for posting here:

It was a tougher decision than I expected it to be because so many of the submissions were thoughtful, bold and clever, but I did find myself especially drawn to the photos of people reading in settings that reflect their own lives.  Reading is such an important part of our lives but the experience of it is different for each of us and I was really struck by the photos that showed that.

That made sense as a way of thinking for us. Trust an editor/publisher to angle it that way. More than just the book, people intersecting with it. I actually noted 7 or 8 I smiled at. One with a beer and a pipe at sunset outside, one in a snowbank, a couple of witty riffs on the contest title, one in a museum with an ancient bronze. All the others can be seen at the Twitter hashtag #riverofstars and I think that photos are also being uploaded to the Forums at brightweavings.com, for those without access to twitter, and to archive them there.

But we actually got to three pretty smoothly, using a lovely little webtool that gathered them all – created for us by the splendid Anar Simpson of llearth (@llearth). And so, first, here are the two that just missed.

Shh! Mommy’s reading

This was funny, ‘real’ and demonstrated impeccable low-key taste in blending robe and bedspread! The tbr pile on the beside table marks a reader, too.

And then this:

River of Stars in the wild, both figuratively and literally

This was beautiful and evocative: a really professional shot and composition, matched with a witty caption. I had used ‘in the wild’ to refer to the book being first released and seen ‘out there’. There’s even a slight hint of the ‘bound’ theme that (alas?) got into the contest with the ’50 Shades’ idea.

And finally, our winner:

Squeezing an air refuel in between chapters…

As Nicole said (and I had to agree) it really is hard to top (!) a setting like this for a book photo. A lot of us read on the job. Few of us can … well, you know. I am guessing all viewers of the picture are grateful for the presence of the other pilot!

And I am grateful to all who entered. It was a small, fun idea when it started – and when the devious people at Wunderkind PR leaped on the joke about ’50 Shades of Kay’ – but it played out beautifully. Thanks to everyone, especially Nicole Winstanley, a good sport and a gamer if ever there was one.

Today’s post is mostly about Canada, and books, but the concept should appeal to everyone who reads, and there’s a giveaway at the end. I’m the ‘face’ of Project Bookmark for April 9th.

Canadians are often accused, and often accurately, of not flashing any measure of pride – or even awareness – concerning our own history. Quick, name three Fathers of Confederation. For American or other contestants, let’s try: quick, name a Canadian not named Justin Bieber. (Yes, Virginia, he’s Canadian.)

It can be argued that muting a sense of national identity means not getting caught up in the craziness that can go with that. But it is also true that it can leave a people feeling rootless, unconnected, lacking a history, lacking stories. And people who have read me know I see a lot of value in historical awareness and storytelling.

Project Bookmark is a national campaign to place plaques with words – from books and stories and poems – on buildings and at sites where those very scenes and images are set. They don’t honour military or political leaders from here or anywhere else. They recognize the writers and the narratives and the places. They tell anyone walking by that here, right here, something happened in a creative work. That this exact place plays a role in a work of art.

Have a look at their website. Tell me you don’t think this is cool:

http://projectbookmarkcanada.ca/discover/

This month, Project Bookmark has asked a number of writers to help them raise their profile, generate national (and international) awareness of an exercise in honouring storytellers and their stories and places and history. How, seriously, would I have declined to participate? There’s a movement afoot, they tell me, to place one of the plaques on Philosopher’s Walk at University of Toronto, to recognize the scene in The Summer Tree that takes place there.

Each writer has a designated day. I’m today, April 9, and anyone coming along with me in donating $20 to Project Bookmark today – and thus becoming a ‘Page Turner’ for them – will be entered into a draw to receive a signed copy of River of Stars. That’s a bonus, though I’m extremely happy to offer it. The cause is the reward.

Join me?

 http://projectbookmarkcanada.ca

I worry about sounding banal in doing descriptions of events. How interesting is it to read, ‘It was a really enjoyable night.’? Not very, I suspect.

The dynamics of a launch event are, as I’ve said, affected by the venue. A pub gives one vibe, a formal theatre another. This room in the library was not where I read three years ago. It was a more newly-built upper reception room, really beautiful, a few people said it would be a great space in which to get married. They did have a bar, there were a lot of people, full house it turned out, and the reception hour before going on stage gave me a chance to say hello to some friends, and for some readers to come by and do the same. That’s a good thing, doesn’t always happen. These things can be impersonal, this one wasn’t.

I read from chapter two, introducing Shan, the female protagonist. Short reading, as I knew the interview/conversation was to follow. Then walked over over to the armchairs where Laurie Grassi, Books Editor of Chatelaine was waiting. I said, ‘Ready to pounce,’ she said, ‘I’m not that tough.’

She wasn’t, but she was really good. Witty and sharp, well-prepared. Good questions and a skill I have mentioned, which is responding to the answer given, not just moving on the next query on the prep sheet. There were some surprises, which I always like. I prefer being made to think by a question, not just roll out answers I am familiar with by now.

You can almost always get a feel for an audience during a reading or talk by how they react to the small jokes. If you get a laugh from throwaways, that’s a good thing. And a part of my own mantra about respecting the reader spills into these events: I really try not to do glib sound bite answers. (I will on television, or they never want to see you again.)

We got a chance to talk about why I infuse elements of the supernatural into history, the theme of ‘exile’ I’d just written an essay about, a smart question abut whether the ‘universality’ of using the fantastic means any story could be in any setting (it can’t, and the query let me spell out why). The way every society (and every person) shapes an interpretation of the past, usually to serve a purpose. Also, roles allowed women in periods of history in general, and the Song Dynasty in particular.

And, don’t ask me how, Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the 1960 World Series came up, and then again, and then again. We had talked about how all the themes in a novel aren’t worked out ahead of time (not by me, anyhow), that some slip in and establish themselves: that’s what that damned home run did last night!

After, I had my usual angsty feeling facing a long signing line. I never want to rush people, often they do have things they want to say or ask and only this one chance, but I am endlessly aware that there are people way back in the room and they’ll have a long, long wait. I tell people that I have interesting readers, they should make friends while waiting.

One of my own oldest friends waited it out and spirited me away for a drink and a bite to eat after. He knows the period that inspired River of Stars really well, is about to defend his later-in-life Ph.D dissertation on it, and made me laugh by saying after the reading and talk he could not read the novel till he’s done – or he’d be terrified of blurring my ‘quarter-turn to the fantastic’ and the real period he needs to focus on for another few weeks. I laughed, because it happens to me while writing all the time. I shift back and forth in names, even my sense of ‘what happened’.

It was good to wrap the night with someone I’ve been so close to since we were in school.

I remember, some years ago, being at an utterly mobbed book launch event here in Toronto. It was for a writer friend who published a smallish book every few years. He was an older fellow, a professional as well as a writer, and a much-loved figure in several subsets of the community. When I say mobbed I mean it. Not only was the event thronged, it was almost a who’s-who gathering. Much media presence.

I joined a cluster around my friend before the event started, gave him my congratulations and murmured, ‘This is sensational, the place is packed!’ He looked at me and rasped (some people can get away with rasping), ‘Guy, you don’t get it! Tonight I am going to sell tho-thirds of my total book sales!’ He was exaggerating, but only to a degree. Essentially, by summoning everyone who knew and liked him, his publishers managed to get two or three copies per person bought by a lot of well-off people.

That’s one kind of book launch. Another is the straight ‘party time’ where the author and his or her friends just celebrate the arrival of an ideally non-bouncing baby book. ‘Friends’ can have a loose definition sometimes, of course. Jackie Mason, the great comedian, once joked about an event where his wife ‘kept it intimate, she just invited the immediate world’.

I get a little odd with launches. I’ve been upbraided (actually, harangued and aggressively shredded might be closer to the truth) by friends because I haven’t called to tell them a launch was happening. But my take has been, pretty much since I was lucky enough to start having actual readers, that launch events are for the people who have been waiting for the book. (I did alert some friends this time. Aggressive shredding with inventive profanity can have an impact.)

But tonight is about readers. I’ll do some thank you remarks off the top, because there are people to thank, and when I tell the audience I’m grateful to them, that’ll be very real. Enough people seem to want the fiction I deliver to allow me to research and work the books, and rework them, until they are ready – or as ready as I can get them. Should I make a bad joke about that old Paul Masson ad with Orson Welles and his gorgeous voice? ‘Will sell no wine before its time.’

(Actually – digression – that line always felt more an adman’s than a winemaker’s. There’s no upside to selling too soon. If the wine isn’t ready it tastes badly, you lose market share. And a good wine can be kept for a few years anyhow. Get me Don Draper, please.)

For the last few novels the first launch night for a book has been a hybrid evening. I do a short reading, but people seem to enjoy – and I know I prefer – a conversation with someone for at least part of the time. I get to be funny, or try.

There are people out there who are really good at helping on stage in this way. It is a skill, no question. And this format doesn’t always work. I attended an evening a few years back with David Cronenberg generously giving his time to interview Stephen King. It didn’t really take off. Maybe too much star-power up there, but more the discrepancy between David, who really is an intellectual, and King, who is very bright (obviously!) but just as obviously didn’t want to go that route.

Tonight I’m with Laurie Grassi, Books Editor of Chatelaine Magazine. Laurie has her own constituency and a real love of books in the widest sense. (Her all-time favourites list is online somewhere. It includes Bel Canto. Go read that.) She’s also funny. Through emails yesterday we made the shared executive decision not to tango on stage if the conversation flags. I doubt it will, just as I doubt a tango would have been especially edifying.

Event is at 7 tonight, cash bar beforehand at 6 PM. At least one bookworld acquaintance wrote me when he heard that and said, ‘No one told me! Now I’m there!’ No comment.

Free online tickets are a request from the library, which is hosting this at the main Reference Library at Yonge and Bloor, in their really gorgeous, very large atrium.

http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT128087&R=EVT128087

No tangos, unlikely to be any tangling (except maybe plot threads?), but it really is special, the night you bring a book to the world, or that segment of it that has been waiting.

Double meaning (what, me, a pun?). The day before today was quite predictably crazy, in an entirely good way, though with that feeling you get after one or two cups of coffee too many. There was a huge amount going on backstage, too (digression: anyone ever see “Noises Off” – brilliant comedy on the chaos backstage while a play is running out front.).

I am, obviously, really pleased with the response of reviewers so far. (Am I being set up for the humongous hammer of cataclysmic criticism soon?) I’m especially rewarded when people write well, and catch things. One reviewer noted a rivers starting small before becoming a torrent image I use, and linked it (perfectly) to the way the book begins.

A few things to note here, before they slip what remains of my mind.

The other meaning of ‘the day before’: the launch event in Toronto is tomorrow. It was a really good event three years ago, at the lovely Toronto Reference Library space, and I’m looking forward to this one, too. I always think of these as events for readers, not a party for friends, but I know a number of friends are planning to come. Cash bar works wonders.

The library wants tickets ordered (free) to help with figuring out how many chairs to set up. They have a lot of space, but come early if you want to be fairly close. Bar is from 6 PM, they tell me, we’ll start the gig at 7ish. Laurie Grassi, Books Editor of Chatelaine, is chatting on stage with me after a short reading (by me, not her, though she’d be great). Am picking the reading passage today. Laurie and I agreed not to plan or discuss anything. I know nothing (as Manuel says on “Fawlty Towers”).

http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEVT128087&R=EVT128087

Next, an early heads-up (will repeat nearer the day). I am doing another AMA on reddit on the evening of April 9th, after a fun evening a year ago with them. I followed, by one evening, Woody Harrelson (or his manager, some think) who managed to mess up prodigiously, and had warnings all day from every friend who knows reddit, but it was great fun, with good questions. I’m happy to go back.

The overall link, for now, is this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy

and my evening is on the right sidebar (may be some other authors you want to diarize there, too). On the 9th, that sidebar link will be opened in the morning. You can go early and post questions or do it real time in the evening. I get there at 7:00 EDT and start typing as fast as I can.

What else? Martin Springett’s lovely “River of Stars Suite” inspired (obviously?) by the book, is available now as a CD, he tells me. It is at his website at http://martinspringett.com and also under his name on iTunes and CD Baby for download. The CD, with signed artwork, too, is a bonus prize for the #riverofstars photo contest on Twitter.

And, the contest.Under fierce and unrelenting pressure (read: polite requests) we have extended the deadline for that from the 7th to the 10th. People have been worried their ordered copies might not arrive in time, which is a fair concern. Here’s the contest description from downscreen again, for those who missed it:

http://www.brightweavings.com/journal/2013/03/fifty-shades-of-kay-the-contest/

Go ahead, be creative, funny, adorable…

I have no one to blame but myself, and I know it.

Some time ago I made a pretty obvious joke among friends and then online about Fifty Shades of Kay. People were amused, I suppose for pretty obvious reasons.

Months passed, as they do.

On Twitter very recently someone posted a photo of their copy The Fionavar Tapestry on the breakfast table beside the pancakes or eggs and a fruit smoothie. Made me smile, as I really like battered (no pun intended), well-loved copies of my books. Just after that, a couple of other people (reviewers, booksellers, authors) happened to post photos of their early copies of River of Stars.

An idea entered what I am pleased to call my mind.

What if we run a contest, I wrote my publicists, marketing people, editors. Do it in the first week after books start arriving in bookstores, give a prize to the cleverest or funniest or most creative photo of a copy of River of Stars in a bookstore.

Fabulous idea, word came hurtling back. (They flatter me when they aren’t harassing me.) But, asked Charidy Johnston, one of the senior marketing people, why limit it to bookstores? Let people have more room to be creative.

She was right. So we all agreed the photos could be taken anywhere. I made a joke or two (I do that) about maybe getting more creativity than we bargained for. After further emails back and forth Nicole Winstanley, President and Publisher of Penguin Canada, editor and friend, agreed to judge this with me.

Cut to New York last Thursday, a day of meetings. Over lunch with a trio of Wunderkind PR publicists, finalizing plans for the photo contest came up and I joked (see the ‘foolish author motif’ emerging?), ‘Given that these are photos, I guess it’ll be like Fifty Shades of Kay after all.’

Laughter, then a sudden, intense, extreme silence around the table. So profound that other diners looked over at us. I felt the first sadly belated premonitions of doom.

‘You realize we have to call the contest that!’ Tanya said. ‘It is too perfect.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Elena. ‘That is what we are calling it!’

See? No one to blame but myself.

So, here we go. Here’s the deal:

The first copies of River of Stars shipped from warehouses this past Friday. Should be arriving in bookstores any day. So, from today to April 7th, the Sunday after the official on-sale date of April 2, readers are invited to post to Twitter their best photos of the books ‘in the wild’. And to be egalitarian, this includes e-book versions, if you can get a good photo of one – which means the UK can play too, as e-books should be out there on the 2nd. (Hardcovers not till July.)

Post your picture with the hashtag we’ve been using: #riverofstars. That’s so we can find them.

People are invited to comment (politely?) on each other’s photos, that’s part of the fun, I hope. After April 7th, Nicole and I will have a drink and look at what’s come in, and pick a winner.

Prize is an extra, signed hardcover of River of Stars, shipped to wherever the winner is and, as a bonus, a double-signed CD of my absurdly talented friend Martin Springett’s just released (this past weekend) “River of Stars Suite” – music inspired by the book.

The music can sampled at http://martinspringett.com/riverofstarscd.html

So there you have it. Start your cameras. Enjoy the book, enjoy the game. Behave.

Interviews are endlessly different. I am always asked, by publicists, family, editors, ‘How did it go?’ And I almost always answer, ‘We’ll know when we see it.’

The thing is, an interview is always in the editing. You can talk to someone for an hour, and their space allowed is 500 words. Or five minutes on air. (Or 90 seconds if it is television, sometimes.) That means you will sound either witty, thoughtful, or cretinous, depending on whether they kept the moment when you sneezed and mispronounced their name at the same time, or not.

So I’ve learned to wait before deciding how a given interview will appear. This is even true of e-interviews, since answers can be trimmed or cut there, too. The truth is, you really don’t know. What you can know, is if someone has done their preparation (starting point: reading the book), if they are genuinely interested in the conversation, and if there’s any kind of vibe between you. (Laughter is often a key, unless it is during that sneeze I mentioned.)

There is also a real range of skills in interviewing, and these are different for print, radio, television, email, or on stage (that last is entirely different). There are also different ways of being excellent. (Just as there are for writing, or acting, or pitching.) I have vivid memories from early in my career of being on air with Peter Gzowski, the late, great titan of Canadian radio. Gzowski was legendary; stories were told of people stopping their cars outside bookstores, running in and saying, ‘I want the book by the guy Gzowski’s talking to right now.’

He had many strengths – warm voice, laughter – but for me the key just about leaped out as we talked the first time. He listened to what his guest was saying. Simple as that, and as hard. Peter was superbly briefed by his producer and staff, but he also reacted to what he was hearing in the studio. He didn’t just move on the next question on his cheat sheet, he responded to what you told him. It became a conversation, not a pre-fabricated q&a. It was a pleasure, actually, and because he was live to air, for those interviews I was able to say, and know: that went well.

Nancy Pearl, the ‘Rockstar Librarian’, with whom I’m talking in Seattle late in April, is also fabulous. We’ve done three sessions together, and her secret is something else. Nancy’s passion for books, for the world of books, for talking about books, sometimes for your book, is irresistible. She pumps you up because her delight is infectious. It is easy to see, five minutes into a conversation with her, on stage or on camera, why she is such an ambassador, worldwide (she just came back from talking books in Bosnia), why people go charging off to buy the books she’s praising.

What’s fun, especially on a book tour when repetition becomes the usual name of the game, is when you get a question that stops you, makes you raise a figurative or even literal eyebrow and, like an ungrammatical Apple fanboy: think different.

Today, in New York, I had an interview with César Torres of Ars Technica, and it was a lot of fun. But what I’ll remember, and discuss with friends, is a question he asked about a scene late in River of Stars when one person ‘betrays’ someone dear to them by releasing something they wanted kept private. César got us going on privacy and the internet and oversharing, and I mentioned Kafka’s executor and dear friend who ‘betrayed’ him by releasing works Kafka asked him (ordered him) to burn. That had actually crossed my mind when I wrote the scene, but I never expected to be asked about that small moment, or have it connected to issues of the current cyberworld. It was, in other words, a terrific question from someone who had read the book, thought about it, and connected it to his own world and interests (César is the Social Editor for Ars Technica).

In other words, a novelist’s dream question.

That one went well. I’ll go out on a limb and say it.

Starting tomorrow, the 19th, Penguin Canada are starting a 3 week ebook promotion on their entire backlist of my work. $6.99 for all titles.

I think targeted promotions of this sort are a smart idea. It has always been seen as intelligent to make sure that backlist books are in print and available in stores as a new title appears. The idea is to let the ‘coattails’ of the new book generate sales of older titles, as new readers discover a writer and the new one generates (one hopes) some media.

Something like this is a fine tuning of the same idea for ebooks. The backlist ebooks will be on sale for the week or so prior to the release of River of Stars and for the week following.

If any of the other markets do something similar, I’ll get the word out. Note that in UK, the actual books for River aren’t till July (I should see their cover ‘roughs’ tomorrow, apparently) but ebooks will be on sale on April 2, same as the US and Canada.

Have brainstormed a fun idea with marketing and PR teams, as to getting readers involved in something, and will announce it at end of week. (Yes, that’s a tease. And your point is?)

Oh. And got my boxes of author copies from New York Friday. None of them were A History of World Whaling. In joke.

When Edward Gibbon presented the 2nd volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the Duke of Gloucester (the king’s brother) the legendary, cheerful comment from royalty was, “Another damn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”

My versions are many, but I’ll never forget the morning national tv host (no, I won’t name him, though he deserves it) who started our interview on Lions of Al-Rassan by chortling, ‘This is a big book! This is a really big book! How do you even write such big books?’ I wanted to say, ‘In the time I spend not murdering you.’

Ahem.

The scribbling I’m doing lately is quite different. In the New World Order, a lot of the marketing for a book is online and that means quite a few e-interviews. I really don’t mind them, and people are often smart and generous. But it is absolutely inevitable that some questions are repeated over and again … and I can’t change the answers. It looks too strange, as if I’m playing with them, and I’m not. So if someone asks, ‘What drew you to the Song Dynasty?’ or ‘What books have influenced you?’ or ‘What comes next?’ … all perfectly legitimate queries, my fear is that anyone surfing to more than one of these will be bored cross-eyed by me!

I spend my life trying not to be boring. (And failing, my younger son advises. I let him live, too.)

The publicists analogize to a politician. They make the same speech in Peoria that they do in Pasadena. Some people may hear both, but the idea is to get your core thoughts out to as many people as possible and most do not catch you more than once. I get it, but I don’t really like it. So I’m happiest when someone throws a curveball question at me, one I haven’t heard and need to think about.

(I have been warned by Laurie Grassi, Books Editor for Chatelaine Magazine, who is doing the on stage interview here in Toronto at the launch on April 4 that if she has a couple of drinks at the reception beforehand it could get very interesting. I have said (recklessly?) that she doesn’t scare me.

All the advance trade reviews for River of Stars so far have been really good. I told one of my editors this makes me nervous. She laughed (has heard this before). Replied, ‘Would you be less nervous if they weren’t?’ (I have heard that before, too.) My film agent said, ‘You always get good reviews.’ I said ‘Bite your tongue! And go sell us a good movie to classy people.’ (He has heard that from me before, too. See? Repetition keeps kicking in around now in this business!)

The tour dates for April are firming up, I’ve tweeted a few of them. I expect I’ll have something complete from Penguin soon and we can put it all in one place. I’ve agreed to do an AMA on Reddit on April 9th, before I go on the road. I did one last fall and it was a lot of fun, though I needed much faster fingers.

And, before I go for now, a birthday shout-out to Deborah Meghnagi, who created Bright Weavings thirteen years ago. Hard to believe it was that far back.

A short but important heads-up for those in the Toronto area who might want to attend the worldwide launch for River of Stars. I’ll be reading and then interviewed on stage by Laurie Grassi, Books Editor of Chatelaine Magazine.

The library website has made tickets available online (two a customer) as of today, March 7th.

Tickets are free but because of that they will oversubscribe (since people sometimes book and don’t show when events are free, obviously). On the library website linked below they warn of this – it is probably a good idea to arrive early.

Doors open at either 5:30 or 6:00 — depending on which of their two webpages you believe! (I suspect it’ll be clarified soon – I’ll ask Penguin to get on that with them!)

Because it is a celebration there will also be a cash bar. I am perfectly fine with signing books for people who have had a glass or two of wine!

Here’s the main link (click on the ticket link to get to that page):

http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Em=1&Entt=RDMEVT128087&R=EVT128087