I almost never reread my own novels, once they are printed and on sale. The small exception is the period when I am choosing reading passages for a new one, and once or twice when I needed to help with a pitch for an older book for Hollywood purposes.

I think this is true of most writers I know. We don’t reread our earlier work, or even the current one once it is truly finished. Philip Roth made news late last year when he announced that when deciding if he would retire, he reread all his own books over a period of time. Pretty unusual, and it was deemed noteworthy.

There is an odd byproduct (for me) in this fact of not rereading. It gets too easy to slip into thinking of River of Stars as a property, a product.The discussions are about packaging and book videos, touring, promotion, who gets ARCs (and when), interviews, launch events, ads, PR letters … and, really, a lot more.

So, this morning, I had a good moment. It came about because I was writing a note about Friday’s over-coffee marketing meeting about the book video being planned. The meeting had left it to me to think about voice-over passages that might be used from the book, and to do that, I started reading certain scenes again.

This is going to sound appallingly self-indulgent (not normally me, I hope!) but … I really liked them. I liked it, the book. I kept reading, well past the passages that offered possible lines to be spoken in a video.

The exercise was a feel-good moment. And it reminded me that behind all of what is now going on there’s a novel, a story, characters, a setting, something about to be shared. And shared in the hope that it will catch readers and engage them … and holds them for a while after.

It is a novel, and I still believe novels can matter. I write them in the hope they will.

There is always a lot of talk on book-to-film, the issue of fidelity to the original material. Everyone knows the main parameters of discussion. That they are not the same medium, that they have different strengths, that a film fails if it tries to slavishly be the book on screen, and can fail (for readers) if it deviates too profoundly, in plot, casting, tone, or themes.

Leaving The Hobbit aside, since I try not to talk to much about Tolkien-related issues, the mixture of outrage and bemusement over the casting of Tom Cruise recently as Jack Reacher (in the film of a book by Lee Child) has been extreme. Reacher, for those not in the loop, is vividely described in all the books as being really big and strong, about 6’5″ or so, and it isn’t just a throwaway fact, it is at the core of the character: a man who causes other men to shrink a bit, whenever he enters a room. He is massively physical. Cruise … isn’t. Yet despite readers’ howls of dismay, Lee Child is on record, whether sincerely or as a good soldier, in saying he thinks Cruise ‘nailed it’.

We’ve done ‘Casting Couches for my various books. In the Bright Weavings Forums, on the Pinterest board, and recently on the Facebook page as part of a draw for an ARC of River of Stars. I make Danny De Vito jokes and (mostly) enjoy the indications of how readers ‘see’ people. I do remind people that hair colour or anything like that is not an important criterion. Easy to adjust. Go for the acting skill. I have my own wishlist (for directors, too) but tend to keep boringly quiet on this, too, as there are real discussions going on all the time. It wouldn’t be smart to diss someone who might be part of a major proposal. (I may have killed the De Vito-as-Diarmuid option already.)

I’m also intrigued by artists offering their takes on scenes or characters from the books. The very nature of visual art seems to allow more room for interpretation. (Not always, this week sees a lot of debate over the unveiled first royal portrait of Kate Middleton.) In fact, when Deborah and I were discussing Bright Weavings, one request I made was that the site try to encourage submissions of scholarship and art.

So to round this rainy morning post off, I’m attaching two works from the Art Gallery on the main site (get there by clicking at the top here, to see some other artwork submitted over the years – Deb, consulting with my artist friend Martin Springett, acts as curator in selecting).

The first is by Naomi Tajtelbaum. Her comment on the site reads, in part,

“My sister introduced me to GGK’s works when I was a teenager, starting with Tigana, which has remained my favourite novel ever since… I chose the riselka since it is a fantastical creature and therefore I felt I could use license to give it an abstract image… I tried to bring in imagery from the book; if you examine it carefully you will find three faint paths and faces. One of the paths includes some gold, whereas one of the faces looks drawn, possibly ill, and one of the paths is branching. The colours mirror the colours used in the description of the riselka, the greens and blues and purples…”

The other piece (there are many I could have picked) accompanied the Washington Post’s review of Under Heaven. Artist Goni Montes called it a ‘dream job’. The piece is called ‘Peony’ and the slight irony is that this image would also be a terrific one for River of Stars, because a Peony Festival in springtime plays a role in the novel. (It was called the ‘king of flowers’ by some, though there is irony there, too, as neo-Confucian purists saw it as too ‘feminine’.) Here’s that one. I like the way the horses, so critical in the novel, are quietly integrated:

The scribbling trade teaches you a few things, if you stay with it. (Save. Back up. Check for hair in chaos before readings.)

But one of the strongest, earliest lessons for me was realizing that writing books is a dialogue not a monologue. Readers bring themselves to your books, to their responses to your books. That means their literary preferences, their nature, their mood of the month, week, hour.

One’s person’s erotic scene, as I have often said, is another’s pornography and a third person’s boring skim-the-pages. Same with a character’s inner monologue, a battle scene, a historical reflection. Well, that last is unlikely to be anyone’s porn, but you know what I mean.

That truth is what underlies the idea that no artist can please everyone encountering their work. Beyond that, it is why, as readers, we often try a book once, put it aside as not working for us at all, then read it later (sometimes not that long after) and love it. Or why we love a book at 15 and wince, re-reading it at 40.

I had a very early encounter with someone willing to fail a university course because he refused to read The Darkest Road. It was not a considered literary judgment. He had, I learned from his professor, actually ‘fallen in love’ with my character, Kim Ford, and was revolted that the author (moi) could be so vile and degraded as to have her sleep with an old man when they weren’t even married. He would not give any more of his reading time to such a person. I learned something from that. Dialogue, not monologue.

A theme of Ysabel is how being 15 today here in the west is radically different from what it has meant in earlier cultures. Ned’s progression in the novel, his taking charge at the end, his parents’ accepting this, feeds into that theme, and there are pretty explicit references to it (I wasn’t being hypersubtle with this.) Juliet, in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was, famously, twelve years old. But some readers have been startled or even angry that there is erotic banter and a half-promise for the future between Ned and Melanie at the end of the novel. The age gap, and today’s sexual ethics trump all for them (including any thinking about what has just happened to Melanie, what she has been, and is just emerging from). So, for these readers, that motif is just inaccessible, it crashes too hard into ‘what they are’ as I mentioned at the top here.

Responses to the core theme of Tigana, the obliteration of cultural identity, range amazingly widely. From those who just don’t get it, don’t even register it, just see the novel as another fantasy adventure (good one, bad one, whatever … look at the on-camera discussion on “Sword & Laser”), and other readers (often in parts of the world that have experienced such cultural oppression) who ask me, powerfully and often, ‘Were you writing about us?’

Those questions are deeply moving. So are comments from readers who stress that they are not normally made emotional or deeply thoughtful by books, but found themselves in that space reading mine. How do you not feel rewarded by such shared feelings. Such as a comment like this one, to an earlier post on this Journal:

I also have been reading for as long as I can remember. I am a military man with several tours to combat, decorated for valor, and awarded the purple heart. I tell you this so you will understand I am not a man that falls prey to emotion. Your writing, all of it, speaks to something inside me. A part I keep buried safe so I can do my job. It is poetry, beautiful to read, and never fails to bring strong feelings out of me. No other author has moved me quite as much. Thank you. I look forward to the journey your next story will lead me on.

I was told a story in Zagreb one night, by a very big, physical man, who had also been a soldier, doing a forced tour of duty in the terrible wars of 20 years ago. He said (late night, after many drinks) that he would end up back in his barracks, with men he felt nothing in common with at all, after a day of horrendous violence, put on headphones to block sound, and use The Fionavar Tapestry, re-reading it, as a way of centering himself again, and accessing some elements of grandeur in the world and people. And he offered thanks, as well.

So let me, in turn, say thank you. When readers come forward to share stories, tell how the novels took them away from their usual responses, or offered access to ones they normally keep sheltered … it means a very great deal.

That is, I suppose, another aspect of the dialogue.

Well, ARCs are being sent out, people have started tweeting that they have them, which feels strange, I have to say.

It is an odd time for me, this stage, with every book. Probably so for any author. (Though I should qualify that, as the range of responses probably goes from catatonic terror to blithe indifference.) I am curious, edgy, have time and energy for a bit. Anyone need their roof reshingled? (Old joke about a handsome, inebriated guy who comes up to a woman in a bar and murmurs, ‘I will do anything for you that you can imagine, or think to ask. Anything. As long as you can say it in three words.’ She gazes deeply into his eyes and whispers, ‘Paint. My. House.’)

Thing is, every reader of a novel, up to a certain point, is someone personally connected with the writer or with his or her ‘partners’ (agents, publishers, marketing people). It can be fine-tuned, revised. Then there is a point where … it is in the wild, as I said in the header. No more amendments, revisions, no more working on the cover or jacket copy…

There’s another very old meme about revised famous last words. So for Admiral Farragut the revision goes, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! … No! Wait!’ Authors can be like that. Paul Valery said, ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’

But a novel being sent out, as River of Stars is now, isn’t so much abandoned as released to the world. Different feeling.

There is a two-tier process at work with the ARCs. Review newspapers, magazines, online journals get them now, because many of them need a long lead time to assign a book for review (or for an author interview or profile). They observe the convention of holding reviews back until publication date (so that people can read a review and go buy the book).

Bloggers tend more often to be solo operators, need less time (generally, there are exceptions) to get to a book, and so that batch will go out in February. And the dynamic for these things online is very different. I’ve had, easily, some of the most thoughtful, engaged, informed reviews of my work from online sources. For one thing, there’s more room, usually. That matters. 400-500 words let you say what ia book is about (sometimes with spoilers!) and whether you like it. Not much more. Give a smart person room to explore a book and … you might get something  worth reading.

Nothing about e-book piracy, no. Benign New Year’s mood this afternoon, en route soon to a January 1 levée some friends hold every year. Host makes superb Bloody Caesars (Canadian riff on Bloody Mary). A good way to start the year.

My wishes to all gathering or sojourning here for a healthy and rewarding 2013.

No, the header is anticipating the nervous circling of desks for protection-from–ferocious-author at my various agents and publishers when the break ends. As I mentioned before, I get a huge burst of energy when a book is finally out of my hands. Some of it is time freed up, some is busywork to distract me from sadness and the usual feeling of ‘if I had another few months …’ but mostly it is a response to accumulated to-dos that get shelved as the books are pushed hard to the finish line.

Once that happens (finish line) there are a lot of post-its on my desk and notes on my desktop and in what I am pleased to call my memory for things to check on or request.

The range is ridiculously broad. Examples. We are changing publishers in China for Under Heaven and thus for River of Stars. My existing house in Shanghai has been folded into a government controlled house in Beijing and the entire publishing programme changes when that happens! (And this is a new one for me in a long career of international editions and houses.)

We need to sort out the charity fundraiser auction for the first book off the press in Canada for River (we have done this four times now, a gesture I always like). Tour dates and gigs have to be firmed up fairly soon for April (some have already been posted online by the venues – Vancouver on April 17th). Some of this comes from the ‘other end’ as bookstores or media request gigs or interviews. (Interviews are, more and more, done online these days.) A UK announcement/press release for River is in the works. Any day. There is film stuff. Always. Usually time-consuming, usually amounts to a tease. But…

The terrific Elena Stokes and Tanya Farrell of Wunderkind PR come on board again this week (they were with us on Under Heaven) to help with marketing and publicity, and coordination is going to be important. Theirs are names I’ll likely mention often as the next months unfold. I may also tease. Actually, it is a lock that I will.

ARCS start going out from NY and Toronto, a few already have (and the winner of the FaceBook ARC contest will be sent hers this week, too). Negotiations are underway at my agents for various foreign editions and I want to have discussions with about a couple of countries where they are getting tangled. (The recession in Europe is hitting the book world, too – no surprise.)

A book video needs to be made. For reasons I’ll explain later (promise), we’re hoping to have it done by early February.

Book videos are a newish and interesting aspect of the business and again everyone is still figuring them out. My own sense is they matter most for YA books, as the target audience views them again and again (‘Is that actor hot enough to play Biff?’). But they are in play for all books now. My filmmaker son has even formed a company, Kove Productions, to do these for authors and publishers. (koveproductions.com) I may do a longer post on this topic later. Someone remind me.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg in the River (ahem). I don’t want to even think about metaphors of crashing into it.

How ’bout that Adrian Peterson? Vikings will very likely lose in Green Bay on Saturday, but it was quite the game Sunday.

I worry about doing a straight ‘reply’ to interesting comments, as the whole discussion might get buried. I like WordPress but the reply/discussion process is slightly awkward.

BOB (yes, he uses all-caps) queried, as he is wont to, the second-class status of e-books. He is a regular on brightweavings, so we’ve had this discussion before. My sense is that there is no likelihood of e-books not becoming more and more significant (though the rate of growth slowed this year in North America it is just taking off in Europe). The dilemma for publishers is trying not to cannibalize their own products. It may be that hardcovers are a doomed species (again, in Europe, they mostly are) but it isn’t automatically ‘stupid’ to try to stave that off.

For a time, the publishing world seems to have flirted with the idea of a delayed e-book release, akin to delayed paperbacks, so the hardcover would have at least some time on stage alone, then the hardback would graciously withdraw and paperbacks and e-books would hold sway. My sense (I may be wrong) is that no one thinks that is a good idea any more, or at least a workable idea. Certainly the delay before trade or mass market paperback is continuing, but the e-books do seem to be arriving with the first hardcovers.

There may remain a pricing policy where the e-books cost a little more when paralleling the hardcover, then come down in price when they are beside a paperback edition. And in the background for everyone is the issue of piracy, of course. In some countries it is annihilating the book trade: I am told by agents in Russia that pirate editions of paper-copy books sell for a fraction of the ‘real’ ones, and then there are the electronic ones for free…

Another comment to the last post was generous but may have missed a part of my point about blogs and early reviews. George, I want to be clear: my own sense is that bloggers reviewing early are not offending the publishers. As I said there is a balancing act at work, though no one quite knows how to do it yet.

If publishers don’t want early blog reviews they have an easy solution: don’t send them out early! My sense (remember I was last dancing with Under Heaven three years ago and things may have changed) is that the industry is perfectly fine with blogs reviewing as soon as they get the ARCs, unless they attach a specific request to wait – and they don’t need to, they can just hold back distribution until they are ready to see assessments online.

The line between a smart, widely read blogger and an ‘online magazine’ is really hard to pin down sometimes, and it may be a waste of time trying. I think the industry does try, and that was my point about their probably hoping that, say, the Los Angeles Review of Books would wait until a book is out, but not being concerned if an individual (or even group) blog reviewed as soon as they got it.

I also know (because I am hearing the discussions) that there are different attitudes among marketing and PR people about this. As I said, people are still figuring it out – and that will mean coming to different answers.

I am amused at myself these days. With the book gone from me, I am waiting for all my publishers and agents to get back in their offices (dammit!) so we can address some things. My dear friend and former agent Linda McKnight used to warn her colleagues about this stage … when I finish a book all the queries and to-dos I have for everyone levitate from the desk and demand to be dealt with. I do try to be cute about it, but a wry remark at the end of a list of six things may not always be enough.

I treat these Journals, in part, as a chance to share with readers a bit about the nature of the book world. I’ve become aware over the years that even people who are lifelong readers often know little about how books are produced, marketed, sold, how they get to them.

Sometimes in the next two weeks, advance reading copies of River of Stars will begin to go out, some in January, many more in February, on a timetable worked out by my various publishers – and ideally coordinated among them. (Monthly magazines get them earlier, for example, they need more time.)

When I was first published (back when books were written with quill pens and read by flickering candlelight), and even until the turn of the 21st century, pretty much, advance reading copies (or galleys) had a specific pair of functions.

They went out, a month or six weeks before publication, to the main review sites, in order that editors could assign them, and the reviewers would have time to read the the book and write their vivisections or rapturous encomiums, or whatever, to appear – ideally – the week the book went on sale. A classic frustration for publishers has always been a great review appearing in a major paper long after the book has appeared (and sometimes gone from the shelves of bookstores).

Another small batch of galleys would go to ‘major accounts’ – the buyers for important chains or stores, or the store managers, to start generating (ideally!) positive word of mouth about the title. A few might go to other writers or known opinion-shapers, for the possibility of a jacket blurb or press release quote.

There weren’t that many galleys prepared, and they were fairly rudimentary much of the time (they still are, in the UK, usually).

The blogosphere and online world in general has changed the game. Galleys (usually called ARCs now) are made in much greater numbers, often much more handsomely, and they go out earlier, and more widely. The underlying notion is that online world is where word of mouth is generated. A long piece by Laura Miller of Salon unpacked how cleverly this path was pursued for The Hunger Games when it was about to appear. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/the_making_of_a_blockbuster/

There are some interesting tensions linked to this. The tradition, the rule, for newspapers and magazines is that a review must not come out before the pubication date of a book. The idea is simple: publishers want someone to be able to go buy a book when they read a review, not wait three weeks – and even forget about it. But online reviewers don’t always observe this rule (there are exceptions) and – frankly – publishers don’t always want them to. Advance buzz has to be, well, advance.

This rankles book page editors. They are dutifully holding back their reviews and discussions till a book is on sale, but meanwhile the whole world (or the part of it with internet access) will have been reading about the title for a month or more.

There is no obvious right or wrong here, though I suppose I’d agree that holding the Washington Post or Toronto Globe & Mail to a pub date review starts to feel unfair if major online reviewers are way ahead. My sense, is that the important online sites tend to wait until close to pub date, while it is independent bloggers who like to get out early with a review.

Maybe it’ll become a measure of a blog’s transition to stature … that it begins to wait until closer to the book’s release. But the irony is, if publishers are excited or optimistic about a book, they may not mind if blog reviews surface early. There’s a complicated tension here.

In other words, as with so much of the book world today, we are in flux, people are still figuring out how to dance to this new music.

In lines I quote often Yeats wrote:

For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?

I think about these words often when I consider writers and readers and the marketplace. The need or desire to succeed, feed one’s children, make a name, ‘breakout’ (in a rush, not a rash).

Urgent marketing is not new. The idea of artists ‘dancing as fast as I can’ goes back a long way, whether it is being ingratiating to the monarch or marquis whose patronage could make a career, flattering the senior poet (in Tang China, say) who could do the same thing, or tailoring one’s actual work to the taste or expectations of the day. (You want sad-eyed-clowns, I’ll give you sad-eyed-clowns. With fangs!)

Most of the time I am genuinely not judgmental about peers who work the room (or cyber-room) ferociously, and it would be hypocritical for me to thunder about this: I am writing this, I am now cautiously on Twitter, people have created a website and Facebook page for me. I am not hiding, though there have been times when I have thought it is better for the art if one does

But I will admit that I do make judgements when some lines are crossed. We all have our lines, in everything, really. Trashing a ‘rival’ anonymously (then lying about it), as one very major historian did on Amazon in the UK, crosses. Buying a hundred five-star reviews from a business that sells them – crosses. A bestselling writer instructing, on her webpage, her very large army of readers in the step-by-step process of going to Amazon to register and then post those five-star reviews (to counterbalance too many one-stars) – crosses. Getting fans to rate a book before they read it – crosses. Amazon allows it. Grace does not.

My guess is a lot of people might share this view (though not all). Some of my other ‘lines’ may not elicit majority agreement. I don’t like hustling for award votes, asking people to ‘do me a solid’ and vote for my book in some popular-vote competition, even though that has become a norm, how they are won. I am delighted if readers support a given book of mine, if they inform each other that some vote is happening. I just find the hustle on my own part inconsistent with any sense of a proper way to be in relation to those to read my work. I take them – and the work – too seriously,

This is all evolving, as the culture (especially online) evolves. Authors and readers are more interwoven than ever before. If I give a ‘bravo’ reply on Twitter to some reader’s witty remark that made me smile, that really is something new, something that simply did not and could not happen when I was starting as a reader – or a novelist. I can (and I will) link to an essay or review of one of the books if I find it generous and intelligent. That feels like encouraging thought, highlighting insights I am pleased to see out there. (If someone pans a book I am less likely to link for two reasons: I am not a masochist, and if I disagree with the comment, linking it would have to come with a rejoinder explaining why, and life is short, art is long, time matters. It is easier to link a piece when the tacit implication is ‘I am happy to see this’.)

But the Yeats quote at the top was brought to mind yesterday by reading, in the New York Times, a piece about reviews being ‘disappeared’ on Amazon. (The full article is here, but may be behind their firewall, for non-subscribers, not sure: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html?ref=technology

The mystery novelist __________, for example, does not see anything wrong with an author indulging in chicanery. “Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm,”

I say no, I’m afraid.  I agree with this quote, later in the piece:

“A not-insubstantial chunk of their infrastructure is based on their reviews — and all of that depends on having reviews customers can trust,” said __________, a science fiction novelist.

I don’t want to get into a detailed explanation of why I think ‘zero harm’ is just wrong. (This is already a very long post.) If I were to do so, it would involve an analogy with steroid use in sport (the ones playing honestly in a world of limited resources are harmed, among others.)

I am more saddened than anything else that the hustle mentality has so greatly eroded a parallel world of dignity, grace, at least aspiring to classiness. Treating readers (or potential readers) with some measure of respect, not as targets to be bagged – or used. Interaction needs to function with some awareness of this, or maybe I’m just wrong. The article in the NY Times focuses on Amazon and reviews, but that is just a single element in all of this.

If someone can say (and sincerely believe) that chicanery (lying, really) involves zero harm in the book-buying world, that person and I are inhabiting very different mental and moral spaces even if we both want to feed our children.

It is not a new divide. Self-promotion has always been an element of the artist’s life. Different artists, in the past and today, had and have different standards as to what they are comfortable doing in order to sell. All things being otherwise equal, the better promoter is more likely to succeed in commercial terms. One issue is whether those are the only terms. (For some they are.) And another issue is whether our culture allows us to draw (or even see) a divide between aggressiveness which might be tacky, and dishonesty, which is something else.

I spend time urging readers (those reading this!) to shape their own sense of where lines might be drawn. Yeats wrote ‘Were neither shamed in his own/
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes’ … that puts some power, some response, some pursuit of class, in the hands of the ‘neighbours’ too. That’s you.

It should be raining when children are buried.

Winter sunshine is a gift

But this is the wrong time

To be accepting brightness. Let it rain.

We know there may one day be laughter

Even for those now grieving.

We are made that way. It is how we endure.

Though we also know some will not come back

To sunlight for a long time, and some

Will not at all. It is possible for the heart

To break and not be healed.

For these, their life divides now and forever

Into before and after the day

Darkness found a child too much too soon.

A short briefing-people post today, though lots is happening. (That’s not supposed to be the case in the run-up to the holidays. Disconcerting.)

Over on the Bright Weavings Facebook page they have started a giveaway contest for the first ARC that will go out to anyone not specifically part of the trade distribution. (This is courtesy of the good people at Penguin Canada and is open worldwide, not just to Canadians.) There’s a bit of a Casting Couch riff/game associated.

Have a look:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Guy-Gavriel-Kay/189763622002

We debated inviting a poem inspired by any of the earlier books (we’ve done that on the core Bright Weavings site) but Facebook is rather more ‘out there’ than the original BW site (which felt like people’s favourite bar or café). And I didn’t want to narrow the entries to those who felt willing to write a sonnet or clerihew about any of the known characters or themes. Maybe for fun another time, back on the main site.

This casting motif plays off the Pinterest page’s ‘Casting Couch’ where you can find (and post) images of the actors you like. http://pinterest.com/theworldsofggk/casting-couch/

Remember: Danny de Vito is not to be proposed for Ammar. Instant disqualification.