The red pen rolls in the dust. The curmudgeon lies curbed. The past is past (for now).

Sandra will be happy. I took a long look this morning at the printout. I took a long look at the electronic files on my screen. I think Sandra stacked the deck … the electronic version of the novel has these neat, clear, sexy red shapes down the righthand side which tell me exactly what Catherine did whenever she proposed shifting a comma or a word – with lines pointing straight to the comma in play.

The printout has … a little bar in the margin and a really bloody faint greyed-out comma or whatever that if I screw in my monocle and ramp up the lighting I can maybe possibly make out if it is to be deleted or added or is a bit from someone’s cookie in the photocopy room. No sexy red boxes and arrows.

Do my loyal readers suspect that the fix is in? That the success of the Marketing Department’s Tag Team assault a few weeks back (the Twitter Twiumph) has breached the wall of Authorial Intimidation? That people now recklessly (wildly!) believe I might be reasonable about things?

Has it come to this? Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…

Catherine, on the phone today, was the soul of calm. If I wanted the red boxes I could ask Penguin to print again, they had likely just accidentally (hah!) forgotten to trigger the option that printed everything in the margins. Of course they would do that for me. Or … I could carry on as I had started this morning, using the on screen text, wasn’t it actually pretty straightforward? And easier on the back? She finds it so! AND … I could just shift my hard copy read-through to the typeset version which she and I both have to review as soon as we’re done with this one anyhow, right?

I hate when people make solid and sound arguments. Once I might have said, ‘I’ll hold my breath until I turn purple!’ But that is so last-year’s me…

Jokes and irritable author image aside, it feels all right. Have done a chapter and a half today on screen and I do live in the 21st century. And C is right … we do both have to go over the next version, which will be in the typeface and layout that will be the actual book’s including the dingbat/colophon/fleuron selected (much discussed in the last Tour Journal – those are the words, pick your favourite, for a section divider symbol). I will have my on-the-page read and won’t have wasted $4 on two pens. (Maybe only need one now, anyone want a red pen?)

Three interview requests/advance bookings today. That game starts earlier and earlier… suppose people do need my views on Verlander and how to pitch to Miggy Cabrera (very, very carefully).

Aware that there are an undue number of irreverent remarks in this post. One might deduce I’m in a cheerful mood. Don’t be silly.

Catherine Marjoribanks wrote me last night – she’d finished the copy-editing. Added that she had teared up reading, even though in ‘hyper-critical editing mode’. Yes, this pleased me a lot. Can’t imagine why. (I did check with her before mentioning this, she said she was happy to own up to it.)

Here’s a good example of the hyper-critical mode, what copy-editors do. She queried in the quick note whether I wanted councillors or counselors, the men giving counsel to the emperor. I needed to think. Opted for the former, as it focuses on the position, the office, the status (not the act of offering counsel), and in the world of River of Stars that’s key. Is that over-analytical? Not for me … I love that she’s on the case with these things. And that it makes me fine tune my own word choices.

Yesterday was a majorly (!) social day. Coffee with UK agent, lunch with a restaurant full of Penguin authors in for the Festival (and editors, sales directors, marketing people). Of course Charidy and Beth, the tag-team senior marketing duo who got me to Twitter, both tweeted about it. I replied. We got onto cocktails. Of course.

I think I may tweet more about cocktails. After lunch was another sit down with Nicole – President of Penguin Canada and my editor, then the thunderously loud, dense, jammed IFOA cocktail reception. Collapsed at home after to watch baseball and the debate – two sporting events?

But now, as of less than an hour ago, the copy-edited manuscript has been couriered from Sandra at Penguin. (Catherine sent it there electronically this morning.) Massive damned thing, sitting behind me on the second desk here. I do this run-through on paper not on screen. Hard copy. I am aware that Sandra probably rolls her eyes and mutters about Vexing Authors but I really like to see each novel on paper once before it goes to be typeset.

I feel it staring at me as I sit here. I have two red pens with which to defend myself. Am ready to turn and do battle…

Handle With Care

A: Half of them don’t need lightbulbs … they are reading off iPads.

IFOA Season. I’m off in a bit, possibly even wearing a tie (decision yet to be made), for four meetings and functions today – and I don’t even have any public performances this year. The International Festival of Authors is in full swing, and 100+ writers have gathered in Toronto … to watch San Francisco vs St Louis Game 7 tonight, No. To warch Obama vs Romney tonight. No. To check out the hotel bar and …

But yes, there are a lot of writers here. IFOA was begun a long time ago by a man named Greg Gatenby and has flourished. A somewhat controversial figure towards the end of his tenure, Gatenby is to be credited for creating and maintaining a literary event here in Toronto that is one of the most important in the world. He initiated a concept of treating his guest writers exceptionally well (there are stories) and IFOA glows brightly on the yearly map of such festivals. The culture media here (what’s left of that) and the publishing world (Canada’s is centred in Toronto, of course) go just a tiny bit crazy.

It is fun, and lively, and the gods know that the book world needs all the attention and support it can get. If I sometimes shake my head, with two scotches  in me, about the blurring of what makes good writing with what makes good stand-up comedy from an author or mellifluous performance, that’s nothing new in our society. We do steadily blur any line between the work and the maker. I worry at times about the gifted writer who doesn’t much like microphones, Q&A’s, cocktail parties, the people who became writers because they weren’t very much into social interaction let alone public performance.

Still, every age shapes the skill-sets that signify for it, and right now Twitter, Facebook, Journals such as this one, and being charming on stage are major elements of the literary process. And I do know that Dickens and Shaw and Dylan Thomas, among others, were stellar because of their performing, too.

Means lamenting this, trying to turn our focus back purely to the writing is pointless. King Canute is often cited as the poster-boy for arrogant monarchs … he’s said to have ordered the tide to stop coming in and (surprise!) appears to have failed. The true story seems to be otherwise. Canute was surrounded by sycophantic flatterers at his court, telling him that his might and prowess were so very great even the sea would obey him. Canute called their bluff, deeply aware of his limitations, and took them to the seashore to show the tide wouldn’t listen.

I find that story way more interesting. If Canute had only gone on the talk show circuit, or had enough Twitter followers, and told it that way a few times, we might regard him as a hero of sorts.

Off to hang with some of the 100+. Cheering for the Giants tonight. Expect the debate to be fractious and without any knockout punches. Also, glumly, predicting that election is so close there almost have to be legal challenges on election night.

It is so frequent, isn’t it … that we start thinking about a topic, or learn a new word, and suddenly it is everywhere. I was musing here a couple of days ago about character accessibility (can we relate to them??) and how it has become a wildly distorted expectation or demand of fiction, and then this morning I came up to a chapter in the book of essays I’m reading …

Howard Jacobson, Man Booker winner, novelist, columnist, commentator, very funny man, has a collection out called (wonderfully, after a Chico Marx line): Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It. I just read the piece entitled “If It’s ‘Readable’ Don’t Read It.”

His take-off point for this short, smooth flight is a neurological study showing that the brain is triggered, engaged, all the lights go ON when subjects confront challenges in Shakespeare’s syntax; the need to process, adjust, absorb surprise in language and the illumination that follows. (Yes, I know, a pun, electrode-wired lights go on, etc.) Words that don’t just dully mirror back our ‘usual’ ways of speaking and writing.

Howard (I’ve met and corresponded with him, does one need ‘full disclosure’ in a journal post?) exults amusingly about this, but goes on to make core points, akin to what I was riffing on earlier this week. (Told you, major coincidence … or maybe just receptivity.)

Try this: “‘Then thank me for it,’ I always say, should the charge of ‘difficulty’ be levelled at one of my novels … ‘Struggling with a book has more of reading in it than flicking through it at a predetermined rate… And laying it aside to scratch your head does greater justice to a book’s contents than never laying it aside at all. They also read who are not turning pages.”

I’ll add (Kay, not Jacobson) that laying the book aside to absorb and respond to emotional intensity, real, unexpected feelings induced in us, is another sign of something reaching deeply into our lives from a book. Passages that take us off cruise-control. We pause to think, to grieve or celebrate, or be wrapped in mystery…

And then (Jacobson again), there’s this: “… those other reading-group inanities – ‘I can’t identify with the characters’ or ‘I don’t find the hero a very nice person’…”

I hate to say it, but he’s right (and not just because I wrote this two or three days ago here!). I suspect Howard hates to say it, or see it, too. The idea that books demand nothing of us implies that they offer nothing to us. Or, worse, that the measure of excellence in a novel is how swiftly and smoothly it slides past us (and then, as often as not, is gone forever).

Books that have a reader up at night but then also stay long after, that’s what some want to achieve as writers – and search for as readers. I want a great book to change me, not just make a plane ride pass. It doesn’t happen often. I always say that excellence is rare, in everything – that is why we value it so much.

Here’s the backstory.

A long time ago on a campus not that far away (U of Waterloo) some people in the English department asked me if they could do an ‘authorized site’ on my work. At that time (1999!) I was pretty down on author sites. They seemed deeply self-indulgent and mostly content-free. My sound bite quote when asked why I didn’t have one was Cato the Elder: ‘I would rather the Romans ask why there are no statues to Cato, than why there are.’ (Still love that.)

But the Waterloo team promised content – scholarship, art, showcasing other people’s ideas around my novels, and the concept that their students (many of them teach the books) would funnel material to the site year by year. It would be a real repository. I bought in. Drinks were involved, as I recall.

Meetings were taken, a committee was struck, students were recruited. A designer was found. Some of the students began chasing down scholarly articles (this was way before that was an easy web-search) and scanning book covers in prep for an Art Gallery on the site. Then, predictably, it rolled towards December and the students had exams and deadlines and the profs looked at each other and said ‘Where are the students?’ My good friend Neil Randall, who had spearheaded this, called me in mid-December to say, ‘We screwed up. It is always too hard to keep these things on track.’ More drinks were ruefully promised – and accepted, not unhappily.

I really wasn’t distressed. More amused, than anything. But then … I got a New Year’s email from Deborah Meghnagi, with whom I’d been corresponding for some time. Deb was then doing some web work for a company and in the immediae aftermath of the U of Waterloo collapse, I recklessly wrote the words, ‘One of these millenia I should get you to do a website for me…’ (Remember, this was New Years 2000! And yes, I know that isn’t really when the millennia started. Lost that argument back then with everyone!)

Cue music.

After not replying at all, and in something like three days (she’ll have the exact details) with a couple of all-nighters I think, Deb sent me, totally without warning, a url for the template of Bright Weavings.

She’d essentially done, on her own, what hadn’t happened in months through a committee or group. (Cue knowing nods of heads.)

I really didn’t think I could say no after that. It took her 6 more months of work, and brightweavings.com went live in, as best I recall, June of 2000. This Journal residesthere, as are the three previous ones, and a tremendous amount of content.

Over the decade plus Deb has scandalously proceeded with a life: husband, child, another on the way, a period as a senior editor for Toby Press, freelancing. I regard all of this frippery as irresponsibly going AWOL, of course. (I also regard teasing as a right.)

On the other hand – and this is a key to this post – the community that sprang up around her and the site led to four or five others stepping up and offering generous and creative support and expansion to her original idea. BW now has a Facebook page and a Pinterest board. It had a Twitter feed at @brightweavings until I was pounded into submission and it became @guygavrielkay (that tragic tale is part of the first post here, I think).

And when I speak of a ‘community’ I do mean it, and that’s what impels this entry. This weekend, about 20 of the denizens who have long gathered in the BW Forums will be actually gathering in Toronto from all over the place to hang with each other – for the fourth or fifth time.

I basically regard myself as no more than an excuse. Some years, when this meet-up happens, I’ve booked a bar for drinks, once we all had a Chinese banquet, this year it’ll be a breakfast gig. Then I get out of the way for most of the weekend, avert my eyes, ask not to be sent the more incriminating pictures…

But flippancy aside, I have to say that the emergence of this group of worldwide friends, spun from the website, has brought me enormous pleasure over the years. If anyone wants champagne and OJ with their breakfast and lattes this weekend, it’s on me.

“I wanted to approach Shakespeare as if foreign … The past is another country.” That’s a composer named Thomas Adès in the New Yorker this week, regarding his opera of ‘The Tempest.’

The second part of his quote is the famous L.P. Hartley line (Hartley said, ‘a foreign country’). As I read the piece (in Critic’s Notebook) I wasn’t sure how I felt about what Adès meant by the comment. But the line started me thinking.

We sometimes over-focus, I think, on trying to make history’s people ‘accessible’ or ‘relevant’ in too-obvious ways. This isn’t the same as linking up themes or motifs, it has to do with trying to make it easier for readers to identify with characters. But the truth is, it seems to me, Adès is right … Shakespeare is both universal and remote. (That’s genius for you, yes.)

In my work I think I’m obsessed with trying to show both things … elements of the past that are startlingly similar to concerns today, and other aspects that are just as startlingly alien. And this author-goal can collide with some modern readers’ desire to ‘connect’ with characters (an analogy: the way Presidential candidates do photo-ops drinking Budweiser in bars, or bowling, just folks.)

With Ysabel, as an example, I was surprised by some readers lamenting (mostly younger ones, but not only) that they didn’t ‘get’ or ‘relate to’ the character of Ysabel herself. She seemed remote to them, inexplicable. But that was the point, from the writer’s point of view. She’s a 2500 year-old capricious, doomed, eroticized Celtic goddess-figure returning in an endless cycle. How should we have a beer with her? How should I (or the reader) see her as accessible, readily understood, just like us? To my mind, a writer who makes such figures clear in their nature and motivation is failing his work, even if he or she makes the book ‘easier’.

I love, and often cite, a line from Walter Bagehot: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” We aren’t supposed to see certain things too clearly, have them explained too precisely. (A reason I have trouble with fantasy derived from dice-rolling games.) But I apply the line to more than the supermatural. It seems to me to resonate also with regard to any work that walks back into the past. Too much daylight, too complete an explanation, is a failure.

Hilary Mantel’s language does a good job of addressing this, even if she’s at pains to present her Cromwell as a ‘new man’, allowing readers to see him as a figure at the doorstep of the modern. Mary Renault was very good at injecting strangeness into her Greek novels. (“There is only one journey that all men make. They go forth from the Mother and do what men are born to do, till she stretches out her hand and calls them home.” That’s from memory, decades ago, and still gives me chills – I may have it a bit wrong. If someone has The King Must Die to hand, do correct me. If you haven’t read it, do!)

My friend Cecelia Holland, especially in her earlier, brilliant historical fictions, is a master of this effect: offering us that feeling of strangeness in the long-ago, in characters with a world-view alien to our own.

I am endlessly wrestling with these issues in my work, looking to balance them. The familiar and the strange, intersecting with each other.

Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize a few hours ago, for Bring Up the Bodies, a book I greatly admire. I reviewed it for the Globe and Mail back in May: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/bring-up-the-bodies-by-hilary-mantel/article4106421/

You do need to read Wolf Hall first (even if the publishers say you don’t) but that’s possibly even better, and also won the Man Booker.There’s a profile of Mantel in the New Yorker this week, by the way. Success came late, and deservingly.

Along with a few others, I don’t essentially agree (as a writer) with this approach to treating the inner lives of real people, but I’d worry about my responses as a reader if I let that stop me from appreciating excellence on this scale.

For a treatment of history and real lives (rather more recent history, even more chillling than the dangerous court of Henry VIII) I have been recommending Laurent Binet’s HHhH. The odd title is an acronym for ‘Himmler’s Brain is Called Heydrich’, which was apparently widely used at the time in Berlin … and the book treats the Czech assassination of Heydrich. Binet shares my resistance to appropriating the thoughts and feelings of historical figures – but takes an utterly different approach to dealing with this. It is a exceptional book about an incident too little known outside the Czech Republic.

The small church where the assassins and their fellows were trapped is now a memorial, and the crypt below it where most of them died can be visited. It is deeply moving, with a very well done explanation of the context and the event in the room up above. I’d put it very high on any list for visitors to Prague. And Binet’s book is a superb, distinctive telling of the story.

Here are two photos from there, SS Cyril and Methodius Church, a walk from Wenceslas Square, towards the river.

This is where the Czechs were trapped and eventually killed themselves with their last bullets. The window is where the Nazis tried to send in tear gas and then water in an attempt to flood the crypt. At lower right is the tunnel the trapped men started in an attempt to get through to the sewers. Tributes and memorials fill it. There are bullet holes everywhere.

Busts of Gabcik and Kubis, the men parachuted in from England to kill Heydrich. They deserve to be better known. So do the victims of Lidice, the village site of the Nazis’ most vicious reprisal.

I am sometimes, inexplicably, accused of being insufficiently sober and judicious. Often, this involves puns. Over on Twitter someone started a very funny hashtag called #archaicfilms with retitlings of flicks to fit ancient themes. Like (a favourite) Acropolis Then, or Of Mycenae Men, or Never Say Nebuchadnezzar Again (!) or Sundial M For Murder … have a look if you are on Twitter.

This all made me very happy. And reminded me of a similar game when we lived in France in 2004-5 where, with some friends, we started doing Geriatric Rock Songs, riffing on the real titles in that way. The guilty accomplices were Martin Levin, Books Editor of the Globe, Neil Randall of U of Waterloo, my brother Rex, and my son Sam, but I did all the ones that you find funniest below, okay?

Yes, I am soberly and judiciously determined to brighten all your Mondays with a few of these, because I dug back into my email folders and found the exchanges. You are, of course, warned. Herewith, some geriatric song titles:

You Can’t Always Remember What You Want

Total Attack of the Heart

Every Breath You Took

One Less Cup of Coffee

Walking on Empty

Abraham, Martin, and Whatsisname (love that one)

Adam Raised His Cane

Penny Lame

Teeth In a Bottle

The Shape I’m Out Of (that’s Martin, a major fan of ‘The Band’)

Shufflin’ Jack Flash

Bound For the Home (Simon & Garfunkle’s last reunion?)

The Needle and the Sweater Done

I’ve a Rocker

and a particular favourite, from Neil, this variation of the Byrd’s immortal ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’

Turn

And no, I am not apologizing. Can’t make me!

No editing this week, as I wait on Catherine. I’ve filled the week with meetings, accordingly. One of the good things this time around is we are way ahead with our cover. My American publishers, Roc, took charge of the design, used the same artist as for the last few (Larry Rostant) and I absolutely love the cover for River of Stars … how it echoes the one for Under Heaven, which just about everyone adored. The monumental figure chosen (with guidance from my editor there, Susan Allison) is perfect for the book. You can see it up top here, of course, or larger on Bright Weavings in the art gallery section.

I’m working on the Acknowledgements for River of Stars. I read an essay earlier this year (someone might find it and link?) that was an irritated assault on the very idea of acknowledgements. One aspect was the notion that a writer’s family and friends really don’t need citing in great numbers, nor does the music one listened to while writing. And there was a pretty funny riff noting that sometimes the writer is just bragging: ‘I want to thank my friends Rihanna and Margaret Atwood for support during many coffee sessions and twitter PMs, along with the always-loyal David Bowie and Junot Diaz.’

Right. Having said this, I still find my own Acknowledgements important for each book, and I spend some time on them. And, as it happens, I am one of those readers interested in the acknowledgements of other writers. (David Bowie? Loyal? Wow!)

For me the starting point is the writers and books that keyed my research. The trick is trying to balance steering readers to the works that were most useful, letting them chase down the material, without making a novel sound like a dissertation. The reality for me is that every book is built on a scaffolding of reading and correspondence and note-taking over a long period of time. It feels proper to show my appreciation for the books and people who are central to that.

Beyond that, we get into ‘you didn’t build that yourself’. Yes, of course, a writer writes his or her books, and usually in an intense and solitary way (not always, but usually?). The very stresses associated with that make it even more important if an author was braced and backed up by people in their lives. There is also a difference between a manuscript on a writer’s desk or hard drive, and a book that can be bought in a store (or downloaded). Production, packaging, editing, marketing … some writers are now doing this alone. Some of us are graced with publishing colleagues who put a lot of passion and skill into bringing the book to  readers. It seems ungracious (un-Canadian?) not to name at least some of them.

On the other hand, I am going to refrain from acknowledging the day-by-day support of my very good friend Derek Jeter, especially the morning after he broke his ankle and the Yankees of 2012 probably died.

On the other other hand, here’s a photo…

Just received the Programming Schedule from Barbara and Chris Roden, who are handling programming for the World Fantasy Convention – which is here in Toronto this year, starting on November 1st. (That’s an info heads-up, WFC always sells out well in advance.)

It is pretty much the only convention I try to attend every year. Even for Certified Curmudgeons there are a lot of friends and colleagues (agents, editors) who attend, making the hotel bar a lot of fun. By now I have ‘traditions’, such as a Saturday dinner group that is partly a memorial to a friend – Charles N. Brown, who created Locus magazine.

One year I watched a world series game in the bar with Jeremy Lassen of Nightshade Books. Jeremy, a ‘goodly, portly man’, in Shakespeare’s words, wore a resplendent orange and black pinstripe custom-made three-piece suit (how would that not be custom-made, I hear you asking). Yes, it was Halloween, but that wasn’t it: they are the colours of his beloved San Francisco Giants, who were playing that night. There’s a fan! Another WFC baseball memory, from the convention in San Jose, involves another hotel bar (you don’t have to comment on everything, you know!), watching my Yankees play (and win) a game, with John Berlyne, a UK agent who really did want to learn baseball. A surprising number of others came over and joined us, pretending similar interest. The final exam involved the infield fly rule. (Those following this year’s playoffs will know that not even umpires always get that right.)

In any case, I am moderating a good panel (people and topic, both) on Thursday afernoon, on ‘The Fantasy of the Wilderness’, a subject that interests me a lot. Then on Saturday afternoon at 1 the programmers have generously given me a full hour for the debut reading from River of Stars. This makes for a mini-tradition,I guess, because I did the first public reading for Under Heaven at WFC, too.

Means I have to figure out a passage … and as I have written in these journals before, reading passages are a tricky business. I don’t like spoilers (because readers don’t, either). I don’t like needing to do extensive backstory explanations. And what ‘works’ for someone at home reading is not the same as what works in a public space, listening. On the other hand, it is a book, not a play, a reading, not a theatrical performance.

Somewhere between now and then I’ll sit down and sort this out … though I often end up with three or four passages from a book that I try before settling on what feels best for touring/reading purposes.

Of course, by the time Catherine M is finished copy-editing the manuscript, I may be forced to read the recipe for dover sole with pine nuts in chapter four. (See previous post for the backstory to that joke).

Another photo? This, also from Prague. Sheer luck – we were crossing the Charles Bridge at night when …

I am quite sure that these were NOT being set off because a Canadian author was in town to sign books. Never did find out why they were being lit, though. Made for a pretty gorgeous twenty minutes. The bridge (especially at night when crowds thin a bit) is magnificent to start with …