I’m swinging west again Tuesday, to Calgary and then Kamloops, in the Okanagan Valley. Calgary is a library reading at the main branch on Tuesday evening. The link to register (free, but requested for admin purposes) is off this page

http://calgarypubliclibrary.com/services/programs-events?p=3405

and there is a separate link there if you follow it up, for out-of-towners without a Calgary library card to be able to also register.

This one looks like a straight reading (and probably Q&A after) so I’ll likely do the Chapter 8 passage I’ve been using.

In Kamloops I’m being interviewed on stage in the Clocktower Theatre (love the name) at the university Thursday after reading, so will offer the shorter chapter 2 bit (introducing Lin Shan) I use when a two-part event is what’s happening. Go ahead, accuse me of finally figuring out how to handle this on-the-road gig.

One of the things that amuses me about touring, and it is fairly new, is that local media do not necessarily interview authors when they arrive in town. They do interviews by telephone before we get there. But they only do them because we are coming. It makes perfect sense when explained (wait, I’m coming to that!): the intention is to promote the author’s event in town in the article, and if the interview it isn’t done ahead of time, they can’t manage that.

So, I fly to Calgary in part because the Calgary Herald will give interview coverage, but the interview took place yesterday from home. (An enjoyable conversation, reporter had such a good voice he should be on radio; plan to tell him if I see him Tuesday evening.) Same thing with Kamloops, one phone interview from here Monday, another from (of course) Calgary on Wednesday.

Yes, this is an odd business.

A really nice review in the National Post today and I have been (supremely) restrained in not teasing writer or editor on Twitter about typo in title, or plot summary error. They happen, proofreading and fact checking have become problematic, of late, in print media. Can you say budget cuts?

Here it is: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/05/10/book-review-river-of-stars-by-guy-gavriel-kay/

My restraint is even more luminously admirable (!) as Mark Medley, the books editor, has been teasing me about an interview we did three years ago where he claims I declared I would NEVER (sic!) go on Twitter. Sigh. It sounded like me, but I checked. What I said was:

“I have a very uneasy inner-relationship with modern marketing,” he [me, that is] says. “It’s easy to sit back and say ‘I disdain it’ when you have people (volunteering to do it for you, as Kay does), but I will not Tweet about where I’m having coffee, or what my kids are doing. I won’t do it.”

I repeated the last phrase in the interview, after he named other writers busily tweeting (Margaret Atwood, included).  I’ll stand by that, pretty much (though I may yet tweet about older son’s film work and am happy to out a certain books editor’s scandalous café habits). But the lesson, for me, of course is the old never say never, because Medley’s main point is right. I thought I’d hold out entirely. And now I find social media fascinating, worrisome, engaging, problematic, wit-filled and disturbing (add some other words of conflict, go ahead). I think it’s a tool, and a seductive toy, and an ambush.

I think my first post in this Journal, or one of them, was about the insistent, clever marketing execs at Penguin who tag-teamed me over lunch, broke me down, and got me to agree to go on Twitter directly in the period before River of Stars was due to appear. (They later did the same thing to Nicole Winstanley, the President.)

So that’s why I’m not teasing @itsmarkmedley too much … I can draw distinctions as to what really I said three years ago (and the all-caps are all-his), but the core point is valid: I might have been perfectly happy just having a publisher or Bright Weaving’s person tweeting news of the books. And I’d have missed so many opportunities to make puns online, or otherwise get myself in trouble.

What needs to happen, as I migrate from marketing phase to research and then writing stages will be something of a pulling back. The ‘toy’ part of the online world as a whole lies partly in how easy it is to access. Our work space, as writers, is also our play space. It’s, as the phrase goes these days, complicated.

I wish I could remember which ’50s American author told the sorry of his publication day, walking around midtown Manhattan and being dismayed to realize that most of the people around him were oblivious to the utter importance of the fact that it was … his publication day!

I’ve never suffered from that degree of disconnect. Might be just me (or him), might be not being in New York, or living and writing in an age where unless you write Fifty Shades of Da Vinci, any sane writer knows that a hardcover fiction release is going to engage only a small subset of the culture.

But there is a variant of the feeling that kicks in around now, a month after release. It has to do with the frenzy of the period from a month before to a month after a book comes out, within that relatively small world. It is easy to get a distorted view of what one is or does during the marketing phase for a book receiving promotional energy.

And now, as it winds down, as River of Stars moves form being the next new thing to joining all other titles waiting for the next newer thing, a shifting of mental gears starts for me.

For one thing, absent any offers from Major League Baseball, I need to start thinking about another book. (To write, not to read!) We’re exploring scripting possibilities, but my ‘accustomed toil’, in Yeats’s phrase, is still, for better or worse, writing novels, and that’s where I’ll almost surely go.

The touring isn’t over. I leave next week for Calgary and Kamloops, and for the fall I need to sit down and choose among a number of invitations in North America and overseas, from various festivals and conventions. But that stage has an extremely different feel to it, compared to the overheated mood of being ‘just out’ with a book after three years. (I wonder how different it is for the very prolific.)

The publishers are still waiting on some major reviews, and they often do come later – last time the wonderful Washington Post review by Michael Dirda ran on Father’s Day for an April release of Under Heaven. And the UK release for River of Stars is in July. I won’t be touring for it, but there will be marketing and publicity there as they explore the effect of the rebranding I’ve discussed here (in the post with the new UK cover). New editions are always being sold to and appearing in various foreign language editions, but that counts as a chronic condition, not a launch period.

In other words, I have a sense this spring morning of a phase winding down and the need to start shaping the next one. River of Stars is still on the national bestseller list at Macleans, at #6 today after 5 or 6 weeks (I’ve lost count!), with new titles by Rutherford and Le Carre near the top, and with Dan Brown and Khaled Hosseini ticketed for later this month. By the beginning of August the fall titles are starting to roll out.

Spring books do continue to sell, and publishers push their bigger titles hard at selected times of the year. Mother’s Day this week for some, Father’s Day for others, obviously a big campaign for Christmas. Soon we’ll move into another ‘next stage’ and start deciding on a cover for the paperback. The Americans have already elected to stay with the blue cover of the hardback – everyone loves it there. Canada is still to make their call: last time they went from the green horse to the black cover with silk and sword (both US and Canada used that). There are different vibes and mandates as between hardcover and paperback. (And different again later here, when Penguin Canada do their third edition, the trade paperback.)

But that, too, is something that pulls me forward to thinking about next.

Next is good. This marketing phase is, fundamentally, a strange period for any writer. It is a part of his or her ‘job’ but can too easily come to be seen as the real job, and it isn’t.

Someone had a comment on the last post, and I thought it better to reply in a full post here.

The Ottawa reading and interview were absolutely worth the drive up from Mtl, so thank you again. I should have asked this question that night, but couldn’t formulate it right. I have had a few days to percolate and would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how you reconcile your…need (is that the right word?) for using the “quarter turn” due to your preference for not assuming you (we) know what an Emperor and his wife are discussing in their bedroom in Byzantium with your love of the Dunnett books. I don’t mean to imply that one must override the other. I’m just interested in your take on the subject.

I’ve talked and written a lot about this. A few points…

My preference as a writer is not identical to my taste as a reader. When I discuss the co-opting of real lives in fiction and my concerns with it, I always note that the books I am about to name as examples will be books I admire! (It is lame and distracting to go after weak titles and authors.)

Dunnett is not the best example, actually, because with a few exceptions over many books she tends to follow the Sir Walter Scott notion (one I agree with) that in historical fiction the real figures should serve as backdrops for the playing out of the story of the author’s invented point of view ones. In particular, that means not going ‘into their heads’ (my usual ‘favourite position in bed for Henry VIII’ comment). Dunnett does do it at times (Richard Chancellor in Ringed Castle comes to mind, and she happily makes Margaret Lennox (buried in Westminster Abbey near Elizabeth I) a supreme villain, but for the most part she’s in Scott space.

Other writers I admire greatly go much, much further in giving us invented inner lives of real people. George Garrett (Death of the Fox, about Ralegh), Hilary Mantel (obviously, today), the brilliant The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, many more.

Many other authors share my concern here. A.S. Byatt, Antony Beevor, Jonathan Dee, just for starters, have written about it. There’s a trend to note here, tangled up with a sense of entitlement culture, and it tends not to be acknowledged, or to be defended as connected with ‘total artistic freedom’.

But, to directly answer Tasha’s question, I have always argued that we can hold two propositions at once (more, if we’re good!): this is a really well-done novel, and it gives me some ethical concerns. Think about “Birth of a Nation” or “Triumph of Will” in film, to take my point here.

I gave Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies the best review I think I have ever given a book in print, and do have issues along these lines (I mentioned them).

Someone had a comment on the last post, and I thought it better to reply in a full post here.

The Ottawa reading and interview were absolutely worth the drive up from Mtl, so thank you again. I should have asked this question that night, but couldn’t formulate it right. I have had a few days to percolate and would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how you reconcile your…need (is that the right word?) for using the “quarter turn” due to your preference for not assuming you (we) know what an Emperor and his wife are discussing in their bedroom in Byzantium with your love of the Dunnett books. I don’t mean to imply that one must override the other. I’m just interested in your take on the subject.

I’ve talked and written a lot about this. A few points…

My preference as a writer is not identical to my taste as a reader. When I discuss the co-opting of real lives in fiction and my concerns with it, I always note that the books I am about to name as examples will be books I admire! (It is lame and distracting to go after weak titles and authors.)

Dunnett is not the best example, actually, because with a few exceptions over many books she tends to follow the Sir Walter Scott notion (one I agree with) that in historical fiction the real figures should serve as backdrops for the playing out of the story of the author’s invented point of view ones. In particular, that means not going ‘into their heads’ (my usual ‘favourite position in bed for Henry VIII’ comment). Dunnett does do it at times (Richard Chancellor in Ringed Castle comes to mind, and she happily makes Margaret Lennox (buried in Westminster Abbey near Elizabeth I) a supreme villain, but for the most part she’s in Scott space.

Other writers I admire greatly go much, much further in giving us invented inner lives of real people. George Garrett (Death of the Fox, about Ralegh), Hilary Mantel (obviously, today), the brilliant The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, many more.

Many other authors share my concern here. A.S. Byatt, Antony Beevor, Jonathan Dee, just for starters, have written about it. There’s a trend to note here, tangled up with a sense of entitlement culture, and it tends not to be acknowledged, or to be defended as connected with ‘total artistic freedom’.

But, to directly answer Tasha’s question, I have always argued that we can hold two propositions at once (more, if we’re good!): this is a really well-done novel, and it gives me some ethical concerns. Think about “Birth of a Nation” or “Triumph of Will” in film, to take my point here.

I gave Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies the best review I think I have ever given a book in print, and do have issues along these lines (I mentioned them).

This week feels like a lot of to-dos to cross off, write more down, cross off. That tends to happen in a break at home during a release period. (Yes, I filed my taxes.)

The CBC ‘Next Chapter’ interview with Shelagh Rogers was exactly what I thought it would be: she’s warm, funny, really smart, likes puns (!), reads carefully, and somehow always wants to talk about some things I want to discuss in a book but no one else has asked. This time we keyed on family relationships in River of Stars, and on courage, in the widest sense. There’s a scene where a mother walks to a market town alone, trying to get help for a sick child, and for me it may be the bravest single thing done in the book. Shelagh gave me a chance to discuss that.

We chatted for about 45 minutes and it was a highlight of the media tour. It’ll air on ‘The Next Chapter’ on May 27th and then again on June 1st, and it’ll be a podcast, too, of course, for CBC.

Ottawa on Sunday night was genuinely a pleasure. First of all it is a good book town, period. Secondly, I seem to have a really solid readership base there, so it was a crowded, lively hall. I checked and a number of them had been at earlier readings years ago for Perfect Books, in a pub they booked. My considered view is that an audience with a drink or two to hand will laugh more easily – and when you want them to.

But even without much in the way of drinks Sunday, it was a terrific session. I was interviewed, after a short reading, by Neil Wilson, one of the Author’s Festival directors (a return engagement for us, we’d done this three years ago) and he gave me great questions to run with – and then in the Q&A the audience did the same.

The line was long and there was a panel starting in the same space, so the Festival people moved everyone to the basement for the signing. I made a (too predictable?) joke about none of them ever seeing the light of day again. Most stayed to get their books signed anyhow. Brave.

Tuesday was more questions, online this time, during a Q&A on Goodreads. I fielded about 70 questions or so through the morning and afternoon, typing away. I haven’t checked but am sure the field of my answers is littered with typos. My first sustained interaction on Goodreads, and it was a really generous group.

I also signed stock at two branches of Book City here in Toronto (both stores took photos, one caught me looking about as unshaven and shaggy as I get … well, I hope that is as shaggy as I get.)

River is still at #2 on the Maclean’s bestseller list which marks, best I can remember, the longest I’ve been at that high a level with any book. We’re #3 on the Canadian Bookseller’s Association list, too. I’ll slide soon: Le Carre, Hosseini, Dan Brown are all May books, and Edward Rutherford, who always hits the top levels just released his newest.

And I’m already back and forth with my editors on jacket copy for the paperback. That feels so strange (and we’ve talked about it): prepping the pb while still touring for the hardcover. But lead times are enormous in publishing these days. The good news is a wonderful slate of reviews to choose good quotes from. Do jacket and inside review quotes sell books? Old (endless?) debate. The industry still assumes they help.

Next out-of-town is in two weeks, when I fly to Calgary (May 14) and Kamloops (May 16), for readings and signings. That should do it for spring, with the possible exception of a return to New York. Come fall, a new Festival season starts but that has a different vibe from touring with a new book. We’re weighing about 7-8 invitations and balancing dates. Before that I really want to have started the research for another book.

Touring is a dying phenomenon, really. Conversations on the road underscored this for me. Despite some colleagues who hold forth on giving away books and charging for readings and t-shirts (how realistic is that, honestly, for most authors?) the migration to online marketing and PR is a reality now. Even when I do an interview with, say, Nancy Pearl in Seattle, that evening ‘lives’ far longer and reaches more widely in the televised version of it than in the actual evening encounter. In a way, some are arguing, you do the live event to create the taped one. Different world.

And … here’s a first look at the elegant HarperCollins UK cover for River of Stars. It’ll be out in July there, though e-books are already available in that market .

This is an ambitious positioning of the book for a literary mainstream market, to be accompanied by targeted marketing to fantasy readers already established over there. Some talented, committed people are putting their heads to this process.

UK cover, River of Stars

Back at my desk. Home for a bit.

I earned the much-coveted ‘Warrior Poet’ designation from the NY publicists after that crazy Friday dash to Seattle and the PBS studios. That, of course is far, far higher up the Secret Service echelons than a mere Road Warrior. It even gives up a license to make really bad puns in your headers. (Like I needed one…)

The PBS interview out there was a surprise, and I told the host, Terry Tazioli as much. Usually television is a fast 4-6 minutes on a morning show. (I’m in town, I wrote a book, I’m reading here tonight, I can tell a bad joke.) But we went close to 20 minutes of pretty lively conversation. Terry explained (and it was an explanation, that his own background is in print.) The show, ‘Well Read’ is broadening its outreach significantly this spring, beyond the Seattle (and Vancouver) area. It will be distributed to PBS stations nationwide, about 80 of them. A coup for them, and obviously useful for getting word out on River of Stars when the episode airs in May. Was worth gunning the Aston Martin through traffic from the airport to get there.

The evening at U of W bookstore Friday was – as I had anticipated – lovely. Could have gone longer but they wanted to close the bookstore for some reason (something about, er, staff wanting to get home, y’know). Nancy is so generally and generously enthused about books (and about mine) it is hard not to be on one’s game on a stage with her. The sequestered reading/events space was filled, with people standing at the back and it was a fun audience. (That means, in part, they decided I was funny when I was trying to be.)

It may be my imagination, but it seems to me after Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, that there may be an increase in Fionavar fans as I head for the coast. Interesting. The west coast is home ground for a lot of Tolkien fans, hence, maybe, traditional fantasy… probably a random sampling error, but had quite a few questions about the trilogy when I reached the Pacific.

Tomorrow morning is another favourite interview, every book. I’ll be in CBC studios here in Toronto, to be interviewed on the air by the wonderful Shelagh Rogers (who’ll be in Montreal this time, though we are both in Ottawa for their Writer’s Festival on the weekend). Shelagh is one of the best in the business, seriously smart, terrific sense of humour. She has already tweeted about putting on a ‘pun muzzle’ tomorrow. (Like that’ll help.)

Tracking the Boston news on a difficult day. Wordsworth wrote ‘The world is too much with us…’ and it has never been more true. We know (or are led to believe we know) so much, so quickly, and we see so much, at speed. The intensity can overwhelm even those calm by nature.

I’m in what feels to be a tiny, trivial irritation stage. Morning flight to Seattle from Victoria harbour was cancelled by fog. Scrambled onto the 1 PM, and publicists back in NY scrambled my noon tv interview to 3:00 which will require very fast driving. Frazzled Author Enters Studio – Celebrated Composure To Follow!

A good night here, interviewed on stage by novelist Rob Wiersema, after a short reading (Shan’s intro again). Signed a lot of books, urged people waiting in line to make friends with each other, because – I always say, and mean – I have really interesting readers. The mother of one couple – who ‘met’ on the brightweavings.com forums, and later met in life, and married – came to get a book signed for the two of them, to mail to England. Too cool. Really.

Tonight will be on stage and television with the utterly splendid Nancy Pearl at U of Washington bookstore. Look forward to it hugely. Nancy was just in Bosnia on a world of books tour, pushing reading as a way of bonding. That’ll be a pre-event dinner topic, probably. Fascinates me. And we can use things that bond us these days, and always.

Sometimes an evening comes together unexpectedly well. I had no idea what to anticipate from the Vancouver Writer’s Festival event last night at the main library branch. It was a shared reading/Q&A with the writer Ruth Ozeki (who lives in B.C. now). I’d read her book and liked it a lot, and was looking forward to meeting her. But one academic friend had emailed me last week saying he’d only learned of the event from me, when I emailed about saying hello beforehand.

His miss, not the organizers’, it turned out. I walked into the library with my brother about 30 minutes ahead (for the Green Room meet-up) and there was a major line or 200+ already snaking through the corridor, waiting for them to open the doors. Yes, evidence there’s a crowd does reassure.

In the Green Room, Ruth turned out to be smart and fun, and then we got a surprise request back there from a Chinese tv crew asking for fast interviews to air over there for World Book Day next week. Couldn’t have been better timed: last week I signed off with my agents on a new two book deal in Chinese for Under Heaven and River of Stars with Chongqing Publishers. (Some will remember that Under Heaven was sold in China, before the house doing it was merged – or bought out – by another, and the joint entity officially withdrew from doing foreign language translations of fiction. They reverted the rights to the book to us, and the agents got to work.) It was nice to be able to talk about this to viewers in China.

On stage, it was a seriously full house. Ruth read exceptionally well from A Tale for the Time Being – she did her own audio book recording (unusual) and it was easy to see why they’d asked her. She does short sections to offer the ‘voices’ of several characters, and since she’s being touring awhile, the reading was polished and engaging – and ended right on time, a sign of a pro.

I talked a little about context for River, after a few thank you remarks, then ‘introduced’ Shan to the audience in the reading from Chapter 2 I’ve been alternating with the passage from Chapter 8. By now I can almost always tell if an audience is with me, and I had that feeling last night.

After, Hal Wake, who runs the Author’s Festival came on to say some over-the-top generous things about the two readings (‘I’ve heard a lot of readings, trust me…’) and we had some terrific questions. Ruth and I were already easy enough together to turn to each other and hand off comments and have some dialogue, riffing on what we were asked. It was just relaxed and enjoyable, even warm. I did have (alas?) one frivolous moment (to offset a few ‘curmudgeon’ mini-rants). Someone asked what I’d tell my 20 year old self if I could talk to him, and I said (forgive!) ‘Buy Apple.’

I then played it straight and did a short bit on the idea of ‘don’t imagine all your decisions and choices are of apocalyptic significance, things shift and evolve’… (But buy Apple, too. When it is invented.)

We signed for a long time, and I was reaffirmed, yet again, in a career-long sense of what generous, thoughtful readers I have. Signing lineups are (pretty obviously) not the place for any kind of real conversation, but people manage to make their intelligence and decency show through. I feel lucky every time. It was a good night.

To Victoria in an hour, the little float plane I love. What I don’t love is having a winter coat (read Winnipeg entry, below!) as I pass through mild coastal weather. I feel like I am lumbering down from mining in the Yukon. Kay of the Klondike, at a bookstore near you!

It is a challenge to do proper Journal posts on the road, though it is a part of the whole idea of the journal, so I shouldn’t wimp out right?

Yesterday was a complex day. On the local level, a snowstorm hit here in Winnipeg. I joked on tv and radio interviews it was clearly a ‘welcome home’ message for me, and I was duly appreciative.

Midway through a day careening about town in snow with Rorie Bruce, publicist here, we learned at CBC radio, waiting to do an interview, about the Boston bombing. I ended up making reference to it at the outset of my booktalk at the splendid McNally Robinson event last night. Would have felt wrong not to. I made that my (small) point: how the larger events of the world are, and always have been, backdrops to the traumas and joys of our own lives. In the Sarantium books I am probably most explicit about this in my writing, The death of an emperor less important to the couple having their first child, or the farm family that loses a crucial labourer to a broken leg just before harvest time.

The evening itself was warm and even nurturing, which is part of returning home sometimes – if we are lucky. I talked for awhile about the underlying motifs of the two main characters in the novel, then read from chapter two, introducing Shan, the female protagonist. There was a really good-sized crowd for what turned out to be a mild enough night after a miserable day.

Really good reviews and some further interviews are continuing to pop up online. One thing I like: it actually looks as if some reviewers are trying to raise their own language game as they address River of Stars. I feel touched by that, too, to be honest. But I want to write something sometime about book reviewers who describe a story then add or discuss language separately. For me, the way I write a book, the language used, is completely part of the story you are hearing, or reading. It isn’t icing on top of some cake. And that applies to how I read other writers, too.

Vancouver, later today. Am assuming (relying upon?) better weather. Event is tomorrow night, reading in tandem with Ruth Ozeki, at the main library. Free tickets needed, same as was the case in Toronto. That’s a library thing, it seems.