Springbank, claret cask. Making this a motif, I guess.

I spent five hours in a boardroom today at Penguin Canada, working with Sandra on her two proofreaders’ queries and notes. Coffees, and I brought chocolate chip cookies when we took a break, since this was a heroic session for her, most of her workday. I was dealing with their notes, she was inputting my page by page responses into the master copy, which will now be turned into the printed and bound book for April.

She outdid my choc chips with an elegantly casual mention that one of the two freelance proofreaders had written ‘This is a masterpiece’ on the last page of her copy. She said she’d never seen that before. I said that this was an exemplary demonstration of proper care and feeding of the wild author.

Levity aside, this felt awfully rewarding. It is the first ‘outsider’ response to the book. Only people I know had seen it to that point. I never have any idea who the freelance proofreaders are (though have asked that my thanks be relayed for careful work here). It is obviously and always reassuring to get support from any readers, especially for a new book, and it is even more so to hear such words from professionals in the business.

Even at this stage errors or typos get caught – that’s why three people plus Sandra are prowling through the manuscript. I was proud of myself last week for spotting a directional error that everyone had missed (score for Team Author, late in the fourth quarter). But there was a naming error right in chapter one that got spotted — it was caught by a reader of the Facebook uploads, too! (Thanks are going out there, as well.)

As Sandra and I were pushing through the pages, Nicole came in herself to give me my first copy of an ARC. These will start going out in January to selected media outlets, then more widely to reviewers in February. There may be a few surprises before that. (Chapter 2, by the way, will only be on the Facebook site for a little longer – that share/read really was conceived as a short term bonus for those who like tasters. Chapter 1 will migrate to the main publisher sites and likely stay up until the book is out, that’s becoming fairly standard.)

After we were done, I shuttled down to the marketing department wing. Beth and Charidy each got to rap my knuckles. They were grinning at me but pretending to be kind: I had been pretty edgy about the decision to bump the ‘Share’ level from 150 to 500. It was heading into a Friday, the weekend has next to no publisher activity, it seemed a big number for a second go-around … but they’d been sublimely at-ease and sanguine.

Shows how much I know. Though I don’t think any of them would pass a lie detector test if they tried to say they expected the 500 level to be reached in just over 24 hours. Bottom line, marketing heads get social media rhythms better than the author does. What a stunning surprise! Who could have predicted it?

I will retreat with such grace as I can muster, with my single malt. It is a cold night out there.

I considered posting a photo of the cat with a bottle of scotch, on top of the fully proofread manuscript, but really … there are limits, right? And the cat prefers campari.

But I can report that this morning, shockingly on time, I finished the proofreading. It is due tomorrow. I am way too diligent.

As I have said before, the thing about ‘finishing’ a book is that there are so many legitimate stages to that. But this one really is done since, after I drop it off at Penguin, it will be collated by the Production Editor (the typos I caught merged with those found by the two other proofreaders) and, well, made into a book. Once again, an odd feeling, staring at it now, but also a very good one.

As I also mentioned (avoiding last kicking cat jokes) that I have added to their workload by making some small (honestly!) word trims all through. Why more work for them? Think about it. If I cut three words in a paragraph, and that paragraph ends with two words on a line, my trims shift the page break. Sometimes a page ends with a fleuron/dingbat. That forces Production to do arcane things that only those with the secret handshake fully understand. (It apparently does not involve sharpening machetes in anticipation of the author’s next visit. Apparently.)

In the meantime, the ARCs ought to be ready this week or next, though with limited exceptions they will not go out till the New Year. The exceptions are that monthly magazines need as much lead time as possible, since some are already at work on their April (or even May) issues. But publicity departments tend not to inflict galley mailings on the Christmas season. The ARCs, as may be obvious, precede this proofreading and my (small, Sandra!) last-stage fine-tuning … this is a reason that reviewers are always asked, on the cover of a galley/ARC, not to quote from it without checking against the final text.

Did I mention this? After the really wonderful evening we had for Under Heaven, the worldwide launch of River of Stars has just been locked in: it will again be at the Toronto Reference Library, in their big Atrium space, on the evening of April 4th. It looks like it will be a short reading, as last time, then an on-stage conversation with a Mystery Interlocutor.

Hmm, this may be risky on my part but … if you want to play, throw out names of people you think would be fun on stage with me that night. Yes, you are allowed to suggest Isabelle Adjani, but I think she’s booked.

Morning coffee with the estimable John Clute, one of the Guests of Honour at this year’s World Fantasy Convention, held here in Toronto this year. John and I try to sit down together at least once a year. He’s a critic, an original thinker, an encyclopedist, probably won’t get ticked off if I call him an eminence gris of the genre he likes to call fantastika. He is also someone invariably, almost helplessly interesting – which doesn’t mean, for anyone who knows me at all, that we invariably (let alone helplessly) agree on everything. That’s what makes the coffees fun. I always walk away energized.

WFC is the one convention I do try to attend each year. I regret (for strategic reasons) to report that I enjoy it. It is a ‘capped’ convention, limited to about 900 or so attendees, and with a very high percentage of professionals: writers, editors, artists, critics, academics, agents. It means that once a year I dine or drink with a number of colleagues who have become friends by now.

One tradition is a small dinner organized by Locus magazine as something of a memorial to Charles N. Brown who founded the magazine and who died a few years ago. There is an expectation I will arrive with new jokes (because Charlie loved them). Liza Trombi, current editor, does the same. Peter Straub has been known to filibuster with impossibly protracted shaggy dog jokes. We toast Charles, who is very much missed.

There has also been a watch-the-world-series mini-tradition in the various hotel bars, which San Francisco has destroyed this year by winning too swiftly. I’ll be doing the first-ever public reading from River of Stars on the Saturday. WFC feels like the right venue, and I did this with Under Heaven three years ago when the convention was in San Jose. I have figured out my ‘reading passage’ and it was surprisingly easy.

Those involved in coordinating the convention are, of course, watching the chaos on the east coast and I’m sure they are hoping (for all larger reasons, too, obviously) that NY and the eastern seaboard are all right – and that people can get out from the airports. It was a bad, dangerous night last night.

Finally, yes, I am editing, ferociously I might add. Here’s a progress photo. It is a slight cheat, I know, the red pens are ironic. I’m working on-screen, but this is where I’m at as of this morning.

Have decided not to put the red pens on eBay. Amused and happy the Seferis and Dante are two of the library bits that show. Both are epigraphs to Tigana! Nice accident.

So, in the National Post today, Mark Medley, the Books Editor, interviews Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon together. (They both ordered the niçoise salad, he reports – you do have to eat smart on tour).

Diaz is quoted at the very end: ‘… because they’re genre writers they’re not going to get a f-king profile in the New York Times.’ (The discreet dash in f-king is the Post, not me!) Diaz and Chabon earlier were asked if the response to genre fiction wasn’t at least improving and both thought not. Diaz said, ‘I don’t think it’s changing at all, I think it’s worse … Name me a genre writer who’s won a Guggenheim. Name me a genre writer who’s won a National Book Award.’

(Mark Helprin comes to mind for a Guggenheim, but that’s not the point, and he only wrote one major fantasy.)

I hate the fact that I am older than both those guys. Been there, seen that? Diaz is whip-smart and a very fine writer. But I think he’s wrong in refusing to acknowledge that even if the speed may seem geological at times, literary culture is evolving just as popular culture is.

It is possible to see writers like those two, or Atwood, McCarthy, Jennifer Egan, Justin Cronin as ‘colonizers’ of genre from mainstream and there’s no question it is easier getting credibility moving in that direction than from being rooted in genre (any genre), but the mere fact that colonization of this sort (I’m using the word reluctantly, I prefer to talk about the blurring of borders or boundaries) happens carries a message.

So does the growing awareness within genre that writing that aspires to excellence isn’t some kind of lame pandering to the Muggles, to steal a J.K. Rowling term. Yes, there are holdouts in all camps. SF writers and readers who are irked and turned off by literary focus or ambition. Academics and judges and critics who reflexively avert their sensitive eyes from the dismal horror of genre books (or even the stressing of narrative verve) … and there always will be! But the numbers and percentages are changing for the better. I absolutely believe that. (I also believe that genuinely excellent work is as rare as it always has been, and we do ourselves no favours by trumpeting the capable – or the merely new – as brilliant.)

Change in what is regarded as canonical or important is going to be slow. It isn’t even so terrible that it is, actually. Trends can carry too much momentum, distort our judgement. (Same is true of the law … it needs to lag a bit behind fast societal shifts, lest it bounce around too much when the society shifts back again.)

Yes, major awards for truly genre-grounded works are rare. Yes, when certain critics find themselves admiring a fantasy they must posthaste name it magic realism. (A pet peeve here.) But my own sense was and is closer to what Medley seemed to be looking for and not getting from his two interview subjects: change is happening, the landscape is evolving, just to stay with my ‘geological’ metaphor. It is better now than five years ago, and was better five years ago than twenty-five.

Also, for what it is worth, I kind of doubt the ’12 other novelists writing zombie novels’ that Diaz mentions (in the context of Cronin’s exalted status) all merit individual profiles in the NY Times. I also doubt he’d really argue they do. The emergence of some writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers in a given time as either pop culture or high culture ‘stars’ can involve many elements, and talent is only one of them.

Still, go read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Talent may be only one element, but it shines in both those books.

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.

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 …

‘Well, I’m back,’ as someone shorter than myself (and braver than all of us) once said at the end of a very long (very good) novel. It works as a starting quote, too, I think.

As some of you will know, I’ve done Tour Journals on Bright Weavings for my last three novels. People seem to like them. I use them to give background on the way books are published (which is changing by the hour, it sometimes seems). I’ve thrown out challenges – to write jacket copy, for example, and edit each other – to allow hands-on experience with this. I give details of the run-up to a book’s release, and what follows. I still try to be funny at times, and kindly readers still allow me to believe I am succeeding. At times.

So here we go again, with River of Stars. It is due out at the very beginning of April. I tend to start the journals well before publication date, because so much of what goes on with the books happens well in advance. I usually stop around when actual touring stops, or winds down. Or I stop. Or wind down.

The change this time around is formatting. The same nefarious forces among publishers and friends who lured me like Sirens onto the time-obliterating rocks of Twitter have joined forces (scary, yes) to insist that WordPress is way sexier (and easier to read!) than the old format of tucking my journal entries into the Bright Weavings Forums.

I do sometimes listen. Really. I do. It isn’t exactly a quotidian event, people have been known to log the moments in their diaries, but this is one of them. I have also been advised that photogrpahs can be used here. I have also been advised that they might therefore be expected.

Fine. Here:

So, this is really just a first post/announcement of more to come. For those who missed it, I did a ‘title reveal’ for the book a while back via this video (done by my filmmaker son).

General news will appear still on the Facebook page (where a couple of the Bright Weavings team, people I really don’t deserve, keep everyone up-to-date on news). I am now @GuyGavrielKay on Twitter (see nefarious forces, earlier in this post!) and, of course, watch this space. I’ll figure out, as I go, how to balance the different modes and forms.

Or is that wildly optimistic?