Help me, look what they want to call my book, it’s horrible!

Some friends and I are currently mulling over book titles for one of our number. Probably a lot of people don’t realize how much writers are tortured over titles. It usually goes something like this. 1) They* initially come to us with a cheery request for our title ideas. They have a discerning and precise list of requirements. It has to be fabulous. It has to hook readers. It has to encompass the story – plot, mood and sub-genre – in no more than five syllables (unless they’re currently trying to replicate the success of something like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, in which case we are allowed seven.) It has to have never been used before. Or, in the case of the lighter and shorter realms of genre fiction, not used in the past eight...

Posted by on Feb 22, 2012 in Book Wednesday, Books and writing | 1 comment

Dan has become secretive…

…. about his music. The secrecy is not terribly effective, as his amplifier brings his guitar to the world, but still there’s been a noticeable increase in the amount of time he plays with the amp turned off, so that I have to sneak into the room under the guise of looking for something in order to hear the little semi-silent tweaks and twangs of his bare fingers on the unassisted metal strings. I hear plenty of him on the trumpet, because band is far enough distant that it’s not worth just dropping him off and picking him up. I could have been in a car pool, but it was an active decision not to. Dan drops through the cracks a little in our family, as does Ben. Nick, Laura and Natalie are the main ones commanding my attention, Nick because...

Posted by on Feb 21, 2012 in Hugh, me and the kids | 0 comments

Monday Eventing – Size Matters Part Two

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote last week and how it applies to so many other things, including writing. Maybe pretty much every field of endeavour has this same elasticity of perception re the obstacles you have to get over or the mountains you have to climb, depending on where you are in your learning, and whether things are going well, and what you find hard or easy. People often ask writers, “When does it get easier?” New parents ask this same question of seasoned parents, too. There, I always answer that it DOES get easier, e.g. there does come a time when you get to go to the bathroom without little hands smacking on the door, begging for you to come out. With writing, though, I’m firmly in the, “It doesn’t...

Posted by on Feb 20, 2012 in Books and writing, Horses, Monday Eventing | 0 comments

Six Sentence Sunday – What I’m working on

Thank you to Sara Brookes for Six Sentence Sunday. I love it! Here’s another book-of-my-heart. I finished this and began sending it out to agents just as the publishing industry threw its hands up in the air, went “Wahhh!” and fled into the forest to hide. Long story short, no one wanted it. At which point I threw my hands up in the air, went “Wahhh!” and threw the manuscript into the forest so it could rot under some leaves. But then I decided that it wasn’t me, or even the book, it was the industry, so I went back and dug it out, brushed off the leaves and am now looking at ways to make it better. I hope to have it out in May. The book is called Saving Gerda. These are currently the opening lines, but that might...

Posted by on Feb 19, 2012 in Books and writing, Six Sentence Sunday | 10 comments

Jasmine and Jess

Jasmine didn’t go over to Meg’s place to watch Kelsey’s debut on LRATS with Jess and the Flett family. Meg called me last week, right after the show, with this news. She has been updating me for months on all the things Jasmine hasn’t done with Jess. It really bothers her. It bothers her even more that she fears she’s expressing a latent homophobia by being bothered. It bothers me that I don’t know how to reassure her. Maybe she’s right. Or maybe Jasmine is not as nice a person as we want her to be. Maybe she does have Jess wrapped around her little finger, and their relationship is imbalanced and precarious or unhealthy as a result. They have “broken up” twice now. I only hear about it second-hand, but it...

Posted by on Feb 16, 2012 in My parents, brothers and sisters | 0 comments