May 24th, 2012

Writing and Money

Something cool happened in April, something that usually happens to me a few times a year but never loses its thrill: in the course of the month, I earned from writing endeavours slightly more than I pay in rent. That’s always exciting, even though it’s far from a sign that I could earn my living as a full-time writer: aside from it only happening a few times a year, rent does not a living make. If writing had been my only source of income in April, I could’ve sat in my paid-up apartment and slowly starved to death. But the idea that I’m even close, even occasionally, is neat-o.

I included this fun factoid in a presentation I was making to high-schoolers, who were quite aghast that that’s *all* I make. But then I told a fellow writer, and he was aghast in a good way, and congratulated me. The expectations for a writing life, monetarily speaking, are so various–and the more you know the less you expect.

I worry about both sides of the spectrum. On the one hand, I think there is a crazy rumour floating around that writing a publishable book equals a lifetime of generous income. That’s hilarious, but I encountered yet another aspiring writer recently who had decided–knowing little of the publishing world–that it would be worthwhile to quit her job in order to write a novel. I quiver in fear for her. But on the other side, I worry about getting too anti-materialist, too hippy-dippy, “I have to write to be happy, payment or not!” I once got a rather stern talking-to from a fellow writer when I said that I would write my book whether or not my grant application was successful; the grant would just make that writing a lot easier and more pleasant. She said not putting monetary worth on my work *causes* it to be under-valued. I say putting a pricetag on work sets me up for disappointment (and not working) if no one wants to pay…but I take her point: artistic creation is hard and it matters, and in our society, the way we appreciate what matters is with money.

So…I try to care about money, but not too much; to treat writing as something that brings me personal fulfillment but also has a market value; to know what is disrespect and what is budgetary constraint. If you say you’re going to pay me and then don’t, I will politely nag you over the horizon; but there’s also situations where I’m more than happy to work for free. It’s complicated.

A further complication is that folks don’t talk about this stuf enough, because money is weird and awkward (unless you’re that girl who yelled at me). Novice writers–or writers doing it for money for the first time–don’t know what to expect and thus feel disappointed when they’re actually being treated generously, or else don’t speak up when they’re actually being treated poorly. So I’m going to do a post on what writers can and do (and don’t) earn. It was actually going to be a part of this post originally, but it’s getting really long, so I’ll see you back here in a few days.

May 21st, 2012

All Kinds of Awesome

First and foremost, the word is now on the street that Mark’s second novel has been acquired by Dundurn Press and will be out in Spring 2014. It’s called *Sad Peninsula* and it’s pretty great, I have to say. Kvell!

In other awesomeness, I found this nice review of *The Big Dream* on Niranjana Iyer’s Brownpaper. I’ll eventually track down the hardcopy in *Herizons* if I can!

And finally, as promised, on Friday night I went to the cast-and-crew screening of the newly completed short film, *How to Keep Your Day Job* and it was absolutely incredible. I think at its core the film has a great deal in common with the story, but not everything–it is an inventive reimagining of the story, and that’s what makes it so exciting–I knew what would happen next but I didn’t know how. It’s also a visually beautiful film, something us writers are never going to create–the way the film looked in snippets on the playback screen onset is nothing like the way it looks woven together into a seamless final product.

As an experience for me, the *Day Job* film has already exceeded my wildest expectations, but I know the filmmakers have even bigger ones. I certainly endorse these, and think they deserve every accolade available out there. I hope to be able to tell you sometime in the fall when *How to Keep Your day Job* will be coming to a theatre near you.

May 14th, 2012

Next Week in Review

I always seem to think I’m just around the corner from a peaceful, unbusy period in my life, and of course in never happens. Now that I’m over the intense craziness at work, I can return to being insanely busy in my off-hours–hosting out-of-towners, attending concerts, filling out government forms ALL WRONG and having to do them over again. Exciting events today include laundry, buying a calculator, and redoing the damn form. If they come for me in the night, please rest assured that I haven’t done anything wrong–I’m just too stupid to prove it.

Ahem. The rest of the week will be better. Here are some of the highlights as I now perceive them–no calculators required!

Tuesday: The Toronto Launch of Akana Schofield’s *Malarky*, which promises to be wonderful. If you, like me, can’t actually make it, there are some other opportunities to see Ms. Schofield read. See you at the library, perchance?

Tuesday also: Cadence: The Next Chapter will be cool tunes and a new member for Toronto’s favourite a capella guys. At the very classy Hugh’s Room. I’ll be there!

Wednesday: The wondrous Kerry Clare hosts an evening of short-story excellence with Heather Birrell, Carrie Snyder, and Daniel Griffin. Depending on my levels of failure or success in other areas of my life, I may or may not be there–but I would love to attend!!

Thursday: I will attend a Feldenkrais class, which is a new thing I’ve been exploring and really quite fascinating.

Friday: Is the cast and crew screening for the new short film, *How to Keep Your Day Job.* They are going to let me attend, even though I am neither cast nor crew. I’ll let you know how it goes (but I have a guess, and the guess is: awesome!)

What are you doing this week?

May 9th, 2012

Care

Having Evan the kitten at home for the past few months has made me thing about things in strange ways. I think it’s because my partner and I are solely responsible for this little being and if we neglect our responsibilities long enough or severely enough, he could perish. Just like that, no more Evan, because we forgot to feed him (that could never happen) or let him out on the balcony where there’s a slot available for a small kitten to hurl himself 9 stories (that could happen, because he’s fast and slippery, and I worry about it all the time), or some other horror I don’t even want to think about. For the first time in my life, I am responsible for the well-being of another creature in the long-term. It’s one thing to baby/catsit for a little while–it’s easy to be hyper-vigilant for a brief intense period.

I know this is not like parenthood or any type of human care–he’s a cat, and fairly autonomous, and a *cat*, but it does make me think about kids in the world and how not everyone has someone to take care of them and make sure they don’t chew on the fan cord or bite paint of the door hinge and then eat it.

So I’m really trying with my new tiny set of responsibilies. Tiny, because really, caring for a kitten isn’t so arduous, unless that kitten likes to roll around in the bathtub right after someone has taken a shower, until he’s nice and wet, and then go in the litter box…only to emerge with litter stuck all over him and run through the house leaving a little trail and then settle on the bed right when Rebecca is trying to leave the house.

I would, of course, have liked to simply continue out the door and get where I was going on time, but that meant Evan would eventually have to groom the litter out of his fur, thus consuming quite a bit of it and making himself sick. So I picked him up and put him in the sink to wash him off. As he squirmed and bit me, I told him, “This is what happens when you get really dirty; someone puts you in the sink to clean you off.”

And then I was overwhelmed by a wave of sadness, because not even every child–let alone every cat–has someone to put him or her in the sink in times of dirtiness.

It’s a funny thing about care–it’s extrapolatable. Caring for Evan has, in a tiny way, showed me how it works, and doesn’t. Even when he loses his ball and looks at my wide-eyed until I move the chair and find it for him, it’s kind of a jolt–without me, that ball would be gone for good and Evan the sadder for it.

I’m not sure what this post is really about–put your loved ones in the sink and wash them? But it’s an interesting phenomenon, anyway–what’s a blog for if not sharing random thoughts?

May 8th, 2012

Reading tonight in St. Catharines

So I’m reading tonight at the Virus Reading Series in St. Catharines with Mark Sampson (yknow, that guy) and it promises to be excellent. And I read yesterday to a seniors group here in Toronto, marking my first-ever reading in (a) a place of worship, (b) in the morning, or (c) that had to follow an announcement that a member of the group had been seriously injured. It was challenging but I think the reading went well, and audience was seriously engaged–tough questions, but those are the best kind.

I’ve done so many readings in the 8 months since *The Big Dream* came out–more than 30, anyway–and I think I like each one better than the last. It’s such a thrill to get to share my work with an audience, and I never know how they’re going to respond–that’s the really exciting part.

So despite the dark grey weather and my lurking migraine, I am in a good mood today! Hope to see you tonight in St. Cats! (Does anyone actually call it that?)

May 7th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *A Nail in the Heart* by Ian Daffern

I am a text-based person–very used to getting all my information, entertainment, and general stimulus from words. My visual perception is not highly evolved. I do actually know what matches, clothing-wise, and when a page layout is poorly done, but it doesn’t bother me all that much–I have to force myself to notice.

So it’s an odd experience for me to read a graphic novel. I’m excited, I’m looking forward to it, but I’ll read a few pages without following too well, pause in confusion, then flip back and look at the images. Ah, I’ll say, that does make sense.

Graphic novels are not just novels with pictures in them–they are a completely other form of storytelling, where words and pictures are highly integrated and symbiotic–neither one could stand alone–telling a story in concert.

This is all a very long preamble to explain why, while I enjoyed *A Nail in the Heart* very much, I perhaps didn’t get everything out of it I could’ve. This short story collection by variously creative person (I can’t figure out how to say he’s active in a number of media–what is that term?) Ian Daffern has three short stories, each illustrated by a different artist. The affect is cool–it’s like a mixed tape, in that the modes and styles of the pieces are all different, but united by a single sensibility in the stories being told.

The stories being told, FYI, are horror, which is also something new for me. The first is “Bring Me the Head of Osama Bin Ladin!” The tone is noirish–a grizzled old fed on an errand for “Eagle One” to bring in proof that bin Ladin is actually dead–guess what kind of proof? Noel Tuazon’s art fits the tone and the gross, grim subject matter quite well. The lines blur slightly in the illustration, it seemed to be, giving the impression both of a dark night and secrets obscured. Very affective. As usual, I had trouble following, but once I’d worked it all out, the ending left me with a shiver.

“Bird of Paradise” and “Eyes in the Sky” were illustrated by Shari Chankhamma and Frank Fiorentino respectively. Both had a more realistic look to them–clearly drawn faces and backdrops, details like freckles on noses and buttons on shirts easy to pick up on. Despite this, both stories were very dark. My favourite piece was “Eyes in the Sky,” because it was the funniest–not just black irony like the other pieces, but some character and dialogue humour along the way. My sort of thing–even though the story ended very bleakly, it still made me smile.

It’s going to be a long journey for me to learn to understand the graphic genre, but I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit and *A Nail in the Heart* an excellent step in the right direction.

Since there are 12 books in my To Be Read Challenge, I thought it be easiest to remember if I simply do one a month. *A Nail in the Heart* is the April/4th book book.

April 27th, 2012

The real truth, and other kinds

This is a reworked distillation of the talk I gave on Tuesday at the Renison Writers’ Workshop. I thought I might as well set it down here rather than let it float off into the either.

I don’t do much in the way of autobiographical writing, but I don’t know that I entirely believe such a thing exists anyway. Even if you you wanted to lay out an event on the page exactly as it happened in real life, if you were at all creative or elegant in the presentation of that event it would elide certain truths, boring or irrelevant though they might be. Once you’ve edited out the lady sitting beside you in the emergency room who kept haranging you about Obama for no real reason, the twenty minutes you spent looking for your OHIP card under the seats in your car, and most of the hours you spent unconcious when you have no idea what was happening, the story looks radically different than how it was actually lived. Change everyone’s names for privacy, collapse three different nurses into a single character because they all said basically the same thing and who has time to develop so many characters–you have a convincing case that it’s not true at all, merely *based* on certain personal experiences you may have had.

Seriously, that’s too stupid a conversation to have, even with myself–though believe me, I’ve done it before. Narrative and 100% truth don’t really go together, but neither does (semi) realist fiction and 100% falsity. I think most writers use observation in their writing–the way the sunset looks out the window on the 9th floor, the way their cat tries to hop onto the counter but doesn’t make it, the way someone gets a migraine when she’s really mad. The world permeates fiction, fiction organizes the world, and the older I get the less alarmed I am about discerning the differences.

I sort of feel the same way about narrative non-fiction–there, the balance is probably tipped toward the truth, but you have the same sort of of constraints on you–that of creating a good story. And if you have to fudge a few details to give events the emotional impact they need to on someone who has never met the characters and never will (whether it’s because they don’t know them, or because the characters don’t exist)–that’s the art of writing well, isn’t it?

**

This actually came out pretty from the Tuesday talk, not sure why–maybe I should’ve actually referred to my notes once in a while. Anyway, I did write something of the pure-unvarnished-truth variety–a list of my most treasured possessions (well, some of them–I’m very materialistic). I actually don’t do much of this sort of personal writing very often–it’s not my scene–but Allyson Latta asked me, and she is both a life-writing expert and a delightful person of the networld, so how could I say no? Also, writing this helped me to notice that pure descriptive writing, without narrative, without plot or character, dialogue or “theme,” is far more likely to be empiracally truthful than it’s paragraphed kin. See for yourself–My Seven Treasure–I bet you can find all these things in my house, looking much as you’d imagine them to!

April 22nd, 2012

Me, around

So it’s getting to be a post a week, these days–which is sad, but at least I’m busy with cool stuff. Well, some cool stuff–I also spent a good part of last week and the week before having a mental breakdown over my non-functional printer. This goes back over a year, when I accidentally mailed the power cord to my perfectly functional printer to Bell along with my modem when I stopped using it. Then my beloved bought me a new printer, which was not compatible with my operating system. Then I traded him for his printer, which was compatible, but promptly broke. Then the manufacturer offered to mail me a replacement printer as part of the warrenttee. That one was also broken. So was the replacement replacement printer. Here is pretty much where the breakdown happened. The third printer to arrive in the mail works, at least a little bit. My standards are pretty low at this point, I my advice is not to buy Kodak printers.

But I digress!! There’s way better stuff to talk about…like

–a nice review of The Big Dream in The Uptown. If you click on the link, you will see a headline of Don DiLillo’s *The Angel Esmerelda*, but if you scroll down the second half is the TBD review (which also draws on an interview I did out in Winnipeg last fall). Besides, DiLillo’s book really deserves 100% of the headline, anyway–if you haven’t read it, very recommended, by both the reviewer and me!

–Shawn Syms published an interesting article in *The Toronto Review* on fiction and social media, which referenced work by Zoe Whittal, Jessica Westhead and yours truly, among others. I’m in such good company these days.

–I’ll be taking a trip to Waterloo on Tuesday to speak to some high-school students about writing from real life (yeah, as if I know how!) and getting (I hope) to hear about what they are up to.

So yeah, RR 3, Printer 1. Well, that’s how I choose to score it.

April 15th, 2012

Prairie Fire Review…and Reviews in General

Tara at Biblioasis passed on a lovely review of *The Big Dream* from the current issue of Prairie Fire. It’s not online, but if you’re curious what TBD is like, it might be worth grabbing the print copy because I think Bob Armstrong does a really excellent job examining the book review. Yes, he also seems to like it a great deal–which obviously makes me happy–but his praise still makes it clear what kind of book it is, so people who don’t like that sort can steer clear. I really like to see a couple sentences like the following in a book review. “It’s located in an industrial park in Mississauga near pearson Airport…her stories focus on the people who work in the call centre, deal with tech support, oversee hiring and firing, or spend all day, on a good day, tweaking a new logo.” They shouldn’t be the whole thing, but some of every book/movie/tv/restaurant/hairstyle review should be just descriptive prose, no judgment implied. You can see how those exact words could’ve come from a very negative review, too. And you can also see how a careful Prairie Fire reader could read Armstrong’s whole review, including the wonderful line, “For readers who want fiction that engages with the world we live in, Rosenblum’s work matters” and still not want to read the book. Armstrong’s praise is wonderful, but I can still imagine reader who want that engagement in another way, and knowing to give my book a pass when they spot it on the shelf.

I think a good review does that–doesn’t *only* evaluate a book but also describes it accurately enough that a reader can make his/her own assessment. Which is why I am so happy about Armstrong’s review when others, which may have been equally positive–have made me a bit uncomfortable. This happened more with *Once* than *TBD*, so I’m not sure if it’s me or the reviewers who did better this time, but I felt…alarmed…by some of the praise I received for *Once*. I would never criticize someone’s reading of my work–once it’s in your brain, it is yours to interpret. But some interpretations, without adequate context or quotation, can lead readers to believe a book is something it isn’t. And that can give a writer heart-attacks–what if people who only like *this* sort of book buy it, and then hate it, when really the book was never intended to be *this* sort.”

The quick response to this is that I need to calm the heck down, and that would be a good one. But I am also trying to learn how to be a book reviewer my own self, looking very closely at the good ones and the bad ones, and trying to see why they are what they are. And I think one key is context–liberal quotation balanced with specific assessment. No matter what anyone says, a list of quotations does not make a review. But neither does an assessment entirely in the reviewer’s voice. Reviews need to be a balance of both evaluative and descriptive to work, I think.

What the exact balance is remains a mystery for me–I guess that’s the art of it.

April 7th, 2012

Rose-coloured and Mark review some Oatcakes

Remember when Mark and I used to do occasional audio reviews of sweets, which I would then transcribe for your benefit? Well, that was a really long hiatus but I got some new batteries for the digicorder and some oatcakes from TWO provinces, so we are back at it–enjoy!

RR: The samples have been consumed, and now…the verdict: New Brunswick oatcake vs Nova Scotia oatcake…Mark Sampson?

MS: Well, as far as I’m concerned, this was a brutal first-round knockout for the Nova Scotia oatcake. I mean, no offense to the good people of New Brunswick, but you don’t put a smear of date inside what looks to be almost an oatmeal…cake*. It’s not an oatcake, it doesn’t have that crispyness, that baked sensation, that taste that just kinda melts in your mouth. No, the Nova Scotia oatcake owned the day.

RR: They [NS oatcakes] were quite delicious. And–and–we have three more! What is an appropriate accompniment for a Nova Scotia oatcake.

MS: I think the only thing that’s acceptable is to have half of it dipped in chocolate. To give you that option of having it without or with something on the side sort of. I would say that if you’re going to do something different with an oatcake, dip it in chocolate, leave the dates at home. But for purists, the straightup Nova Scotia oatcake is the way to go. These are delicious, I think, these are some of the finest oatcakes I’ve had.

RR: They are from the Just Us bakery in Wolfville….I’m sorry I ate the chocolate one before I got here.

MS: That’s quite all right–I’m very happy with what you did bring home.

RR: And the New Brunswick oatcake is from The Bridge Street Cafe in Sackville.

MS: Well, I’m sure they do good work. I’m sure that they are a wonderful bakery with all kinds of delicious things to eat. This oatcake is not bad, but when you’re comparing it to a Nova Scotia oatcake, which could’ve just come right across the border. I mean they are just so close, Sackville is right there next to Nova Scotia…but no, no comparison at all.

RR: But will we eat these plain, will we eat them with tea, will we put jam on them? What will we do?

MS: I’d like to have one of these with a coffee. I think these would go over very well in the morning with a cup of coffee.

RR: Breakfast oatcake.

MS: Yes, indeed.

RR: Would you like to melt the bag of chocolate chips and pour it over one of the oatcakes?

MS: Why, I think that’s a brilliant idea.

RR: Tune in next time for “Altering Your Oatcake”**.

*Perhaps the tactical error was purchasing the date oatcake at all–they had plain ones, but I was tempted by novelty. My bad.

**We completely failed to do this and just ate the rest of them unaltered.