Rainy Wednesday
January is a sad, weird month in Toronto.
In many ways, it's the beginning of a new year, which is marvelous, and has been a source of wonderful inspiration for me since I was very young. I've usually preferred New Year's Day to Christmas, because I'm wedded to the notion of new beginnings. If I go back to diary entries from my late teens, I can see that I have recorded a sense of euphoria and cleanness on the eve of a new year.
Outside my office window at the top of my house, wet snow is falling in patchy, uncomitted sheets. When I walk the Harper the yellow lab with my friend Eric down the ravine path down by the river, I suspect that it will be cold enough to warrant a hat and gloves, but not either refreshing or inspiring.
I've been sleeping very badly for the last week or so, and I rose late today with an Advil headache.
The novel I am writing, "Diving Into Blue," which is due at my kind and patient publishers very soon, has been twisting and turning in my head like a fish just pulled from the ocean, spiny and sinewy, shaking saltwater everywhere, and occasionally cutting me on its sharp scales. Generally I dislike writers whose torturous process they describe in dishonest detail---on one hand pretending to solicit sympathy, while in truth hoping for envy at such exotic travails---but I recently discovered first hand what happens when you take a character down a road for 30 or 40 pages, then realize that you've painted him or her into a dead end.
Also, having attended a private boarding school while trying to write a novel about a private boarding school is replete with its own challenges, especially when you're known as a nonfiction writer to begin with. Accessing my own memories while making sure the story reads like the fiction it is, keeps my imagination on its toes.
I'm looking forward to laying it aside for 6 weeks or so while I write the horror novella for Alyson Books that I signed the contract for when Brian and I came back from Los Angeles. The novella is called "In October," and the short version of the description is that it's about a young and isolated boy in a small town who accidentally summons up the answer to most of his prayers one freezing autumn night, then finds out that there is a terrible cost to it. Believe me, after months at my fictitious boarding school of the imagination, this horror novella and its world of demons, lonliness, and dark witchcraft, is going to be a walk in the park.
In many ways, it's the beginning of a new year, which is marvelous, and has been a source of wonderful inspiration for me since I was very young. I've usually preferred New Year's Day to Christmas, because I'm wedded to the notion of new beginnings. If I go back to diary entries from my late teens, I can see that I have recorded a sense of euphoria and cleanness on the eve of a new year.
Outside my office window at the top of my house, wet snow is falling in patchy, uncomitted sheets. When I walk the Harper the yellow lab with my friend Eric down the ravine path down by the river, I suspect that it will be cold enough to warrant a hat and gloves, but not either refreshing or inspiring.
I've been sleeping very badly for the last week or so, and I rose late today with an Advil headache.
The novel I am writing, "Diving Into Blue," which is due at my kind and patient publishers very soon, has been twisting and turning in my head like a fish just pulled from the ocean, spiny and sinewy, shaking saltwater everywhere, and occasionally cutting me on its sharp scales. Generally I dislike writers whose torturous process they describe in dishonest detail---on one hand pretending to solicit sympathy, while in truth hoping for envy at such exotic travails---but I recently discovered first hand what happens when you take a character down a road for 30 or 40 pages, then realize that you've painted him or her into a dead end.
Also, having attended a private boarding school while trying to write a novel about a private boarding school is replete with its own challenges, especially when you're known as a nonfiction writer to begin with. Accessing my own memories while making sure the story reads like the fiction it is, keeps my imagination on its toes.
I'm looking forward to laying it aside for 6 weeks or so while I write the horror novella for Alyson Books that I signed the contract for when Brian and I came back from Los Angeles. The novella is called "In October," and the short version of the description is that it's about a young and isolated boy in a small town who accidentally summons up the answer to most of his prayers one freezing autumn night, then finds out that there is a terrible cost to it. Believe me, after months at my fictitious boarding school of the imagination, this horror novella and its world of demons, lonliness, and dark witchcraft, is going to be a walk in the park.
posted by Michael Rowe at 1:34 PM
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