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Some good—no, great—news on the writ­ing front: I’ve been award­ed a writ­ing grant by the Man­i­to­ba Arts Coun­cil.

The project I’ll be work­ing on is a novel­la, titled “Palimpses­ts”^[1]Work­ing title; I’m also con­sid­er­ing “Dried Flow­ers”, about a woman liv­ing in a library where all the books are slow­ly eras­ing them­selves. She has a com­pan­ion who tries their best to rewrite the erased works, with vary­ing lev­els of suc­cess. She’s also haunt­ed by strange dreams.

Eight works are fea­tured in the sto­ry, some based on real-world books^[2]Not quite a roman à clef, but per­haps a roman de romans à clef, hein?, oth­ers whol­ly invented.

I’d been work­ing on the project back in the summer—it was one of the pieces I was deal­ing with dur­ing my writ­ing retreat—but when I sub­mit­ted the grant paper­work in mid-Octo­ber, I quite delib­er­ate­ly pushed it to the back of the queue.

Now it’s come back to the front, of course. I got word on Fri­day after­noon about the grant, and as I write this—Saturday evening—I’ve got the 8 palimpses­ts select­ed, with thumb­nail notes about the new text. I’ve had some inspi­ra­tions about the rest of the sto­ry too, the world June (the hero) has left, the world she’s liv­ing in now, and the world she vis­its in her dreams.

I’m excit­ed. This has the poten­tial to be a very good sto­ry. It won’t be easy to write, and I don’t intend to make it easy to read. Good luck to us all.

In oth­er good writin’ news: The good stuff is now avail­able in my province. In my city, in fact.