It might be a little blasphemous of me, working as I do at a university, but I find a lot of comfort in this simple sentiment.
via PostSecret
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Library haul
Went down to the public library tonight, since my copies of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and John Scalzi’s The End of All Things were due back.
(Reviews: The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a spooky coming-of-age/memoir tale from a master of eerie fantasy; The End of All Things further solidified my view of John Scalzi as my generation’s Joe Haldeman (though it might have been smart of me to read The Human Division first).)
So I went in without any plans as to what I wanted to check out. I did check the catalogue for the status of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which has been checked out every time I’ve gone looking for it. Tonight was no exception. One day (shakes fist at the sky).
But by and large I had no agenda. I checked the New Releases section, and snagged Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath. Then I wandered over to the SF/F section, which is where I usually end up. Grabbed another volume there — a four-novel omnibus of Philip K. Dick novels, which either a) has fantastically small print or b) serves as a reminder of how short novels could be back in the 60s. And then I took a gander at the graphic novels, where I grabbed my third and final volume: Scott McCloud’s Sculptor.
I’m looking forward to all of these. I just can’t decide which should be first.
Help?
Access Copyright
Are you a Canadian writer?
Are you signed up with Access Copyright?
If not, why not?
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I found out about Access Copyright via a circuitous path. One day a few years ago, my aunt — an English teacher, currently working in China — sent me an email congratulating me for my poem (my first publication, a poem named “The Two Seasons”) appearing in the provincial English exam.
My response: “Huh?”
After an extended conversation with my aunt and a couple bureaucrats in the Department of Education, I got a look at the exam, an explanation (which boiled down to “We thought we were in the clear, copyright-wise, because of Access Copyright”) and an an apology for their unacknowledged use of my copyrighted content.
And I signed up with Access Copyright as a Creator Affiliate, and now every year I get money in the mail, just for having published content on paper in Canada.
So, like I said: if you’re a Canadian writer, and not an Access Copyright affiliate: why not?
Une épopée des plus brillants exploits
I grew up in Ste. Rose du Lac, a village with a strong French population. From grade 1 to grade 9, I rode the bus 20 minutes every morning and every evening1 in order to attend school at École Laurier, a French immersion school in the nearby village of Laurier. There I learned to parlez en français, and all my classes (with the obvious exception of English) were taught in French. I learned my fractions in French, I learned about weathering and terminal moraines and drumlins en français, I learned about Louis Riel2 and the Métis and the plains of Abraham in French. Even at recess we were supposed to converse in French. We didn’t, but the teachers supervising would pretend not to understand if we tried to speak to them in English.3
I learned the Lord’s prayer in French. I learned my national anthem en français, too; in fact, it was years before I learned it in English. (Later I learned that the French version is the original, and the English words currently in use — not a translation of the original, but a different anthem — were written over a quarter-century after the version that I learned, and still treasure.)
On Remembrance Day, which is, of course, today, there’s a stanza in the French anthem that resonates with great power:
Car ton bras sait porter l’épée
Il sait porter la croix
En anglais, roughly, it means:
Because you understand the sword,
You also understands the cross
You can’t have war without casualties. You can’t have conflict without cost. You can’t have the sword and not expect fields of crosses, shot through with poppies.
Souvenons.
- My dad worked out the mileage once. I’ve been around the world twice on a school bus. ↩
- When you go to a French immersion school run by a Catholic ex-nun, the pantheon goes Dieu, Jésus, l’esprit saint, Louis Riel, pape Jean-Paul II, et tout le reste. ↩
- Unless you had, say, a scalp wound or an obviously broken arm. ↩
Write, edit, submit, repeat
I just submitted a new/old short story — “The Ravens” — to Corey Redekop’s Canlit Comedy anthology. Fingers crossed.
I actually wrote the story a few years ago, and submitted it to a couple markets, who rejected it. It seemed like the right idea for a humour piece, so I tried to resurrect it…
…but I couldn’t find the original file anywhere.
And so I re-wrote it from the ground up. I think it turned out all right. I read it today at Write Club, and there was quite a lot of laughter. I’m going to call that a good sign.
Wish me luck!
Update: Well, I’ve made it into the 2nd round. Fingers still crossed. (Crampin’ a little bit…)
Whoa. Psychoanalytic criticism.
Someone, back in 2013, took it upon himself (or herself) to run my vignette “Eating Everything That Ever Was” ([available in “Seven Very Short Stories”) through the lens of Freudian literary criticism.
My story starts on the 7th click, and the analysis happens on the 8th. I had no idea I was writing about a mother/son dynamic. (Though I suppose you could argue that I always am; that we always are.)
This is awesome. (Also completely kosher, per the CC that the story is licensed under.)
Writing Advice (no. 21 in a series of ∞)
From one of my favourite authors, the great Michael Swanwick:
It’s not just that the stories I read the other day are fables of consolation while the classics set out to overthrow the reader’s complacency. It’s that in the great stories things change. Irrevocably.
And science fiction is the literature of change.
Busted warps
They’re everywhere in this town.
I mean, I hit like 20 of them on my bike ride today, and I gained no speed whatsoever. It would’ve really helped when I was going into the wind, let me tell you.
Writing retreat: Retrospect
Well, I’m back home again. I had a delightful time up at the cabin. I got about 6500 new words written in The Shadow Crusade, which doesn’t include the 4500-word outline that I hammered out (which especially targets the endgame of the novel). That should hopefully help me focus in on the story, and avoid my unfortunate habit of noodling.
I can almost hear my wife’s voice now: Write faster, Johanneson! (With a tip o’ the hat to Michael Swanwick and his wife Marianne Porter, of course.)
Next week: Back to work. (The day job, that is.) No vacation is ever long enough, especially when viewed in the rear-view mirror.
Thanks a million, E&K, for the use of the cabin.
Hold my calls.
