Noteworthy

Dan Green on Richard Ford.

Jean Baird on book prizes and genre fiction's place in CanLit.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - 3b

Here is a new YT vid with a further excerpt from my novel PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS.

I'm still trying to work with the technical limitations of MovieMaker. Speaking of tech limitations, I had a much longer post on making this almost ready to put up when ... the text cyber evaporated. Am doing deep breathing at the moment.

Hiroshima Reverb

From a screenplay story on Hiroshima I've been working on for some time now. According to CNN, it's back in the news....

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - INTRO

This is the intro to my novel ms., PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS.

Keep posted for more.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS - YT vid

This is a recent vid from my new novel ms. PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS. It's part of The PM Project, an overarching collection of three novels (including one mega-novel) and some linked short stories, monologues and graphic fiction. All these projects are connected: either characters or thematic concerns move back and forth between them. But all also work as discrete, independent modules. They stand alone.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS is set in Seoul and Toronto. It is a family drama, but, with its depictions of underemployment, workplace stress, and geopolitical secrecy, it is a social novel as well. Its main protagonist, Bak Dae-woo, makes a brief appearance in my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM. This is his story in full.

PAPER KEYS TO BURNING KINGDOMS

A brief description of my new novel ms. is up at my new site.

The Korean Wars

From "The Cry of the Magpies" by Kim Dong-ni:

Ok-nan said that her coughing fits had occurred even before the half year had elapsed. When months passed by without a word from me and the magpies continued to cry in the mornings, my mother's eyes began to glare in a strange way. Then the strange glaring of her eyes seemed to shift over to a long spell of coughs. At first her condition was not so very bad, but beginning about one year after I left home, she got to coughing almost wihtout fail whenever the magpies cried in the morning....

I remember my mother was in the habit of mouthing such words as "O, God!" or "Help me!" after her occasional coughing fits even before I left home for the battlefield. And now she was replacing those words with "Bong-su!" and "Kill me!" 

In my view, there was not much inconsistency in this development. Rather, these seemingly contradictory expressions were no more mutually exclusive than the two sides of one coin. The way I looked at it, "Help me" could very naturally become "Kill me", a suffering deepened into bottomless despair.

[From ""The Cry of the Magpies", Kim Dong-ni, The Portable Library of Korean Literature, Jimoondang Publishing, Seoul, 1961, 2002.]

Drawings IV

This is one of my favourite photos of Richard and me (our mom's in the background). It's at the opening for my first solo show of art -- a group of life drawings of people at work. It was held at Partisan Gallery ... I can't remember the date -- sometime in the 80s. Richard came down from Montreal. My mom was living in Toronto at that time, and I think my dad had moved there as well. The crowd was good even though the sort of work I was doing -- highly representational drawings without the aid of photos -- wasn't considered hip at the time, and still isn't considered so. The drawings themselves were of people at work ... again, an unhip subject-matter.

Richard was more affected by the modernist aesthetic I was. Actually, I was affected by it, too, but not as purely; I was heavily into cartoons as well (an interest starting in childhood), particularly political cartoons and what back then we called "underground comics" (that's graphic fiction to you, 21st Century kultur-kampfer). He'd had a show at Concordia, where he studied. His works were giant paintings: neo-expressionist self-portraits and animals. Come to think of it, I was strongly interested in neo-expressionism as well. But his work was very uniform in its aesthetic -- he'd put down lines in large bold strokes. I don't remember that he experimented much with different media when painting -- he stuck to acrylics, and a similar style. (Later, he became interested in sculpture and ended up doing a lot of line drawings -- I think by this point he just didn't want to buy paint.) He also during this university period did drawings in india ink, which were, looping back again, similar to his paintings. In effect, he was drawing rather than painting -- the paintings were drawing-like. Many painters have this tendency, and it's simply one way of solving one's visual subject-matter: one uses lines of colour rather than blocks of them. Lines always materialize in representational work, no matter how abstracted. But some artists use them as a primary visual element, and Richard and I both fell in that category. We were both -- as we had been when kids -- drawers.

Norway II

During our first trip to Norway we took a car trip with my paternal grandmother (Farmor in Norwegian) through the mountains north of Oslo. It was the summer, but in the highlands the temperature dropped quickly.

It had been a hot summer in Oslo, and neither Richard nor I were prepared for the coldness. It wasn't all that bad, really, but our windbreakers didn't quite do the trick. Most of the time we were at lower elevations -- driving along a thin, apparently endless highway. It was when we drove up to the top of a mountain that the ice fields would appear.

The beauty of the fjords is something to see. Geographically, they are quite plain -- old mountains with soft edges and a lot of wild grass growing on them. (I'm not even sure if I remember them from an individual memory or whether my recollection of this detail has simply been filtered through one travel brochure pic too many.) It's too bad we didn't come better equipped, clothing-wise, to do a day's worth of hiking. I didn't fully appreciate the beauty of a geographic formation like a fjord until I did some hiking with my uncle Henrik in Newfoundland many years later and saw formations that were very similar in Gros Morne. This is the only trip to the Norwegian fjords that I've made. Hopefully Suki and I will be able to make the trip together some time -- we're not hardcore about outdoors activity (i.e., no tents), but we definitely like being outside for hours of walking.

No Thin Line

Jennifer Armentrout has secured a sizable advance/book deal thingie after a combination of small press and "self-publishing". In a recent interview, she remarks:

Jeremy Greenfield: You’ve seen a lot of success very quickly. How long have you been writing?




Jennifer L. Armentrout: I started writing seriously in 2007 with my first book, a young adult paranormal romance, and I got a contract on that in 2010 through a small press, Spencer Hill Press. They published it in October 2011.



I started out like most authors do looking for an agent but I couldn’t get one. Once my book came out I was able to get one.



Since 2011, I’ve had 13 books come out. All the books that have come out are with Entangled Publishing and Spencer Hill. My Harlequin Teen book doesn’t come out until the end of this year and my Disney Hyperion books are scheduled to come out in 2014.







JG: What made you decide to self-publish in the first place?



JLA: Came up with the idea in the shower and wrote the book in 20 days in January. I can write pretty fast. I sent a partial to my agent and she loved it. She said, “we can definitely sell this.” We targeted about four-to-five publishers and it was really well-received and all the editors loved it but it got turned down at every publisher because the new adult market is very risky. It’s hard to get it into bookstores. And the market is getting flooded. So, we had this book we thought would sell it but couldn’t.



When we found out we couldn’t sell it Kevan and I had a serious conversation – neither of us had done anything with self-publishing before but I knew some authors who had done it and had some help getting copy editors and cover designers and other people to help. We formed a marketing plan that we thought would work. I have a platform but we wanted to reach beyond my readership so that’s when we decided to do the three-day $0.99 deal and it worked.



It has all happened so quickly. I wrote the book in January, we published it in February. It’s been an insane couple of months.



source:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/best-selling-self-published-author-jennifer-l-armentrout-signs-six-figure-three-book-deal-with-harpercollins-for-wait-for-you/



So it seems if I understand the background to this correctly that in reality she collaborated with her agent, brought her manuscripts out via Kindle, sold many copies, then signed a deal with Avon. All this begs a couple of questions: is it really self-publishing when one collaborates with a publishing professional? Or is it simply that agents are becoming publishers themselves? (The Wylie Agency threatened to do this some time ago with its backlist, then, I believe, for whatever set of reasons, backed off.)

East Coast

This was taken at the home where my mother grew up. It's in New Brunswick on a tributary of the St. John River. My maternal grandparents were potters, and next to this house (very large and ramshackle is how I remember it) was a studio that we actually slept in -- it was a rectangular, bungalow style building -- sort of like a giant bachelor apartment -- and it was not as musty or damp as the big house seemed to be. (There was another house up the road that was deserted and positively spooky; no one wanted to stay there.) Actually, I thought the big house (in photo) was kind of cool. I remember trying to convince my dad we should sleep there.

At that time, the entire area was overgrown and kind of mysterious. There was a pathway to the river. It wasn't long, but by the time you got to the shore, the house was lost in foliage. There was another route -- a dirt road -- to the main road (maybe also dirt at that point). When we drove down it, the saplings on either side would brush against the car windows as vigorously as if we were in a car wash.

The beach

This is Richard and me at the beach -- we tended to go to the lakes in Gatineau Park pretty much every weekend when we were still at Rideau Terrace. Later, when my folks broke up and Richard and I were living with Mom in Manor Park, Dad would take us to the Gatineaus on a fairly regular basis, though not as frequently as before.

Lake-wise, we had favourites, and these were susceptible to fashion: when we were very small it was Lac Philippe. Later, Lac Lapeche. There were others, too, for example Pink's Lake (sort of a noisy party-place where the fragile eco-system finally got so stressed that park authorities closed the lake to swimming). But the two former are the ones I remember most.