Matthew Bin

Good news from Bookland Press: On Guard for Thee: Canadian Peacekeeping Missions is now available in e-book format!

Anyone with a Kobo device, or the Kobo app on their phone, tablet, or computer, can now download and read the book.

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Things have been busy lately, hence no posts in a little more than a month. But here’s good news: CanWrite 2012 is a go!

Four days, four ways to access masters, muses & magic!

Need to get away from the hustle and bustle of your day-to-day routine ? Are you suffering from a serious case of writers’ block? Want to jump start those creative juices by talking shop with fellow writers? Could that draft you’ve been working on benefit from some constructive feedback from your peers or a professional editor?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, the Canadian Authors Association is delighted to invite you to our 91st annual writers’ conference. Join us for easy access to the following options:

• Personal writing time
• Writing circles – learn from your peers
• Blue pencil sessions – get feedback from professionals
• Hands on writing workshops
• Master classes for published and mid-career authors
• Voice coaching for truly effective readings
• Hands on help with social media tools and techniques
• Open mike readings
• Opportunities to promote and sell your book
• Click on the link below to get more information or to register.

I know I’m going to be there, and I hope I’ll see lots of other writers there too.

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Now this is the kind of thing that I’d love to see more of. There’s a great poetry festival every year in northern Ontario, specifically in the town of Cobalt, the Spring Pulse Poetry Festival. And this year, they’ve got a unique way of getting there for those from more southern parts of the province.

We’re leasing an Ontario Northland Railway car and need 20 paid passengers. They are giving a 20% discount on return fare which is normally around $228. Per person return would be around $184. We’re getting sponsors to help subsidize trip for those who are financially challenged. Have negotiated a group room rate at local hotel for $75 per double room with breakfast.

On Thursday May 10 the train will leave union station for Cobalt. The trip takes around 8 hours. The festival is going to start on the train itself with book launches, writing workshops, readings, music, art lectures, etc… A professional photographer will be on board and we’re also going to film it for a documentary. Then we will continue with the festival throughout the weekend and train will return to Toronto on Sunday May 13.

We have several members from the league of poets and the Ontario Poetry Society signed up. I have interest from two other musicians to play and certainly would love you to join this very unique adventure. Right now collecting a pre-registration list and do hope you are keen to be part of this collective creative train tour.

I’m really sorry that I’m going to be away that weekend, because it’s this kind of innovative, creative, and fun stuff that really gives me hope for the Canadian literary scene! I’m not much of a poet but I would love to take part in this.

If you’re interested, check out the Poetrain or e-mail David Brydges for more information.

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I decided to put my short story, “Unrest Among the Smart Cows“, up on Amazon. I’ve had this story for a while — I started it when George Carlin died, because it’s one of his quotes that got me thinking about the themes in the story.

It wasn’t easy to put “Unrest” into epub format. I don’t do much HTML any more, and I was never an expert with it. There’s a table in the story, though, and I had to render it appealingly in HTML to make it display all right in the Kindle format. I ran it through the Kindle simulator and it seems to be okay.

In other news, my novel L.M.F., which has been available for the Kindle for a while, is free to download for the weekend. If you haven’t read it, now’s your chance. (Or you could actually pay the three bucks for it after tomorrow — that would give you a chance to read it, too…)

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Such as:

• As you probably know, I’m pretty active on the Reddit website. Well, a writer on there put together a site to promote other redditors’ books, and ended up with RedditAuthors.com. Not bad for a couple of days’ work!
• This seems like an interesting place to send some work, doesn’t it?
• I’ve received a cheque from The Windsor Review for my short story, which they’re publishing later this year. Their publishing schedule continues to amaze…

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After finishing the science fiction novel last week, I went back to the “suburban satire” I had been working on. Back to writing longhand, back to the — relatively — real world of 1986.

I have complained often and at length about finding space to work in the afternoon; when I don’t take time for lunch (or sometimes while I’m eating lunch), I tend to sit and write. My place of choice was a Starbucks for a while, but they removed about a third of their seating and suddenly I was unlikely to find a seat there, no matter when I went over there.

I moved over to the Second Cup; it’s quieter, the staff are nicer, and there is almost always seating available. I find the counter by the window to be very conducive to writing — the seats are comfortable and the world passing by is just the right amount of distraction for me. Starbucks has one of these counters too, but it is more cramped and less comfortable. I hate sitting there at Starbucks, while I prefer sitting at the counter at Second Cup. Ah, the whims of the spirit.

Yesterday, though: thwarted. One of the rules of a modern urban society is — or ought to be — that bags and coats do not merit a seat. At the Second Cup yesterday, three people and their accoutrements had taken up the five seats at the counter. If there isn’t a law, there oughta be.

I have learned, though, not to be shy in these places. I think it is entirely permissible to share tables and ask people to move their things and so on. “Oh — is anyone sitting here? Do you mind if I –” is usually enough. I have yet to find someone who isn’t willing to share, or to make a big show of moving their bags (probably to cover up the embarrassment of being called out for taking up too much space).

The Second Cup was too busy, though, and the line was moving too slowly, so I tried Starbucks. Success: a table. I was even asked to share it, which I gladly did.

All this to say, I wrote six hundred words yesterday. Writing longhand is extremely slow, I’ve found. And I can’t find my good fountain pen, so it isn’t even enjoyable. But I’ll finish this novel, eventually, and somehow.

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So on Monday I finished my latest novel. Brendan’s Way is a science fiction book set on a colonial space ship travelling to a newly-settled world, about two or three centuries in the future.

Brendan is a young, idealistic farmer turned colonist, recruited to take the trip by a shadowy group of revolutionaries and dissidents. He is travelling with Neala, one of the revolutionaries, who is posing as Brendan’s wife. But Brendan doesn’t know until they are hurtling through space that Neala is hiding much more than her identity.

So I’m still working on the pitch, obviously, but that’s a good start.

I did two new things when I wrote this novel. One was writing it on a keyboard instead of writing it longhand. In the past, I found that writing on the keyboard was difficult; I stalled easily and the words refused to flow consistently. This time, though, not only did they flow easily, I wrote at an unbelievable pace. Longhand I average 500 words per hour; on the keyboard I was up to 1500 words per hour. I was shocked at how quickly it all came out.

It might have something to do with the other change I made in my process: I wrote a detailed outline for the whole book. It was about 10,000 words long itself, and had roughly one paragraph per chapter. I stayed very faithful to the outline until the very end — only the last two chapters were not worth keeping from the outline and it took a little effort to rethink the ending.

Although the book came out much more quickly, I found that I lost something in the process too. It’s hard to define exactly what; I think it’s most accurate to say my style is just weaker. Again and again I’d finish a sentence and think, well, I hope I remember to improve that when I edit this thing.

The speed tradeoff is significant though. I went from nothing to outline in two days, and from outline to completed draft in five months. Considering it took over a year to write On the Heat, it’s quite amazing.

Of course it’s just a first draft, and there is lots of work yet to do. But the first draft is the biggest milestone there is, and I’m happy to have passed it so soon.

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I was reading a thread on reddit today where someone was talking about their inner critic and how they found it so hard to even get started. Paralyzed by fear and all that. Nothing new there, and nothing that most of us haven’t dealt with at one time or another.

One response that I really liked, though, was from another writer who had been through the same thing recently. His solution was to decide to write a hundred stories. His plan was to show them to no one, just write them to get the words flowing.

He wasn’t done the hundred stories — he’s still working on them, in fact — when he started some new writing projects. He’s obviously excited, and obviously past that hump. And he did it by giving himself an utterly irresponsible and unrealistic goal and trying to achieve it.

It’s a fantastic technique. It’s one I use from time to time; two winters ago I set out to write 10,000 words in a single weekend, when I went away to a little hotel in a sleepy off-season town. Just last month I set a goal of 20,000 words in the first two weeks of October, when my wife was away on a trip (but while I was also working full-time). I hit both goals, albeit just barely.

There’s something about setting impossible goals that really works for some reason. Maybe it’s freeing, mentally; you wouldn’t beat yourself up for falling short, since the goals were so outrageous from the outset. So you work towards them without the same kind of pressure.

On that note, I was planning to finish the book I’m working on by the end of November. I’m pretty far behind the pace I need to get there — basically I need to write around 20,000 words in the next three weeks, and work is really busy these days. But what the hell — I’m working to hit that mark anyhow. I only started this book in July so finishing it by the end of this month would be a great achievement. If I don’t get there, well, I’ll finish it soon after.

Back to work, then.

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I e-mailed my agent about a month ago, to ask for an update. I hadn’t heard from her since March, when I sent her my latest complete manuscript.

Her lack of communication was already starting to trouble me, and I had begun thinking about looking for another agent, or laying it on the line with this one.

Today she finally replied, and it wasn’t really the reply I was hoping for…

Thanks so much for your patience.  I have read On the Heat and reviewed La Famiglia.  You have a great knack for making a reader hungry and anxious.  Still and all, it is with great regret that I have decided that I simply can’t take these on.  I think you’re ready to go with the first two in a good series.  In some ways they remind me of Benny Cooperman/Howard Engle.

My difficulty is that in this tough fiction market, we’re really struggling to place our fiction. And while  I think several of the smaller Canadian publishers would jump at the chance to launch you, I know that the time and energy I have to give is severely limited–due to our work load and [some personal issues in her life, which I had not known before].

There are a number of good Canadian agents handling commercial fiction–Helen Heller has a wonderful track record, as do Beverley Slopen, Sally Harding, etc. and hundreds in the US.

With every good wish.

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