Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Parallel-parking the croutons.

This is the kind of day any writer would want. Well, this writer, at least, wishes she had more of them.

My god, an idea for a story setting off sparks in my head at 5 a.m., so up gets I to the dining room where I last left my laptop, and giddy-up, away we go. I wrote for hours, and think I've got a new, weird children's story coming together. I haven't written anything in that department since The Bone Talker, which came out way back in 2000.

All day writing ... including a 6 page fan letter to Alix Hawley, a Kelowna, BC writer whose first book of short stories, The Old Familiar, blew me out of my slippers. And Thistledown Press published it. Good on them, I say. Good on them!

Did I really have time to write a six page fan letter? No. Was it important to do it anyway? Damn straight. Writers get such scarce attention, and the review situation in this country is deplorable.

Plus, I believe in this writer (and don't even hold the fact that she was born in 1975 (!) against her). How great is she? Well, here's an example. It seems some of her characters have aversions to food. She write of pickles as being "shiny, glandular." There "a scab of roast potato ... a wodge of pie." The turkey smell "attacked." Pastry pinwheels come out looking like swastikas. And one character parallel parks her croutons. I love that.

Okay, back to the article I'm currently writing for The Western Producer. (Who, I wonder, first called it The Western Seducer"?) Berry picking, that's my topic. Kinda fun. Everyone's got a story ...

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