K.V. Johansen's Blog, page 6

The Adventures of Mister Wicked: The mysterious affair of the dog who woofed in the night

’Twas the night after Boxing Day, and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Or so the humans, blissfully asleep, would have thought, if they had been awake to think.

Someone, however, could not sleep. He had something on his mind.

“Woof!” said Mister Wicked. When nothing happened, he stood on the bottom of the Forbidden Stairs and said “Woof!” again.

“Rarroooarrawurraguh,” mumbled the human with portfolio for night-time woofings, and she rolled blearily out of bed and stumbled downstairs.

Mister Wicked greeted her with enthusiastic tail wagging.

The human was not enthusiastic at all. She made her way to the kitchen in the dark and found the Wicked Dog’s harness and leash.

That was not what Mister Wicked had in mind. He retired into his box and curled up small. Any reasonable human would have concluded from this that either there had merely been a test of the emergency woof system and no real digestive emergency was imminent, or that it had been a different sort of “woof” entirely. However, at 3 a.m., very few humans are capable of reasoned thought and logical deduction. The human tugged on Mister Wicked’s collar and then went around to the back of the box to poke him in the ribs (leading Mister Wicked to wish the gods had endowed him with a more substantial indoor doghouse than a wire cage and a bedsheet).* Mister Wicked, in a state of some disgruntlement, emerged from his box and condescended to have his harness put on. The human found her boots and her coat and her hat and her mittens, and they went outside.

The night was cold and still; the ice that coated every twig and stalk glittered beneath the light pollution of the streetlamps; the snow was fluffy over a nice hard crust. Mister Wicked forgot he was disgruntled at the human’s inadequate grasp of canine and frolicked. Frolic, frolic, frolic.

“Hurry up,” grumbled the human, entirely failing to appreciate the lovely frolic in the garden she was having.

Mister Wicked rolled onto his back and waggled his paws in the air, to convey his general enjoyment of life and disinclination to be towed inside again.

“Well, hurry up, then,” said the human, and they frolicked some more. Eventually Mister Wicked humoured the human and they went back inside.

He remembered why he had been woofing.

“Woof?” he said, and stood in the hallway, waggling his tail endearingly.**

“Go to bed,” said the human. “Bedtime.” She got the going-back-to bed bedtime biscuit, so Mister Wicked, with a sigh, went back to his cosy bed in the living room, and the human tucked him in and gave him his biscuit.

“Siiiigh,” said Mister Wicked, his head pillowed on a Shetland Wool sweater, sans bilboes, as the human went back to bed.

In the morning, when the human, still somewhat humourless due to not having been able to go back to sleep for another hour, came downstairs, she was greeted with the sight of a sock.

Her sock.***

The one that had been missing when they sorted the laundry the day before.

It was laid out carefully in the middle of the hall carpet.

Mister Wicked saw her looking at the sock.

“Woof!” he said, and waggled his tail hopefully. Now, perhaps, after a good night’s sleep, the human’s grasp of canine would be improved, and she would recognize the subtle difference in intonation between “Help something nasty is going to happen if I don’t get outside Right Now!” and “Nyah, nyah, I have your sock.”

The human looked at her sock, which assuredly had not been there when she went to bed the night before (for the first time, that is).

The human remembered an incident the week before, when there had also been a three a.m. emergency woofing, and in the morning, a half-eaten sock had mysteriously appeared in the hall, carefully laid out for inspection.

The human sighed. “My sock,” she said. “Not Mr Wicked’s sock.”

Waggle waggle. Mr Wicked knew that perfectly well. That was, after all, the whole point. That was the Game. Dog steals sock. Human cries, “My sock!” and chases dog. But humans are so busy during the day that they never want to play for long. It was really quite a good idea, he had thought, to stash a sock away in his box when the humans weren’t looking, for later use during the long, boring night-time.

That the human never turned on the lights when she came downstairs at night was the one flaw in his cunning plan.

* Crate training is all very well, but be warned, your dog may decide the crate is his fortress/tree-house/treasury-for-stolen-items and you may find it becomes a permanent part of your household furniture, a useful surface on which to pile reusable grocery bags and dog paraphernalia in a small and cluttered house, but likewise, a substantial taking-up of the very limited kitchen floorspace. And he doesn’t even sleep in it. It’s just a fort for brooding, hiding from tooth-brushing, and scoring goals in games of soccer-ball/hah-hah-I-have-stolen-your-X.

** Having the tail (and spirit) of a husky, Mister Wicked waggles rather than wags his tea-cup tail. The effect, in a beast who inherited Siberian husky curl and German Shepherd length, can be rather comical.

*** A nice Stanfield’s wool work sock, she would like to add, as was the one he ate. She still hasn’t found the mate to that one. Presumably it is still hidden somewhere in the house for a future bout of three-in-the-morning boredom.

Dispatches from the Desk: A life of their own: characters (antagonists) with depth

You’ve heard writers say their characters take on a life of their own. You’ve probably heard writers grumble about how their darn people took over the story and changed what they intended to happen. You’ve probably also heard other writers saying that that’s nonsense, the writer is in charge, etc. Maybe it comes down to a difference in plotting techniques. If you’re an evolutionary writer rather than an outliner, it’s far more likely your characters are going to evolve as you write and end up driving parts of the story in directions you didn’t expect because, remember, you were just trying to get to that distant height of land that is where your story ends, and the road between you and that went wandering into the dark forest. You didn’t know what was going to happen there anyway. Someone working from an outline is more likely to have fleshed out the characters in greater detail before they began, and to have less room for them to deviate from that, because, in the complex interlocking pick-up-sticks of a plot, changing one thing can change everything else.

I’ve been dealing with this with one of my characters lately. He was turning out to be a great drag on the forward momentum of the plot. He was psychologically interesting. He was historically plausible. I’m not writing an historical fiction. What I mean is, he was the sort of person who, realistically, would create the sort of situations I needed him to create, and who would, in real life, do the sorts of things he was going to do, to make him an enemy of the heroes. Or the antagonist, you if want to be more lit about it.

He was also boring me. It’s hard to sympathise with the self-righteous, and weirdly, I found it hard to think of him as the hero within his own head, although a pious, self-righteous man is likely, even more than the rest of us, to know he’s doing the right things for the right and necessary reasons. He needed more dash, more . . . I realized, complexity and mystery, because all that self-assurance didn’t seem to be leaving anything to discover. I took the Spouse and the dog out for a late-night walk in the graveyard and held forth, thinking aloud. (The Spouse suggested that I could maybe just get a small stuffed toy to think at, since I wasn’t actually looking for input.) Usually I do my thinking aloud, as it were, while writing, but in this case I needed that babble and waving of hands. It worked, and I talked myself into a realization of what I needed for this antagonist’s role in the story. I needed to change this and this about him . . .

The moment I sat down to write again, I couldn’t see him, the guy I was writing about, having that different cast of mind. I should have been able to take what I had, call him B1, and recast his thoughts and actions to make him into B2, while leaving him standing where he was. It didn’t work. The moment he was B2, he couldn’t even stay in the same place. He couldn’t be the same child in the family. (He’s a middle-aged man by this point, but still . . .) He had to be the younger brother, not the twin. He had to have done one thing very differently as a boy, to be where I needed him to be now, in his head. And that put him a few hundred miles away now, and changed all sorts of other things, which is making the whole story more interesting and creating problems, of the healthy, challenging sort that keeps things interesting and alive, for a completely different part of the story that was slowing down a bit.

Taking on a life of his own? That’s a metaphor. That’s the thing some people miss when they say, nonsense, you’re the author, you’re in charge. Of course you are. A character taking on a life of their own is that subconscious problem-solving human brain at work, fizzing away, analysing what’s probable, what’s consistent with human headology (love that word, Mistress Weatherwax), what’s consistent with the established reality of this world, what works with what needs to have happened by the end, and, vitally, what’s interesting and exciting to the one who’s got to write those 130,000+ words that are going to make it all happen. That creative cellar full of all the oddments and shadows is making connections, leaping from rock to rock to cross the stream without stopping to consciously think, that one or that one. So sometimes you do end up leaping and realizing you’ve hit a dead end, flailing your arms wildly to spin off the force of your leap as you pose precariously on one foot realizing you have nowhere to go and need to retreat a stepping stone or two — but you’re still much further along, committed to the crossing, and you just need to backtrack a little, not all the way to bank behind. That “life of his or her own thing” is us saying, I didn’t think of that before I began, but once I started writing out of the depths where the poetry and the magic happen, that was what worked. B2 couldn’t be where I had put B1, because for him to have those different aspects of his personality that the story needs, he can’t have done the things B1 had done that put B1 where I had him. It wasn’t psychologically plausible. He had to have made different choices long before. That looks like having a life of his own; it’s really the rapid-spinning mind saying, these connections don’t work: if-then if-then if-then and then he must be here, now. And you the writer say, ah, yes, that’s obvious, without even noticing, usually, what’s going on down in the cellar to lead you to that conclusion.

This isn’t how one of the bad guys from Blackdog ended up being quite heroic in The Leopard and The Lady — that was always her trajectory and the roots of it are there in Blackdog if you look — but it is how a pair of secondary characters ended up taking over my imagination and turning out to be some of the most interesting — and occasionally difficult — protagonists I’ve ever tried to write.

B2, meanwhile, having killed his older brother/self off by his existence, must be very far away from where B1 was last seen standing and brooding. He’s definitely going to start causing very different problems for said unexpected heroes far earlier than I thought he could, when I was at the plodding and consciously plotting stage.

I think I should re-read one of my biographies of Cromwell and see what that does for him, down in the murky depths of the cellar.

#SFWApro

Marakand: The Leopard – Epic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery, Part Two: Let’s call it Character-Driven Epic Fantasy?

I write out of a character in a situation; that’s nearly always the starting point, and if the character isn’t working, the story dies. I can’t seem to say, ‘This is the world and this is the plot,’ create the appropriate characters to enact it, and send them out on stage. The end result is that even when I think I have a plot all worked out, a history to tell, once the characters come properly alive, it can turn out I was under a serious misapprehension, not necessarily about the largest outlines of the history, but about all the details of how it worked out and who actually drove the story.

Take Ahjvar and Ghu, for instance, those two embattled men on the cover of The Leopard. The heroes, in fact. (I love the way that Raymond Swanland shows them here.)

The Leopard: Marakand Book One, cover by Raymond Swanland

I kept trying to write the book about someone else, trying to tell the history of an event in Marakand, which is the place you get to if you keep going east on the caravan road. This potential hero was a come-from-away Marakander guard captain who found herself ensnared in the affairs of the Lady, the tyrant-goddess of the city. I was determined to tell this history. I went through draft after draft that just would not satisfy me, that was just wrong. There was an assassin, a lesser character whose actions were the catalyst to touch off catastrophe. He had a different reason for being there in every draft, but he always showed up already in the city with his servant, or he was already a captive of the Lady, or at least he came riding up to the city gates. Then … “The assassin’s house …” I finally began, hundreds of miles from Marakand, from the point of view of a new secondary character, a young bard sent to carry a message to the assassin Ahjvar, the Leopard. (She had begun life in one version, where Ahjvar was a more legitimate servant of a king, as his recently-slain partner. You know, the grim corpse sprawled stage left.) Suddenly, at the point that it switches to the assassin’s perspective on the encounter and Ghu, whom the girl of the opening paragraph has seen as a simple-witted servant boy, begins upbraiding Ahjvar for his behaviour towards the girl and Ahj says he doesn’t like the colour of her hair, the story all fell into place around them.

What? I thought. Why? What’s wrong with her hair? I love it when these minor lines that just seem to write themselves suddenly get caught up in the under-mind’s frantic dance to weave everything together, the subconscious puzzle-solving of writing, and suddenly turn out to be the seed or the hint of something complex and important. It’s sort of as though instead of being able to say, ‘humorous line, minor detail’, the unconscious pattern-seeking storytelling mind thinks, It’s there, so it must be a clue, and begins frantically to discover — invent — all the connections that explain why Ahjvar doesn’t like red-haired women, and why it matters — vitally — that he doesn’t.

I’d always known he was under a curse. I hadn’t been able to settle on why.

Oh, I realized, rather quickly. It’s his book.

The plot itself is not that different from what I had planned; part of the larger story arc of Moth and the werebear Mikki, who wander in and out of other heroes’ stories for a few chapters in their quest to find the devils (or perhaps to avoid finding the devils) who’ve escaped their graves. Although Marakand is not a sequel but a new two-book series set in the same world, it builds on hints in Blackdog of the situation in the city of Marakand: the execution of wizards, the existence of the Voice. How I ended up telling it, though was quite different from what I had initially imagined. It’s definitely epic in that it is a polyphonic narrative, with a greater complexity of politics, human and divine interactions, and long histories underlying its present. Along the way, though, much of the history between beginning and end turned out to follow a different path to that end than I had anticipated, and that’s because of the characters, who, in best S&S tradition, set off on a journey with no idea where they’d end up.

The best of both worlds, I’d like to think.

Blackdog and The Leopard: Epic Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, and the World of the Seven Devils, Part One

So, are the books and stories set in the the world of the Seven Devils (‘The Storyteller’, Blackdog, and The Leopard, which is part one of a two-volume work called Marakand) epic fantasy or sword and sorcery?

The Leopard: Marakand Book One, cover by Raymond Swanland

Epic fantasy seems the best description among the contemporary crop of sub-genre labels, but there are also readers who regard them as leaning more to S&S.

Blackdog, cover by Raymond Swanland

Well, labels are dangerous. I don’t think about labels when I write, or when I read. I can say that I definitely do write fantasy. I definitely do not write paranormal romance or mystery or westerns or vampires. Nor do I write ‘urban fantasy’, which name seems to have been pinched from de Lint and handed over to paranormal romance, or . . . what other types of fantasy are there? Well, probably there are more that I don’t write. It all gets a bit hazy. I came up with my own classifications for recent trends in children’s fantasy when I was writing the litcrit book Beyond Window-Dressing: Canadian Children’s Fantasy at the Millennium. Adapting those, I’d be inclined to call what I write for adults ‘traditional secondary world fantasy’ and leave it at that. Too much refinement in categorization just ends up becoming exclusive, not helpful as a guide to “You might like this book, give it a try.” However, with so much on the virtual shelves these days, people do need some guide to narrowing down their search for that next thing in their to-read pile. The drawback of that is that not only do the labels risk becoming rigid barriers, rather than fluid and overlapping circles, but that the meanings keep drifting anyway.

The term ‘high fantasy’ seems to have pretty much dropped out of use in the last twenty years. ‘Romance’ as in W.P. Ker’s Epic and Romance, has been taken over for another genre entirely, except for its continued use in its proper sense by medievalists. When my publisher first began publicizing Blackdog and calling it epic fantasy, I breathed a sigh of relief. Ah, so that’s what I am. It was embarrassing not to be certain. But as I said above, some look on it as sword and sorcery. My impression of S&S is that it is usually about a hero or two off having adventures without much external cause beyond their own urge to keep going. They don’t have an end to achieve, except to survive whatever villain they’ve run afoul at the time and improve their own lot in life. They’re not initially desperate to save the world/kingdom/village, on the large or small scale, though they can find themselves in a situation to do so as they go on. Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger and Del series is a fairly recent example of that. Epic fantasy, in contrast, involves a larger picture, a larger world with a greater complexity of politics and history revealed on stage, and heroes whose motivations are external as well as internal; they want not only to survive and achieve some personal victory in whatever is driving them, but from the start, they want to achieve something for a greater cause. As time has gone on, we’ve reached a point where the description ‘epic fantasy’ is being applied more and more to pseudo-histories that become so vast that there is no room in them for the Hero, only a huge cast of characters enacting a history, as in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Books of the Fallen. It’s possible we’re on the verge of another subdivision of sub-genres, about to discover a need (a marketing need?) to divide epic fantasy into differing types again. But between epic fantasy and sword and sorcery, where do ‘The Storyteller’, Blackdog, and The Leopard fall?

A good case could be made for looking on ‘The Storyteller’ as sword and sorcery. Stranger comes into village, tells a strange tale, things happen, stranger walks away, leaving smoking ruin behind . . . But the story she tells and which unfolds around her audience and engulfs them, there in the queen’s hall, is that of the first of the of seven devils to have escaped his grave, and so it is rooted in an older history that still affects those kingdoms of the north, and which is the catalyst for events that will come to pass in the lands along the caravan road in the future. However, for Blackdog and The Leopard, my publisher was quite right; ‘epic fantasy’ is the best shorthand label (the story unfolds in a setting of prior history which shapes and drives it, and what happens has tendrils that reach out both off the map and into the future). However, since they’re on the more character-driven end of that epic spectrum, they have that sword and sorcery appeal, too.

To be continued in part two, Blackdog and The Leopard: character-driven epic fantasy

Dispatches from the Desk: We shall meet at Philippi. No, wait, not there …

“Only once that skeleton-map-outline is made am I going to let myself make the file and start writing, even though the first chapter has been in my head for something like two years now.”

It was about a month ago I wrote that, in a previous blog post. I could almost have predicted the outcome. It’s happened before. That first chapter, which had been living in my head for two years at least, turned out not to be where the story started at all. I had barely set fingers to keyboard when the actual words made it clear that no, A., G., and I., were not going to meet up in this way at this point. Their predestined forgathering was in fact to occur some time later and many hundreds of miles eastward. But … but … but … my lovely scene. Kindling, consumed and gone, and a more lasting fire taking its place … I hope.

Well, the whole idea of a sort of vague itinerary, word-map of the plot, still applies, but I realized I can’t fill in more than the very roughest details yet, because it’s in part one of my planned three-part structure that I will be figuring out who’s who and what. It’s only as I begin to chivvy people onto the stage that I figure out whom else I need, what character implies other characters to support them, who can actually take on several roles and both keep things interesting and reduce clutter. It’s here, as well, that the details of the culture start to grow out of the nicely stirred-up and fermenting compost of my research reading. The characters themselves, as they evolve at this point, begin to provide the complexities of the plot, which prior to this could have been summed up in about one sentence. “One av the seven original plots,” you may remember the Irish priest in Emily of New Moon murmuring to himself as the young Emily recounts her thrilling ‘maiden exiled to convent to keep her from unsuitable beloved’ epic idea. It’s all the detail that evolves after one says, A. and G. go to X to do Y” that makes a real story out of it.

And as usual, one of the lesser background characters is getting really, really interesting and has suddenly revealed himself as a fairly major player in events. He’d just better not get uppity and try to take over. This is G.’s book, after all.

Dispatches from the Desk: The Joy of Cartography

I’ve been reading assorted histories, books on archaeology, architecture, and the like, and scribbling notes about characters as they begin to appear to me, but I’ve suddenly hit the point where all that has achieved enough solidity to need something under the feet to support it. Time to make a map.

I have a rough map, or a series of them, attached to maps for other parts of this world, but it’s a very sketchy outline, intended mostly to keep the world to scale and attempt to keep the mountains and rivers in realistic configurations. Now I need details. Usually, aside from the bare geographical outlines imposed by earlier works, I would leave the details to emerge as I write, but as I noted previously, I’m trying to work on this project with a bit more of a skeleton outline, or a word-map/itinerary of plot-landmarks of where the story is going, so I need more solidity to my real map. I can’t leave it to the characters to discover, because things will be happening all over which will affect them. I need distances and terrain in place before they ever set foot into the story. Parts of this one will be more like chess or go and less like searching for the source of the Nile.

My sketch map covers a whole continent and includes things that never make it into any book. It consists of sections of professional maps that were done to scale based on my ‘good’ maps, some of my ‘good’ maps, sketches done on the computer, and sketches done in a rather smudgy pencil in my notebook and scanned. Adjusting all those to the same scale and patching them together was a good day’s work, last winter. There’s a real map of part of the primary world underlying it, to keep me honest — I mean, to keep latitude and longitude, climate and distances, reasonable for a planet of our size. What I did today was cut out the relevant sections of the rough map into new files, over which I will put new layers, in order to draw a clean, good copy, on which I can begin laying the groundwork (hah!) for the plot, charting distances and times, and working out who needs to be where, when, and what they need to do on the way.

I need to come up with the right opening sentence, too. Get that right, and the whole first chapter will appear.

Dispatches from the desk: Skeleton – Map – Outline?

On not getting lost in the wilderness of writing without an outline

or

Why this next book is going to have a skeleton to hang its story on, even though outlines stifle me

or

It’s not so stifling if I call it a map of the structure

I’ve written before, somewhere or other, about how I don’t work well with outlines. When I’m giving writing workshops in schools, the teachers invariably want me to tell the youngsters that real writers use outlines, and I have to tell them that there aren’t any rules about what ‘real writers’ do and do not do when writing.

Outlines. Some do, some don’t. Generally, I don’t, except for a rolling outline of rough notes that evolves and pushes ahead of me as I write, until I get close to the last quarter or so of the book, when, yes, I do pretty much know everything, although I can still be taken by surprise by what suddenly seems right, obvious, and inescapable in the character interactions, in defiance of what my notes said was supposed to happen to so-and-so. I once wrote a book to an outline. Then I threw the limp, dead thing out, and wrote it all again.

However, my last major project (of which more news anon, stay tuned for bulletins …) has set, even for me, the Dark Overlord of Nigglers, Grand High Master of “Dear Editor, wait! Don’t read that version, here’s a new file …,” a new record in numbers of revisions. I’m not going to confess how many drafts it went through, at least, not at present. I am going to say, I have a very, very patient and trusting editor. We’ll just observe for now that it was a very high number and life is too short to ever do that again.

The reason for that unspeakable number of drafts was pretty much that I started writing the book before it was ready to be written, and it had to ripen while I was working on it, which is why the initial hero ended up being cut from the book entirely and a minor character turned out to be the hero and … well, it was all very interesting and I’m very, very satisfied with how it turned out. Like most good stories, it feels as though it’s the inevitable history that has always existed; I can’t imagine it happening another way, now. I have no intention of doing that again, though. It was not fun. (Moral: do not start a novel when already burnt out with brain going “phut” [which the Oxford says is the sound of a bladder -- or possibly a thought bubble -- collapsing].)

So here I am, starting the Next Project. I have a bit of an anxiety about ending up lost in that dark and trackless forest again, even though this particular story has more seeds already planted in the foregoing one than the other did in the one before it, and thus more landmarks in the wilderness of what is going to happen (if you follow). (In fact, the epilogue is already written in sketch form, with some dialogue, and I find it hard to imagine that the final sentence of that is not going to turn out to be the real final sentence of the book.) Furthermore, there’s a serious, standing-army war in this one, and that’s a lot of rather complex and interlaced things to have to keep unravelling and re-knotting if major structural changes become necessary. This has led me to conclude that …

I need an outline.

Heresy. And I’m just as afraid of that killing the story as I am of the stumbling-blind-in-the-dark feeling of the story failing to unfold hill by hill as I reach each new horizon and find instead that it is a slough. Possibly of despond.

So, while I am beginning in my usual way, by reading lots of history and archaeology and anthropology and letting it all compost away, to nourish sprouting ideas and grow into a new part of the world, and making notes that generally end up a bit of a jumble between historical fact and ideas I had while reading, I am also letting, in the back of my mind, an outline start to simmer. Pretty soon I will set pen to paper and start sketching it out, probably (sigh) in multi-coloured inks which will get overlaid and moved around with scribbly arrows till it’s illegible and I need to do a new one. It’s not going to be a detailed chapter by chapter outline, because I don’t do that. However, it is going to be the skeleton of the book. I know I’ll start by dividing it into three parts, three movements of the story. Certain anchoring events will go into that. Then I’ll start sketching out what needs to happen to get from one of these anchor points, or major landmarks, to use my more usual writing-process metaphor, to the next. That, I think, will keep the story on track, by giving me a map of where I’m going.

There, it’s not an outline. It’s a map. I can live with that. I like maps. Maps, unlike chapter-by-chapter outlines, have big interesting spaces left on them to explore, which is how I write and where the magic happens, so that’s good. It works. Only once that skeleton-map-outline is made am I going to let myself make the file and start writing, even though the first chapter has been in my head for something like two years now. I’m beginning to look forward to it with the excitement, and trepidation, of a traveller preparing for a long journey, a traveller who has one of those less-than-accurate maps with a lot of enticing supposition and many mysterious blank patches to draw them on.

Slush Pile Stories

I was thinking the other day about slush piles, those heaps, literal or virtual, which every editor has sitting on their desk awaiting attention. For the editor, they feel like a vast heap of coal to be shovelled in search of that one elusive diamond. For the author, the experience is a bit like that of Steven Appleby’s Captain Star on the Lonely Planet. Most of the time you sit in your wheelbarrow, waiting and waiting and waiting for the message rocket with orders, and as the sun sets with no communication, you think, maybe tomorrow. “Maybe tomorrow” keeps you going. I wear (too) many hats and deal with both sides of the slush pile, but I realized a while ago I had had, as an author, some rather amusing slush pile experiences. So here they are.

Long ago, after waiting and waiting and waiting to hear back about a submission, I finally wrote, a year later, to the publisher asking for an update. They phoned back to say, “Gosh, we’re glad you got in touch, because we lost the envelope, the cover letter, and the first page with your address on it and we want to publish it and we couldn’t figure out how to find you …” (How did they manage that? I still don’t know. This was long, long ago, in the days when, although I had email, publishers did not.)

Then, once upon a time, I submitted a short story collection to a publisher. To be precise, I submitted one sample story and nine outlines. Their guidelines said they took at least three months to respond. Lots of time to write the rest of the projected stories, I thought. A mere week later (how did Canada Post manage that?) I got a letter back requesting the rest of the MS right away. Fastest short story collection ever written, I can tell you.

You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson after that, but I once had a YA novel that I abandoned during a bout of, to put it mildly, discouragement, about two-thirds of the way through. Quite a while later, it occurred to me that I really should submit that project somewhere, great grey clouds of discouragement or not. So I did. And they said, Yes, please, they would like to buy it, could I send the compete MS asap? I went to do so and discovered a complete lack of complete MS. How exactly was this story supposed to end? Only one way to find out. I wrote frantically, and it turned into a series. This is not, however, a procedure I would recommend for everyday inspiration.

There was the time that a publisher called me in a panic to say, “You haven’t sent back the corrected proofs; you had to have the corrected proofs back by yesterday.” To which I said, “I did send back the corrected proofs and Canada Post’s tracking system says they were delivered.” So they went off and panicked some more, and eventually found that someone had put my corrected proofs in the slush pile.

A publisher once emailed me to ask if I could possibly submit a manuscript to them, please, because I’d been highly recommended by another author and they would really like to see something from me. And I said, “Er, you’ve had something in your slush pile for at least six months now.” And they said, “Oh.” It was published later that year.

And then there was Blackdog, which was sent in when Pyr had a brief open window of looking at unsolicited, unagented submissions. And as the editor tells it, he was all excited to have discovered it and thought what a wonderful Cinderella story it was. And then he looked me up. Nineteen previous books or not, from my point of view, it was still a glittering ballgown and a coach and six!

The Matka Gorge and the Monastery Dormition of the Theotokos

Book-signing at the Ikona bookstores was the official business of the final day of “Days of Canadian Literature in Macedonia”, but our hosts made sure we got to see some of the countryside as well, with a trip out to the Matka Gorge. This is the deep ravine of the Treska River, which has a hydro dam on it from 1937, forming a lake further up the ravine. Beyond this, there are caves, at least one of which is among the deepest in Europe, though we didn’t go that far, as it entails a longish boat trip. (For photos, see the gallery at the end of this post.)

The steep-sided valley between the folded limestone mountains was home to a number of churches and monasteries in the Middle Ages. Some are still in use. The most accessible of these religious sites, more or less where the river leaves its gorge for wider terrain and heads towards its merging with the Vardar, is the monastery often just called the Matka Monastery, but dedicated to “the Dormition of the Theotokos”, the Eastern Orthodox feast commemorating the death and bodily resurrection of Mary. The church there dates to the fourteenth century, as do some of its frescoes, but some stones from much earlier Christian buildings were reused in it. The present monastic establishment, which was founded in 1998, is home to half a dozen nuns and an elderly woman who has retired to the monastery. “We are seven,” the sister who was our host there said, which sounds like the start of a Wordsworth quote. We became guests for of the monastery for a little while that afternoon because one of the sisters is a friend of one of the festival organizers; we were invited around back of the monastery for Turkish coffee and cakes, with a view of a small grassy meadow rising into a hillside of steep woodland and stone, while hens foraged among the daisies under the watchful eye of the monastery dog. Birds, the only one of which I could identify by sound was a European blackbird, sang, and the noise of the crowds which had fled Skopje on a day of 34 degree heat and brilliant sun was shut away down on the thronged road along the river. Though I was enjoying very much the many and varied events of the past day and a half, it was a very restorative oasis of calm and stillness in the rush and anxiety of so much of that week of travel.

Guests often stay at the monastery. It would be a place very conducive to the concentration required for writing, I think, and is the sort of environment I try to create for myself at home when I’m working, though the lawn-mowing arms race in the neighbourhood doesn’t do much for peace and quiet. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when the monastery was a foundation for men, it is known to have had a very good library.

The nineteenth-century monastery building reminded me of illustrations of an Elizabethan inn, with a gallery running along the upper floor and a veranda beneath, a similarity added to by the white plaster and dark beams we think of as Tudor. The masonry of the small, domed, cruciform church is brick and stone with very thick mortar making an attractive pattern. The ancient stone incorporated into it includes portions of columns, pillars, and part of an altar as well. The paraclisis for votive candles is modern, dating only to 2002, but was built to echo the style of the church. The small guide one of the sisters gave me says that it also incorporates part of an ancient Christian altar. There is also a freestanding bell-tower, though I don’t know how old that is.

Down below the monastery is the road along the river, which turns into a path with a low guardrail, heading upriver. Photography is forbidden around the hydro dam, but there are quite enough spectacular views without that. The low mountains, folded and warped layers of grey limestone, are scattered with green and flashes of mauve where the lilacs are in bloom. The river was still in spate with the spring freshet off the higher mountains where snow still lingered. There were a lot of trees I didn’t recognize: some species of juniper or cypress with quite large cones, something that looked like a fig … Dejan said it wasn’t good to eat but that you made jam out of it; he only knew the Macedonian name, which I wrote down to look up later, discovering that it looked like a fig because it was a fig. Hunting around online turned up the suggestion that the figs that have gone wild in the southern parts of the Balkans originated with trees planted around monasteries and mosques. Figs and lilacs, an unlikely combination. The lilacs were mostly on the far shore of the lake above the hydro dam, though, so I don’t have any good pictures of them.

We saw another ancient church, that of the monastery of Saint Andrew. It also dates from the fourteenth century and contains medieval frescoes.

Three of us left the other two having coffee at the outdoor café down below Saint Andrew’s and walked a fair ways along the increasingly-narrow path above the lake, which twists around jutting shoulders of stone and sometimes passes beneath low overhangs where tall people need to duck. When we turned around to the head back, the light was getting lower, showing up the layers and folds in the stone even more sharply than before.

It was one of the most memorable parts of a memorable trip.

* * *

Quite a number of people helped make my attendance at the launch of the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Pirate-Queen possible. The Canada Council for the Arts assisted with a travel grant; the trip could not have happened at all without that. The translator of the Macedonian Torrie books, Marija Todorova, and my Macedonian publisher Vermilion did splendid work in bringing another Torrie out and in organizing, and then re-organizing, a book launch. Dejan and Nikola from Ikona were unfailingly considerate and helpful hosts and made the trip a huge success for me. The new friends I made, David Chariandy, Aleksandar Prokopiev, Elizabeta Seleva, and all the folks from the NGO Sumnal, are also a part of the trip that will stay with me. Furthermore, various friends and relatives at home helped out in various ways — you know who you are. Благодарам.

* * *

No thanks at all to the corporate entity Air Canada. One does not just pop over to the Balkans for the weekend.

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Dining in the Republic of Macedonia

I think the foods of all the southern areas of Eastern Europe are related, from the similarity in climate, which affects not only what grows well, but how foods were traditionally preserved and stored, and from the shared history of the late medieval Turkish conquest and subsequent centuries of Ottoman rule. The names, though, can differ from country to country and each region has many of its own specialities as well as its own twists on the shared dishes.

This trip to the Republic of Macedonia, at the end of April, was timed nicely for the start of the outdoor eating season, when in Skopje the householders have moved out to their gardens and the restaurants and coffeehouses have flowed out to patios and streetsides. Though I was only there for three evenings or two full days, my memory of it, in between book-related events and tours around interesting parts of the city and surrounding countryside, is of a lot of eating, more than seems possible to have fitted into such a short visit!

Garden of the Hotel Aleksandar

From a long, leisurely post-breakfast coffee with the night-desk clerk from the Hotel Aleksandar (the one on Vostanicka) under the larches in their garden, the morning I accidentally set my alarm on Istanbul time and got up an hour before I needed to, to several evenings out with Dejan and company, it’s clear that Macedonians make eating a time to relax and enjoy oneself. It’s not something to be rushed through, to get on to the next phase of the day. Lunch is late, closer to two than noon, and supper is likewise later in the evening, around seven or eight.

Dejan Trajkoski and Nikola Madeshovski took David Chariandy and me to a number of different restaurants serving traditional Macedonian fare, with a varying array of other guests, who were writers, publishers, and academics living in Skopje. Each time, rather than ordering individual meals, we had a large array of different dishes to share. I didn’t get the names of many of them, but there were salads of tomato and cucumber covered with a grated white cheese, the sauces pindjur and ajvar, based on red peppers (which we used to be able to buy at the grocery store here, but the Superstore decided we Maritimes didn’t need such exotic foodstuffs and stopped stocking them a couple of years ago — traditionally eaten with bread, they make a good sauce for homemade pizza), flatbread, grilled “beaten” cheese, which doesn’t melt, several other white sheep cheeses, platters of roasted vegetables, salty kebabs sprinkled with hot pepper flakes, a soured cream, the paprika-flavoured baked bean dish tavche gravche (тавче гравче), roasted mushrooms, curried chicken and mushrooms (okay, I admit that one is probably not native to Balkan cuisine, but it was very good), and more tomato and cucumber dishes. I also tried an excellent lentil soup on one occasion, had Macedonian-style yoghurt which was the best ‘Trinkjoghurt’ I’ve ever had, and was introduced to a bagel-like (in that it is annular), sesame-seed-coated bread called gyevrek (ѓеврек), a variant of the Turkish simik spread throughout the former Ottoman empire. I’m going to have a go at making gyevrek someday soon.

There are only a couple of types of Macedonian beer, according to Dejan, and on this trip I didn’t sample any; the large bottles of zlaten dav (златен дав) or Golden Oak looked like a daunting quantity for someone running on hardly any sleep. My notebook records that it is a “non fizzy wild” — or possibly that is meant to be “non-fizzy mild” lager, according to Dejan. I’m all in favour of non-fizzy ale and beer, though I lean more to the dark side. However, I tried several Macedonian wines. On my last trip I had been really impressed with the wines produced in Macedonia. They seem very rich, nicely complex in flavour. The Spouse and I tend to rate wines as either complex and interesting, or thin. Any Macedonian ones I’ve tried have definitely fallen in the rich and complex category. I didn’t rediscover the particular excellent red I bought at random in a grocery store for my hosts last time, though I remember it was said to be made from a grape variety indigenous to the region, but I had a very interesting red wine regardless. It was a Vranec (in English; it’s spelt бранец so I think would be pronounced more like vranets– with the ts a bit plosive as in tsar) named T’ga za jug, a wine I was told (I think — it was late, I was exhausted, and my notes are a bit sketchy) had been named by contemporary Macedonian poet Bogomil Gjazel after a poem by a famous nineteenth-century poet of the region, Konstantin Miladinov. The name means “Longing for the south”. (The poem was written while Miladinov was in exile in Russia.) We also had a white wine, a Riesling from the company Alexandria, which was excellent as well. No, we weren’t drinking wine all evening. That was another occasion entirely. (I mean, the Riesling was another occasion. There was no drinking-all-evening occasion; the Macedonian evening of dining out does not involve copious drinking.) But to continue the alcoholic theme for another sentence, I also tried rakia for the first time. Also very nice!

The interior of Old City House, showing off the beams and plaster: Elizabeta, me, David, Nikola.

Although nearly every meal I ate in Macedonia was served outside, on the second evening five of us ate at the Old City House restaurant, the architecture of which shows what a traditional Macedonian house would have been like. There was a courtyard, but we were in a room of dark wooden beams and white plaster. Elizabeta drew my attention to the ceilings, which she said were decorated with wooden intarsia work in a traditional style. There were many antique oil lamps and other items decorating the rooms as well.

Ceiling, Old City House Restaurant, Skopje.

The final evening was a gathering of many of the people David and I had spent the preceding couple of days with, Dejan, Nikola, Dr. Elizabeta Seleva, Dr. Aleksandar Prokopiev and his wife, and a number of others. It was a long, leisurely meal with much conversation in several different languages. (Actually, at one lunch in the Old City I ended up speaking English, German, French, and my few words of Macedonian in short succession, and there was Albanian being spoken among those at the table as well.) Conversations ranged over poetry, what to feed pet rabbits, the current political situation in Macedonia, the National Post and their “nobody noticed” proclamation about the Macedonian president’s visit to Canada (rather embarrassing, when at the same time David and I were national news over there), and a complicated effort, with drawings, to work out what the Macedonian word for dandelion was. I seem to have omitted to write it down. (An earlier effort to figure out what the English for some peculiar-looking beast with large mouse-ears — my interlocutor was a poet, not an artist — concluded it was a musk-ox. Probably.) I came away from it all with the feeling that this is what a gathering of thinking people should be like — and also, the conclusion that I really like Macedonian cheese. And wine. And curried mushrooms.

And of course, ajvar and pindjur, which, you will notice once I finally get that long-promised next Torrie book written, Wren and Torrie develop a taste for while Wren is apprenticed to Rookfeather in Callipepla.

In the next post, I’ll finally be getting some of my many photos of the Matka Gorge up.