Tom Ryan's Blog, page 4

Little Paper Time Machines

I had a moment this morning that thrilled me down to my boots. It happened at the library.

When I was a kid, probably about ten or eleven, someone gave me a book. This wasn't such a big deal in and of itself – I read constantly when I was younger, and people gave me books all the time – what made it special was the effect this particular book had on me.

The book was "The Curse of the Blue Figurine," by John Bellairs. A lonely boy gets caught up in an epic magical adventure, involving a magical ring, a cursed statue, and the possible end of the world. Awesome stuff, fantastically written – funny, dramatic, adventurous, and terrifying. I remember quite clearly that it scared the shit out of me – in a good way. It certainly didn't scare me enough to keep me from devouring it – I re-read it so many times that the cover eventually fell off.

It was a cover, incidentally, that had it's own special appeal – illustrated and designed by the fantastic Edward Gorey.

This was the kind of stuff I lived for. Gothic adventures that I could easily imagine myself getting caught up in.

At the time, the only libraries I had access to in my rural town were the small (albeit well curated) one at school, and a bookmobile that came to town once every month or so. Neither one of them carried any of other Bellair books. In those dark, pre-internet days, you couldn't just boot up your computer and order a book at whim, let alone download one onto your iPad the minute you finished the previous one. A year or so later I found another Bellair adventure, "The Dark Secret of Weatherend" at a bookstore in Halifax, and my mom let me buy it. It definitely didn't disappoint.

That was it for me and John Bellair. I didn't come across any more of his fantastic quirky adventures, and I ultimately grew up and moved on to other things.

Recently, however, I found myself thinking about those two books again. I've been working on a project that has some atmospheric similarities to the Bellairs stuff, and I began to wrack my brain trying to remember the name of the author. Today, at the main branch of the Victoria public library, it popped into my head out of nowhere, and I hustled up to the kids section, to see if there were any Bellairs books.

Oh. My. God. Fifteen of them. FIFTEEN! Old, hardbound, and well-used, just the way I like my library books. Each one with an amazing Edward Gorey illustration on the cover. Best of all, though, I learned for the first time that the two books I used to own – "the Blue Figurine," and "Secret of Weatherend," were parts of two different series, when I'd always thought they were stand-alones. I know this makes me sound like a nerd, but I almost peed in my pants right there. It's like reading the first Harry Potter book and thinking the story ends there, and then learning that there are six more, each fatter than the last!

There's no real moral to this story except that the library is awesome, books are like little paper time machines, and there's nothing better than coming home to a chilly house in October with a bagful of creepy page-turners and turning on the fire.

Dear Me

On Friday, I submitted my final round of edits. Way to Go is finally out of my hands. Boo yah.

Soon, I'll write a detailed blog about what I learned while editing, (hint – a LOT) but right now, I'm gonna take a step back and stop thinking about it for a little while. It was an amazing experience, I learned more than I ever thought I would, and I'm really proud of the book – but for the time being, I need a break from it!

Over the next few months I'll get to see my cover design (exciting!!) and various other bits and pieces will start to come together as we prepare for launch. I don't have a date yet, but I'm thinking it will happen sometime in April or maybe May. That will definitely roll around soon enough, but it gives me a bit of time to breathe.

I'm just a few days away from finishing the first draft of my next book. In the weeks ahead, I'll be polishing it, looking for some feedback from test-readers, and going through the submission process. I'll also be blogging about the whole thing, and I think it will be especially interesting to people who are working towards submitting a book of their own.

Finally, some really cool news. Dear Teen Me is a website that prints letters from YA authors to their teenage selves. The letters are funny, sad, poignant, insightful, and illustrated with some awesome, occasionally hilarious photos of the writers in their younger days. Anyway, tomorrow's letter is by yours truly! I was thrilled at the opportunity to submit, and I really enjoyed writing to myself as a fifteen year old. Many thanks to Miranda Kenneally (a fellow Apocalypsie!) and E. Kristin Anderson for giving me the chance to contribute.

Check it out, let me know what you think!

What's Happening?

 

I'm finally getting myself back on track, after a long summer hiatus. I've been editing like crazy and I'm happy to report that I can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. The final editing deadline has been set for October 15, a month from today. I've really enjoyed the process and I've learned a lot, but I'll be ready to put this one to bed. It's been a lot of hard work – sometimes frustrating, always rewarding – and now I'm ready to focus on the other projects that have been slowly but steadily pulling themselves together behind the scenes.

The blog is still undergoing a few thematic changes, but it will be up and running full steam in the next week or so. In the meantime I have a couple of pieces of good news that I'm excited to share.

First and foremost, the book has a new title! Way back in February when I signed my contract, the first piece of advice my wise and wonderful editor Sarah had for me was "you might want to think about the title." I was pretty resistant (it was my first book – my baby!) but over time, it became clearer and clearer that the original title wasn't working. My first clue was that NOBODY could ever remember the name once I'd told them – pretty funny, when you consider that the original title was You Might Not Remember Me. Uh, yeah.

Anyway, the book is now called (drum roll) Way to Go. I'm really happy with it. It's short and snappy, and best of all, it fits the book really well. Everyone I've told about the new title has responded really well.

The other great news is that a few months ago, I was granted entrance to The Apocalypsies - a fantastic group of Young Adult and Middle Grade authors whose debuts are, like mine, scheduled for publication in 2012. I love all of these awesome people (there are over 100 of us, mostly in the States and a few of us in Canada, the UK, and Australia) and I'm really excited to read all of the great books that they'll be releasing. Best of all, it's great to be part of a supportive and enthusiastic bunch of people who are learning about publishing and editing and marketing along with me.

In the weeks to come, I'll have more to say about the most recent rounds of editing, and lots of other news and info about the Apocalypsies. I'll also be letting everyone in on a really fantastic project that I'll be part of in October. In the meantime, I'm totally stoked to settle into the fall and get some serious work done on some really exciting projects.

Till next time…

He's Not Me. I'm Not Him.

One of the hardest things to understand or explain about writing fiction, is the weird trance-like magic that turns real experiences into made up stories.

"You Might Not Remember Me," is set in a small seaside town on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. The year is 1994. The main character is Danny, a 17 year old boy. He gets his first job at a restaurant. He does a really crappy job of washing dishes.

I grew up in a small seaside town in Cape Breton. During the summer of 1994, I was 17 and working at a restaurant. I was told, more than once, that I was possibly the worst dishwasher in the history of soap and water. (Dear potential future readers : don't worry, there's a lot more to the story than a teenager washing dishes. I promise. Please still buy my book. – ed.)

The thing is, Danny isn't me. The town isn't the same one I grew up in. The restaurant? Totally different.

But it's pretty obvious that some significant elements of the story are drawn from real life. It wasn't planned, it just kind of turned out that way. The part of my brain that remembers stuff played a complicated game of Broken Telephone with the part of my brain that makes stuff up and writes stuff down, and the resulting first draft was sort of stuck between the worlds of reality and fiction.

For a while, this was a problem. While every other character in the book was entirely made up, Danny had a bit too much me in him. Instead of letting him do his own thing, and be his own character, I found that I was basing his actions and words on what I would have said or done under the same circumstances. As a result, some of the other characters, who were free to be themselves, felt more authentic to me than the guy who was actually telling the story.

Thankfully, I have a great editor, who has put a great deal of work into helping me find the story behind all the words. We spent a lot of time getting rid of the unnecessary stuff that was clogging up the story, and now the focus has shifted back to the characters and their motivations. This week somehow, there was a shift in the way I saw things – instead of viewing the story through Danny's eyes, I started to view it through my own eyes, and for the first time I was truly able to start seeing Danny as an entirely separate person.

Actually, entirely separate is probably overstating it. Every character has something of the writer in him or her, there's just no avoiding it. So when my next book comes out, don't be surprised if the main character, the mystical aardvark warrior Princess SmooMoo from the Planet Fleeth 37, just happens to be a terrible dishwasher.

 

One Year

One year ago today, at 5 o'clock in the morning, we got in our car and we left.

It was a nice morning. The iPod was full of good tunes, the highway was beckoning, and the west coast gleamed warm on the horizon. The future skimmed along the road in front of the windshield, and the world yelled out, reminding us that something new was just around the corner. But as we crossed the MacDonald Bridge and drove towards the border to New Brunswick, my heart was heavy in my chest.

Every day since then, a bit of that sadness has skirted the edge of my vision. I've caught glimpses of it every day for a year.

And what a year it's been.

I saw Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I saw the Canadian shield and the Prairies and the Rockies and the beauty of our cities and the diversity of our people. We drove through one sad and dying small town after another. We passed tree after tree after tree after tree. The clouds in Saskatchewan sat like sculptures in the air.

After 12 days of driving, we finally hit the Pacific and got on a ferry that would take us to the end of the line – a new place to call home, at least for a while. After 11 years in one city, I learned to love a new one. Not as much, perhaps, and not the same – but lots, and differently, and in new ways every day.

I spent a lot of time by myself. Days and days and sometimes weeks. Some times it was lonely, but mostly it was fine. I learned to see things differently.

My dog and I took walks in all directions. We peered through fences, and gawked at huge houses, and stopped to smell the roses. Every once in a while, we walked all the way to the beach and I let him off leash and he chased seagulls through the surf. Sometimes, the mountains across the Juan de Fuca Strait were as clear as day, and sometimes they were hidden in the clouds.

I listened to some music. I took a ferry to another country and watched a couple of legends playing under the stars, while people all around me waved their lighters in the air. I watched a man singing songs about getting older that he wrote way back when he was still young. I clapped my hands and stomped my feet with everyone else to music from the deep south at a church in the true north. One evening I stood for an hour on the sidewalk in my new neighbourhood, as a crowd gathered at the edge of someone's yard. Together, we listened as a dozen or more people pulled all their instruments and voices together and played bluegrass so sweet and so sad that you'd think it was coming all the way from the hills of West Virginia.

Every day things things changed, and every day things stayed the same.

Some friends I've known since we were kids had children of their own. Other kids in my life kept growing up, kept getting older, and guess what? The rest of us did too. Every day for a year.

My grandmother passed away. As a little girl, she was given pennies by soldiers returning from WWI. At my age, she was waiting for her husband to come back from WWII. She lived every day for more than 99 years. A few weeks ago, a close family friend died, well before his time. Every day I spent with both of them was a gift.

I saw more homeless people this year than I'd seen in my whole life. A group of tired young teenagers, their belongings in plastic bags, clustered together outside a shelter, cracking jokes, bumming smokes. No doubt wondering every day where to eat. A bunch of cheerful wanderers building a driftwood city on the beach, tying bedsheets and tarps onto weather-worn redwood branch teepees. Sad lost souls, wandering the streets drunk, or stoned, or just confused. Talking to ghosts in their heads.

This year in Canada we had an election. I didn't love the outcome, but I'm free to complain about it, and I'm free to do something about it. This year in many other parts of the world, people died in the streets for those same rights.

Every day I ate three meals, and every night I slept in a bed. Every day I was lucky.

Every day this year, I tried to write. And when one day turned into ten days turned into eighty days, I realized that I had a book. It wasn't perfect, by any means, but it felt right, so I tried again. I know now that I'll keep trying every day until I die.

Every day this year, I missed the east coast. I missed my family and my friends and the people I worked with. I missed my island and my hometown and the city I lived in for more than a decade. I missed the sound of the Atlantic, and the October leaves in Cape Breton, and the wind on the South Shore. Sometimes, I even missed the winter. For the first time in my life, I missed Christmas at home.

Every day this year, I shared everything with the perfect companion. Some days we spent together, and many days we had to spend apart. But every day that was more than enough, because every day he was all that I needed.

Every morning of this whole year I woke up and it was a new day. Every day, that's as good a place as any to start.

Darker Themes

 

Several days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Meghan Cox Gurdon in which she examined what she referred to as a disturbing increase in "darker themes" in contemporary Young Adult fiction. Her essay was highly critical of a number of general trends in YA, and it singled out a few specific books and authors. The article's subtitle perhaps says it best : Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?

The central premise of Gurdon's article is clear : if teens are exposed to literature that examines dark and serious subject matter, there's a good chance that they'll be negatively influenced by it and possibly act out in response to what they read. Her argument is basically a variation on the old idea that "if you listen to heavy metal music, or play Dungeons and Dragons,  you'll become a crazy headbanger and sacrifice cats,"- only applied to literature.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is an idiot. I should say that I took the time to search for and read several of her older articles. I didn't want to judge her character on one isolated article. I wanted to make sure I had given her the benefit of the doubt. After reading several of her earlier works, my opinion stands. She's an idiot.

Apparently the internet agrees with me. Reaction to the WSJ piece was swift, fierce, and wide-reaching. It was also overwhelmingly negative. While a few scattered commenters applauded the journalist for taking a stand against what they saw as the "filth and depravity" that are all too common in today's books for teens, a significant majority felt differently. Thousands of people took the time to chime in on twitter, facebook, and countless YA message boards. Most of them felt quite strongly that Gurdon had wildly mis-read and mis-represented the reality of what's being written for teens, and more importantly, how they're reading it.

I found the online reaction both moving and encouraging. With one great example after another, people responded to her by pointing to a book, or books, with so-called "dark themes" that are, or had been, crucially important to them as teenagers. Within hours of the article's publication, over 100 people had commented about the article on the Wall Street Journal's website, and the twitter topic #YASaves was trending worldwide (for people who don't use twitter, that means it was a widely discussed topic.)

In reaction to the article, I found comments from survivors of rape and incest, who said that without books that helped them articulate the wild range of emotions they were dealing with, they don't know how they would have survived. There were similar stories from people for whom books had helped them while they lived with family members who were severe alcoholics or drug addicts, or who had themselves been drinking or using. There were teens who grew up mercilessly bullied in small towns, and found solace in books about people enduring the same sorts of tortuous experiences. Other people talked about being physically abused, and their gratitude towards the books that told them it was okay to stand up and get help.

Being a teenager is a rough, tough business. I don't care who you are. It's difficult for the geek sitting alone in the cafeteria, and it's difficult for the prom queen. Growing up is not easy for anyone.

Being a teen was hard for me too. I grew up gay in a small town, in many ways isolated, scared of being found out, unwilling to admit to myself that I was different, unable to accept myself as I was, afraid of the consequences of my reality. Back then, where I lived, I wasn't lucky enough to find books about kids like me.

But books helped me anyway. They opened doors and windows, they smashed down walls, and tore down buildings. They revealed to me hidden insights, fresh perspectives, new ways of seeing the world as I'd never seen it before. Reading brought me to understand that the world I inhabited was more expansive, and held so much more opportunity, than I often wanted to give it credit for.

Books taught me that possibilities win out over limitations, any day.

Meghan Cox Gurdon missed the point entirely. Dark, honest, gritty, genuine, straight-talking books, books that flip over rocks to see what's squirming underneath – they don't encourage teens to follow some cynical garden path to darker, unhappier realities – they lead them away from those realities, to brighter, more hopeful places. They show them the difference between the world that is, and the world that can be. They give them evidence that they aren't alone. Written proof that things get better.

Editing – Round Three

Halle-freakin-lujah, the first round of edits is done. The manuscript is now out of my hands and back to my Sarah, my editor, so that SHE can take another crack at the devil book.

It's been a long and eye-opening month of editing. I learned a lot. A couple of highlights :

1) I tend to describe characters as having "a mop of [insert the adjective here] hair." Really, truly. It was so frequent and obvious that when it was pointed out to me, I was embarrassed. One character had a "mop of shaggy brown hair," another had "a mop of curly red hair," a baby was "cute and chubby, with a shiny little head that would one day sport a mop of wispy toddler hair." Okay, not that last one. The point is, the Mop Top Hair Shop™ should be paying me royalties.

2) I need to chill with the run-on sentences. By nature, I'm an excessive writer. I use a lot of words in places where a few would work just as well. There's no better way to be cured of this than to consciously tackle a manuscript with the intention of cutting words, and realizing in the process how many are worthy of being cut. I'd say that between Sarah and myself, we shortened or cut about 2/3 of the sentences in the book.

The columnist and essayist E.B. White, who is perhaps best known for writing "Charlotte's Web, also wrote and published, along with William Strunk, an English usage style guide. "Elements of Style," often referred to as Strunk and White, contains as straightforward an opinion on this topic as you're likely to find anywhere -

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Words to live, or at least write, by.

Now I have the better part of a month, at least, to forget about the mountain of edits. I can move on to the shiny new idea, which has been rattling furiously in the cage at the back of my brain, trying to get out.

But first – to the disco!

Okay, no disco. I'm too old for excessive fun. I'll probably have a couple of glasses of wine and watch some Netflix. If I'm feeling saucy, I might put on some Earth, Wind and Fire and do the grapevine through the apartment.

Let the music ring boldly, and the liquor flow freely, so as to allow for good and joyous times to roll thunderously through the evening like a gilded chariot carrying Bacchus himself to a feast of good tidings.

There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

When I was 13 or 14, the front tire of my bike hit a rock and I flew over the handlebars, landing in my father's recently chopped woodpile. My forehead connected with the perfectly round cut end of a smallish stick, exactly one inch in diameter.

It was because of this bizarre accident that I came to school the following day with a bruise so perfectly circular, and so neatly centred above my eyes, that it almost resembled a less exciting version of the Harry Potter lightning bolt scar.

Or at least that's what I told people.

The truth behind my bruise was in some ways more believable and in some ways less believable. On the evening in question, I'd been plunked on the couch watching some crappy sitcom and fiddling with one of my brother's action figures, a villain from the Masters of the Universe collection. The character was called "The Leech," and true to his name he had a suction cup on his face.

I don't really remember what possessed me to stick the toy to my face. I was probably just bored, and absent-mindedly decided to test its suction abilities on the nearest wide flat surface, which happened to be my forehead. It wasn't until much later, after I'd tossed the thing aside, watched a couple more hours of TV, and gone upstairs to brush my teeth, that I noticed the Toonie sized hickey adorning my face like a supersized blush-colored bindi.

If I'd been the kind of teenager who got real hickeys, I might known enough to steal some of my mom's concealer and try to hide it. Come to think of it, if I'd been the kind of teenager who got real hickeys, I probably would have had better things to do on your average weeknight than sit around testing suction cups on my face. But you work with the tools you were born with, I guess, and so I cranked my imagination into overdrive and headed to school the next morning prepared to tell the most plausible lie I could come up under the circumstance.

And lie I did. For the better part of a week I cheerfully, and with gripping detail, told the story of the stunt-worthy bicycle flip over and over again – to my classmates, my teachers, and basically anyone who so much as glanced at me in the hallway. I still don't know if anyone believed me, or if they saw through my story from the get-go, but looking back, I'm guessing that people generally didn't much care one way or the other.

I tell this story to illustrate a point, which is that I have always, since the day I first learned to talk, had a tendency to make shit up.

In my younger years, this character trait (or personality flaw, take your pick) could sometimes manifest itself in some pretty dramatic ways. There was the summer I worked at a convenience store and convinced a tourist kid that Jodie Foster was my godmother. There was the massive estate in Northern England that I told a co-worker (still a good friend) that I stood to inherit on my 21st birthday. I once stood at the kitchen counter and compulsively ate all of the frosting from a cake my mom had baked, and then successfully blamed it on my younger brothers. (I kind of hope that admitting that last one to the world wide web will finally convince them to forgive me, because I'm telling you, it was well over 20 years ago and in their minds the statue of limitations on it has yet to run out.)

Now that I'm older and wiser, my stretchings of the truth tend to lean more towards healthy embellishments. The pub in our neighbourhood is "the best" neighbourhood pub I've ever frequented. The ribs I ordered last night were "the most amazing," I've ever eaten. My dog has learned to "speak English" when nobody else is around but me.

On good days, I tell myself that these tendencies are what make me want to write, to tell stories. That's probably true, at least to some extent. When I'm in a writing trance, the stories and characters and events that I'm imagining onto paper seem real to me – in many ways, they are real, and there's no question that they're informed by things that I've experienced, and people that I've known, if only in very subtle ways. The best "made up" stories, in my opinion, are peppered throughout with the truth. "Black Swan" was completely over the top, but clearly inspired by the dramatic, obsessive and very real ways in which an artist can be consumed by their art. Although set in a galaxy far far away, "Star Wars" wouldn't have had such emotional resonance if we as an audience weren't all too aware of the miserable plight of the Wookies and their sad, doomed planet.

On bad days, I tell myself that my tricky relationship with the truth has me walking a very fine line between coming across as a transparent yarn-spinner or a delusional sociopath.

I'm guessing that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I'd like to think I always know what's going on when I'm playing with facts to develop a better story, or trying to convince someone that I was late for our coffee date because a Kangaroo escaped from the zoo and traffic was shut down. On the other hand, there's the uncomfortable reality that sometimes I have a hard time remembering which parts of my story are true, and which are thrown in to spice things up a little. It's not unusual for me to end up falling for my own fabrications, and I have no idea how to figure that one out.

I'll have to ask the dog what he thinks.

Freedom²

Editing is going well, but it's a slog. As I've said before, as important as the editing/rewriting process is, it's not as much fun as pumping out sexy fresh ideas.

For me, and I'm guessing for a lot of writers, one of the hardest parts of getting anything written – or edited – is the part that involves sitting down at the computer and churning out the words. It's pretty obvious how crucial that is – I know that if I wait for the muse to come knocking at the door, I won't get much work done. 1% inspiration and 99% elbow grease, or whatever the hell it is that they say.

Over the past year, I've managed to create a well-oiled routine for myself. I'm usually able to close the door to the office, sit down in front of the computer and have my first sip of coffee by 8 a.m.

Then I reach my hands out in front of my face, link fingers, give my knuckles a good crack, poise my fingers over the keyboard – and proceed to surf between Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, HuffingtonPost, CBC, PerezHilton, Etsy and various blogs for about an hour.

Eventually, while I still have some coffee left, and when the Guilt Angel who lives on my shoulder has started beating me in the neck with his harp and whispering "You really suck, you lazy moron," directly into my ear, I finally open the file I'm currently working on. Then I read through what I finished up with the day before, bite my baby fingernail, closely examine my fingernails, and quickly flip to my web browser where I proceed to spend the next 20 minutes on Wikipedia researching (in order) fingernails, claws, talons, eagles, gargoyles, Gargamel and Caramel, before surfing to Google and searching (unsuccessfully) for the Caramilk secret.

Then I head to the kitchen and root around in the back of the cupboards in the hopes that somehow the previous tenants left a Caramilk bar wedged behind a pipe.

After eating two spoonfuls of peanut butter that I've dipped into an open bag of stale chocolate chips that I find half spilled into the darkest reaches of one of the lower kitchen cabinets, I'll probably vacuum the house. If I'm feeling ambitious, I'll teach myself to brew beer.

Finally, after I've called a cab for the Guilt Angel, who's decided to move to Idaho, I tell myself that it's time to stop procrastinating and finally get down to work. Which I do until Oprah comes on.

The Oprah reference might have tipped you off to the fact that this particular breakdown of a typical writing day is actually somewhat dated. If so, you're right. I described it in detail to better emphasize the effectiveness of a small purchase that I made several months ago that has literally SAVED MY LIFE.

It's called Freedom, and it's an application that sits on my desktop looking for all the world like a boring little clock. When I turn it on, it asks me how many minutes of Freedom I want. I usually choose something between two and four hours. Then I punch enter and, Presto Zingo – I have no more internet access.

Like I said, this has SAVED MY LIFE. It would be impossible to put into words how fantastic this invention is. You might be thinking to yourself, "why doesn't he just use self-discipline to avoid the internet when he's working?" That's a really stupid question. Have you ever used the internet? IT GOES ON FOREVER IN ALL DIRECTIONS!

This is a rough estimate, but I'd say that before I started using Freedom I managed to write about 230 words a week. Now I write about 457,000 words a week. Something like that. I don't know how I operated without it, that's for sure.

Speaking of Freedom, I started reading "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen a couple of days ago.

I avoided reading "Freedom" for a while for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it was in the Fast Reads section at the library, and I didn't know if I wanted to commit to reading a 600 page book in 7 days (ask the Guilt Angel about the library fine I left back in Halifax, he loves telling that story.) The main reason I didn't rush to read it, however, was that back in the fall when it was released, I found that it got way too much attention, and as much as I love a good bandwagon (remind me to show you my brand new Canucks jersey) I didn't feel right about jumping on this one.

Don't get me wrong, I love when a book or an author gets noticed and praised and discussed, but there was something about the non-stop publicity over this one novel that rubbed me the wrong way. It was almost as if we were supposed to think that this was the first amazing noteworthy novel to be released in the last 20 years, which is obviously not the case. You would never see this kind of isolated attention paid to one particular movie or album – I just didn't think it was healthy for the world of books. I mean, how good could it be?

Anyway, I broke down and started it a couple of nights ago after supper. After several hours of reading, I'd had enough. I tossed the book at the wall, walked into the backyard and unlocked the tool shed, wrapped myself around the lawnmower, and cried myself to sleep.

I will never, in a million years, write a book as good as "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen. Forever ever!? Forever never ever.

But you know what? There's not a hell of a lot I can do about that other than shrug it off and get back to work trying to produce the best work that I'm capable of writing. So the next morning, after I'd uncoiled myself from the lawnmower and picked up the rakes and shovels I knocked over while trying to get out of the shed, I headed back inside, quickly brewed myself some coffee, and sat back down at the computer. Then I turned on Freedom and got back to work.

After I checked my Facebook, of course.

Social Me Me Media – Part One – Jerks Use the Internet Too!

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to come right out and say something.

I get in fights on the internet.

I'm working on it, I swear. But friends, I'm here to tell you it's an uphill battle.

I joined twitter a couple of years ago. Twitter is a great tool if you want to follow friends and interesting public figures and keep up to date on current events. It's also a great way to YELL at people you disagree with. I don't know why I was compelled to follow every hardline right wing politician and political commentator on the internet, but it wasn't long before I was tweeting stuff like :

Dear @SarahPalinUSA – SHOOTING BABY DEER w HOMEMADE CATAPULTS IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT! Pls GO BACK 2 ALASKA.

(For any hardline right wingers currently reading my blog, please note : I am being sarcastic, I actually agree with you about everything. Please still buy my books. – TR)

This kind of thing went on for months. Instead of paying attention to Oprah, Raffi and the Governor General, I fixated on the negative messages that were all too easy to find if you looked for them. My blood pressure soared, and my creative energies were being sapped from paying so much attention to these hateful hateful people.

So I took some drastic measures. I unfollowed all the jerks, and got back to finding out about Lady Gaga's Kraft Cheese Singles™ dress, and the details of David Suzuki's webstreaming lecture series on Sustainable Emu Farming. Almost overnight I noticed an improvement in my mood and my creative output.

Unfortunately, I wasn't out of the woods yet.

Dun Dun Dunnnnn….

The other day I was unfriended on Facebook. It's a long story, but I'll try to give it to you in a nutshell.

A lot of you are probably like me. You found out about Facebook one morning in early 2007, and by the following afternoon you had an account, several photo albums, and people who had bullied you in elementary school were sending you friend requests. During those early days most of us were guilty of the friending binge. You know what I mean – whodoiknow?! whodoiknow?! aretheyonfacebook?! ihavetorememberallthepeopleiknowandfriendrequestthem! facebookfacebook! whodoiknow?!

During those very early days of Facebook I was sent a friend request from a stranger. It was a woman, close to my age, and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out who she was. Eventually, I vaguely remembered meeting her at a party, circa 2001. A party where we were drunk, spoke for about ten minutes, discovered we had a couple of people in common, and went our separate ways. We never spoke again, but somehow she found me on Facebook and sent me a friend request. Then we continued to never speak again.

For four long years I have ignored this woman, and she's ignored me. I don't blame her for sending me a friend request – we all did the same thing back in those idealistic free lovin' early days of Facebook. But here's the thing. Occasionally her status updates pop up in my Facebook feed and it turns out that she's kind of a neo-conservative. That's fine with me, really, I honestly believe that there are a wide and legitimate range of political opinions, and we aren't all going to agree with each other. But if you're the kind of person who throws your opinions out into the world like grenades, you should kind of expect people to respond. Is that reasonable?

Still, for four long years I managed to ignore this person. Then the other night, she made a characteristically snarky comment about something, and without really thinking about it, I quickly typed a sarcastic reply and clicked send.

Click the refresh button – wait for it – wait for it – Baboom! Unfriended. UNFRIENDED! Gasp!

I don't know why I care, I mean, I literally spoke to this person for about 10 minutes out of my whole life. We were essentially strangers. We obviously have absolutely nothing in common. I mean, I like ice cream and Stevie Wonder, and she thinks the Canadian social safety net is a scam for leeches and freeloaders. MY Facebook friends like music and art and gardening and biking and their kids and all kinds of other fun stuff, and HER Facebook friends like to joke about overweight people and talk about how stupid liberals are.

You might be thinking that this is a very one sided account of the story, and she can't defend herself. Good point! Maybe she should get her own frickin' blog.

See? I find it way too easy to get riled up about this stuff.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with writing and publishing. I had intended to blog about how what I'm learning about the importance of an online presence for newbie writers. I've heard the same thing everywhere. From publishers to writers to editors to agents to readers – everyone expects a writer to have an online "platform" or "hub." Naturally most writers choose to have a website and usually a blog, along with Facebook and Twitter and any number of other social networking sites.

Sometime soon, I'll write that blog about creating a platform, but when this Facebook altercation popped up the other night, it got me thinking about something more specific. You see, part of the transition to developing a public online presence is developing an online persona. The way you present yourself to people who aren't your friends and family. New online friends, readers, and (hopefully) book buyers.

Here are two very different examples of online writing personalities. Neil Gaiman for those of you who don't know him, is a fantastic and prolific writer, with an interesting online presence. He has a great blog and is active on twitter, and keeps himself relevant by engaging regularly with his readership. Another example is Jacqueline Howett. Howett is a self-published author who submitted her book to a blog that posts reviews of self-published fiction. The blog gave her book a bad review, and instead of accepting it and moving on (even the best books are bound to get bad reviews) she got into a prolonged and embarrassing fight – first with the blogger, then with lots and lots of other readers of the blog. Howett now has a reputation on the internet, but unlike Gaiman's it's not exactly a desirable one.

So if there is a point to my ramble, I guess it's this : I could choose to develop a persona that fights with people who disagree with me, or I could choose to develop an online persona that wants to have interesting conversations about books and art and current events with the cool people who are interested in having those conversations.

Obviously, the latter option is the way to go. But taking that route involves spending some time ignoring the stuff that pisses me off, and focussing on the stuff that's worth the energy.

It's worth it in the end, I'm sure, and so I am going to continue to make a conscious effort to avoid those conflicts.

But it's not going to be easy. I mean, have you heard the crap that comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth?