On visiting the past (present and future)

I’m very busy right now: the move back to Canada, a final draft of The Next Novel due soon, my Ink e-publishing on the verge of a launch … so my notes here will be sporadic and scattered over the next little while. 

Not that I don’t have a great deal to share!

I was struck this morning by an essay written by writer-friend Stephanie Cowell, “The Mystical World of Historical Fiction.” A quote:

To sustain the journey of writing a historical novel requires passionate interest, research, many rewrites, great skill, and the patience of a saint. Lives often do not come with plots; we have to create a plot to take the reader down the path of the story. We have to say, “Come with us. We will show you something wonderful.”

Other articles of interest:

“What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the Determinants of Book Reviews.”

An interview with Stephen King: “I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up.”

The image above is from BibliOdyssey:  Wendel Dietterlin’s 1598 work on baroque engravings -’Architectura von Ausstheilung, Symmetria und Proportion der Fünff Seulen’. It evokes, for me, the revision process: one walks through a “finished” manuscript into a wreckage. One must have faith!