Upcoming Events Part 2 – BookSweet
This Friday I will be reading and talking with Ursula Whitcher about our two new books, her collection North Continent Ribbon and my novel The Jaguar Mask, at BookSweet, an indie bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just across the street from the Univerity of Michigan North Campus. We’ll start at 7pm and probably talk for an hour. I’ll have Guatemala-flavored jaguar lollipops to share. And then afterward, I will take you out and buy you a beer if you want one. Or an EANAB (that’s an Equally Appealing Non-Alcoholic Beverage, as they are apparently known at U of M) if you’d rather. Or two. Please join us?
North Continent Ribbon is an outstanding example of something I feel like many short story writers I’ve known and worked with have strived for, but few have achieved: a series of interconnected stories all set in the same world which, when read together, feel like a unit, more than the sum of its parts—also spoken of, yearningly, as the “mosaic novel”. Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Angelica Gorodischer’s Jaguars’ Tomb are three such which have inspired me deeply. I tried hard for a long time to write one of these myself and have not yet given up. In my limited experience, a regular old halfway linear three-act novel structure is way easier. I’m excited to ask Ursula about how she did it.
If you can’t make it to BookSweet but would still like to support The Jaguar Mask: you can get one of the aforementioned jaguar lollipops by ordering a signed copy of the book right here at the brand new, created-for-this-purpose Mossy Skull shop!
I’ve also got a bunch more events yet to come, including the just-added Word on the Street Festival in Toronto the weekend of September 28th, where I get to sell books at the Stelliform Press table! See Fall Tour graphic above for more.
Please stop reading; this is supposed to be a promotional post not a therapy session, but it’s also my blog which is the closest thing I’ve got anymore.
I can’t emphasize this enough, as someone who had literally no idea what they were getting into when they were 16 and decided they could totally write and sell a popular novel and now is in a heap of trouble as a result: do not write with the intent to publish a popular novel without at the same time making intensive preparations that will enable you to interact with people—a lot of people, over many months and years—about said novel. You will have to ask strangers and friends to do things for you which will disrupt their routine and make their lives harder, things like spending money, writing reviews, and going to events. You will have to act like you and your work deserve this attention in order to convince them to do so and that their efforts are worthwhile. You will have to simultaneously prepare to face rejection from avenues you’ve never even considered before while also somehow continuing to be relentlessly motivated by the conviction that what you wrote is great and deserves to be accepted and celebrated. To some extent it’s the exact same dilemma you already faced in figuring out how to face rejection for your writing itself and keep writing anyway, but now you’re older, your brain has been toiling in its rut for decades, digging that rut deeper, and having to be rejected by libraries and bookstores and event venues and book fairs and convention programming tsars is somehow different from being rejected by editors.
It’s not for the faint of heart. Time will tell whether I end up counting myself among those.
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