Maybe, Prime Minister

"In a recent conversation I had with Prime Minister Harper he confessed that he has always wanted to write a book. In an hour-long, surprisingly candid interview Mr. Harper said 'If I had the time, if I wasn't busy with other... things. I'd be writing books, I think. Novels.' When pressed for more details Harper admitted that he'd always been a closet writer. Even as a boy growing up in Etobicoke [a suburb of Toronto, Ontario, Canada], when his asthma kept him from his greatest passion, hockey, he would occasionally let his imagination take him where his lungs couldn't, he said. 'I remember filling a small notebook with stories about a young kid who scores all the goals, gets hoisted onto the shoulders of his teammates—that sort of thing. The kind of guy that ends up with the most popular girl in school.'
     When asked whether he sees himself ever giving up politics and pursuing his childhood passions he replied that he would consider it, possibly when he retired and had more time on his hands. 'Not the hockey, of course. That—well, that's something that should be left to professionals.'"
—Avril Täusch, Attendant News Services (France)
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"In case you haven’t heard, Yann Martel is ending his 4-year correspondence with Stephen Harper, a decidedly one-sided communication project Mr. Martel penned, What is Stephen Harper Reading? I hadn’t really followed it too much but when the end of anything is announced, I need to make sure I haven’t missed out on something really important.

     Yann Martel is the Canadian author of one of my favourite books, Life of Pi. On CBC Radio, Mr. Martel said the inspiration for this ongoing quest to inspire our country’s leader to read more books was his concern that when asked his favourite book of all time, Mr. Harper responded, 'The Guinness Book of World Records.'
     Not good, thinks Mr. Martel, and he decides the private reading library of our Prime Minister needs some sprucing up. Not only does he send him a new book every couple of weeks or so, he writes him a letter providing an overview of his choice for this particular choice… like a one-sided pen pal book club. Four years and 99 books later, little wonder why we haven’t seen a book penned by Mr. Martel for quite some time given the time commitment of this endeavour."
— the dust bunny chronicles
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From: The Globe and Mail

"Long derided as an enemy of the book, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is now poised to publish one.

     Bucking a tradition established by fellow neoconservative Mike Harris, who named the picture book Mr. Silly as his favourite work of literature, the Prime Minister’s book will purportedly contain actual text.

     News of the impending publication has led to a softening of opinion toward Harper in the country’s writing community. [...]

     'Finally the Prime Minister’s copyright policy is starting to make sense,' said a spokesperson for the Writers’ Union, referring to legislation currently before Parliament that critics complain will claw back writers’ rights and threaten the livelihoods of both writers and publishers. 'We all thought he had a thing against literature, but it turns out he was just trying to clear some space for himself by killing off the competition. You have to admit it’s a pretty clever strategy.'”

— Nino Ricci

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Fiction Factory

From: James Patterson Booklist

“'Let’s shoot the breeze for a bit,' says James Patterson, exuding a relaxed attitude on a recent morning at his Palm Beach home despite the fact that he has 13 books coming out this year. He had 11 last year. To date, the 65-year-old author has published 95 books—his most recent, Guilty Wives, hit shelves this week—and according to Nielsen ranks as the country’s top-selling author.
     Those numbers have added up to big business: Mr. Patterson earns more than $80 million a year, according to people familiar with his publishing empire.
     More than a handful of those recent titles are aimed at young adults, as Mr. Patterson continues to expand his publishing empire beyond the thriller and detective genres. He’s also shopping projects to Hollywood and has a new movie inspired by his Alex Cross series that will hit theaters later this year.
     Mr. Patterson works seven days a week out of a two-room office suite at his Palm Beach oceanfront home. White bookshelves line the first room, where he does the bulk of his writing, all in pencil on white legal pads. There’s no computer; just a telephone, fax machine, an iPad, and a bag of bubble gum. The second room looks like a traditional bedroom, but the bed is covered by books, loose-leaf papers, and manuscripts.
     When it comes to writing, he has a well-practiced system: he writes a detailed outline and then hires someone—often a former colleague from his advertising days—to write the ensuing scenes, usually in 30 to 40 page chunks. He will review those pages every few weeks, sometimes providing notes on them and other times re-writing them entirely."
— Lauren A. E. Schuke, The Wall Street Journal
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"You cannot plow a field by turning it over in your mind." — Author Unknown

Maunuscript by J.G. Ballard (from: A Piece of Monologue)

"There are some writers who wouldn’t dream of entering a writing competition. They consider such things beneath their dignity. I’ve even come across someone who refused to take part in competitions because 'someone has to lose.' My response to this would be 'someone has to win, and it might be you. But if you don’t enter, you certainly won’t win.'
     My own feeling is that writing for a competition is helpful for these reasons:
• You have to write to a word limit.
• You have a deadline to meet.
• You often have to write on a given topic.
• Even if your work is not among the winning entries you have a finished story article or poem that you can adapt for another market
     [...] I should come clean and say I haven’t won lots of writing competitions. I seem to get to the runner-up stage quite often, but don’t make the big time. Of course prizes in writing competitions are not always in the form of cash. You might win a holiday, a place on a writing course in some exotic location or as I did many years ago you might win a lavatory seat!"
— Mary Hodges, Daily Writing Tips
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For information about our writing contest go here...

Staging Success

"I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazine write-up on the release of The Corrections. It began:
     'Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen, hunched over his keyboard in a scavenged swivel chair held together with duct tape, wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. ''You can always find the 'home' keys on your computer,'' he says in an embarrassed whisper, explaining how he managed to type under such constraints. “They have little raised bumps.”'
     What could drive a man to such madness? Later in the piece, I learned:
     '"I'm very concerned with providing a maximally enthralling experience,'' Franzen says of his work. ''Another 20 years of boring literary novels, and the thing's dead.'''
     Even then, this struck me as a wonderful piece of theater. Imagine persuading the Times that you’ve personally saved the novel—blindfolded!
     [...] Franzen took to the pages of Harper’s, opining on the talent in the room, the condition of the novel, the condition of his novel. Nor did he court success through public gestures alone; his private life, too, he shaped ergonomically to the purpose. The very furniture of that tiny Harlem studio—the drawn blinds, the duct-taped chair—set the stage for his coup. Ears plugged, eyes covered, he willed himself to become the figure he’d dreamed of being, a figure he feared might go extinct: the celebrated novelist."
— Austin Allen, big think
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"This is, of course, a sales-driven industry, and in these internetty days there’s more competition and more ways to compete than ever. It’s not enough for the author to have written a book and for that book to be, however you define it, good – the author must also be visible online, actively selling and promoting their product to the best of their abilities.
     Whether or not this is the author’s job may no longer be a question. A web presence of some kind is almost always required for a new author, and web activity can only help. I just happened to be enough of a dork to already own a blog in some deplorable corner of the internet.
     The issue I’m starting to have my doubts about is the author’s visibility. I know it’s probably pie-in-the-sky idealism talking here, but I do think most types of art suffer the more the audience knows about the creator. Not only does familiarity lead to contempt, but (especially in literature) the anonymity of the creator’s voice lends it authority and impact. It becomes steadily harder to take someone’s work seriously the more you know about them.
     [...] It’s sort of a Catch-22 situation. For new authors, it’s so necessary to make sales that we are perfectly willing to create blogs and facebook groups and twitter hashtags for our work, and in many ways that can help considerably. But it’s also perfectly possible that the more we expose ourselves and lunge forward for our audience’s attention, the more we detract from the actual reading experience."
— Robert Jackson Bennett
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"Little Tail"

From: pencilcarving.blogspot.ca

"Pencil, from the Latin penicillus, meaning 'little tail.' Little tail?
     Not everyone writes even occasionally with the old-fashioned yellow pencil with pink eraser top anymore. This astonishing fact came to my attention through a more newfangled way to communicate, the Facebook post. But the lowly pencil remains my writerly tool of choice. I use #2 lead, no doubt a holdover from my formative bubble-tests years. The lead isn't really lead, either, but rather graphite mixed with clay; I'm okay with that.
     I'm not exactly monogamous in my writing tool relationships. I write my novels (and everything else I write for publication, for that matter) primarily at a keyboard. When I journal I often use a pen, blue or black ink, I don't much care. But there is nothing like the freedom of a pencil as I'm taking the muck that is a first draft and trying to make something of it. Not quite right the first time? Erase and try again!"
— Meg Waite Clayton, Huffington Post
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"Around 1560, an Italian couple named Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti made what are likely the first blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil. Their version was a flat, oval, more compact type of pencil. Their concept involved the hollowing out of a stick of juniper wood. Shortly thereafter, a superior technique was discovered: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the halves then glued together—essentially the same method in use to this day.[...]
     Vladimir Nabokov rewrote everything he had ever published, usually several times, by pencil. John Steinbeck was an obsessive pencil user and is said to have used as many as 60 a day. His novel East of Eden took more than 300 pencils to write."
— Wikipedia
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eRobbery

"My novel The English Monster was published on 1 March. A week later, a Google alert dropped into my inbox with a link to a forum post on a site called Mobilism, on which a character called 'Fe2' was offering a reward to anyone prepared to produce a free ebook version of The English Monster for him to use.
     Most books these days are pirated in some form or another, and having worked on the web before I was a novelist I was anticipating that with a fair degree of sang-froid. But this was the first piratical move on my book, and it was also an oddity – more an incitement to piracy than piracy itself.
     This, I discovered, is how Mobilism works. The site is essentially an enormous discussion board. It started, as far as I can make out, as a place where people made 'mobile' versions of games and other stuff and offered them to each other. It now offers mobile (read: pirated) versions of movies and music as well as games. And books. Lots and lots of books.
     However, I need to be careful about my terminology, because Mobilism is very, very careful about its own. It states, often, that it does NOT host any files of pirated material on its own servers; it only links to them. It also provides a kind of currency mechanism for people to reward each other for producing pirated material; you earn things called 'WRZ$' by posting on the site, and you earn a great deal more by producing versions of content and making them available for other users."
— Lloyd Shepherd, The Guardian
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You can get this book—legally—here...

Squatters Write

"Once secreted away in the crannies of liberal arts colleges and assigned to the dull torture of reading undergraduate manuscripts, writers today are just as likely to be taking up residence in bookstores and libraries, prisons and scientific research stations, cruise ships, safaris and almost any semi-public enterprise that happens to include an extra chair in the corner.
     Some seek a new version of the traditional sanctum where they can devote themselves wholly to their work – without paying rent. 'I was honoured and thrilled to have a space with a door that closed,' says Manitoba children’s and young adult writer Anita Daher, author of Spider Song and the first-ever writer-in-residence at Winnipeg’s Aqua Books. 'It was a room of my own when I didn’t have one, and there’s nothing nicer for a writer than being surrounded by books.'

     Others, like Cape Breton-born Jean McNeil, pursue novel residencies in search of experience. 'I’ve been writer in residence in the Antarctic, in the Falkland Islands, Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, and on a ship’s expedition to the west coast of Greenland,' McNeil said this week by phone from the banks of South Africa’s Selati River, where she is undergoing training as a safari guide – 'my own kind of bespoke writer in residence.'”

— John Barber, The Globe and Mail

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