So, Friday's mail brought ARCs of Bedtime Story. And today's mailbag brought this…
What, Rob? A new book deal? How is it we haven't heard anything about this?
Well, you will. Soon.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
The universe? She is funny…
Monday, July 26th, 2010Oh. Hai.
Saturday, July 24th, 2010And there it was, waiting for me in the mailbox yesterday.
And yeah, after the weirdness of the other day, just in hearing about it, I was a bit prepared. Nevertheless, it was quite a moment… Yeah, it's done. And here it is, in my hands…
Complete with blush-inducing tag-line from the Montreal Gazette: "One of our most promising and original voices"… I'm just going to sit here quietly and wait for the other shoe to drop…
A note for posterity: There aren't very many of these, distributed chiefly to the media and the trade, as is usually the case for ARCs. Collectors disagree about whether an ARC constitutes a true first edition or not — I'm not going to leap into that fray (I save my opinions for fountain pen and Springsteen boards). However, I will say this: this ARC DOES constitute a variant printing, if nothing else. Yes, as is typical of ARCs, there ARE minor textual variations between this and the final version — I spent ten days going through these pages word by word at the beginning of the month — but that's not what sets this version really apart. THAT would be the title page.
Take a moment — you'll see it.
Yeah, that.
For the record, it makes me smile… And yeah, I had it fixed.
Weirded
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010There is a moment, in the life of every book, when it becomes suddenly, gob-smackingly real.
With Before I Wake, that moment came when I opened up that first book of Advanced Readers Copies (ARCs), and gasped, and wept, and held a lifetime's worth of hopes and dreams in my hands for the first time. (Okay, that's perhaps a little overstated, but I think you see the point).
With The World More Full of Weeping, that moment came when I saw Erik Mohr's fantastic cover art. It literally took my breath away, and made it real months before there were actually books.
For Bedtime Story, that moment came today. No, I haven't seen an ARC, but the fact that I started getting emails from people who had received them brought the reality of the whole thing crushing down on me, fifteen tons of weird.
Part of the weirdness, I think, is that it's done. DONE. DONE! A couple of years late, and after much work and angst, but DONE. That's weird enough.
What really got me, though, I believe, was the fact that there were ARCs landing on desks before I had even seen one. Now, I'll be getting mine in the next day or two — it takes a little longer for a package to travel from Toronto to Victoria than it does for one to travel across town — but that's not actually the weirdness.
No, the weirdness comes with the fact that, for the first time, the book is going out into the world completely outside of my control. For the past four years, I've controlled who read it, and when. I've spoken to everyone who touched it. I knew which pages were where at all times. I was in control, dammit (well, as much control as one can be when one is in the throes, but that's another post for another time).
And now I'm not. Now it has a life of its own, completely outside of my control and, to a very, very great degree, out of my awareness. As of this morning, it's not mine anymore.
And that's a good feeling, it's just a strange one to get used to. It's done. It's out in the world. And now all I can do is watch.
(drum roll please)
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010It's with great pleasure (and a minimum of commentary), that I give you (TA DA!), the new book:
Bedtime Story will be released, in Canada, on October 19, 2010. Other territories will, hopefully, follow — my agent is taking news of the book to the London Book Fair next month. My fingers will certainly be crossed.
As to perhaps the more important issue (ie, what it's about), I'm going to reprint here what the foreign publishers will be seeing at the Book Fair, and pretty close to what booksellers will be seeing in their upcoming catalogs and rep appointments:
Following his bestselling 2006 debut, Before I Wake, Wiersema returns to his exquisitely plotted blend of supernatural thriller and domestic drama.
Novelist Christopher Knox began his writing career with a bang. The echo of that success still rings in his ears as he sets to work every morning on his second novel, ten years later. His wife feels like a single parent, and with Chris living in exile in a studio above their garage, it won't be long before she is.
Chris discovers a fantasy novel by an obscure author he loved as a child and gives it to his son, David. Father reads to son nightly, and To the Four Directions soon enthralls him. Until one night, when young David is reading alone, an inexplicable seizure leaves him in a mysterious state of unconsciousness. As his seizure recurs every night, his father learns that only one thing will calm it, a bedtime story from his strange new book.
Convinced that the secret of David's collapse is within its pages, Chris crosses the continent in search of the truth. Meanwhile, David wakes up within the story he has been reading, and as his father struggles to free him, David struggles to survive, facing perils unimaginable in a world created to capture the hearts and souls of children like him. Both father and son are headed toward a fateful collision of worlds, and a showdown with ancient evils, both fictional and very real.
That's all I'm saying at the moment, but you can bet I'll be talking a LOT more about this in the coming months!
Live from Vancouver…
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Much to my surprise, I had an email from the BC Achievement Foundation, asking if I minded them posting the video of Friday's speech on their website.
I know it's unlike me, and is completely at odds with my private, almost reclusive nature, but I thought, "What the heck, why not?"
So here it is.
Mail call
Friday, December 18th, 2009It's no secret — I love getting mail. I love opening a package and not knowing what to expect. Or knowing EXACTLY what to expect. And this time of year is great for mail, as I'm sure most of you can appreciate.
Today, though…
Well, I knew it was coming, but even forewarned, there's still something of a heady thrill receiving an edited manuscript back from ones publisher. Well, a heady thrill, with a healthy dose of anticipatory nausea.
I have a ritual, for times like these. I open the package, I take a quick look at the notes, I glance through some pages, looking to see how many markings there are on the page, and then — this is the crucial step — I close the box and ignore it, for at least 12 hours. Let my initial feelings of shock and dismay fade…
This time, though, I added a step. I took a photo:
Sorry for the grainy cellphone-ness of it, but I wanted to capture the moment.
I've included a copy of Before I Wake for scale.
I heard that! That *gasp*.
Would it comfort you to learn that on the FedEx waybill, the package was listed as weighing 12 pounds? No?
Me neither.
I guess I know what I'm doing after Christmas…
The eternal circle…
Thursday, December 17th, 2009I suppose this is the way these things SHOULD work, timing-wise.
No sooner do I see that the first installment of "Just Like the Ones He Used to Know" is up and getting hits at books.torontoist.com than I receive word from my editor at RHC that a box is headed my way by courier — the first editorial pass through the forthcoming new novel. I should have the pages sometime today…
Story published, novel in revision, new work started… the eternal cycle. This is what my life looks like, and I couldn't be happier.
(On a side note — I've started a post with notes and thoughts and ruminations and such about the Christmas serial. I'm going to hold off on posting, though, until the whole thing is out and read, but you have that to look forward to, if you're the sort that looks forward to those things…)
An announcement…
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009As promised, some news, direct from books.torontoist.com:
The editors of Books@Torontoist are proud to announce the publication of an original story by Robert J Wiersema, bestselling author of the novel Before I Wake (now published in ten countries) and the novella The World More Full of Weeping. The story, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know,” will be serialized on the site in eight daily posts, beginning on Thursday, December 16 and ending on Christmas Eve. The story of a man who makes a mysterious journey to his home town on a stormy Christmas Eve, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know” revives the Victorian tradition of ringing in the holiday season with a story of the ghostly and the miraculous.
The serialized story will be accompanied by photos and original illustrations provided by Torontoist’s stable of talented artists and photographers.
Rob was kind enough to provide us with an introduction to his holiday tale. Please read on and return tomorrow for the first installment of “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know.”
At first glance, there’s something a little counter-intuitive about a Christmas ghost story. After all, isn’t the season all about births and rebirths (depending on which point on the Christian/Pagan trapeze you occupy)? Well, yes.
And yet…
There’s a long history of ghosts and Christmas. One need look no further than what is perhaps the best known Christmas tale, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has not one but four ghosts (don’t forget poor Marley.) And on the other end of the spectrum one of the best known ghost stories – Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – which is deliberately framed as “gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be”.
Some of my favourite examples of the form, though, come from Robertson Davies, who collected, in High Spirits, 18 years worth of the Christmas ghost stories which he had delivered at the Christmas celebrations at Massey College. His ghost stories were a little on the lighter side (though in all fairness, compared to The Turn of the Screw, practically everything is at least a little on the lighter side).
When I was asked by Torontoist to write a Christmas ghost story to be serialized in the run-up to the festive season, I took it on as a challenge. I had a limited time to write the story, which meant an even more limited time to gestate the story. I thought, for a time, that I might write something humourous. Or something Toronto-based. Then I thought I might write something personal, a bit revealing. But then, as these things do, the story bubbled to the surface of my mind, almost fully formed, and completely different from anything I could have consciously devised. So it goes.
Although it’s a ghost story, “Just Like the Ones I Used to Know” goes back to those things which are, to me, the fundamentals of the season: warm houses, snow-storms, travel, food, and family. It’s set in the fictional B.C. town of Henderson, and it’s about coming home, and what that means.
You should definitely click over to books.torontoist.com (right now) to see this announcement in its proper setting, with an example of the art James mentions in the release.
For the record, this is the story that I was writing in the early part of this month. I'm actually very pleased with it — it came in on-time, at-length, and it does exactly what I want it to. Which, really, is all a writer can ask.
Speaking of asking: when James asked me to write this story, I had mixed feelings. Traditionally, I'm not good with deadlines (which might well be the understatement of the decade), and I was decidedly overbooked. There was a novel to finish, and reviews to catch up on, and all the ancillary stuff of work and life to contend with. But we spent some time talking it through when I was in Toronto last month, during a boozy late afternoon at the See Hai Lounge in lovely North York, and by the end I was committed.
Thankfully, the writing came easily, and the story came out well.
Considering, though, that last November I signed on with CZP to publish The World More Full of Weeping over drinks in a Toronto bar, and now this, I'm starting to think I need to spend more time in bars when I'm in Toronto.
So, that's the news. I hope you read the story, and enjoy it.
This just in!
Monday, December 14th, 2009Oh, my.
My editor at CZP just sent me this review, from Publisher's Weekly:
The World More Full of Weeping
Robert J. Wiersema. ChiZine (www.chizine.com/chizinepub), $12.95 paper (104p) ISBN 9780980941098
Wiersema’s haunting novella–whose title aptly references a line in William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child”—revolves around an 11-year old boy named Brian whose love of the woods behind his father’s house in rural southwestern British Columbia leads him to supernatural discoveries—namely Carly, an ethereal girl. Carly shows the boy a breathtakingly beautiful “hidden world” in the forest. When Brian disappears one day, his father is forced to revisit obscure memories from his own youth—memories that involve the mysterious forest and a girl named Carly. Powered by a sublime sense of wistfulness and a setting that is simultaneously natural and otherworldly, Wiersema’s novella seamlessly blends literary fiction with mythic fantasy to create a lyrical, surreal and deeply melancholic reading experience. The book also includes an essay entitled “Places and Names,” in which the author explores the signification of “personal geography” and explains how his fictional town of Henderson (the setting for his story) was created. (Sept.)
Do you think "Wiersema’s novella seamlessly blends literary fiction with mythic fantasy to create a lyrical, surreal and deeply melancholic reading experience." is too long for a tattoo?
Simply…
Friday, December 11th, 2009… the best editorial comment one can receive*:
It makes me smile every time I see it.
(*context-sensitive, naturally.)