Category Archives: Writing

Does anyone else hear a hamster wheel?

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Every morning as I drop my son at his kindergarten room, I say hello to my writer friend as she drops her daughter at the kindergarten room next door. And most mornings, I go away shaking my head at our mutual panic, because we are both chronic overcommitters. Which means our morning drop-off conversations go something like this:

Monday
Her: I’m taking these pictures for the PAC and I volunteered to help create Christmas ornaments with the kindergarten class but they didn’t tell me it was today and my son didn’t want to go to school this morning and I have a ton of work to do!
Me: I have to print posters for the PAC and check the rent increases for the preschool because I present at the board meeting on Wednesday and we’re shooting a video after school and I have a ton of work to do!

Tuesday
Her: I was going to get all my work done this morning, but my son threw up and now I’m going to try to work on my laptop while he watches cartoons on the couch.
Me: I’m going skating with the kindergarten class and then I’m going to fit some work into the afternoon, except I’m supposed to be cooking for six people tonight which will probably mean I get nothing done.

Wednesday:
Her: My in-laws are coming in three days. God help me. Do you know where I can borrow an air mattress?
Me: I was going to get all my work done this morning, but my daughter threw up and now I’m going to try to work on my laptop while she watches cartoons on the couch.

Thursday:
Her: I’m looking straight ahead. I’m making no eye contact. I’m going directly home to work.
Me: I’m looking straight ahead. I’m making no eye contact. I’m going directly home to work.

Friday:
Her: Five hours of uninterrupted work yesterday! I met all my deadlines.
Me: What a coincidence! I sent off my work late last night. Coffee?

Over the weekend, we remind ourselves that one of the benefits of the writing life is the flexibility. And then on Monday it begins again…

Loving the lateral

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Reading this interview with science writer Claire Eamer, I was struck by how she describes seeing her words transformed into an illustrated, designed book. She says:

“Maybe the highlight was the first time I saw the page proofs for Super Crocs. That was the first time I had seen my plain old words-on-digital-paper transformed by a designer into a startling and entertaining piece of art. I think that experience is one only kids’ writers get…”

Whenever I give school presentations, kids ask how I come up with my ideas for the illustrations in the 50 Questions books. And, of course, I don’t. My manuscript gets sent into the nether (otherwise known as New Zealand), and a few weeks later, sketches begin to arrive from Ross Kinnaird.

It’s the best part of the book-creation process.

It’s SO much fun to see how an illustrator can take an idea you brushed upon or a word choice you unknowingly made, and come up with something new and mind-bending and hilarious.

We writers pride ourselves on lateral thinking, but we have nothing on illustrators.

And as I tell the school kids, Ross gets his big ideas while sitting in a bathtub of lemonade, with a chicken on his head. (You can see for yourself. He says so in the books.)

Revisions: Cubist Version

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Everyone knows that fiction writers revise, revise, revise, and then revise the revisions. Non-fiction should be easier, right? There’s a detailed outline. There’s background material. There’s a proposal with the tone, the style, the length — everything — discussed and settled.

None of this actually seems to help. I mean, there’s not quite the same wandering-in-the-wilderness-of-ideas feeling that comes with fiction, but there is still a heck of a lot of revising to do.

My first draft tends to involve wading through oceans of research and gathering the information that’s going to interest kids. I pull one fact from one source and another from a second source and a sidebar idea from a third, and then I have to double-check it all and fit it together on the page like a jigsaw.

The problem is this: when I go back and look the next day, my jigsaw puzzle is a picture of a gazebo in a rose garden. It’s ridiculously boring. It needs some cubism and abstract expressionism.

At the moment, I’m in the process of sifting through my most recent 50 Questions, finding places to lighten the tone, add the craziness, and up the variety.

And in the absence of abstract expressionism, I might go for the poo jokes.

Eight

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I have to describe myself in eight words or less, for a form interview. Ack! Writing bios is already excruciating, but what does one do with eight words? So far, these are my options:

  • In a crisis, only good at making tea.
  • I’m funny in other ways.
  • Usually wears matching clothes. Not always clean ones.
  • Often having one real conversation and one imaginary.
  • Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Big nose. Many words.

Votes? Better ideas? Maybe I should stick to one word and just write, “boring.” Or “neurotic.” Or, how about:

  • Loses mind when writing eight-word bios.

All good news

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There are many things to feel Pollyanna-esque about, here in the world of Kyi.

  • I did two more very fun school visits arranged by the Fraser Valley Regional Library. Would you believe that along with all the other cool stuff I listed last week, the Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam also has a reading buddy program, matching teen readers with small children, and a teen advisory board? I wish I were qualified to join that board…
  • In other good news, we have not yet been crushed by an earthquake.
  • Finally, I’ve submitted my new 50 Questions manuscript! And in the mental process of (A) my manuscript rocks, (B) I think it may have some issues, and (C) the editor says the whole thing needs an overhaul, I’m still happily sitting at step A.

It has been a ridiculously busy October. But now I have coffee made, a stash of Halloween candy at my side, and nothing but fun writing to do for the rest of the week.

Happy Halloween!

Save the writer

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I have just bought a book called Save the Cat. Why? Well…

  • It was recommended at a SiWC workshop.
  • It’s called Save the Cat, and I have no idea why, and that’s a pretty interesting title and I’m a pretty curious sort. Although, now that I think of it, there’s that whole cat/curiosity thing.
  • It’s supposed to solve all my problems with plot. This would be good.

But the best thing of all about reading Save the Cat? It will distract me from the fact that there was a massive EARTHQUAKE off the coast last night, and aftershocks today, and I’m dropping my kids off this morning at a 100-year-old DEATH TRAP of a school.

Ahem… yes. Of to read Save the Cat now. Seismic Upgrading Committee meeting on Thursday. Maybe yet one more letter to the premier before that.

The NEW non-fiction

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There’s an article by moi in the most recent edition of Wordworks, a magazine produced by the Federation of BC Writers.

This edition is edited by kc dyer, and the whole darn thing is dedicated to children’s writing, so there’s lots of interesting material to read. If you want to know all about the new non-fiction, and the tricks to competing with a Wikipedia page, you can find my piece on page 25.

Is it too early to pack?

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I’m growing more and more excited about my trip to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference next weekend.

Partly, this is because my presentations are complete, and I can now relax a little. Before I began putting my materials together, I had this looming fear that I would have nothing to talk about. It turns out either I do know something after all, or I’ve invented an alternate universe in which my baseless opinions travel through the keyboard onto the Keynote screen and become fact.

Mostly, I’m looking forward to spending a weekend with hundreds of other writers, including some amazing presenters.

Elizabeth Lyon gave a master class for CWILL BC a couple years ago, the most practical and useful workshop I have ever attended. I’m hoping no one else knows how brilliant Elizabeth is, because one of her talks coincides with one of mine, and if there’s anything more nerve-wracking than speaking about inspiration in a hotel conference room for 90 minutes, it’s talking to yourself about inspiration in a hotel conference room for 90 minutes.

Eileen Cook is quite possibly the funniest writer I know and the only one who writes about cow vaginas. She, too, is a wonderful teacher and someone capable of providing a whole notebook’s worth of practical and motivating tools in a single workshop.

Dennis Foon is someone I’ve always wanted to meet. Years ago, I used to typeset his books for Annick Press. They always took me twice as long to arrange as any other book, because I’d get so caught up in the plots, I’d forget to insert the em dashes and ligatures. Twice the typesetting time, but excellent training in storytelling!

Would you believe that I get my own child-free hotel room for the weekend, I get to spend time with these people, and I actually get paid? Don’t tell the conference organizers… they had me at “hotel room.”

You can still sign up, until October 15th. Let me know if you do — I have some extra flapper costume components for the dress-up banquet.

A hotel room and a feather boa… squee!

What the…?

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Keep a notebook, keep a notebook, keep a notebook.

Probably the most repeated piece of writing advice ever. And useful. Assuming you’re the type of person who writes coherent notes.

Here’s what I found written on a blank page smack in the middle of my notebook yesterday:

  • Sacks – undies for guys to increase fertility.
  • Depleted uranium in bullets (Bernie – ex-solider?) Gulf War Syndrome
  • Shark Dialogues – novel
  • Tangles (graphic novel) Sarah Levitt
  • Potassium Chloride between the toes – a little hard to accomplish?

I mean, wow. Have you ever seen anything so incomprehensible? I actually stared at this page for quite a while, trying to figure out WHAT THE HECK I was thinking when I wrote these notes.

Eventually, potassium chloride triggered the answer. These are notes from my most recent visit to a Lyceum book club, where we talked about 50 Underwear Questions and 50 Poisonous Questions… and apparently a few other topics, too.

I wonder why I needed to read Shark Dialogues? And I wonder who I was planning to off with that potassium chloride trick…

The “other” small town

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I’m reading Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. Partly because someone recommended the book to me, but also because the author happens to have written my all-time favourite poem (“Places and Ways to Live”).

Anyhoo…

Richard Hugo has some interesting things to say about inhabiting a place that is your home and yet isn’t. He says you have to write in a town you’ve never seen before, but a town where you’ve lived all your life. In this mid-space: “it is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk. Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem.”

I suppose this is a variation on the idea of ex-pat writers, on a smaller scale. It struck me because of it’s “town” focus. I am, after all, a small-town girl at heart.