Calgarian Reunion Party

Sadly I will be on the Island and miss this event, but as a public service I am passing on word that there will be a Calgarian Reunion Party at the Number One Legion on 7th Ave SE, this Friday, July 31 from 7:00 -- 11:00 PM. Hope ya'll can stay up that late! I am assured on several fronts that people will be having pairs of draft for me. And I do hope (kind of) that someone will take pictures!

I miss all the good stuff.

Canadian Authors Association Residency; Calgary Public Library Literary Awards

This has been one of those newsy weeks. So last night I was offered (and was very happy to accept) the position of Calgary writer-in-residence for The Canadian Authors Association. This is the first time the program has been run in Calgary and if it works out well will hopefully become an annual thing. Right now I'm working on finding a location for doing manuscript consultations in (have a few possibilities up my sleeve). The program will run mid-September to mid-December and mid-January to mid-April. I'll post details later on where you can send a manuscript. Very exciting! Here's some info about the program:

http://www.canauthorsalberta.ca/writer-in-residence

And this morning I got word that Love Minus Zero is a semi-finalist in the first annual Calgary Public Library Foundation Literary Awards in the adult fiction category. Finalists will be announced the week of September 7th. Details on the award can be found here:

http://blog.calgarypubliclibrary.com/blogs/cpl_foundation/archive/2009/04/30/2749.aspx

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Hmm. Looks like I'm going to be kind of busy this fall.

Fiddlehead summer fiction issue excerpt excerpt

Got my contributor copies of The Fiddlehead 240 today, the summer fiction issue. My piece is an excerpt from Love Minus Zero, and they've linked to an excerpt from the excerpt on their website, here:

http://www.thefiddlehead.ca/current.html

Looking forward to sitting down and checking it out later, looks to have some awesome work in it.

So that's it for my forthcoming stuff. I'd better get busy and write something one of these days.

Woot!

Crescent told me to say that. Don't I sound young and hip?

It's been a busy week. Got the proofs off to Thistledown this week, which feels fabulous. Also got to see the complete coverspread for the first time, which was exciting. Well, maybe other people don't find this kind of thing exciting, but I do.

Wrapped up the draft of the story Diane looked over for me and sent it off. I did some work on another that I had abandoned before the book stuff started, but this one is going to need some major surgery. Don't know if I can do much to it right now. I need to prepare for this workshop, get some grant applications going, set up some out of town readings. Um, and we're going to the Island the first two weeks of August-ish. To relax, yeah.

Also got my tech support to update ye olde website. But I got him to show me how to do it (you know, the give a man a fish thing). And here was the test: I updated one of the links myself just now. And it worked! I am so up-to-the-minute. I am like FPS or something. Right, Crescent?

Proofs; Beer; July in the town of cows

Nothing Sacred galley proofs arrived from Thistledown late this afternoon. Good stuff. I'd just wrapped up a draft of a new story yesterday and sent it off to Diane Girard, my beloved first reader, so the timing is great. Sure I won't need all seven (7) days to read them, but I do want to take my time, be careful. And then that will be that. All done. Cool.

Had a beer with Rona tonight. Good to get out and talk in person to a grownup over an alcoholic beverage. As I entered the bar I called unto mind that it was Stampede, but this didn't seem to be a problem as far as getting a table and so forth went. Stampede seems rather subdued this year, we agreed. Is it the weather, the economy, who knows? But that's fine with me.

Speaking of cool -- whoa, it's freezing out there. Had to turn the heat on in the Westfalia on the way home. Dude! But that's Calgary for you. Now I have two sweaters on and am drinking herb chai. Yeeeeeehaw.

Punk rocker turned author at it again

Brief mention of me and Love Minus Zero in a piece by Eric Volmers on novels set in Calgary in today's Calgary Herald, here:

http://www.canada.com/News/Perfect+Setting/1760975/story.html

Eric has been doing a great job of spotlighting local authors and their books, and I really appreciate it. It's tough to compete with the big publishers and their big money. So thanks, Eric!

Cool; Cool; Cool

What made me think of this again? I don't know, but last winter when I was doing research for a story I was writing, I came across this information about the phonautograph. You can hear a recording (admittedly quite hard to make out) of the inventor singing "Au Clair de la Lune" that was made in 1860, the earliest known recording of the human voice. And it hadn't even been heard before until last year! You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph

Also cool -- I wrote this afternoon. For almost three hours. Wow, almost forgot what that was like. I'll have to do it again sometime.

And the final cool thing: my new phone. Well, not really the phone. It's not very fancy by modern standards (though it does have a camera in it). But the ringtone! Oh, I went crazy and bought a ringtone: an MP3 of Miles Davis playing "Summertime". That is definitely cool.