Good Guys
My second novel, Good Guys, publishes next month! Already advance review copies are making their way in the world, some bundled with a copy of The Boat People.* Publishers Weekly gave the novel a glowing review. Indigo named Good Guys one of their “Most Anticipated Books,” meaning you can pre-order from them for only $20. I’ve been invited to a couple of festivals and earlier today, I recorded a podcast interview. Slowly, surely, things are ramping up.
Blurbs
Recently, on CBC’s Commotion podcast. there was a dishy chat about blurbs. It’s worth a listen if you’re an aspiring author or have a first book deal or are curious about what it means to get a more established author or Barack Obama to say one nice word* that can be printed on your cover.
Most of us need blurbs and we all have a fraught relationship with them. It’s amazing to receive any sort of advance praise, especially when you’re deep in your feelings in that final stretch right before a new book comes out. But blurbs require hours of free labour. And the galling part is it’s impossible to do the (unpaid) job without toppling into cliche hell. To wit…
Yellow
No more novels about writers writing books, I swore. And then I read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Yellowface is the story of two authors. Athena is Asian and hugely successful. (I kept thinking of Zadie Smith, getting that mega publishing deal while she was still at OxBridge. ) June is white and midling. When Athena dies, June takes her unpublished manuscript - about the Chinese Labour Corps in WW I - and passes it off as her own. Spoilers ahead.
Take the wheel
In my 20s, I took up pottery. The classes were held in a shed, at the bottom of a blousy garden, where three of us students hunched over our wheels while our instructor walked around in an old pair of dungarees and chatted about the raccoons who were terrorizing her household.
Pottery is a physical act; you have to put your whole body into the effort if you’re going to keep the clay centered. More often than not, we novices found the clay controlled us, spinning itself in unexpected ways. A bowl stubbornly flattening into a plate. A vase becoming a mug. A mug shrinking to a pinch bowl.
Care a lot
Recently, a straight white guy tried to mansplain threading and bikini waxes to me. I smiled and wandered away. No, actually, I’m not sure about the smile. It might have been a scowl. Difficult to say. I’ve never had much of a poker face and my days of tolerating the senseless monologues of idiotic men are over.