Could you share a little about yourself and what led you to become a writer?
As the Summer of Love had turned to a
Canadian Fall, I left Vancouver and
rented a farm near a small town in the Cascade Mountains of British Columbia
called Grand Forks. I was born a few
miles up the road but had spent my teen years just outside the ‘big’ city.
The editor of the local newspaper took a
liking to me and asked me to write a small piece explaining why I chose to
return to the valley when so many young people were leaving. The piece was a success and became a regular
column. I have made a living from
writing in one form or another ever since.
According
to your Bio, you now write full time, but just how much of your life is set
aside for writing?
I write three hours a day. No more, no less. The most important tool in my portfolio is discipline.
A long time ago someone told me, ‘If you
want to be a cowboy you have to wear a cowboy hat.’
If you want to be a writer you have to
write, day in and day out. But writing
is a physical business and it is important for a writer to understand his or
her physical limits.
I know you
have other novels out, but today I want to focus on Woman of the Century.
Could you
tell us a little about your novel? Would you take us on a brief tour of your
novel and the world you’ve created?
The
Twentieth Century was a period of particularly dramatic transition both
socially and technologically. Those who
lived through it witnessed dramatic political progress, ordinary people were
offered new opportunities and the means to travel and migrate.
Nowhere
did this transformation express itself with more vigour than the arts,
especially painting. It was an
exciting, fraught and challenging time for all who lived through it and offered
unlimited possibilities for dramatic tension and moral dilemma.
Where does
the inspiration for you main character and her story come from?
My mother arrived in Canada from London
as a war Bride in 1944 but never let go of the old country. She yearned for the city of her childhood
and the family she left behind. She
talked of little else.
When she touched on stories of her mother
her eyes always filled with tears. I
never met nor knew my Grandmother. Woman of the Century is my imagining of her
life.
What is the
message behind the story? Was it something you specifically wrote a story
around or did it develop as your characters came to life?
The most innocuous person you might pass
on the street may have lived an extraordinary life. Not all greatness results in celebrity or notoriety.
I knew what I wanted to write about long
before I started the book. All in all
it took me more than thirty years to finish it. I had to wait for my mother to pass and she hung on for a very
long time.
Over the years the characters taught me
things I didn’t know and told me things I had not heard before.
Do you work
from an outline or just go with the flow? If you use an outline, how detailed
is it?
As with most of my work I outlined first,
built a foundation timeline, added the broad historical details, then, let the
characters loose in the framework, pushing them back when they strayed too far
out of context and disciplining them when they didn’t behave in a manner that
was true to their background and beliefs.
Your novel
spans a century and I am curious about the amount of research involved in such
an undertaking.
Could you
tell us how you go about it, how you ‘catalogue’ information to make it all
work, (since everything from language to clothing changes as well as
technology, values, traditions etc.)?
Every day, whatever I’m doing, I collect
information about whatever I’m interested in, especially when it bisects
specific project that I’m working on. I
have notebooks filled with bits and pieces of this, that and the other.
When it comes time to insert a given
detail into a current work, I acquire as much additional insight as I can,
shying away from the well know to the minor facets of an issue.
It is the fleshing out of the minor that
brings the major into focus.
How does
this book differ from what you have written in the past?
Woman of the Century was a much bigger,
far more personal story than I have ever told before. Through most of my career I have written to brief. With this book, I owned it, from inception
to completion.
How long
have you been awaiting the release of your novel? How much time has elapsed
between having typed the last word, through the editing phase and to print?
About four months. Waiting for the final edit was the hardest
part of the whole process.
How have
the changes in present day publishing impacted your schedule as a writer?
Not
much. Writing is writing. Writing on a computer is very much easier
than a manual portable and carbon paper but that also means more people can do
it. In many ways it was sheer physical
effort of writing that gave me the edge over the writers who wanted to do it
but didn’t have the strength.
How do you
handle marketing? Do you have a plan, a publicist or just take one day at a
time?
Now, I have to rely on word of mouth and
social networking. The strategy is to
find a champion for the book who knows the market and believes in the
project. Someone with whom I can share
the critical and financial rewards.
Do you have
any advice for aspiring authors?
Write.
Write whatever you can, whenever you can. Writing is much more important than research or marketing. It is a skill that comes from practice. Clattering away on the keyboard is
equivalent to doing scales on the piano.
However good the research or the marketing, it will all come to nothing
if the product doesn’t deliver.
Could you
tell us what you’re working on now?
A piece of
non-fiction based on the idea that we carry belief within us, like we carry our
genetic code, but we cannot locate where.
I’m looking for that location.
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