This weekend we moved apartments – the preparation for which has taken up much of the last three weeks. But now it is over and everyone (including, surprisingly, the cat, who I thought would be freaked out for much longer than she was) is settled in and ready to get back to everyday life.

I don’t know if I mentioned on here, but for 2009 my New Year’s resolution was to not eat candy for a year. Those of you who know me know that this was a big thing to give up: I have a gigantic sweet tooth, and in particular I really, really like both sour candy and all types of licorice. So it was a real test of my resolve. And I did it: for a solid year, I didn’t eat a bit of candy. Much discussion was had in this household as to what qualified as ‘candy’ – ie, chocolate is not a candy per se, but if it came in the form of what is labelled a ‘candy bar,’ then it was. So no Crispy Crunch, no Skor, etc., but I did eat things like chocolate almonds and occasionally Purdy’s chocolates or what not.

At midnight on January 1 I tucked into my first candy in 365 days. I bought five different types to celebrate, and had the full intention of eating them until I felt sick. Which I did. And it turned out I couldn’t eat very many and that, after the first few bites, I wasn’t really into it. The year off had purged me of much of my reaction. I didn’t eat much at all.

By about a week later, with small amounts of candy eaten throughout, though, I’d started to get back into the swing of it – if I saw candy, I wanted it, etc. Lesson learned, I thought: I never really needed it or wanted it; it was just that by allowing myself to have it, I begin to teach myself to feel that I want it and need it.

Side note: this is the only time I can think of in my life where I’ve 100 per cent followed through on a New Year’s resolution. There’s another lesson there: I respond best to concrete, measurable goals. Things like “get fitter” or “write more” don’t have enough of a yardstick for me.

So my new thought is this: what if I resolve (unrelated to the New Year – I’m not stuck on traditional dates or anything like that) to write every day for the next year? Even if it’s only a sentence, I have to work on one of my own writing projects (writing work done for other people doesn’t count) every day. No breaks.

This one’s harder, because it’s not an act of omission – which takes no time, beyond the mental time required to say No, no candy today – but I bet I’ll get to the end of  a year and find that I both wrote more than I otherwise would have and that the habit of writing every day has set in to the point that I just keep doing it. Suddenly it won’t take willpower to find time to write in a day – it’ll just be habit. Unthinkable to not. We’ll see.

This year I’ve read 100 books. (Barring any further reading before midnight on the 31st, of course, but I don’t think I’m going to have the time in the next couple of days, so I’ll probably be stuck with this nice round number.) I kept a list for myself, just like I did last year. One happy side effect of taking time off to write was that I got a lot more reading done – in 2008 I apparently only read 41 book.

Now, to the highlights!

FAVORITE YA NOVEL

This was a competitive category this year. Probably the most competitive, actually – looking back at my list it appears I read quite a lot of YA and quite a lot of it was new and award-winning. A noticeable theme here: awesome heroines. All three of the young women who lead these books are formidable.

Honourable mentions: Graceling, Kristin Cashore; Un Lun Dun, China Mieville

Winner: The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

FAVORITE NON FICTION

I Believe in Yesterday

A lot of the non-fiction I read came from one category: writing how-to guides. The rest of it was very widespread, although mostly focussing on personal interests: travel, agriculture/food, literature.

Favorite writing how-to guide: Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose

Honourable mentions, general non-fiction: Farm City, Novella Carpenter; The Magician’s Book, Laura Miller

Winner: I Believe in Yesterday, Tim Moore

FAVORITE DISCOVERY

Does that seem vague? Oh well. Anyway, these were all discoveries, of a sort, mostly in the sense that I hadn’t read them before and thought I should have.

Honourable mentions here  go to Canadian writers whose work I was glad to discover: Bill Gaston (whose short stories exactly fit my appetite for shorts that combine energy and plot with strong writing) and Alastair MacLeod (who is a Canadian legend and whose characterization and evocation of place aren’t to be missed), as well as to Neil Gaiman, who I hadn’t read at all when the year began, and then I saw the Stardust movie and picked up that book and since then I’ve read almost all his stuff.

Winner: on a totally different tangent, but still: all the Jeeves & Wooster books (and PG Wodehouse as well). I had never read his stuff and it’s very funny. And relaxing. It’s good to have in one’s repertoire.

FAVORITE SPECULATIVE FICTION

I like both fantasy and sci-fi. I’ve definitely read more Hugo winners in my life than Nobel Lit prize winners. This year I did a lot of re-reading in the category,

Honourable mentions: American Gods, Neil Gaiman; The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente

Winner: The Veil of Gold, Kim Wilkins

FAVORITE NOVEL

The Story of Lucy Gault

I apparently did not read that many lit-fiction novels this year. I can’t even come up with an honourable mention list. Last year was a better one for novels – of the 41 books I read I can see at least five that would have battled their way onto an end-of-year list. And two books from that year made my all-time top ten. That being said, this year’s winner also managed that feat. So it was a dry year, but that’s not taking anything away from the winner, which I think is breathtaking. (And the author may have deserved a position on my ‘favorite discoveries’ list, too.)

Winner: The Story of Lucy Gault, William Trevor

Yes, that’s right, I am returning to the working environment for the forseeable future. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning the blog, and it DEFINITELY doesn’t mean I’m abandoning the book. It’s just that the whole not-working thing wasn’t working out from a financial perspective anymore. The hours for the job I’ve taken should have me home early enough to get some work done in the evening. Or maybe early in the morning? (Doesn’t sound like me, does it?) We’ll see what works out.

I won’t go into what the job is here, but suffice to say that it doesn’t involve writing for a living, and should therefore leave my writing energies free to go straight into my own creative projects.

Man, this post on Apartment Therapy makes me salivate. It’s probably a fallacy to believe that writing would be easier – or that I’d spend more time doing it – if I had a working space like those ones (especially the first one, with the huge windows on either side and the lovely wall of books), but I still do sort of believe it. When I sit in my chair and stare out the window at power lines and cranes, it’s not particularly inspiring.

I can’t decide if this article (on CNN.com, but apparently brought over from Oprah.com) is depressing or inspirational. I knew (in fact, I talked about it a few posts ago, I think) that it took Junot Diaz a long time to write Oscar Wao. And I knew that he threw out a lot of pages along the way. But in the article he goes further into that process, and it sounds like writing that novel pretty much ripped his life apart. Sure, he went on to win the Pulitzer (and the Rooster, yay) – but in the meantime he spent almost a decade hating everything he did and tearing his hair out about it. Depressing. But inspiring, I guess, in that he eventually overcame.

This one was in my Dad's collection

When I was a child I particularly liked my father’s collection of high fantasy novels – Terry Brooks and David Eddings paperbacks, mostly – which were to be found about the house on various shelves. I liked them, not because I wanted to read them (though when I was a little older I would go and read them) but because of their covers – bright colours, wonderful creatures – and their maps. I really liked to pour over the maps in his fantasy books. Amusingly this is one of the reasons he likes them as well, and has been heard to say a few times that he really only likes books that have a map at the beginning. (To be fair, he also likes Pride and Prejudice, which has no map at all. But probably he thinks it would be improved by a map.)

Anyway when I was about twelve I had a period where I was obsessed with drawing maps of fantasy kingdoms. I loved making those crazy coastlines and inserting ruined temples and thick choking jungles and impenetrable mountain ranges. As an offshoot of that I wrote the beginnings of some pretty bad fantasy novels; and then I gave up on both the novels and the map-drawing. I never gave up on reading books with maps, though. I still like it when they have a map.

All this in lead up to say, I have drawn a map of the imaginary-but-grounded-in-reality island on which my novel takes place. I didn’t do this with the intention that it actually be in the finished book – though my dad might argue for its inclusion – but rather for personal reference, so I’d know how far people were going on certain journeys and what geographic relationship various people’s homes had to each other. And now I’m going to share it with you. Enjoy, map-lovers!

Map of Salishan Island

 

So I’m a bit behind on this – this article has been making the rounds of the Internet in a flurry for the last couple weeks – but I just got around to reading it recently so it’s still fresh for me.

I really like reading about how writers do what they do; my favorite part of short story anthologies is the bit in the back where the writers talk about the process for that particular story. (And if anthologies don’t have that it makes me sad.) So the article’s like that times a whole career instead of just one story which is fun.

Highlights:

Idiosyncratic methods - Nicholson Baker has a series of highly entertaining methods for writing: first he’s talking into a voice recorder, then he’s growing a beard and videotaping himself rambling for 40 hours. I like this sort of dedication to finding a unique process. I also like his beard. Richard Powers writes while lying down and talking into voice recognition software. John Wray wrote Lowboy while riding the subway in New York constantly. Perhaps I should get into my island setting by riding the ferry? Too similar? Maybe I should write out in the woods, or in a farm field, or a barn. A barn actually doesn’t sound too bad. One of my characters lives in a barn.

Surprising number of people – Orhan Pamuk, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Dan Chaon, Amitav Gosh, Russell Banks, Edwidge Danticat – were specifically described as writing first drafts by hand. Is it meaningful that they are almost all men? Only Danticat among the women that I noted mentioned longhand writing. I tried writing by hand the other day. I went to the library, which has no plug for my laptop. I wrote about four sentences, realized that I couldn’t really read what a couple of the words said, and went home again. Anyone who’s ever seen my handwriting knows why serious longhand writing would be a disaster for me. As a reporter I always had to transcribe my interviews immediately or risk losing 50 per cent of the words.

Failures: lots of talk about failure, about manuscripts that didn’t work. Kate Christensen has apparently had to throw out whole drafts of four novels; Margaret Atwood has abandoned two books partway in; Junot Diaz threw out 600 pages of Oscar Wao before really getting going. This makes me feel better.

Dan Chaon says: “I used to think my average as a short story writer was one completed story out of every 20.” This, also, makes me feel better.

What will I say if I am ever famous and asked to contribute to one of these? Unfortunately I think my methods, which involve sitting in a chair with a laptop computer, do not make for entertaining reading. Maybe I will make something up and pretend that I write in a zero-gravity chamber or something.

Well, my guess about Annabel Lyon winning the Giller didn’t come true – but she did manage to avoid the “curse of threes,” winning the third of the major Canadian fiction awards she was shortlisted for (the Rogers’ Writers Trust Fiction Prize, which was given out last night.)

Also at that link, news that UVic creative writing MFA student Yasuko Thanh won the Journey Prize, a $10,000 Canadian short story prize, for a story called “Floating Like the Dead.” Congratulations to her – and to UVic, which as the newest MFA program in Canada, will probably benefit from the exposure.

Weird thing happened today with the writing. I was working on a fairly pivotal scene that happens to take place on the shore of a pond. I have written, in the past, three scenes that take place at this location, although I don’t think all of them are going to be retained when I finalize a first draft. But anyway – in a writing sense, at least – I have been there a number of times.

So today while writing I was trying to think of new things about the setting that hadn’t been described yet, and I thought to myself, well, I can’t think of any so maybe I should just go down there and take a look, maybe some photos. This was followed by a very long moment in which I tried to place the pond in the actual geography of the area that I live; found that I couldn’t; and realized that I had somehow come to completely believe that this spot, invented by me, actually existed.

Ack! The book is coming to life! Or am I being sucked into it! One or the other. Soon I will be found to believe that my characters are real people, and have to be stopped from calling them up on the telephone for a quick chat.