Soooo, let’s see. Before going to Greece last year, I had a vague idea of a novel I wanted to write, and I had a rough draft of the first section. While I was in Greece, I sat down (almost) every day and worked on it, and figured out where I wanted it to go and who the characters were and what format it would take. There was a lot of trial and error and trashed pages, but when I flew back to Canada in September, I felt okay about the whole thing. Still, I didn’t want to show it to anyone. The thought of even my most trusted first readers reading it embarrassed me and I kept it to myself. Anyway, back at home Bats or Swallows came out, and I started working full time again, and there was just general life getting in the way of things. I also knew the book needed some breathing room, so I let it go for awhile. Then, I started the QWF mentorship, and it gave me a push to pick over the draft again. Between January and May, I worked on the entire thing slowly and steadily, lots of weekend afternoons at my kitchen table, some lunch hours at the food court with print outs of chapters,evenings in bed with the laptop. I would meet up with my mentor every two weeks or so and hand over clumps of pages and the first time I did this I had to sheepishly have a drink before I could stand talking or hearing anything about it. And basically he told me: keep going. So I did. Last week I did a reading as part of the program, stood up on a stage in a dark room and read the very first chapter to a group of people. It felt nice. (The fact that my mentor quotes Greil Marcus in that linked post shows that I was paired up with someone on the same wavelength too.) I’ve also slowly started sending sections to my writer friends. After this weekend when I type up my final adjustments to the third part, I can’t think of anything else to do except let it sit again so that I can get some distance, gain some perspective.

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The sky is brightest around the edge of antique columns. And no line is sharper than the one dividing a column from the sky that frames it. There is a simple, entirely irrational explanation for this: what separates the column from the sky has been worn down – has become thin and therefore sharp – over time. The sky is as close as can be while still remaining distinct. This absolute separation between the timeless man-made and eternal is never as pure as it is in the ruins of Greek or Roman antiquity. That is one way of looking at it. The other – a different way of looking at the same thing – is that the distant past is brought into sharp adjacency with the present.

The ruins were bathed in a perpetual present – a version of eternity – of which the golden light and stalled moon were the perfect expression. I moved from place to place, arranging the intersections of columns, sea, and sky in new ways, new angles. Perhaps the simplest lesson of antiquity is that, after a time, anything vertical – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, whatever – commands admiration. Ultimately, though, the lure of the horizontal will always prove irresistible.

(From Geoff Dyer’s essay “Leptis Magna” in Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It)

A good feeling is when you’re reading something you’ve been looking forward to reading for awhile and then realize that so much of it coincides with things you’ve been thinking about or trying to write about.

(Scene from a desk. This was last summer in Athens.)

2011 felt kind of formless at the beginning of the year, but with January coming to a close it’s starting to take shape. There are travel plans on the horizon, some within Canada (mostly of the East Coast variety) and some much more far flung. I even have birthday plans in April – tickets to the Pixies, who are coincidentally playing in Montreal on my actual birthday. Writing-wise I’ve been steadily working on the novel, but was starting to feel like I was maybe too deep into the project to see it clearly. There’s something so daunting about large amounts of words. Often when I’m feeling stuck on a story, I’ll send it to a friend for an outside opinion, but with a book I feel like it’s too much of an imposition. Also, I’m just shy about it, how unpolished it is, and clunky and unclever. So, I’ve been working in my own little bubble and crossing my fingers. I was pleased, then, when I found out that I’d been selected to participate in a mentorship program I applied for back in the fall. For the next few months I’ll be working with a writer who will help me whip my work-in-progress into shape and I won’t feel guilty bugging him with my drafty draft sentences and plot lines because that’s the whole point of the program. Some people, when I’ve told them about the mentorship, think that I’m taking the mentor role, which is funny to me. I know I just published a book, and while I feel relatively comfortable with short stories, a novel is still nebulous, uncharted land. I’m grateful for a guide.

When Andrew and I went to Greece last year, we rented our apartment in Montreal to the sweetest couple. We trusted them with all of our possessions, just emptied out the closets and drawers so they would have somewhere to store their clothes. In a moment of self-consciousness I also packed up my collection of journals and notebooks and stored them at my parents’ house. There’s nothing especially damning or even interesting in these books, mostly to do lists, cryptic paragraphs and miscellaneous notes. Maybe that’s why they’re embarrassing – if someone opened them up expecting to find something juicy, they’d be disappointed. Anyway, when I returned to Canada I didn’t bother lugging the notebooks back to Montreal, but this past weekend when I visited Toronto, I flipped through a few out of curiosity. I found one from early 2009 that was mostly wedding planning details and musings, but also had a fairly lengthy series of notes about the novel I’m still working on. I don’t remember thinking about it so seriously back then, and at first I was disappointed to realize how long I’ve been working on it. Eventually the sting dissipated – 2 years is nothing in the novel-writing world, right? I’ve had other distractions along the way too, and anyway, I’ve simply needed all that time to get to the point I’m at now. Maybe one day I’ll figure out some novel writing shortcuts, but for now I just need time and patience to write and rewrite and make missteps or the occasional breakthrough. Maybe it’s apt that my first novel notes were in the same journal as my wedding details: I guess I’m in it for the long haul.

With our trip to Greece slowly approaching, I’m starting to think about my summer reading list. I suppose it’s a bit formal to think of it like that, but books will be hard to find abroad, and even though I know of a good English bookstore in Athens (and a gorgeous one in Santorini, if I make it down there), books are much more expensive in Greece. So, I’m going to devote a substantial amount of space in our luggage to books. In my day-to-day life, I have a tendency to favour novels on the slimmer side. It’s hard to sustain the focus required to read something long when your reading is limited to short blocks of time. But, in Greece I’ll have the luxury to read for longer periods, so I’m looking forward to tackling the thick kind of novels that really infiltrate your brain and weigh down your shoulder bag when you’re walking around town. And, because I’m often self-conscious of the fact that I didn’t take any English literature courses in university, I want to take advantage of this time to fill in a few holes. I have Ovid’s Metamorphoses ready to go and Moby Dick. I have Robinson Crusoe. (Yes, the adventure at sea theme is also deliberate.) We’ll see what else gets added to the pile.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what goes into the process of creating a long piece of work. The thought of writing something that turns into a 500 page paperback is not just daunting, but seemingly impossible. I’m hoping that by immersing myself in these kinds of works, I’ll learn something.

I spent two evenings last week watching Joanna Newsom perform at the Ukrainian Federation in Montreal. I had initially bought a ticket for the first show, and then because I still felt the urge to see her, did some Internet sleuthing and found a ticket for the next night’s sold out show. I shuffled my way back to the church, grabbed a seat, and watched. Her last album, Ys, came out when I first moved to Montreal. I still had a few clients in Toronto, so I often took the train back and forth between the two cities. I would always take out my computer and tell myself to work, but then hours would pass and I would still be listening to music and looking out the window, laptop off. I was usually listening to Ys. I was curious about whether her new album, Have One on Me, could have the same effect. It’s a triple disk, most songs longer than 6 or 7 minutes. It sounds excessive and for some people (my husband, for instance), it is, but I’ve been enjoying the feeling of sinking further and further into the music. Slowly learning the lyrics and seeing how the songs open up, and these are the kinds of songs that blossom big if you’re patient enough. It’s a gorgeous and thorough piece of art, the musical equivalent of a 500 page novel. How the hell does one make something like that?

I’m starting to get the urge to work on my novel again, the one I started more than a year ago. I jumped into it a little too enthusiastically and then lost some steam and realized that the foundation needed some serious rebuilding. By then the thought of trashing and reworking many, many, many pages was exhausting. So I set it aside. I’m wondering if maybe I’m up for the challenge again. Maybe. I’m working my way there, and I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. Speaking of writing novels, Meggy, who I’ve been a fan of since she made zines and personal websites, and now co-writes an amazing fashion blog, has started another blog about writing novels. It’s thoughtful and well written, and if you’re reading this, you would probably enjoy her site too.