The first 10 weeks of the Bookhabit competition are over and my novel, Island In The Clouds is one of 60 entries to have made it to the next round of rating and comments. It’s currently rated at #34! The first two chapters are now available for free downloading and rating for the next two weeks. Click here to link to my novel’s page; scroll down to the new announcement on the page; download, read, rate and comment. At the end of the two weeks, the ten top-rated novels will then be read and judged by a panel. The overall winner will receive $5000! Please visit the site and participate. Thanks for your help!!!

And, great news! Overnight, thanks to readers’ help, Islands has shot up to #30 on the ratings list!!

And a new season of books begins… I’ve just returned from a week in Toronto, and before that a week in Vancouver, where we met with the various publishers represented by the Kate Walker & Co. agency, and were informed of all the new publications being released for the Fall season. Quite exciting! And it’s great to be back in the saddle again, meeting with old friends in the business, making new friends, and representing a few different publishers from the last time I was a sales rep. Now comes the time when I must sequester myself away, sift through all the information, catalogues, samples, selling materials, and make up the presentations I’ll need for selling the list to bookstores, libraries, and other customers. Lots of work ahead, but many, many great books to sell. I’ll post a few of the titles as I work my way through all of this. But, believe me, a LOT of great books!!

Or “labour” as we write it here in Canada…

This week’s question on Booking Through Thursday:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I’ve studied several editing courses, as well as taken some writing programmes, over the past few years and the best books recommended to me by instructors and fellow students were The Forest For the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I highly advise anyone learning to write creatively that they read and reread both books. As well, Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose is a book that every aspiring writer should read. I was speaking with an editor/publisher recently about the authors who had submitted work to her company and she suggested that the most important thing most of them had missed in preparing themselves for the writing life was being well-read - not only in not reading good work in the genre they wished to be published themselves, but also just not reading a lot of good books in general. She told me that many authors say they’re so busy writing that they don’t have time to read… WRONG ANSWER!!! Read, read, read, and then read some more. But make sure you’re reading good books and following their example - not copying them, but trying to understand what makes the books so good in the first place.

As for grammar books, dictionaries, thesauruses (or is that thesauri?) and writing-instruction books, I have some, and most are the standards, but, really and ultimately, that’s what an editor is for and why publishers hire copy editors… It’s important to prove to an editor that you can write a good sentence and know how to spell - for the most part - but what is more important in writing is to prove that you can tell a good story, know how to describe characters and situations, and have the ability to keep a reader engaged from the first sentence to the last words of whatever you write. An editor’s job, in fact, is to fix those words, to tweak them and make them work that much better, but they can only do that, and are only interested in doing that, if you have a great story to tell in the first place.

Go to the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick website for a complete list of winners in their recent contest. Scroll down to the non-fiction results where my name is listed - it’s official!

All the books that have made it into the second round of the Bookhabit Unpublished Novel Contest so far have been scored. Take a look at this page:

http://bookhabit.com/newsdetail.php?nid=32

If you haven’t downloaded the first chapter yet, rated that or the entire book, or made a comment on the site, please consider doing so soon by clicking on the widget at the right, and help me move my novel up the chart! The more complete books that are downloaded, the more points I receive. Thanks!

I received notice yesterday that I’ve won first place in a non-fiction contest I entered! I’ll post a link and the details of the contest here once everything is posted to the sponsors’ website.

This is the first time I’ve won anything for my writing!

Betsy was in Calgary over the weekend! Great to see her again. We go back a long way, to Queen’s days, when we met in residence and then shared an apartment. She moved to Alberta after we did and has lived here ever since. It was so good to catch up again in person. Here’s a picture she took of the two of us - a couple of grinning fools, but with no double chins showing in this photo. I believe her new-fangled camera has an anti-double chin setting.

Amazingly, we both look exactly as we did when we graduated from Queen’s. Well, almost exactly…

I hope so! I’ll find out on Monday afternoon when I have an appointment to see the doctor. It’s seemed like a very long six weeks, and having a broken ankle has restricted my movement somewhat during that time, has especially made things tricky starting this new job on the right foot, so to speak… But it could have been a lot worse and I thank my lucky stars that this was only a simple break that caused little to no pain. A good friend recently took a severe fall and is still in hospital while the doctors determine exactly what damage has been done to cause her to be in so much pain. My heart goes out to her! I hope you recover enough to get home very soon, and that the rehabilitaion after that does not take long at all.

During the next week there will continue to be many more changes for me. I’ll move into my niece’s apartment, temporarily, while she continues to search for a new house where we can both live comfortably together. So I’ll be getting to know my furry-great-niece-and-nephew, Piper and Jack, for the first time. Plus I will be contacting and introducing myself to all of the customers in my territory - by phone at first - and meeting an author, and others who I’ll be working with in the future. Lots to do, but it’s all good, and I’m totally optimistic that everything I have left to do will fall into place when it needs to.

And a good day it was… still getting organized, but I feel I’m on top of things. I had a great lunch with my good friends, and former Calgary publicists from days gone by, Marilyn and Donna. It was like old times with lots of laughter, reminiscing, and an exchange of information. (Not gossip; no, never that!) We had many years to catch up on.

Then I accompanied Niece Anne to join her knitting group at a coffee shop in Kensington - and I don’t even knit. Yes, Little Sister, eat your heart out! I crutched over there as it wasn’t too far and I’m getting around a lot better these days on this cast. Met some very nice knitting-women there, even one who has met and worked with many people I know in the book biz. So that was fun!

Tomorrow, another lunch, this time with a publisher. Yes, it certainly is rough being a working stiff once again…

It seems I’ll endure anything - cold, threat of snow, and crutching it more than three blocks - just to eat an East Indian dinner. Too bad the food didn’t live up to all the effort I expended in getting there.

But we did have a great evening visiting with Patty and Pat. And they offered us a ride after dinner was over so I wouldn’t freeze my toes off or kill myself on the ice and snow trying to crutch back to the hotel. Niece Anne was too busy taking pictures of me and laughing to be able to hang on to my coat, ensuring I didn’t do any further damage.