New Book Out in April, and Walking into the Woods of a New Novel
A celebration, and the dark scary woods of a first draft
Hello. Have you had a good summer? Did you write all the things you wanted to write? The summer can be a glorious chance to reset — to allow hours of ease to seep into a day, if you’re lucky — or it can be just as pressureful as the rest of the year, when it comes to writing. If you find yourself with more free time from your day job in the summer, you might be pushing yourself to write more and more.
But whether it was relaxing or stressful, summer always comes to an end, and my favorite time of year arrives — the fall, with all its crunchy leaves, smells of wood fires, and the boundless optimism of a new school year. I think I’ll be a student all my life, and so the fall heralds the start of new opportunities to write and think and be human. I hope you have plans for the fall to re-connect with your creative writing — whether it’s completing a new short story, taking a course, or trying a short freewrite each day.
I’m writing with very happy news on that front: my second novel, MINOR PROPHETS, is finally making its way into the world. It will be published with Ig Publishing in April 2023. Pre-orders are already available, and they mean a tremendous amount to authors, particularly indie authors, so please consider visiting and throwing a pre-order in my direction. You can learn more about the novel at Ig’s site, and I’ll be talking more about it in future newsletters, giving you some sneak peeks and some insights into the ideas that went into the story. Expect apocalyptic cults, bloodletting, daughters, woods, porcupines, Chicago, and other things. I’ve worked very very hard on it over the years.
But that brings me to the other pressing concern of my writing life these days — which is the absolute terror-joy of entering a new novel project. While MINOR PROPHETS was trundling away to finding a publisher, I started work on a new novel. Every novel you write has to teach you how to write it, so it’s been a slow process, full of its own frustrations and challenges. And it’s been a long time since I was actually at this stage of the process — that is, completing a messy first draft. It’s one thing to be tinkering with and re-shuffling the already completed pieces of a mostly-done novel for, literally, years. It’s another thing entirely to be facing the blank page, having to generate new stuff, new ideas, new characters, new situations.
Writing a first draft can feel like walking into a dark wood without proper equipment. You bring the tools you used to write your previous novel, and they’re so, so inadequate; an ice pick in an orange grove. But still, you forge on, listening for the sound of strange birds in the trees over your head, fumbling with a new character you’ve only begun to know. Somehow, the longer you spend in that dark wood, the more it becomes a friend to you. You learn to live beside an unknown river. You see a path emerging, no more than a deer track through the trees.
And eventually, you get to cover day, and you get to reveal the cover of the novel, like the one for MINOR PROPHETS:
Other News:
• I’m thrilled to have won a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to assist in completing my next novel.
• I published a short piece about parenting in a pandemic, “I/You/Me”, with Motherwell Magazine
• I’m teaching short fiction and novel classes with Storystudio and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Check by my site for more info on the next round of classes I’ll be teaching.
Your Writing Exercise:
Your character is trespassing in their life, crossing a physical boundary they shouldn’t. It might be the wrong floor of the office building where they work, or a room in their house when their grumpy grandparent is sleeping and isn’t meant to be disturbed. Show us the tension and drama of being where you’re not supposed to be, and show us what is discovered in that forbidden space that blows the story’s conflict open.
Terrific news, Blair. I just re-read THE DEVOTED and longed for a new book from you. Preordered!