How I’m Spending My Summer Vacation

Well, it’s the end of another summer month and, though I still haven’t taken a vacation, it’s been a pretty good run. The weather’s been cracked, but that’s not new. Mostly, I’ve spent the summer so far working on my writing. I finally got my short story collection finished once and for all and shipped off to a prospective publisher. It might take a while to publish because short story collections are a tough sell. So you might ask: why write one if it doesn’t sell?

Fact is, I didn’t start out wanting to write a short story collection. Heck, about seven or eight years ago, I didn’t even consider myself a short story writer. I write novels, so I figured the best way to learn how to write novels is to actually write novels. Writing short stories will only teach you how to write short stories.

That might still be true, but it does teach you to be a better writer. There’s a challenge in writing a short story that is totally different from writing a novel. Don’t get me wrong—writing a novel is still a lot harder simply because of the sheer effort, discipline, and sustained creativity it takes. But the short story requires focus, storytelling skills, and attention to the perfect word choice.

A few years ago, one of my stories (about a fictional town called Darwin) won an arts and letters award. Then, the next year, I wrote a novel about Darwin that won the Percy Janes Award for an unpublished manuscript. But I still had tons of Darwin stories to tell. Three more years in a row (2006, 2007, and 2008), I wrote brand new Darwin stories just before the deadline and submitted them to the arts and letters awards, and each one of them won. So, really, around 2006 or so I started realizing that I was working on a collection. Last year, I got an arts grant to finish the project, and I did. I wrote a bunch of new stories, and this year, still not satisfied with the quality, I wrote several new stories. On and on it went until, at last, I finished it this summer. Now the waiting begins. It won’t be easy to sell it, but I’ve got a list of publishers I want to sell it to.

Meanwhile, I’ve had interest from an agent in B.C. about a gothic novel I’m working on called “The Two Sisters,” so that’s what I’m working on now every day. For an unpublished novelist, it’s a rare thing to get that kind of interest for a book that hasn’t even been written yet, so I’m stoked to try and get it done by the end of summer.

Beyond that, I’m acting in a short film for a friend who’s making her very first film. It’s a good match because it’s my first time acting. I’m not sure I’m any good at it, but I’m at least enjoying it. It’s a film noir kind of thing, set in a 1940s sort of St. John’s, a bit of a parody of classic films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Just my kind of thing. There’s other acting stuff too, and hopefully I can talk about that in a later blog.

It’s been a busy summer—looking for a house too, which is time-consuming, but the thing is to just roll with it and enjoy the process, like everything else. Que sera, sera.

There’s a whole month left in this thing, and I intend to enjoy every bit of it. Hope you do too! I’m looking forward to the fall semester, but as The Trews say: “I’m not ready to go!”