Tagged With: Mad Richard
ChatGPT and my novels (in the style of Drake)
I was bored, and actually had some questions, so I logged onto the AI model ChatGPT. Here’s our conversation, edited for length. My novel Time Squared from 2021 is being pirated. Can you find any pirate sites, including Reddits and sub-Reddits, where the novel is being offered for free download? I’m sorry to hear that […]
Passings: Deaths in the Family
I’ve been thinking about the word “plangent” lately, a word with mourning tolling inside it like a bell. The weather has been perfect lately in Toronto, one breezy summer day following another, the sky a high light blue, the air warm and dry. But it’s mid-August and our short Canadian summer will end before long. […]
How to Research a Book
“I’ve just spent a term teaching first-year writing based foundationally on primary source digital archive,” reads an email I got recently, “and I loved seeing my students discover that writing was much more interesting when they had research that was personally interesting to them. “What does the research process look like for you, and when […]
Charlotte Brontë turns 205
Charlotte Brontë was born on this day in 1816. It’s also the 95th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, who opened her historic eyes on April 21, 1926. That makes Charlotte exactly 110 years older than the queen. But who seems the most modern? Every time I re-read Charlotte Brontë’s best book, Jane Eyre, I think I’m finally […]
Writing Tip: Permit Your Characters Happiness
One film I liked a lot at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was Kuessipan, the story of two young women growing up in a Quebec Innu community. It’s a deep look at female friendship and the hard questions of leaving a community or staying there; about racism and colonialism and the bright joys of being […]
Writing Tip: Leave Out Details (Including Prince Albert’s Skates)
I learned a new word the other day: paralipomena. It means things left out, usually from a piece of writing, which are used in something else later on. Recycled outtakes, more or less. Of which I have a few. Playwright Alan Bennett introduced me to the word in one of the essays collected in Writing […]
Research Notes: Out-Takes from a Novel
Researching a novel means reading and travelling, amassing material and then cutting, cutting, cutting for focus and flow. This leaves outtakes, like the cloth left over after you’ve cut out the pieces of a garment. Not that I’ve done any sewing for years. One piece of cloth left over after writing my latest novel, Mad […]
Tip: Writing for the Public, Writing for the Self
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.” I’ve been writing lately about the long-gone British critic Cyril Connolly, having started to read him when I remembered his famous quote about the pram in the hall being the enemy […]
How to Record an Audio Book
So there I was in the studio, listening to actor Pascal Langdale tape the narration of my novel Mad Richard for an audio book. Born in England, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Pascal has a jaw-dropping range of accents and tones ready to deploy. Here was the soft voice of […]
Mad Richard: The ancestral dog
Of all the things to find in the family boxes this weekend, as my novel Mad Richard launches: this pooch, whose photo was taken in the 1870s or 80s. Turns out it was the dog of someone mentioned in the novel: Henry Verrall. Uncle Henry Verrall, it says on the back of the photo, the […]
Book Review: M Train by Patti Smith
Appropriately enough for a book by a musician–a wandering minstrel–I read Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train, on planes and in a hotel room. I was attending the American Booksellers Association convention, flying to and from Minneapolis to promote my novel, Mad Richard. Since the flight home was hours late, I finished Smith’s book about the […]
Minneapolis and Tibetans and Booksellers
So there I was following a Tibetan monk around the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Nosy of me, but I was wondering what would interest a Tibetan monk in a Midwestern art museum. He was an older man in a saffron robe with a mustard-yellow toque and fetching mustard-and-crimson striped socks emerging from big sneakers. Huge […]