September 6, 2016: Online book launch of The Spawning Grounds
- Thread starter Gail Anderson-Dargatz
- Start date
Sometimes I just get stumped. I find an obstacle that appears insurmountable. A surefire cure for that seems to be time, and distance. Put the book away. Go do something else for a few months....sometimes for several months. I have had the experience of suddenly waking up one morning and knowing exactly what I had to do for a project that had had me stumped for ages.
Yup. Family distractions. We have a blended family of four kids. Four kids! When our two youngest were young, Mitch bought me two big orange traffic cones for my birthday. The idea was that I put these cones outside my office door when I was working and the kids were supposed to leave me alone. Did it work? Of course not. But over time they’ve come to learn to respect my writing time. They now stop each other from interrupting with “I’m writing!”
Life, health, work...what helps is involving myself in the writerly life and connecting to other writers. Sometimes it is social connection, sometimes workshops or writers' camps (like the one in Providence Bay) or even organized writers' groups and associations. To finish it, to keep working on it, means you have to keep thinking about it. All these things keep me thinking about my current project and help me to keep working on it.
Hi Gail and everyone else!
I was lucky enough to win an advance copy, so I have read it and it's sitting in my head still being digested, I think.
I was touched right off the bat by the introduction, which comforted me knowing that there are times in our lives when it is just hard to write and that those times can pass. And hearing about the effect of losing one's mother... In the middle of my 40s now, but looking forward to the 50s!
In the novel, I won't give anything away, but it was easy to get to know the characters and the dynamics of the small town felt very accurate to me, having lived in a small town in BC. It also just seems so timely and I am glad someone is writing looking forward and helping us figure out the world today.
I was lucky enough to win an advance copy, so I have read it and it's sitting in my head still being digested, I think.
I was touched right off the bat by the introduction, which comforted me knowing that there are times in our lives when it is just hard to write and that those times can pass. And hearing about the effect of losing one's mother... In the middle of my 40s now, but looking forward to the 50s!
In the novel, I won't give anything away, but it was easy to get to know the characters and the dynamics of the small town felt very accurate to me, having lived in a small town in BC. It also just seems so timely and I am glad someone is writing looking forward and helping us figure out the world today.
That really does work! I've solved lots of plot problems setting the novel aside and working on something else. Usually in the middle of that new project I have a EUREKA moment about the novel resting on the back burner. (Somehow I posted this, but it didn't attach to Michelle's comment the first time.
I see a few Providence Bay Writers Camp alumni here today. Wave! I use our time in Providence Bay to write too, for this reason: sticking too close to home both literally and figuratively can really stall a fiction project. To write about our home landscape, we often have to leave it. I found it much easier to write The Spawning Grounds on Manitoulin Island. I was felt freer to imagine my home landscape, to move the necessary distance away, to write a fictional landscape.
I'm late, with shifty internet, but this is very exciting. I don't know if I'm supposed to chime in like this or continue to creep - but I just love this line from your mom, Gail -
"My mother always said that a woman could count on life calming down after the storm of her forties had passed, and she was right. I now understand why women writers so often produce their best work in their fifties."
"My mother always said that a woman could count on life calming down after the storm of her forties had passed, and she was right. I now understand why women writers so often produce their best work in their fifties."
