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Newfoundland Author Chad Pelley Wins Inaugural Salon Fiction Prize

February 23, 2013 / Monique

Congratulations to author Chad Pelley, winner of the inaugural Salon Fiction Prize.

[Press Release] Saint John, N.B., February 21, 2013. The Telegraph-Journal, New Brunswick’s provincial newspaper, telegraphjournal.com, is ecstatic to announce that Newfoundland-based author Chad Pelley has won the inaugural Salon Fiction Prize for his short story, Second Look at Nothing.’

Launched July 2012, the Salon Fiction Prize awards $1,000 for a previously unpublished work of Canadian short fiction. The winning piece is also published in the Telegraph-Journal’s weekend fine arts and culture section, Salon. Second Look at Nothing is running in the Feb. 23 issue of Salon.

Chad Pelley’s short story was selected from more than 100 entries from across Canada by an esteemed Atlantic Canadian jury empanelled for the new prize: Giller Prize-shortlisted short story writer Alexander MacLeod; Halifax-based Atlantic Poetry Prize-winner Sue Goyette; and Universite de Moncton professor Thomas Hodd.

Chad Pelley is a multi-award-winning writer, songwriter and photographer from St. John’s, Newfoundland. His debut novel, Away from Everywhere (Breakwater Books) was released in 2009, and his follow-up, Every Little Thing (Breakwater Books) hits bookshelves in March. Recipient of the Newfoundland and Labrador Art Council’s CBC Emerging Artist of the Year award, Pelley is president of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador and runs the CanLit blog saltyink.com. See Chad Pelley’s author bio and book links on 49thShelf.com

About Salon
Published every Saturday in the Telegraph-Journal, Salon is home to some of the best arts and culture writing in Canada, honoured with both national and regional newspaper awards. As space and resources devoted to books continues to dwindle, and the CanLit landscape disappears from Canadian newspapers, Salon remains dedicated to supporting our nation’s writers and their words.

Infographic: How Interactive EBooks Are Made

January 14, 2013 / Monique

Aptara‚ a well-known company in publishing circles that specializes in content production for ebooks and apps‚ has posted an infographic on how interactive ebooks get built. Interactive eBooks combine mobile and graphic technologies to create reading experiences that go beyond just text on the page.

Book Review: Seen Reading by Julie Wilson

January 1, 2013 / Monique

My last read of 2012 and it was written by friend and colleague Julie Wilson. A lovely end to a year of fine reading.

Source: jhgordonbooks.com
Also on the Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2012 list!

Seen Reading is a collection of microfictions written by Julie alongside literary voyeur spottings from her SeenReading.com heydays.

Quote: READER: Caucasian female, late 30s, with strawberry-blond hair, wearing brown skirt and lime-green blouse with sleeves rolled and buttoned at the elbow. Sunglasses sit in lap.

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
(Anchor Canada, 2004)
p 157

On the opposite page is “Ends” a short (short) story about a couple sitting at opposite ends of a couch and one of them noticing all the little age marks of the other before noticing her own flaws. When did this happen?

The book itself is a beautiful little object worth keeping on a coffee table or bookshelf. The paper and production quality is lovely and the contents are witty, quirky and worth savouring.

Seen Reading
by Julie Wilson
Freehand Books

Craig Mod on Designing eBooks

December 26, 2012 / Monique

Craig Mod is one of the book+tech people who I follow because he thinks a lot about the future of books and storytelling and how digital reading is different and, more important, how we can better design for that experience.

40 minutes worth taking out of your day. Watch this instead of some crappy reality tv show.

Live Chat with Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl

December 14, 2012 / Monique

I joined author Annabel Lyon in a live chat today as part of the Vancouver Sun Book Club.

Annabel Lyon is the author of The Golden Mean and The Sweet Girl.
Annabel Lyon’s Books on Amazon

Here are a few highlights from the chat with Annabel Lyon on The Sweet Girl

On how The Golden Mean and The Sweet Girl work together
I was really drawn to Aristotle first and foremost, his intellect, and then I was stuck with the fact that he happened to be an ancient Greek – it was the philosophy that drew me first, the history second. But after I finished writing The Golden Mean, I knew my project was only half-finished. That was such a male book, but I wanted to look at the female world also.

Tips on writing dialogue
always, always, always read it aloud. That’s my first instruction to students. If it doesn’t sound natural aloud, it’s not going to read like natural dialogue. I also encourage students to make the dialogue do the work, and not rely on what are known as dialogue tags (she shouted menacingly, that kind of thing). Those are like stage directions, and for me they dilute the power of the line itself. And finally, in historical fiction, make sure your characters still sound like real people. I don’t think “Zounds, my liege, thou hast verily captured it” is nearly as good as “You got it,” even if you’re working with ancient characters.

In response to my question about routine in writing (whether for fiction, or in my case business writing)
Thanks for your question about routine, Monique. I’m not a big believer in the Romantic image of the writer–alone, suffering, pirate blouse in a garret somewhere, waiting for the muse. It’s a job, and I treat it like a job: dress professionally, go to the office, do your work. You wouldn’t procrastinate relentlessly if you were a lawyer or doctor or drywaller or barrista, and you shouldn’t let yourself do that as a writer, either. I like to compare creative writing to journalism, partly because my dad was a journalist, but partly also because there’s a huge overlap between the skill sets. A good non-fiction sentence and a good fiction sentence have a lot in common. A good opening to a short story and a good lede in a news story are playing on a lot of the same principles. And, similarly, I believe strongly that good creative writing can be taught, just as journalism can be taught. Inspiration, no, but craft, yes.

On factual references in the novel, in particular midwifery and stillbirths being buried with puppies
The puppies: yes, this was something I learned about on my trip to Greece. I was fortunate to travel with a university class from Carleton and U Winnipeg (I made friends with some academics, who let me tag along), and one of the things we got to do was learn about the work of Maria Liston, who teaches at Waterloo and also works at the American School in Athens. I joke that she could be the star of CSI: Ancient Athens, because her work focuses on things like bone remains. She can look at a bone and tell you what it is, how the person died, etc. She told us about her research into the remains of babies found in wells with puppies, and concluded that these were drops midwives used for babies who hadn’t survived. The puppies were one of those touches that was so bittersweet: awful, and yet you could imagine someone grieving the baby’s death and (in their belief system) wanting to send something cuddly with them, to keep them company. You can’t invent this stuff! And of course, as a fiction writer, you can’t pass it up either. I got her permission to use this.

On why I included The Sweet Girl in my Shoebox Project for Shelters package
Related to Golden Mean as a male world and The Sweet Girl as a female world, I’m participating in The Shoebox Project this year (final dropoff day is Monday!), where you put together a shoebox of gifts that are delivered to women in shelters. I felt that Pythias’ story was a good survival story, or at least showed how you need to keep your wits about you even when the world seems against you. So it’s included in my shoebox. http://www.shoeboxproject.com/

If you’re looking for a great gift this season for a reader then I highly recommend The Golden Mean and The Sweet Girl. A combo pack or singles.

The Shoebox Project

November 26, 2012 / Monique

Do you know about the Canadian not-for-profit organization called The Shoebox Project? I’m going to participate this year. The idea is that you fill a shoebox with small gifts and non-essential items, which are then distributed to women in shelters during the holidays.

This is the first time The Shoebox Project has a Vancouver initiative. And, my friend Kate has written a good blog post on how to participate. The goal for Vancouver is 100 shoeboxes to share with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Shelter and the Vancouver Rape Relief Centre.

I’m in apartment declutter mode so I certainly have a empty shoebox to fill. Plus, it doesn’t take much time, it’s fun to give during the holidays, and the dollar value is $50 so it doesn’t cost very much. If $50 sounds steep, why not buddy up then it’s only $25 for each of you.

Want more info? Check out Kate’s post above or the Shoebox Project’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TheShoeboxProjectCanada

Since the shoebox needs to have new items, if you’re a local business and have appropriate items for the shoeboxes, then please consider donating items. It doesn’t have to be for all 100 boxes, see Kate’s post for details on that.

Here’s a list of what should go in the box (approximately $50 in value):

Body or hand lotions
Makeup: mascara, lipstick and nail polish. (Please no concealers or foundations)
Toothbrush, toothpaste and floss
Chocolates, cookies, candies
Mitts, hat, scarf
Perfume
Brush, comb
Bus or subway tokens / phone card
Gift certificates (McDonald’s, Tim Horton’s, Shoppers Drug Mart, Wal-Mart, Cineplex). Please include the receipt!

* And don’t wrap the box, it has to be opened and inspected.

My declutter mode has also sussed out some cool sparkles and other decorative items I can put inside the box for padding. Off to package up my shoebox gift.

Drop off location open until Monday, December 17th:
Vancouver: 2305 McLean Drive (Mon to Fri: 8AM to 6PM; Sat: 11AM to 6PM)

BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Announced

November 6, 2012 / Monique

The longlist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction has been announced. One hundred and forty-three books were nominated for the 2013 prize of $40,000 and from that list the longlist of ten books have been selected.

The longlist is as follows and full details are included on the attached news release:

A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape
Candace Savage

A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda
Robert Fowler

A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring
Nahlah Ayed

Here We are Among the Living: A Memoir in Emails
Samantha Bernstein

Pinboy: A Memoir
George Bowering

Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age
Modris Eksteins

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
Taras Grescoe

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy
Andrew Preston

The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen
Stephen R. Bown

Walls: Travels Along the Barricades
Marcello Di Cintio

The finalists for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction will be announced December 4, 2012. The $40,000 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction is presented by the BC Achievement Foundation and will take place in Vancouver in early 2013.

Previous winners of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction include:

• Charlotte Gill for Eating Dirt (2012)
• John Vaillant for The Tiger (2011)
• Ian Brown for The Boy in the Moon (2010)
• Russell Wangersky for Burning Down the House (2009)
• Lorna Goodison for From Harvey River (2008)
• Noah Richler for This Is My Country, What’s Yours? (2007)
• Rebecca Godfrey for Under the Bridge (2006)
• Patrick Lane for There Is a Season (2005)

Penguin and Random House Merge

October 30, 2012 / Monique

Media outlets are reporting that two of the big six publishers have merged.

It’s interesting to see the coverage, in particular the Canadian opinions of the merger. What we have are two of the publishing industries biggest players forming one super publisher, Penguin Random House.

Realistically both were already owned by international media giants Bertelsmann (Random) and Pearson (Penguin). The new super publisher is “super” because it merges the publishing divisions and imprints across North America, Latin America, the UK, Australia & New Zealand, India, South Africa and operations in China and Spain. Wow.

The media reports, likely from the merger press releases, are spinning this as a fight against the dominance of Amazon. The idea being that a larger entity can play ball better with the dominant retail vendor. Even though Random House is quite advanced in terms of their digital publishing and data savvy, and Penguin is advanced in terms of innovative digital publishing and brand recognition, we still have two publishers (now one) against a data and technology machine. I’m not sure what people are expecting can be leveraged here. Nor why they think that their publishing buddy, if they are successful in playing better with Amazon are somehow going to open the door for smaller publishers.

My take is good for Penguin and Random House. I hope they don’t spin their wheels trying to consolidate operations and create efficiencies that likely don’t exist.

My concern would be for authors and agents and the diminishing diversity of established publishers because I do still believe publishers have a lot of valuable industry knowledge not yet earned by innovative publishing startups. We’ll see how merged these operations and imprints become but I suspect there will be reductions.

My advice to all publishers is to look closely at the skills Amazon has developed since the late 90s and catch up as quickly as possible. Look at your direct to consumer marketing, look at your brand experience, look at your website usability, look at your purchase funnels, go mobile, get your head around the data, stop looking at what other publishers are doing and look at the leaders in b2c retailer/ecommerce, assess your products, find your audience, find the budgets, hire the right staff and doggedly seek the winners. (I know you think you’re doing that, but if you step way back and take a look at you vs. them, you’ll see the difference.)

As Joe Wikert says, ‘Instead of just merging I’d rather see one of the big six stand up like this small publisher and say “we’ve walked on eggshells for far too long‚ it’s time for us to get serious about building that direct channel and not worry about how our existing channel partners will react.”‘ (TOC.OReilly.com)

Dennis Johnson of Melville House has a good review of the media reports on the Penguin Random House merger.

Mini TOC Vancouver: Corey Pressman

October 20, 2012 / Monique

Today is the first O’Reilly Mini Tools of Change Conference in Canada. Here’s the schedule.

First up was Corey Pressman of Exprima Media, which produces cool interactive experiences on mobile. Mostly apps at this stage. His presentation was titled “The Journey to Contentopia.” and it was an overview of where we’ve come in terms of the first hand-held tools of cavemen to the hand-held tools of today.

A Couple of Take-Aways

Make “app-y” experiences.
Content producers can be everyone, i.e., Exprima worked with coffee producers who had training videos, eco info, and instructional info on how to sip and taste. The app is available and iPads were distributed to the coffee co-ops in the growing countries who use the content to help training, inform or educate their farmers and other vendors.
If you get the app-y experience, users start thinking, “how can I produce content for that?”

Corey Pressman studied anthropology so he had a number of metaphors and parallels to share.

Humans have neurological needs that require containers for our thoughts. We moved from hand-held cave tools and using those tools to tell stories in cave paintings. We had the scribe era where we hand-crafted manuscripts. And then the printing press arrived and brought about this punctuation in the equilibrium of the crafting of printed works. The printing press brought about an abundance of printed material that was only possible through manufacturing‚ not hand-crafting.

When things go off the rails, it’s because we have abundance. In times of abundance, business opportunities abound. We get the birth of publishing.

To Publish (v) To make public.

This means we need businesses that help distribute printed works to the public.

We have another punctuation in the equilibrium of book production, and that is digital transfer. Digitization creates abundance. Abundance means that our neurological need in the container of an iPad app or ebook, is no longer a book. As Tylor Sherman talked about in his TOC workshop on HTML5 yesterday, content must be differentiated from the container.

As Corey Pressman mentions, in The Order of Books by Roger Chartier, authors don’t write books (meaning that “book” is a mechanical process), authors write content (meaning there is a separation between content and container).

If we understand that we’ve been through this process before, then it changes our perspective of how we design and develop containers for our neurological needs.

The book can’t bind the reality of it all.
The ipad can’t bind the reality of it all either.
These are containers.

HTML is what go us to where we are today in publishing. Circa 1990, content got untethered from container with the birth of the internet as we know it today. This was a pivotal moment. In anthropology, we have this with the introduction and overlap of species. And those “hopeful monsters”, the new species, survive or die away, but the ones remaining are the ones who are adaptive. They become the species of the future.

With the printing press, the 1st books were made to look like illuminated manuscripts. As we say in geek, we lacked interaction protocols for the new platform. Over time we developed metadata for those “new” manuscripts. We added page numbers, spaces between the words, footnotes, set pictures and added front and backmatter.

In anthropology, this transition period is also a beginning, it’s an incanabula period (incanabula means cradle, early days). We are still in the early days of epub and apps. We are mimicking the old creations.

Page curl on ipad
iBooks sets thumbnail images of book covers on a wooden looking shelf
Digital backgrounds are made to look like paper

Now it’s time to grow up.

We have to intentionally design: don’t just make it look like something else.

User-centered interaction design will save the world (of content) anyway. We need to think about what people are doing with these devices, not what they did with the old containers.

Curated content: comprehensiveness vs. essence, noise vs. sound

Mini TOC Vancouver Oct 19-20, 2012

October 10, 2012 / Monique

October 19 & 20

Centre for Digital Media, 685 Great Northern Way
$150 for Both Days (Workshop + Conference) or $75 for Single Day

What’s Mini TOC?
Come out to Vancouver’s first mini-TOC. O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference is an annual event held in New York every year. Just like TEDx, mini-TOC is a way to bring the same type of stellar programming from the main event to the local stage. This is the first time the event has been held in Vancouver!

Who’s It For?
Smart, engaged, bookish and techy people are going to gather on October 19 and 20 for a series of workshop events on the Friday and a full conference day on the Saturday. If you’re a publisher, author, marketer, designer, programmer or interested in the convergence of books and technology, then this conference is for you.

October 19, 9:30 am to 5 pm: Friday Workshops

Start time is 9:30-10 am for registration, coffee and networking.
Then at 10 am, there are two tracks to choose from, either Tech: HTML5/Mobile or eBook Publishing.
Lunch from 1-2 pm.
The tracks continue on in the afternoon.

When registering, make sure to pick either the Tech or eBook track. I was a bit confused by the registration process. So to clarify, if you’re keen on both days, look for the ticket types that are $150, then select either the Tech or Ebook one. If you’re interested only in the workshop day or only in the conference day, then those are the $75 ticket types, and again if you’re choosing the Friday workshop, make sure to select your preference for the Tech or Ebook track.

October 20, 9 am to 5 pm: Conference Day

Start time is 9 am for registration and coffee. The conference gets underway at 9:30 with some introductory remarks and the Keynote from Corey Pressman of Exprima Media, “From Caves to Clouds: The Journey to Contentopia”

Quote: Corey Pressman taught Anthropology for 12 years before leaving teaching to start Exprima Media, a software company dedicated to creating robust and engaging educational experiences for the web and native mobile platforms. Exprima Media is currently working with publishers such as W.W. Norton, John Wiley & Sons, and McGraw Hill to build the future of educational interactive media. Also, under Corey’s direction, Exprima Media is participating in the ‘global mobile’ revolution, developing educational mobile applications for use in less economically developed nations.

I’m super excited for the next presenter, Igor Falestski of Mobify.com, who will be talking about designing for multiple screens. Meaning, how do publishers plan for and design for iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Android devices, desktop and whatever other devices are out there.

Great presentations follow on academic publishing and mobile apps, digital publishing models, challenges with discoverability in online marketplaces, book design, legal conundrums and the advantages and disadvantages of digital reading.

To check out the full schedule:
http://oreilly.com/minitoc-vancouver.html

Registration for mini-TOC Vancouver
http://minitocvancouver.eventbrite.com/

* There is a 50% early bird discount that ends Friday.
Ticket prices right now are the discounted price: $75 for one day or $150 for both

Don’t Forget Ignite
And, stick around after 5 pm on Saturday for the reception and IGNITE presentations. In case you’re unfamiliar with Ignite, it’s a style of presentation that is flash fire and timed. The format is 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. It’s a real performance!

So Misguided