Telltale Takes Off, eh!

Yes, it's true. I've joined forces with Felix Baron and our good friends Laurie Clayton and Michael Crawley. telltale.ca rattled around my brain like loose Scrabble tiles until our webmaster, Kim Crawley, sat down to play. This is us, online.

To celebrate this momentous occasion we're having a contest. The winner will receive three autographed novels from the four authors. (I'm not being enumerate here, one of the novels was written by Laurie and Michael.)

visit:

http://telltale.ca/

to join in the fun.

It's taken a while to get to this point but it seems all four careers are taking off. So please try to swoop by the website and join in this auspicious occasion.

We're here!


http://telltale.ca

We're here!

The Women's Club is Ready to Read!

The Women's Club, by Michael Crawley and Laurie Clayton, is now available in the UK.

Be the first to catch the wave! Ride it to the crest, clutching your copy in your clever hands.

Rah! Rah! Rah!

End of Summer Reading

I'm baaaaack. And I'm baaaaaacked up, work-wise, that is.

The trip was a complete success. From the blazing hot beach days
to the fabulous meals to the big laughs with the family to the
OMG I love my Dad and my siblings to the happy birthday Mad
celebrations.

One of my favourite moments was when four of the siblings, including me,
were cavorting in the water and Roger, second youngest and perhaps the most scarred, physically and mentally, from our tortuous childhood, paddled out to join us in a rubber raft. We were going to dump him out until he protested, citing his hydrophobia, and we actually desisted (!) Instead, we 'pushed him out to sea' (in reality, a crystal clear Canadian lake) chanting, "VIKING FUNERAL,VIKING FUNERAL!"

The whole thing was shot by his girlfriend, and my Dad can be heard commenting, "I've never seen the five of them play together before."

Sadly, on my birthday, we couldn't see the meteor showers as the sky was overcast.

(Although the honest truth is that everyone was dog tired by meteor shower night and although nobody was wimpy enough to actually say it, I think
we all felt a bit relieved by the uncooperative cloud cover because we could toddle off to bed instead of sitting up all night in awe and then making the drive to and flight out of Winnipeg in a state of exhaustion.)

I had a few hours to kill in the 'Peg the next day so I dropped in on an old
highschool pal, Jordan Van Sewell, who is an amazing artiste.




It's hard to find pictures of his work I can pirate and paste on my site, but the book shown at the top of this post, The Jester's Realm contains a ton of gorgeous images.

We picked up our conversation where we'd left off nine years ago, as old friend are apt to do. Many laughs ensued. When the time came, he drove me to the airport in a typical Winnipeg torrential downpour.

I'm heavily into the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. I'd read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before my trip, and kept book number two, The Girl Who Played with Fire, for the trip. I cracked it open on the flight out, read five hundred or so pages during the week, and on the flight home I read until the plane taxied to a stop in Toronto.

I'm now reading the third and final book of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's nest.

If you haven't started reading the trilogy yet, you're in for a real treat. Start at the beginning, please, with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.



The late, alas, Stieg Larsson was a true feminist. He delivered the manuscripts for all three novels at once (freaky deaky, Tom Wolfe would say to that) and died shortly thereafter. All three books have been made into movies in Sweden and, now that the trilogy is a worldwide sensation, are about to be remade, Hollywood style. ('Cause you know the Americans have such trouble with sub-titles.)

Since I've been back I've tried to get to work only to have belated birthday celebrations getting 'in the way' day after day. But I think we're done now!

So, back to work tutoring and creating a new program for the writing school, and finishing an Amazon review of editor Sacchi Green's latest antho, the very purty, very dirty Lesbian Lust.



Oh, and any day now Michael Crawley and Laurie Clayton's exciting crime novel, The Women's Club will be flying off the printing press and into the hands of happy readers everywhere! If you can't wait (and I don't blame you) you can pre-order now!

UK

Canada

USA .



Yahoo!

Must fly!

xoxo Mad

Crime Time

It's been so long since I've posted that I almost got lost getting here. For a mad moment I thought I was Jeremy's fedora . . .

But I'm okay now. The thing is, I've been *helping* my dear friends Laurie Clayton and Michael Crawley. They've written a crime novel for Max Crimes, a new imprint from John Blake Publishing Limited, created especially for Maxim Jakubowski.



And they've been busy! See, John Blake Publishing sends the copy edited manuscript to the authors, in this case Michael and Laurie. The master document is also sent via email. The authors are asked to go through the copy edited hard copy and accept or reject changes. Then the authors make the accepted changes to the master document.
When the process is complete, the master is emailed back to John Blake Publishing.

I pale to think that at one time I thought I might be a good copy editor. Gasp.
The hard copy of The Women's Club was covered in comments and symbols. She (we know in this case the c.e. was a she) did not miss a thing. From the embarrassingly obvious (Johnny Walker should be Johnnie Walker) to the minutest detail (ellipses is done like so: space dot space dot space dot space) and beyond (an en dash is different from an em dash is different from a hyphen, doncha know.)

I do now!



Actually, poor Laurie worked on it solo for about two weeks, agonizing over each suggested change. One day she opened the emailed copy (which is called, appropriately enough, soft copy)and worked on it all day without actually ever saving it to her computer.

The work was lost. She lost her mind.

After that, Michael took over. He, having a much greater ego than she, zipped through the rest of the document accepting and rejecting and making the accepted changes to the soft copy and voila!

Once the doc had been emailed back to the publisher, it was time to get their publicity package together.

Publicity package? Huh?

That's right! Along with the usual bio and cv they were asked a number of questions pertinent to the process of publicizing their novel. And once that was done, an eight by ten glossy of each of the authors was requested.

Ye Gods!

Yesterday Laurie (fresh from the hairdresser's) and Michael (fresh from a nap) experienced their very first photo shoot. Nothin' fancy, you understand.

The digital pictures were sent off to John Blake's Head of Marketing, thus completing their latest round of work on The Women's Club.

Phew.

The front and back cover is ready. When the novel is published in the fall, and I'll make sure to let you know the date when we - er - they do, they'll receive their third and final advance.

Third? You mean? Yes, John Blake gives their authors a first advance on signing of the contract and a second when the completed manuscript is accepted. A third when the book is published.

Oh Gawd it's all so civilized. But then, from the signing of the contract to the novel's publication is about a year, so there's time to do all this stuff.

It's been great. I'm really excited. You know, for Michael and Laurie.

And don't they make a nice couple when they're all cleaned up and smiling for the camera?



'I love my editor' picture from www.gawker.com
Copy edited page of Toronto Star from http://fletter.tumblr.com