Eye Weekly’s Pop Fiction book club discusses John McNally’s After the Workshop, a novel about a star MFA student reduced to working as a media escort for visiting authors. Come on — you wish you’d had the idea first.
Eye Weekly’s Pop Fiction book club discusses John McNally’s After the Workshop, a novel about a star MFA student reduced to working as a media escort for visiting authors. Come on — you wish you’d had the idea first.
Thanks to Open Book Toronto for pointing out the Canadian Writers in Person archive, videos of notable Canuck writers reading at York U. There’s some great stuff here. Where was this kind of thing when I was in university?
The Star’s always interesting Map of the Week looks at where military recruits come from in Ontario. This would be interesting to look at on a national scale, but apparently there are technical problems involved in figuring that one out….
Regular force enrollment is very low in the Golden Horseshoe, with very few exceptions. Ontario has 13 postal areas with a population over 20,000 where nobody at all joined the Regular Force in 2007 – 12 are in the GTA and Hamilton.


Over at the Raincoast blog, Dan Wagstaff is running the 5 Things Vancouver travel series — a sort of miniguide to Vancouver for Olympic tourists and visiting terrorists. It kicks off with an entry from me, in which I politely don’t express my feelings about the Olympics.
(Image from cfarivar’s Flickr stream.)
I wasn’t sure about this video until the whale showed up. (Via Zunior.)
This is pretty cool: One of my favourite bands, Handsome Furs, are doing a video tour of Asia and posting their updates on CNN’s website. Is CNN suddenly becoming relevant again? (Via NXEW.)
Whoa! The Post reports that Lynn Henry has left Anansi to become publishing director at Doubleday.
Oh, Taddle Creek, if I wasn’t already married….
Pity the poor en dash. Never has a piece of punctuation been so noble and yet so misunderstood at the same time. Back in the day, when typesetters ruled magazine design, the en dash had power; the en dash had cachet. Since the dawn of desktop publishing, however, it seems anyone who can click a mouse fancies himself a designer. Unfortunately, these would-be art directors know little of the history of typography and even less in the ways of properly typesetting a page. Ironically, they also know very little about their own computer keyboard and its nuances. As a result, age-old practices, such as the use of the en dash, a piece of punctuation not granted its own special key, have fallen by the wayside.
The CBC is reviewing the icopyright issue and will try to clarify things shortly. In the meantime, bloggers can link and excerpt like normal.
Previously:
I’ve never seen an episode of Lost, but I’m going to trust George Murray on this one. Because he gets ornery if you start asking questions.

The Globe and Mail posted a Q&A between readers and some hard-core coffee types, including a couple of experts from Cafe Artigiano, the place I hit to get ready for work. It’s nice to see people still care about quality and getting the little things right. Trust me — you notice it in the taste.
(Image from tonx’s Flickr stream.)
I just returned from a booksellers’ fair in Victoria, where I met all sorts of interesting people whose passion for books humbled me. I also had the opportunity to talk to some other writers about what they’ve been working on, and I’m really looking forward to reading their forthcoming books. In no particular order, here are some of the ones I’m excited about:
Todd Babiak on autobiographical fiction.
My new novel features a protagonist whose father burns up in his sedan. At first it felt wrong to include it in the novel, as though I were cheapening the final months of my father’s life. I took it out, and then I put it back in.
6. $9.99 is not the only price. If publishers start having more say in the sale price of books, there is always one thing they can’t control: what the customer is willing to pay. Right now, we sell a lot of books at $9.99, even more below $9.99, and a fair number above $9.99 as well. That’s unlikely to change. The right price is one that allows a retailer to eke out a living, the publisher to cover costs and pay the author, and the reader to feel that they have enough change left over to buy another book soon. We’ll get there.
I was getting hammered by spam, so I turned the comment approval option back on until the deluge passes. Feel free to comment like normally, and I’ll approve the real comments — and interesting spam — as soon as I see them.