January 5, 2024
Creative Goals for 2024
We woke up to 2024 with a thin layer of snow on the ground, surprise, surprise, particularly in this winter that isn’t—not that I’m complaining about that. But the snow delighted me, a fresh coat, a blank canvas, the perfect note on which to begin again. And for (at least?) the fifth year in a row, we returned to the lake to greet the year, to the edge of the land, where the waves come in again and again, where the beach is forever changing, never the same place twice.
A fresh coat, a blank canvas—these things invigorate me. I’ve spent the last three weeks laying low, staying quiet, coming back to myself after an autumn that left me quite exhausted and feeling creatively paralyzed, most uninspired. The space and quiet making me feel ready to create again, to get excited and make things. To switch up my routines as well and try some new things, to recalibrate. And to decide that the following are where my creative focus will be directed.
- Finish my novel! This is my Emily Henry-meets-Katherine Heiny-with Barbara Pym as a maiden aunt-book, which I’ve been writing since 2021, and which just might be the freshest, funniest, smartest thing I’ve ever written. It currently needs its final third radically altered, and my goal is to have the draft ready to go by the end of January.
- Focus on long-form writing (ie sign up for my Substack!): I spent all fall yearning to write an essay about why a museum takes up so much real estate in my novel, but lacked the time/focus to get it done, until I was called on to write an author talk for an event in November, and finally getting that piece on paper just felt so good. I want more of that! And I want less of the fragmentation of thinking that results from so much time spent on Instagram. AND SO…I am trading that time for a commitment to writing one fun, rich and engaging essay every month throughout 2024, and after the first three months, those essays are going to be for paid subscribers only on my Substack. (If you already subscribe to my newsletter, which is a digest of blog posts and book reviews, you’re automatically signed up for the Substack—watch your inbox for my first essay [on Danielle Steel’s Jewels, naturally!] at the end of the month!)
- Create a podcast! Coming in March. WATCH THIS SPACE!! I am excited to learn more about audio recording and editing and to have some fun conversations about books and reading.
- Begin a new book: There is a story in my head, or rather a sweeping family tree, and I think that all this might be a book I want to write (a book that inspired me to pick up Danielle Steel’s Jewels again, actually!). I want to write a saga! A saga necessitating the fact of historical fiction. Am I up to it? Can I pull it off? The only way to find out is to try….
October 15, 2022
Two Spots Left!
I’ve got TWO MORE spaces for manuscript consultations in December before I close up shop to spend the next few months on on my own writing, so if you want to work together, this is your chance!
Here’s how it works: I charge $1000 CDN plus tax for fiction manuscripts 80,000 or less. I will receive your draft by December 1 and get back to you mid-month with a detailed letter outlining my responses and a draft of your ms with my annotations, and then we’ll have a one hour online meeting to talk about how great your book is and what its possibilities are.
My approach is big picture, plot and plausibility, character development, narrative style, and I’ve worked with everything from first drafts to manuscripts already contracted for publication. My job is to make you excited to tackle the challenges of your next draft, and to use what I’ve learned from my experience as an expert reader, book reviewer, anthology editor, and author of three novels to help you take your work to the next level.
I love this work SO MUCH, and that’s partly because of the confidence with which I can say I’m really good at it.
And I’d love to work with you! Email me to claim your spot.
June 9, 2022
I want to read your fiction!
I’m just a woman…
standing in front of a mural…
…dreaming up ways to help you take your fiction W.I.P. to the next level!
I’ve got spaces available for manuscript evaluation this summer!
With decades of expert-reader experience (including as a book reviewer and anthology editor), along with everything I’ve learned (a lot!) as author of three novels, I know I can help you get your manuscript to where it needs to be.
Email me (kerryclare@gmail.com) if you’re interested! I charge $1000 CDN for a manuscript 100,000 words or less, and only accept projects where I know I can give you your money’s worth (ie for your novel about faeries, you may need to talk to someone else).
Looking forward to working with you!
April 27, 2022
The Direction of Your Dreams
I was recently writing in a journal of prompts in response to the question of what I’d like to tell my younger self about my life right now. And what I remembered was how much possibility my younger self once found in the phrase attributed to Thoreau , “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine.” Inscribing it into all kinds of scrapbooks, perhaps purchasing a poster of a sunset with it quoted.
What I’d tell my younger self: “Look! I did it.”
*
Two years after my first novel came out, I’d found myself in a creative jam. My publisher had rejected my next novel. I was proud of Mitzi Bytes, but its sales hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was feeling pretty despondent. Like this was my chance, and I’d blown it.
(Never mind that so much of things like book sales are outside an author’s control. Suspicions I’d long held were underlined in a really smart and candid recent post by novelist S.K. Ali, who wrote, “Your book sales are not yours to bear…if you love marketing, great! but a publisher has the greatest pull of all and can put a book on any list — NYT, Indie, USA Today etc — without you moving a finger. So, Sajidah, keep doing all of that stuff you do, giveaways, tiktoks, AMAs, but only because you love your readers. [Those things don’t move book sales. YOU don’t move book sales. Don’t bear that burden.]”)
It was late 2018, in response to that despondency, and feeling like I’d used up all my chances, that I decided to conjure some more. In 2019, I launched the #BacktotheBlog Movement, which led to Blog School, and also a wonderful bookselling project I’m still so proud of, the now-departed Briny Books. And then, in the midst of that summer, I signed a deal for my second novel, everything coming up Kerry after all.
*
I wonder if any advice I have to impart about going in the direction of one’s dreams would be as relevant if I hadn’t ended up defying the odds and getting that book deal in the end? I think it probably would, because my happy ending was not the end, but just another chapter (hurrah!), but experience has shown me that an author is never set, never really arrives, that writing, like everything, is a process of becoming, and the next thing is never sure. That the advice about going in the direction of one’s dreams never stops being applicable.
*
When I say, “Keep going! Don’t give up,” I’m not saying that you should keep beating your head against a brick wall. Sometimes “keep going” means doing something different, a shift, a pivot. I finished a novel in 2007 that nobody wanted to publish, and I’m glad I didn’t go to the ends of the earth in an attempt to find a publisher, because I might have found one if I’d tried hard enough, and that novel wasn’t very good.
What I’m saying is don’t stop creating things. Don’t stop being inspired. The wonderful thing about literature is that readers are so central to the form—there’s nothing passive about it. Keep reading. Keep engaging with ideas. Keep a notebook. Keep a blog. Maybe you have bigger dreams of projects you’d like to get to the end of, but in the meantime, a notebook, a blog. A quilt. A cake. A conversation. All these things are tangible and real. In keeping with the life you’ve imagined.
*
*
I started thinking about all of this in response to a recent post by Kelly Duran, whose kindness, generosity and candour as an author has been so refreshing to encounter. Her feelings about where she is two years out from her debut novel resonated with me for sure, and made think about the metrics we have to measure success. As well as the dangers on fixating where we’re going instead of noticing and appreciating where we are right now.
With writing, its always about the next thing. And while I understand that, but it’s not the way I want live my days, to measure out my life. I want to rest on my laurels. I want to breathe. I want to rest.
*
I started thinking about all this in response to the book Creative Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, by Ayun Halliday, whose comics I used to read in Bust Magazine back in the days when I was learning to call myself a feminist. I think I am the small potato I am because of Halliday’s influence, because of her example that it’s possible to live a creative life, to combine that life with motherhood. Blogging’s DIY ethos in line with her zines and off-off-Broadway plays. Her example of how exactly one goes about confidently in the direction of one’s dreams and lives the life she imagines.
Most of us are never going to hit the big time. But is that really the reason we’re doing it?
It’s not the dreams themselves, it’s the direction.
I’m thinking of yoga, and how much of a pose is about reaching for it instead of actually getting there, and how it’s really the reaching that makes the process worthwhile.
If you didn’t have to reach, what would be the point?
*
I remember thinking about my goals when I was a little bit older, too old to be penning axioms by Thoreau into pretty notebooks, and I wasn’t actually thinking about Thoreau at all. But I was plotting out my life the way one might be plotting the trajectory of a line on a graph, and it occurred to me that if I tried to be a writer, to write, that even if I never achieved such goals as a published book (or two books, or three, or a bestseller, or a prestigious prize) that I’d end up in a very different and likely more interesting place than if I hadn’t tried at all.
That it’s actually impossible to lose this game.
*
What Thoreau actually said, from Walden: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
March 18, 2022
Home Office
The desk we bought to replace a patio table we’d been using indoors at the height of WFH (about a year ago; things since then have improved and half our household now leaves the house to go to school) finally has a proper chair, thanks to Tiny Beaches Interiors, from whom we also got the desk. And I’m working here today because it’s March Break downstairs and I’m spending this morning working on Draft 2 of my new novel, which I’m billing as “Emily Henry meets Katherine Heiny, with maiden aunt Barbara Pym looking on approvingly.” It’s a lot of fun.
January 19, 2022
Book News!
I’m thrilled to share news that my third novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND, is coming Spring 2023 from Doubleday Canada. It’s a story of friendship over decades and how motherhood complicates that connection, at times drawing friends together, other times pushing them apart, and how IMPOSSIBLE it seems sometimes to find other women making different choices from one’s own. This is a story that I’ve been working on for a very long time and I’m so thrilled for the opportunity to finally share it with you!
I’m grateful to Samantha Haywood and her team at Transatlantic for their work on the deal, and to the wonderful Bhavna Chauhan for having me back for another book.
December 8, 2021
The Books of the Years
I’ve written different versions of this post a million times over the years, about the books that are launched into the world and how hard it is to tell as an author, for most of us, if our books ever really land, because while there are several metrics for taking stock of these things—awards nominations, rave reviews, billboards, celebrity endorsements, bestseller lists, appearing on the New York Times Notable list, etc—there are so many books and so few opportunities that most of us won’t end up making any of these. Which can be crazy-making, which I know from experience, and also every time I post anything like this, someone responds with an angry comment how about how I still haven’t reviewed their book yet*—one woman once did this ELEVEN YEARS after she’d sent me her book, which I’d say is a long time to hold a grudge, but then I’m an author too, so I get it.
But also, you’ve got to let that shit go.
It is very hard to release a book in Canada in 2021, and while I would have told you the same thing when I published my first book back in 2014, since then it’s only gotten harder. But one thing that’s the very same is the author’s lack of control over most of it, even if you hire a super fancy publicist.
Which is really hard, of course—that you can’t make magic happen. But also: the magic is going to happen without you, which is the very point of magic.
I’ve written this too before: the life of a book is long, and your book is out there in the world being picked up and put down, and picked up again, read, and reread, borrowed and lost, and found, and shelved, and picked up again. Even if you don’t know about it, it’s happening.
Yesterday I published 49thShelf’s Books of the Year list, a job I so enjoy being tasked with because I know how much it will mean for each and every author to have their book recognized by our humble little list. And I have another list of my very own coming up soon, with a few overlaps, another chance to shine light on the titles that I’ve loved best, but also to take stock and make sense of my own reading year. It’s really personal, mostly, and as arbitrary as any of these lists really are, in that they mean everything, and nothing at all.
Also yesterday, Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club announced their December pick, which is a big deal, this decade’s version of Oprah’s, and it just so happens to be my good pal Marissa’s latest novel Lucky, which came out in Canada in the spring, a truly life-changing opportunity for an author, and this is the kind of magic I’m talking about, a game of fortune and chance, and it’s the one thing that just can’t be plotted. I think we ought to just be grateful that they happen to anyone, and be glad we live in a world where books are still hot commodities, even if it might not be our specific books enough of the time….
To just keep going, and writing, and reading, and dreaming, and to be a part of the literary fabric of the world at all, as readers and writers alike—what a privilege that is. Most of the time, though it doesn’t pay the rent, it’s even enough.
November 26, 2021
What Comes Next
I’m so tired this week, and I’m trying to think of reasons this might be (I woke up too early on Tuesday morning because I was very excited for my husband’s birthday and also to book Iris’s vaccine, and these days I need eight hours of sleep to be a properly functioning human), and then I recall that I was also so tired this time last week, and maybe that’s just how weeks go. Last Friday I was also trying to work through a substantive change within the novel I’m revising, a change that would alter the project considerably, and when I am tired, everything is terrible, hopeless, impossible. In the week since then, I’ve come so far in figuring out what to do about the problem in my book. Last week it was a giant gaping hole, and by now it’s been filled in so much that you might not even notice that it hasn’t always been this way, and I’m thinking that waiting and patience really are the answers to so many questions. In writing, or anything, to skip over the part that’s got you stuck is usually a good strategy. You don’t have to do everything in chronological order, and become exhausted and paralyzed by the question of what comes next. (Wait and see, remember?)
The news seems dire today, not catastrophic floods of last week (climate change news has wrecked my jaw, so much clenching, and now I have to sleep with a night guard that I really ought to wear all day), but a huge increase in Covid numbers and also a brand new variant of concern, and no one knows any more about this variant than they did yesterday when I first spied the headline, the article, when I clicked, just a handful of lines, but it’s almost like a balloon now, so much speculation and opining about something still very unknown and uncertain, but way inflated, and I don’t understand why ordinary people think they have to follow the news, to refresh and refresh, I mean, when really you could check out a newspaper about two times a week and not be that much less informed. It reminds of right before I finally quit Twitter, when I logged into the site and Van Morrison was trending for penning an anti-lockdown anthem and I wish I’d never known that. Passively scrolling and refreshing Twitter does not count as engagement. Neither does refreshing your favourite newspaper’s Covid life-feed, or watching a cable news channel 24/7. What if you decided to curate your own feed, and it was the world right in front of you?
More than anything else in the world, it’s other people’s anxiety that makes me anxious, and I sure wish the media would stop so unceasingly feeding it.
I am looking forward to the holidays, the same thing that happens to me reading-wise on the verge of happening again, which is that I SCRAMBLE to get all the current year’s news releases read, and that at a certain point I thrown up my hands and say, “Fuck it!” Which always happens in early December, before I begin my holiday properly, but my reading habits are on vacation already, and I start reading the fully indulgent paperbacks that have been piling up, books of little consequence and it’s this reading off the beaten track that’s my favourite part of the holiday season, along with the Globe and Mail holiday crossword, so rich with strangeness and surprises.
It was during the Christmas holidays a year ago that I first learned about the UK variant. I always spend my holidays offline, but had opened my laptop to google Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, whose novel The Dancers Dancing had been sitting on my bookshelf since 2013, and which I was finally reading, totally obsessed with. And I remember perusing The Toronto Star online when I was done, and it was either a story about the existence of the variant, or that it had found its way to Canada, and the overwhelming sense of all this was dread, which is what I’m feeling today. (It’s also overcast, which doesn’t help).
But here’s the thing: there’s been far too much of this for far too long, I know, but we’re still here, so many of us, and real life goes on to the point where I’ve started getting frustrated at people again for swimming too fast in the slow lane, such a petty concerns. The pettiness continues, which is wonderful, really, don’t you think? That even two years into a pandemic, that everything needn’t be high stakes all the time, and I just think that adapting is what we do, and we will, and we don’t have to be afraid all the time, freaked out about what’s next, because we’ll find a way. My youngest daughter is getting vaccinated tonight—what a thing is that! And as we headed off into this new year, a miracle like that was certainly never predestined, and maybe just that not everything is always going to turn out terrible, is what I’m saying. Allow for the possibility that some things will be fine.
October 21, 2021
Back Home Again
After months of floundering around (and not so fruitfully) in the Land of First Drafts, it’s such an absolute pleasure to find myself back at work on a manuscript that has a four walls and a roof, plus windows and doors (not to mention precious editorial feedback). The imagery of a house particularly fitting between this is so much a book about homes and spaces, more rooted in place than anything else I’ve published. And while the story is fiction, many of the places where they’re set are not, homes and apartments I’ve lived in, plus the Lillian H. Smith Library’s Osborne Collection and and the Royal Ontario Museum, and the effect of becoming immersed in this project again is so completely transporting, plus kind of cozy as the autumn weather makes way for the inevitable chill.
October 21, 2021
10 Questions
The excellent Kate Jenks Landry did a Q&A with me on her inspiring blog, and you can read it right here!
