The Unwritten Books

The image above is South Glen Road Bridge, by F.W. Micklethwaite, and it’s in the public domain courtesy of this website.

On Thursday, I went out to Eden Mills to attend a media event held in one of the organizer’s back yard. About a dozen of us turned up, including reporters for the Guelph Mercury. I gave a brief reading from my novel, Fathom Five and the reporters moved about, interviewing everyone. You can read the Guelph Mercury’s take on the event here.

I also saw the line-up for the Eden Mills Writers Festival on Sunday, September 7. Barring changes, I’ll be reading a section of Fathom Five in “The Common” at 3:30 p.m. with three other young adult and children’s writers, including (gulp) Dennis Lee.

No pressure, huh?

Anyway, it’s a great honour to be invited, particularly for the 20th anniversary, and if you have a free day that Sunday, I highly recommend that you come out. If you love books, if you love reading, or hearing authors read, there is no better venue. Eden Mills is an idyllic setting that manages to shoe-horn over a thousand other book lovers along their main street strip for that day. For writers and readers, there are few better ways to bolster one’s creative juices than to be surrounded by so much literary appreciation.

I have a copy of Alligator Pie that my mother read to me that I’ll be having Dennis Lee sign. Governor General award winners Kenneth Oppel and Arthur Slade will be there to promote their latest novels, along with Jane Urquhart, Robert Sawyer, and many more. There will be books to sign and, of course, thousands of books bought and sold. I’m really looking forward to it.

In other news, I’ve been working on edits for The Young City, officially due for release on January 17, 2009. Barry Jowett has been very diligent, correcting typos and those niggly bits of punctuation that drive me up the wall, and he’s made some astute comments on plot elements that need to be made clearer. I myself am pleased to have caught a couple of continuity errors that I’d missed up to now.

I just happened to find a resource that I wish I had had back when I was writing The Young City. The folks behind the Wikipedia project have gathered together an image archive, full of royalty-free, public domain images, and Toronto is well represented. Check out these historic images of Toronto in the 1880s, the decade in which The Young City is set.

Looking at these photographs and looking at my narrative, I must say that I’m glad that I found this website now to make sure that I got the setting and atmosphere basically correct (fingers crossed). Thanks to Bill Robb for pointing this site out to me.

Anyway, I’d better get back to work. I have more edits to do, and after playing catch-up to two kids, I’m very, very sleep-deprived.

From the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Best Books for Kids & Teens 2008:

Whether you’re stocking a bookshelf in a classroom, library or at home, every title in this guide has been given the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s stamp of approval.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Fathom Five has been accepted among the CCBC’s Best Books for Kids & Teens, 2008, a publication formerly known as Our Choice. I’m in good company with other excellent candidates, including Tom Henighan’s Demon in My View and Deborah Ellis and Eric Walters’ Bifocal.

The Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Our Choice publication has helped schools and libraries stock their shelves for the past several years, so this inclusion is not only an honour, but it should help sales.

I’d like to thank the jury of booksellers, librarians and authors who picked Fathom Five to be among the Class of 2008. I greatly appreciate the honour.

On Friday, I had the immense pleasure of being mobbed for autographs!

I was scheduled to read to about 51 grade 5 and 6 students at Ryerson Public School near downtown Toronto. The event was sponsored by the Deloitte consulting group, who brought in individuals to volunteer their time to foster a love of reading in inner city kids. I also was asked to lead two workshops.

I was sort of thrown in at the deep end. I made it to the school on time and was whisked to my classroom, given an introduction and basically told, “they’re yours, go to it.” Heh, no pressure. Fortunately I was prepared. I was told that the workshop was to have the students read a piece of a story and come up with their own ideas of where the scene or the story went from there. I read to them a couple of pages from The Dream King’s Daughter and they got together in groups and got to work.

I was privileged to have the help of the teachers and a number of Deloitte volunteers to keep order and keep the kids interested, and I was also privileged to have an audience of eager, interested and kind children, who took an interest in the scene, and came up with a number of great ideas as to where it could go from here. Some even wrote out enough of a story that they were able to put a “The End” at the end.

After the workshops, I read snippets from The Unwritten Girl for fifteen minutes, and answered a few questions to close the session. Deloitte provided copies of my book to the students, and I stayed to sign autographs.

I didn’t take pictures of the event itself. The volunteers from Deloitte were snapping pictures, and I’ll post them once they give me permission.

I’d like to thank Deloitte for arranging this event, and I’d like to thank the teachers for providing me with fifty-one students who made me feel very welcome. And I’d like to thank the students who made the visit such a rush. It was a very mixed group, but everyone was there to learn and they made the experience a lovely one. The kids are all right, as they say.

In other news, I’m pleased to announce that The Unwritten Girl has been chosen as one of the first books to be highlighted by the Anne Book Club run by Sullivan Entertainment, the people behind the Anne of Green Gables movie and cartoon adaptations. The idea behind this book club is to focus on books that Anne herself would have enjoyed if she were around today: classic and modern titles for kids and young adults, with a strong female lead, promoting family values and a love of reading.

On Monday, I’m going into Toronto to, among other things, be interviewed by Sullivan Entertainment for their book club website. I’m looking forward to it, and will let you know when the video is available for viewing.

Here are some more pictures from my Friday.

	Downtown Kitchener deserted in the early morning.
	The infamous wall of sound on the north end of Yonge/Dundas Square. I’ll have more to say later, but I would say here that the square appears to have survived the onslaught. Tellingly, though, most eyes of the people on the busy square were on the people around them, and not on these obnoxious billboards.
	Pity the poor man wearing a cellphone costume at the Eaton Centre
	Barbed wire on a TTC sign? Were people climbing it?

Just because blogging is a little slow here doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. Although you probably already knew that, what with the new baby and all.

Nora is doing well. She still feeds at 2, 4 and 6. Unfortunately, sometimes her two o’clock feeding lasts until four. Ouch. And, of course, with Vivian, there’s no way we can sleep while the baby sleeps. :Erin: and i are at the zombie walking stage.

And I’m still working on the latest book commission, a book about Space for a book series called Extreme Environments. The draft is due in two weeks. Fortunately, I’m well on my way to finishing that.

Things are actually picking up in the fiction side of my life. I have a few gigs to announce:

On June 16, I will be signing copies of The Unwritten Girl at Dundurn’s booth at BookExpo. The signing will take place at 2 p.m. and will be followed at 2:30 by my mother, who will be signing copies of her newly released novel, The Prism Blade I believe.

If you love books, and can make it out to BookExpo, you really should go. It’s like an injection of pure book energy into your arteries. The buzz in the air the last few years really gets my creative juices flowing. I’m really looking forward to this event, running into all the authors who will be present, and chatting with old friends.

On Sunday, September 7, I will be reading at the Young Adult tent at the Eden Mills Writers Festival and likely signing copies afterward. The festival is really a wonderful event, as this small, picturesque town really brings out the crowds, and some heavy hitting authors. People listen to books being read while sitting cross-legged on the side of a hills, or wander among the tables up the usually-quiet main street of the town. And everybody is so welcoming. Once I took refuge from the heat in what I thought to be an antique shop, but which turned out to be somebody’s home, containing a lot of old furniture. The owners didn’t mind; they’d just opened the place up for the event.

This is the second time I’ve participated at the Eden Mills festival, but the first time that I’ll be reading during one of their main Sunday events.

Finally, on Sunday, September 28, I’ll be reading from Fathom Five at the author’s tent at Kitchener’s Word on the Street. Again, this is an energizing event, seeing all of the people come to Victoria Park united with a shared love of reading. I’ve hosted or attended panels at the last two events; this is the first time that I’ll be reading there as an author.

There are other things happening as well, which I’ll report on as I get more details, but it’s looking to be a good season of promotions for The Unwritten Girl and Fathom Five, and we haven’t started working on promoting The Young City yet. Stay tuned.

Sometimes the author is the last person to know.

As you know, I’ve been busy these past couple of months, so I haven’t had a chance to chat with my publishers. But clearly my publishers have been hard at work as well, getting ready to bring the third book in my Unwritten Books series, The Young City into print. I haven’t received the edits for this story yet, but we already have a cover on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com. I’ve printed it here.

The catalogue copy is as follows:

Rosemary Watson and Peter McAllister think their future is clear: they’re finally heading off for university. They’re thinking about finding apartments, picking courses, living like adults.

But what happens when the future becomes the past? While helping Rosemary’s brother move into an apartment in Toronto, Peter and Rosemary fall into an underground river and are swept back in time, to Toronto in 1884. It’s a struggle to survive and adapt to the alien culture of the late nineteenth century. Peter and Rosemary are forced to work together, to live together, and to become the adults they’ve only been pretending to be.

As the days stranded turn to weeks, then months, Rosemary and Peter begin to wonder if they’re really ready for a future together - and what they will do if they can’t get back.

Then someone brings them a watch, powered by a battery, made in Taiwan.

James Bow is the author of two previous books in the Unwritten Books series: The Unwritten Girl and Fathom Five. A transit enthusiast, urban planner, and freelance writer, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

Again, I have to complement the design department at Dundurn for doing such a fantastic job with their covers. They really have an advantage there, thanks to Erin Mallory (who did a great job matching the style established by Jennifer Scott in the previous two covers) and her co-workers, in creating covers that help the books leap off the shelves. It perfectly captures the tone of the story, and it looks very good. They really have a good eye for this sort of thing.

And thanks to Dundurn for this wonderful pick-me-up. It’s good to know that The Young City is on its way.

I’m typing this on a train, making use of VIA Rail’s on-board wifi service as I head into Toronto to attend the Ontario Library Association Super Conference. The decision to go by train was a little last minute, but I’m glad I’m here, despite the early hours of the day. The University of Waterloo is having a snow day today, and while the roads are still fairly clear, it doesn’t look like they’re going to stay that way, and getting home on the 401 would have been a chore.

I’m here as part of CANSCAIP’s presentation of authors. I’m also blogging this on the OLA Super Conference’s website The organization of Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and performers has kindly selected a bunch of CANSCAIP authors who produced books in 2007 and given them a stage and five minutes each to talk about their book and why you might be interested in getting one for your library. Interest was so intense this year that CANSCAIP had to put names in a hat and draw out their selection at random.

This is a wonderful opportunity for all the authors, especially those from smaller presses that have to fight for attention among the bigger players, and there is going to be a lot of talent on stage.

So, if you happen to be at the Super Conference, come on out. The presentation is taking place at the Expo Theatre at the base of the 100 aisle on the Expo floor. It starts at noon and continues until about 1:40, after which authors will be on hand to autograph copies of their books. There is also a draw at the end of the presentation — a collection of the books being promoted on stage.

I’m looking forward to the conference. I enjoyed it last year, and I always enjoy Book Expo. There’s something about these conferences, like a critical mass of fun and knowledge, that just explodes on you. It reminds me that I’m lucky enough to work at this for a living and that, more importantly, I’m not alone in doing it.

I also hope to have a few spare minutes to sit down and write, a bit on The Dream King’s Daughter and a bit on a new project that needs to be done by February 18 (more on this later). And assuming that the City hasn’t called out the Army (though the last big storm was a bit of a feather in mayor David Miller’s cap — he got through it without armed personnel; Lastman didn’t), I hope to meet with my editor at Dundurn to talk a bit about The Young City, catalogue copy, and edits before this story goes to print.

More updates as I get them.

Why, it seems like only yesterday that I got news that my first ever book would be published. Today, I learned that I am now the proud father of a trilogy. The third and final (so far) book in the Unwritten Books series will be part of Dundurn’s Fall/Winter 2008-9 season.

Here’s the official e-mail:

From: “Barry Jowett” xxxxxxx@dundurn.xxx
To: “‘James Bow’” xxxxx@bowjamesbow.xxx
Subject: The Young City
Date: Fri, Jan 25 2008 11:44:13 AM GMT-05:00

Hi James,

At long last, we’ve given the go-ahead to The Young City and would like to publish it in the Fall/Winter 2008-09 season! I’m looking forward to it - I think it’s going to be a strong part of a strong Boardwalk list.

I’ll work on the contract in the next week or two and get that out to you. In the meantime, I need to prepare for a concept meeting next week and am hoping to have an initial run at the catalogue copy for that meeting. Would you be able to provide about 150-200 words about the book that we can use as the basis for the copy? Also, if you’d like to modify your author bio, let me know and we can incorporate any changes in the bio in the catalogue. (Or if you’re fine with what was used on your last book, we can go with that.)

Well, here’s what I worked out, with a lot of help from Erin:

Rosemary Watson and Peter McAllister think their future lies clear before them: they’re finally out of high school and heading off for university. They’re thinking about finding apartments, picking courses, living like adults. Everything is certain, especially the life that they’ll share together.

But what happens when the future becomes the past? While helping Rosemary’s brother move into his basement apartment in downtown Toronto, Peter and Rosemary fall into an underground river and are swept back in time, to the City of Toronto in August 1884. It’s a struggle to survive in a strange new city, to adapt to the alien culture of the late 19th century. Peter and Rosemary are forced to work together, to live together, and become the adults they’ve only been pretending to be.

And as the days stranded turn to weeks, then months, Rosemary and Peter begin to wonder if they’re really ready for a future together - and what they will do if they can’t get back.