Charlotte Gill | author site & blog

Ladykiller for your iPhone

2009-06-20T15:52:00.004-06:00

Okay, so this is totally beta, which means I'm basically pulling it out of my ass and not even remotely sure about the technical soundness of this project, but now you can download some Ladykiller at Feedbooks. For iPhone, Sony Reader, Kindle, a bunch of other gizmo gadgetry probs, and, of course, good old PDF. If it works out, I might add more. If these formats don't work for your device, send me an email or leave a comment.

Last-ditch, last-chance Calgary reading

2009-06-02T11:03:00.002-06:00

The last reading of my residency is this Thursday night @ the Flywheel series. Pages in Kensington. And you know Pages always has good cheese.

Here's the line-up:

Ross Priddle
Sarah Gibbs
Helen Hajnoczky
Charlotte Gill (Markin-Flanagan Writers-in-Residence at U of C for 08-09)
and Eva Tihanyi launching her new book, Truth and Other Fictions

Thursday, June 4th

Pages Books on Kensington
1135 Kensington Road NW

7:30 pm sharp

Done*

2009-05-31T22:53:00.003-06:00

*Am non-verbal.

In the Rundle Lounge

2009-05-08T08:18:00.001-06:00

At the Banff Springs Hotel.

This guy gives me hope

2009-03-20T11:19:00.005-06:00

Michael Tamblyn, CEO of BookNet Canada, is unafraid of technology:

I can't explain this, but as an author I feel comforted by a publishing helmsman who can throw around a phrase like, "bring in someone who can hack some PHP and configure a database," and not sound like my mom trying to use the word "bling."

A fair question: "When was the last time you saw this on a publisher's website?: beta."

Via Q&Q.

In praise of dark books

2009-03-11T10:23:00.003-06:00

Thank you, Steven Beattie:

Heller has hit on the precise word to describe this demand for uplift and sympathetic characters in fiction: infantile. It's almost pathologically regressive to demand that writers, who are supposed to engage with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, should spend their time rubbing their readers' backs and cooing about how everything's going to be okay before sending them off to bed with a cup of hot cocoa. Fortunately, there are writers--Heller, Richards, Barbara Gowdy, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq--who understand this. But it's unlikely any of them will be making an appearance on Oprah's book club any time soon.

Readings aplenty - Marina Endicott

2009-03-06T14:32:00.002-07:00

Tonight @ Pages. Marina Endicott's readings are so good, you wish she could bottle and sell them.

Readings aplenty - Alberto Rios

2009-03-06T14:24:00.002-07:00

Arizona poet Alberto Rios reads at U of C next Monday. I just finished his memoir, Capirotada--a warm, funny multicultural boyhood told in clean, poetic sentences, one after another, from start to finish. Proves it's impossible to grow up with a British mum and a Mexican dad and keep a straight face.

Motherland

2009-03-03T18:19:00.005-07:00

Am jetlagged from last week's trip to London, where it become immediately evident the benefits of living in a megacity that never sleeps when the trains come every two minutes instead of every hour. Where I ate tomatoes that were red instead of that insipid pink that make me somehow think of a fishy gene-splice. Where there were a lot of purple coats and high-heeled Mary Janes going on down the sidewalks. Where friends may or may not be anticipating the high finance shitcan. Where it is possible to be called an "international" by a bald old man whose mouth makes you bless North America for its dentistry alone. Even if it means you get to live in a place where the walk to work is not a fashionable trot but some kinda deep Antarctic break-up of slush and sloshing floes.

Not all hell and handbasket

2009-02-20T08:42:00.006-07:00

Now that we're in the thick of recession, is it just me or does all this doom and gloom smell faintly like bullshit?

I am currently in love with WebEcoist, where you can see all kinds of miraculous things every day, including their 7 Wonders Series, featuring not benighted CEOs or shamed fund managers, but rocks that "sail" on their own across the desert, exotic clouds that look like UFOs, and giant oceanic sinkholes.

Contrary to current reports, is not the world still full of amazement?

Keanu reads

2009-01-23T16:23:00.002-07:00

A dude's bookshelf, including such titles as:

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Proust's Temps Perdu
The Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq (annotated with: "Oh, yeah, baby!!" he says. "When I read this, my head exploded.")

Excellent!

Upcoming in Edmonton

2009-01-19T15:38:00.003-07:00

Now that I own proper winter attire besides Gore-Tex ski pants, I am fit for my first-ever literary visit to the upper regions of Alberta. I'll be reading at the U of A campus on February 5 with Marina Endicott and Thomas Wharton.

Fakoir

2008-12-29T13:38:00.005-07:00

Sweet old couple with Holocaust memoir outed as fakers:

Again, Oprah is just a sucker for a wildly implausible story about the damn Holocaust. All the way back in 1996, Herman and his lady had a gushy segment on Oprah's show, and their tale was deemed "the greatest love story ever told." Trouble is, the romance at the heart of Rosenblat's story (which was turned into the now-canceled memoir Angel at the Fence)--about a young man in a concentration camp who was thrown an apple a day (to keep Dr. Mengele away) by a young woman across the fence; later they met in Brooklyn and fell in love--turns out to be completely fake, and everyone's sad because why would these nice old people lie? And about something so terrible. Ah well. Oprah hasn't spoken out yet, but when she does... Oh lord help us. She has been jilted one too many times, this book-loving Patron Saint of Sad, Lonely, and/or Awful People.

We just love these amazingly miraculous life-affirming redemption stories. You know the ones where the woman waits a hundred years for her lover to come back from the war, or the one where the quadriplegic blind mountain climber is rescued from snowy hypothermic death by his preternaturally intelligent dog. But life--what a pain in the ass--just doesn't actually cough up the goods. No wait, maybe we want to read novels, but we don't like that they're such a patent crock. What we like is books that are secretly fake. Everyone's sad all right.

New Year's resolutions

2008-12-29T11:41:00.003-07:00

Anyone who's patient enough to be my friend knows I can't stand the telephone. This year, my lovely neglected people, I promise to try harder to stay in touch. I'm going to indulge a little more in home cooking, and try more often to share the table with friends. We'll all be eating in a bit more, I'm assuming.

I figure it's been a strange and interesting year for Heather Mallick, who posted her resolutions at the Ceeb:

5.) I will stop buying embossed patent leather Italian Moro triangle totes and black buckled boots for a shiny life I do not in fact live.

Same goes for oversized clutch purses, ivory satin office separates and costume jewelry with grosgrain ribbon in the links. It's sad but factual: you don't have to dress up to write. Hairdressers have snaggle-tooth hair; fashion editors look pale, pimpled and wretched; it works for them.

So true. You need yoga pants, one of your husband's ming T-shirts, wool socks and a toothbrush. Though I wish I'd read this before I fell into Arnold Churgin the other day.

Happy holidays

2008-12-28T14:57:00.002-07:00

Best wishes for the new year!

And a warming blip of Euro-prop from the excellent people at DeSmog:

Xmas Eve tubage

2008-12-22T12:18:00.004-07:00

You can see me--if you look really hard--inside the Christmas Eve episode of Writer's Confessions on Bravo:

Writers' Confessions EP: 3/04 (E) 2007

Series that examines issues central to the complex craft of writing. This episode looks at acclaimed authors including William Boyd, Jonathan Safron Foer, Charlotte Gill, Nicole Krauss and Richard Ford as they discuss how writers get through the hard times, bouncing back-and-forth between ego and self-doubt, and the pros and cons of being a successful writer.

We're living without The Box of Irresistible Rays this year, which is a relief, because everybody knows there's no better incidence of writerly mortification that to witness oneself on TV.

December 24, 9:30 a.m. EST.

Pulp

2008-12-17T15:05:00.008-07:00

Over at Q & Q today, a rundown of this cheeky bit of NYT rhetoric, an author's appeal for a wedge of that U.S. bailout cheddar:

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in "being a writer" than in writing itself. "There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost," she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let's say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers' average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Too many books, people? Quill says yes, and apart from rope and hanging oneself, I think I probably do, too. My sister used to work in a bookstore where employees wore out this acronym: STLR, or Straight-To-Landfill Release.

Think of the trees, one commenter says. Which got me to wondering: exactly how many trees does it take to make a book?

One ton of virgin free-sheet paper is made using the pulp and bark from 24 trees. 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of paper or 8,333 sheets. Say the average novel uses 320 pages or 80 sheets. And is printed at the bestseller threshold of 5,000 copies.

1 book = 48 trees.

30 below

2008-12-13T12:58:00.007-07:00

No major plot thickening around here, except maybe a recent explosion in site traffic due to rampant worldwide Googling of a somewhat alarmingly named romantic device, the "Ladykiller vibrator."

Just returned from a week at the Banff Centre, where I made the acquaintance of two fantastic writers, David Chariandy and Ruth DyckFehderau, whose residencies coincided with mine. I walked to the Banff Springs Hotel and had a beer in the Rundle Lounge while staring out at the craggy, snowy view. I thought about how unreal this view is, and how staggeringly raw at the same time. I walked a lost Korean kid into town by way of the graveyard and we talked, misunderstanding each other the entire way. It was then that I started to get that unsettled, despairing feeling. The one that always arrives when I'm getting to the end of a draft.

Now, I'm back in Calgary, and are you fucking kidding me? No wonder nobody walks anywhere in this town. My eyelashes froze together this morning on the way to campus. I was also reminded that it is possible to suffer frostbite on one's ass.

Adaptation?

2008-11-27T09:19:00.007-07:00

And then the real carnage began:

Yesterday's MobyLives story about Random House freezing employee benefits was followed by the company's announcement later the same day that it's boosting its efforts to build up its ebook library and expects to have some 15,000 titles--including books by major authors such as John Updike and Harlen Coben--available within just a few months. Following Friday's MobyLives story about Barnes & Noble's historically bad third quarter earnings report, there's yesterday's Wall Street Journal story by Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the even worse earnings statement expected today from Borders Group Inc. Then there's this story from blogger Ed Champion: it seems Borders has told the Independent Publishers Group--the country's largest independent book distributor--that it won't be paying them for two months, a devastating development for IPG's client publishers, and a potential signal that Borders is on its last legs. Then, late yesterday afternoon came the report that was most stunning of them all: A Publishers Weekly alert that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors to stop acquiring new books for an indeterminate period. According to PW's Rachel Deahl, HMH's vice president of communications Josef Blumenfeld confirmed the story after it was leaked to PW, although he said it was "not a permanent change." Nonetheless Blumenfeld "hedged on when the ban might be lifted," says Deahl. Instead, he insisted "it's a symbol of doing things smarter; it's not an indicator of the end of literature."

But I do have to wonder how much of an effect all of this will have on authors, who more or less live close to their margins anyway. The other day, my lovely friend Sam said, "You know, I never felt the boom, and now I'm not feeling the crunch."

Shiver me timbers

2008-11-25T14:35:00.002-07:00

Some people say the financial crunch has hit book-town, at least in the U.S. Media outlets send people down the road, Random freezes pensions, and at least one publisher halts acquisitions. This isn't just my winter face, people. I've already started cringing.

Solid like Barack

2008-11-08T12:19:00.005-07:00

Maybe it takes the worst president in history to get people to change their minds:

I remember the conversation I had with my friend Loren McArthur when Florida was called for Gore.
"Gore's really going to clean up the environment."
"We won't be allowed to drive anymore."
"Or throw things out. Or go to the bathroom."
"You can go to the bathroom, but you have to recycle it."
"You'll have to wear a contraption that captures your waste and recycles it."
"Then you can eat that."
"Yes, you'll have to eat that. It'll be this goop, which you'll just recycle right up and eat."
"Gore Goop."
"Gore Goop. And you can put it in your car."
I remember the smug blond Republican aides outside the Dade County courthouse, grinning and chanting and pretending they were a spontaneous mob. I remember James Baker flying down to Florida and lying, lying, lying. I remember Lars-Erik Nelson, the excellent political writer for the Daily News and New York Review of Books, dying in his apartment that month of a heart attack. I always assumed it was in front of the television, watching Baker.
It was the beginning of eight bad years.

YouTube time-waster

2008-11-02T19:51:00.002-07:00

On the B.C. coast they like to log in the wackiest places. With a giant Sikorsky helicopter. I love helicopters. Even though they're bad for the environment.

This is us on a cutblock somewhere near Seymour Inlet, at the southern end of the Great Bear Rainforest. Watch a JetRanger land on a giant log:

Watch it take off:

Sad treeplanting news

2008-11-01T10:09:00.002-06:00

On Thursday a crew barge transporting treeplanters in Burke Channel near Bella Bella, BC ran into trouble when the boat's bow hatch opened unexpectedly. Several passengers were ejected into rough waters. One planter is dead and another is still missing. No names have been released until next-of-kin are notified. For those who've worked in the area, it's likely many of us will know the people involved.

I only found out about this yesterday, when my stat counter blew up with hits by those looking for more info. If you've Googled your way here for that reason, you can find coverage at Canwest and also the North-Island Gazette.

Domain sale!

2008-10-30T12:15:00.002-06:00

I don't often go for affiliate sleaze, but this is a good one. Doteasy, the totally brill (and Canadian) people who host this site, are having a 48-hour sale on domain names. You can register a new site for $4.95 USD. That also includes 1 year of ad-free hosting--a ridiculous deal for po' artists, if you ask me. Search for available domains with the thingy below. After the jump, enter coupon code: 081031AA.

Mr. Invisible

2008-10-28T08:48:00.006-06:00

As promised, here is the private investigations feature appearing in the latest Vancouver Review:

"I want to pimp you out," I tell Randy over the phone.

"Excuse me?" he asks. I can almost hear his facial expression.

"I mean want to write a story," I add. "About your job."

I know he wears James Bond's watch, the Omega Seamaster, waterproof to 300 metres, in case things get murky and deep. I know he"s allergic to barley, and that his other car is a motorcycle. At parties he tends to drift away to the cheese platter, anthropologically observing our movements. I know Randy Fiarchuk is a civilian spy. Beyond that, it's a question of imaginative glimmers.

What I have in mind is one part Hollywood noir, one part hardboiled fiction. A standup guy in a lowdown world. What I'm after, to be honest, is sleaze. People up to their armpits in secrets and lies, caught out in the white blitz of exposure.

To my surprise, he agrees. "It'll be good publicity," he says.

You have no idea, I think.

As it turns out, neither do I.

This feature is chockers with killer photography--it makes the story, really. Luckily, you can find the VR on magazine racks nationwide.