The Blog Tour Experience

I’m halfway through my blog tour and I have to admit, it has been a great experience and a great way to celebrate Braco‘s nomination for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. The idea was first discussed in the writer’s group that I joined this past February. Two members, Kate Robbins and Valerie Francis, already had a well established web presence and were very familiar with the concept of the blog tour.

And yes, they had to explain it to me.

My first thought was that it would be a monster to put together, but Kate held my hand and the tour got off to a great start with her post on April 17th. Valerie and Rati Mehrotra volunteered to take a week and they encouraged me to approach novelists Paul Butler and Michelle Butler-Hallett to do the other two weeks. I was thrilled when they agreed to host.

I first met Paul in 2008 just after I had finished my BA and the Creative Writing Diploma program at Memorial University. I had worked on the basics for Braco at MUN but needed help to go further. That’s when I came across a posting in the Writer’s Alliance newsletter for his new novel writing course. The ad said he could bring our projects to life and that is precisely what he did. We worked together off and on for two years in workshops where I could also get great feedback from a number of other aspiring authors. It was the best environment to develop the novel and I doubt it would be in print today without his contribution. I don’t think I could say thank you enough, and today, I am back in his workshops working to bring my next project to life.

While I worked on Braco with Paul, I also applied for the Writer’s Alliance Mentorship Program. The program pairs established authors with emerging ones and over the course of a few months, the mentor provides one-on-one feedback on our projects. In 2009, I was paired with Michelle. I still remember meeting her at a coffee shop downtown to give her a copy of my manuscript. All five hundred pages. She picked it up and said that we had to drop it on the floor just to listen to the sound all that work makes. It was quite the thud and I imagine a few coffee cups vibrated at the other end of the shop. We had a great laugh over that.

The wonderful thing about the mentorship was the opportunity to get another perspective on the manuscript and Michelle helped me change my focus from the process of storytelling to the actual words I used to tell the story. I think we can get so caught up in developing plot, character and structure, we can forget about the words. I did a fiction writing course with Lisa Moore at MUN and she introduced me to the concept of show vs tell, but until I was able to go through the whole manuscript with Michelle, I didn’t always see it. Halfway through the mentorship, it was like a light bulb going off. Michelle completely changed the way I write the words. It’s a process that is ongoing and perhaps never-ending, but absolutely essential to building a strong story. What she did for me will follow me to the end of my writing days and I appreciate it immensely!

Kate, Valerie and Rati round out the hosts for my blog tour. All three are members of the writer’s group aptly named The Scribe Wenches. The group also includes Vicky Barbour and Melanie Martin. I’ve only known them all a short time, but their energy and commitment to writing and building their presence on the web is infectious. I’m in awe of what they’ve accomplished both with their writing and their online following and have no doubt the group will produce a number of fine books. I know I can’t thank them enough for encouraging me to start building my own online presence. They helped me put together this blog and taught me about twitter.

I finally know what a #hashtag is! 🙂

What I’ve seen from these writers over the course of this blog tour is an amazing sense of community, a willingness to help each other in any way whether it be with our stories, our words or our online presence. In a small writing community like St. John’s, this kind of support and cooperation is essential to get our voices heard across the island and around the world. We can’t do it alone.

As Jack Sheppard once said on Lost: “Last week most of us were strangers. But we’re all here now, and God knows how long we’re gonna be here. But if we can’t live together… we’re gonna die alone.”

The blog tour continues today with on Michelle’s blog Aether Punch. This month, Michelle’s short story “Lost-wax Casting” will be published in an anthology edited by Sandra McIntyre called Everything is so Political. Be sure to check it out!

Next week, the tour moves to Rati’s blog and will finish up with Valerie on May 15th when she will announce how you can win a signed copy of Braco.

🙂