Reading with Carrie Mac

Enjoyed reading at the festival this morning with Carrie Mac. (Thanks to Nancy Batty for lovely introduction.) Carrie read from the first novel in her Triskelia series, and then we took questions for a few minutes. It was fun being paired with her. We got to big-up Canadian inventors (the safety net for tightrope walkers and the Kevlar vest); rave about public libraries (books! All the books you can carry! And they're free!); talk about the challenges of continuing to write once it becomes a job; and muse/rant about genre pigeonholes.

Official bookseller for the festival is The Oak and Rose Book Shoppe in Moose Jaw. I wandered in there by chance yesterday. It's a small family-run bookstore. If they don't have the title you're looking for in stock, they will take orders.

After the reading I attended a tribute luncheon for Gary Hyland, the poet who started the Festival of Words, which is now in its twelfth year. Mr. Hyland has ALS and is unable to attend the festival this year, but they taped the tribute so that he could hear the speeches and the voices of his friends who read from his work. On the tape he'll also be able to hear the scraping of chairs in the packed auditorium as hundreds of people rose to give him a standing ovation. He sounds like an amazing man.

Now I'm taking a writing break, sitting outdoors with my laptop. Today the weather here is sunny and mild, and where I'm sitting overlooks a big green park with lots of trees. I'm achy but ignoring it as best I can, and the writing's going moderately well. I'm still marvelling that even though I'm writing way more slowly than I need to and than I've done in the past when under deadline, I'm able to keep more or less on track most days despite all the distractions of being in a new city every few days. I've never really been able to do that before. Amazing what a difference a few iron pills seem to be making.