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I just answered the last round of the proofreader’s queries for Sorrow’s Knot. That means the book is officially done. Barring catastrophe, I won’t change a word in it from here on out.

Wanna see what it takes for me to get to that stage? Here is the stack: notebooks with two different hand-written drafts. Computer print outs of some major typed-up drafts along the way. (Think of them as drafts 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0.) And a big old stack of index cards. Plus much coffee (not pictured), doses of emergency chocolate, and a banana-coloured teapot for scale.

When I talk to creative writing classes, I often bring the equivalent stack of drafts from Plain Kate. (It’s a bit different — fewer notebooks, more print outs.) I give them a rough idea of what I changed in each draft, and why. Of how long it took, and who helped. I don’t mean this to be intimidating — I try hard not to make it intimidating. (I am self-deprecating and point out my enormous failures, as well as the tendency of editors to butter you up for a page or so before getting to the twenty-item bulleted list of things you did wrong)

I do this because I want convey to young writers what it took me so long to learn: that the difference between wanting to be a writer, and being a writer, is mostly just finishing the darn book. And finishing the darn book involves editing. No student writer I know likes editing. But most published writers have grown to love it. You learn it secret and crafty joys.

No, really. You do.

Sorrow’s Knot is forthcoming in October!

Here in Canada, Q&Q is a big deal. Sort of like Kirkus and sort of like Poets and Writers. They just did this. That's me in the yellow box.

I saw it and I just about fainted. And then I read it ... I won't quote all of someone's article, but here are some choice bits.

There is a darkness in Erin Bow's writing -- a mythical, mysterious reverence that suggests whispered tones and secrets held close. [...] She creates legends in a way not many authors do anymore, augmenting the shadowy cast of her intricate fantasy worlds with crisp dialogue, complex characters, and moments of levity. [....] If Bow can temper the bleaker elements of her tail with as much grace as she exhibited in her first novel, the world of YA fantasy may well have a new master in its midst.

*book (n.) Old English boc "book, writing, written document," traditionally from Proto-Germanic *bokiz "beech." *

One day a wall, as if of glass,
descends between us and the others
of the world.
At first a notice is posted:
"We are not sure what is happening."
Then, another.
Theories and birthdays.
Love notes and photos
of the dead. Slowly the whole dome
is papered. We stand as if in a forest.
The light shifts and dapples.

(Part of a series of short poems called "definitions.")

Dear Fellow Writers,

Try this the next time you are with a patient friend. Keep a tune in your head, something easy like “Happy Birthday,” and tap the beat of it out on the table. Have them guess what tune it is. Have them try it for you. You will be astonished at how hard it is for them to guess, how hard it is for you to guess. It seems so perfectly obvious what the tune is, when you already have it in your head.

This blindness of the tapper to the listener’s experience is called (and I love this) “the curse of knowledge.”

Fiction writers suffer from the curse, and badly. The beats we put on paper sometimes seems quite clear to us, because we already have the tune of the story in our head. Our readers, though, have a hard time catching the tune. It isn’t our fault, and it isn’t their fault. But it requires a huge leap of imagination to put ourselves in their shoes.

I think the curse is why putting our drafts aside for a while helps. It helps you hear what is actually on the page, by allowing the memory of what was in your head to dim a bit.

Apart from that, my general advice is to be generous with — let me switch metaphors — signs and blazings, handholds and footholds, maps and supplies. Be more generous than you think you need to be. Be kind.

Outside of Leningrad, digging up potatoes,
are scientists. It is 1941. The Germans closing in.
The scientists, men and women, are from Pavlovsk Station.
Their work is to save the 6000 kinds
of potatoes, the banks of edible seeds
in their glassine packets, the hundred varieties
of cherry. It will not be easy.
There are rats, and even rats are not
the hungriest. There is bread made of sawdust.
Jam made of wallpaper. For 872 days,
Leningrad folds inward like a fertilized flower.
640,000 dead, and mostly of starvation - but these
are merely numbers. In the basement of Pavlovsk Research Station,
the man in charge of rice starves to death
while leaning on the sacks of rice.
Perhaps in weariness. Perhaps in prayer.

(this was a sonnet once, but it isn't any more.)

Through the snows of March, the crows
seem sharper, their black gloss limned
against the wet newspaper
of the sky. Three times I saw one sweep by
Carrying brightness, with flight feathers spread
like an infant's fingers - gold in the beak
like a bit of fairy tale, like a fox's smile.
Bread? Cheese? On the fourth glide I realized it was only grass.
Last year's grass, dried to flaxen. They were nesting, merely,
routine as some old sorrow.
Sometimes you think the world loves you.
But no.

softer
than cherry blossom
April snow

I am going to try to put up new work regularly — ideally daily — for poetry month. I spend a lot of time these days with fiction, mostly because it’s so gosh darn long, but poetry is my first love and I still like to both read and write it.

Here’s a poem-in-draft from a new sequence of short poems called (collectively) “definitions.” They owe something to Anne Carson’s first book of poetry, Short Talks, which I recommend every chance I get. Go watch Anne read from Short Talks, people.

Religion

When a strange frost killed his beloved orchids
English eccentric Edward James
built his garden again
in concrete, upright and immune
to ice. Eventually, though,
the vines grew over it.

Look what came, everyone! It’s Kate Somente, Plain Kate in Portuguese, fresh out from Editora Rocco in Rio de Janeiro. Rejoice, Brazil!

The one thing I always check is the name of the three kittens, who in English are Raggle, Taggle, and Bone. In this edition, they are Brique, Braque, and Craque. (According to the ever-helpful Google translate, this means Brique, Braque, and Crack. Thanks, Google translate.) But thanks truly to the real translator, Waldéa Bracellos, who seems also to have translated the Silmarillion, and therefore should have no trouble with the odd objarka.

I’ve been sitting on this for way too long. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the official Sorrow’s Knot cover! Isn’t it gorgeous?

I also have an official release date: November 2013 — this November! — from Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic. Let’s start a countdown. And look! Flap copy!

At the very edge of the world live the Shadowed People. And with them live the dead.

Suspenseful, eerie, and beautifully imagined.