My novel Curva Peligrosa opens with a tornado that sweeps through the fictional town of Weed, Alberta, and drops a purple outhouse into its center. Drowsing and dreaming inside that structure is its owner, Curva Peligrosa—a curiosity and a marvel, a source of light and heat, a magnet. Adventurous, amorous, fecund, and over six feet tall, she possesses magical powers. She also has the greenest of thumbs, creating a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger.
When Curva had ridden into Weed on one of her horses two years earlier, she was like a vision from a surrealistic western with a parrot perched on each shoulder and a goat following. Curva’s glittering gold tooth flashed, and she wore turquoise rings on each finger. A rainbow-striped serape hung from one shoulder. Curva also wore a flat-brimmed black hat and carried a rifle along with six-shooters.
Before I committed myself to writing and became part of that world, I had no idea what was involved in constructing a novel. I assumed the narrative flowed easily from the writer’s pen to paper (and in those days, a lot of writing was done with a pen or pencil, though typewriters also were used). The finished product looked so pristine that I couldn’t imagine it ever being anything but perfect. Not only did narratives read as if they had come fully formed from Zeus himself, but they also were error free.
I’ve been surprised by the questions I’ve received at readings and from friends about what is considered my overt treatment of sex in my novels. All of the characters, male and female, experience complications because of it.
We writers are innocents in many ways, especially regarding the selling side of the publishing business. As long as we can stay in front of our computers, engaged in the dream world of our fictions, we don’t have to think of how these narratives will find their readers. Now that three of my novels have been published, I’ve had to make the adjustment. It hasn’t been easy.
The road to publishing a novel is a long one. When I reviewed my notes for my first published novel, Fling!, I was amazed to discover I had started working on it in 1999. When I first began, I had hoped to write a lyrical novel a la Virginia Woolf. Then my husband called my attention to a review of another Canadian writer’s book, Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman. When I read of her comic sense, “both inventive and tough,” I realized again how much I wanted to and can write in this way. But I also had resisted it because the style seemed limited to certain topics. It’s difficult to write beautifully and be funny, and I was letting my desire for beauty inhibit the progression of what later became Fling!
When I give readings of my last published novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy, I always spend time explaining that it didn’t come fully formed like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. I’d worked on parts of it for years, but eventually, the narrative solidified and attained its final shape. As is often the case for me, it took a while for the main character’s voice to fully emerge. It’s a little like a partial birth, if there is such a thing. The legs and arms came first. Eventually the rest followed.
With a poetry collection (
Readers who aren’t writers themselves tend to think that most aspects of a novel come directly from an author’s imagination. Some novels do arrive in that fashion, but most don’t. These readers don’t understand how characters can appear and then evolve during a narrative, learning and growing through their actions and the resulting events that unfold. 
Since the release of Freefall: A Divine Comedy, I’ve been asked numerous times at readings what inspires me during the process of writing a long narrative. How do I keep going in the face of years of revisions? This questioning caused me to review the notebook I kept during the writing of this novel, something I create with each book I write. The notes end up being almost as long as the work itself, allowing me to have conversations with myself about the project—what’s working and what isn’t.
Pen-L Publishing, the house that has published two of my novels (Fling! and Freefall: A Divine Comedy), has also contracted with me to write another that features Tillie Bloom, Freefall’s main character. This new work’s title is Tillie: Portraits of a Canadian Girl in Training, and I’ve been working on it for the past few months when I wasn’t making final revisions to Freefall.
During a recent interview, I was asked how I start a novel and create characters. Unfortunately, I couldn’t give this person an answer that was universal. Each book puts different demands on me and has its own particular origins. So I’ll focus here on my most recently released work, 
As a fiction writer, I often ask myself why people read novels and how can I convince them to read mine? That question occurred to me again recently when I finished a novel that had me questioning why I read fiction. The book was engaging enough. The writer was competent and had created characters that seemed believable (though that isn’t necessarily a criterion for me). There was enough tension to keep me reading in order to discover more about these lives I had immersed myself in. But the experience felt flat, and I wondered why I had spent several precious hours on something that wasn’t more satisfying.
Small presses don’t have the reputation that larger presses do of maintaining high editorial standards. But my experience with these presses, especially the one that published 
We writers are innocents in many ways, especially regarding the selling side of the publishing business. As long as we can stay in front of our computers, engaged in the dream world of our fictions, we don’t have to think of how these narratives will find their readers.
