Okanagan wine, the Ogopogo, Writing Echo, and more

Hello! I’ve been meaning to send out a newsletter for weeks now, but to say it’s been busy around here is to put it mildly.

Pacific Contact Conference, Kelowna

Most of you know that I’m married to Kirk Dunn, aka The Knitting Pilgrim. Kirk does a lot of things—he writes, he performs, and his favourite thing is knitting. He is known for knitting installations both big and small (you can see his work here) and for living at the intersection of knitting and theatre. This is the origin of our play of the same name, The Knitting Pilgrim.

Last week, we went to the Pacific Contact showcase conference for the performing arts—this year in beautiful Kelowna, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley (and yes, we drank incredible wine while working our arses off, and no, we did not see the Ogopogo lake monster—boohoo).

Here is Kirk on the flight, working on his Star of Bethlehem wristers, the pattern for which he’ll get onto Ravelry soon.

These artist-presenter conferences are held across the country annually and we attend twice or three times a year in different provinces to promote and book our theatre shows.

Here is Kirk putting together our booth:

I’ll just say that other booths offer treats like chocolates and candies to attract people to their booth… Kirk insists on offering, yes, that’s right, knitting. That is the man I married. (And for the knitters in the crowd, the sweater Kirk is wearing is designed by his mentor, Kaffe Fassett, and Kirk knitted it entirely with yarn from his favourite knitting store on the planet, La Droguerie in Paris.)

We have gotten to know some lovely people while attending Pacific Contact—especially people who have helped us learn how to tour. Petrice Brett, for example, is the booking and marketing coordinator for BC’s Axis Theatre and the block booking coordinator for Pacific Contact, which means helping presenters collaborate to tour performing artists or companies. Petrice is an ambassador of all things good in the arts world in British Columbia, full of great advice, and has an incredible sense of humour which keeps us laughing when we aren’t sure where to be or who to talk to.

We always see Marcus Lundgren at these conferences. He is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Dufflebag Theatre company which tours across Canada and internationally. We met Marcus at our first artist-presenter conference in 2020 and he immediately took us under his wing, giving us advice about how to tour without losing our minds. Which, you know, is more than a little valuable.

The benefit that I could not have predicted from attending these conferences is how inspiring it is to see the extraordinary work of so many artists. The most incredible musicians, singers, actors, and dancers share their talent in showcases, and I soak it all in and get writing ideas. Stay tuned for those.

Here is a photo from one inspiring showcase of a new show called “La Marée Noire” from Quebec’s Fleuve-Espace Danse, which was performed outdoors at Kelowna’s waterfront.

The conference was great, we booked more Knitting Pilgrim shows in BC where we will tour in April 2025, and we put out feelers for our next two shows as well, Spycraft and a new Christmas play we have in development.

Here we are on our way home:

Next conference for me: The Toronto Indie Author Conference, May 4-5, 2024

I’m pumped about this one and look forward to learning a ton about independent publishing, right in my own backyard. I have been on a massive learning journey about every facet of that business and how to enter it since last summer when wonderful author Phil Dwyer told me about independent publishing at a writers’ retreat. Honestly, it was not on my radar, but now my head is exploding with projects to independently publish.

Calling all writer friends—want to attend with me? Here is the link to the website and info.

An update on Lost in France

I feel thisssss close to calling the real first draft of my next book Lost in France done. I finished the raw first draft on May 1 last year, and I was so excited, I posted this:

Post-print-up euphoria is real, people. And totally legit—it’s important to celebrate the wins, especially in writing.

My massively talented friend Ann-Marie Kerr has long said that when she produces work in the theatre, she gets a real-time echo back from a live audience when they applaud after a performance. But in TV, we don’t often get an echo (I write an episode of TV, I submit it to the producers, and it might be months or longer before it airs, and by then I have moved on. I often don’t even know when episodes air.).

And in writing fiction, well, the wait for an echo is even longer. If I write something that doesn’t get published (and we know the chances of that), it might never have an echo at all. So celebrating the wins, like typing The End, or having your partner read the draft no matter how, um, draft-y it is, is important.

As for Lost in France, after I’d printed it up, and we’d drunk a bottle of bubbly because it had taken me a year to write it (as opposed to the stupidly long time it took me to get At Last Count out into the world), I realized I needed to make changes to the manuscript.

 First, it was 124K words. Um… no. (A typical novel is 80-90K.) So I took another pass and got rid of 24K. Then, at a much more fighting-weight word count of 99.5K, I sent it to the editor I worked with on At Last Count, who I adore and whose opinion I really trust, Alex Schultz, for a developmental edit.

 He sent a few key notes back which put a look on my face like this:

It’s weirdly taken me about 6 months to process how to address one fundamental question posited in Alex’s excellent notes (and I’ve been busy writing other things during that time, most notably romance movie spec scripts for streaming, so don’t worry)…but I’m finally there, and so I am implementing that change (a sort of sweeping change, unfortunately, but that’s how the writer cookie crumbles), so I can safely say I’m coming back to a better first draft.

And, btw, in the process, the manuscript has lightened up even further to around 89K. It’s fascinating to me that I could cut about 35K words and very little plot or meaning.

Meanwhile, given Lost in France is meant to be at minimum a three-book series, I’ve realized that I need to outline and write Books 2 and 3 before delivering any of them, because their storylines and characters all depend on one another. So while I feel like a kid who got to the end of the Book 1 party and then didn’t get her loot bag, I know it’s best to park Book 1, forge on with Books 2 and 3, and make sure the story tracks across all three books before doing anything further.

So stay tuned on the progress of the Lost in France series. A fun research period is coming up which I can’t wait to share with you.

 Until next time,

 Claire