To Paris and its gorgeous writing prompts everywhere you look

Paris is a city of sights and sounds and smells to stimulate writing. It’s also a place to visit my wonderful family, but I’ll share the writing bits with you here.

Not long after Kirk and I started our house swap in London, we went to Paris for 10 days. A wonderful (I mean wonderful) family member lent us his apartment, which made the whole trip possible. All he wanted was a signed copy of At Last Count. Easily done!

A few things were on the docket.

One – we wanted to do a bit of research for our play Spycraft, which is set in England and France in 1942. We discovered a wonderful museum we’d never been to before in the 14th called Musée de la Libération de Paris Général Leclerc. It’s full of really interesting things about the Resistance. Here is a typical radio used by spies (the kind our character likely would have used):

I also had the Lost in France book series (my next publishing effort) on the docket. I was working on it in two ways.

One: I’ve been vetting my semi-final manuscript for Book 1, so I could get it to the copy editor by Aug 1. The way it works these days is, an author gets a book copy edited before sending it to publishers for consideration—even before sending it to their book agent. So, while juggling all the other balls, I’ve been re-reading the manuscript at a pace of about 10 pages a day, checking for everything from timeline inconsistencies to repeated words to character development to proper punctuation. The book currently sits at 313 pages, or about 89.5K words (down from a whopping 124K words many months ago, which seems to be my process, writing very long, and then needing to trim way the heck down).

 When I first printed it up in Toronto, this was what 124K words looked like:

Needless to say, it’s now much more manageable. Still, the vetting process is one of those tasks where, if you aren’t consistent about chipping away at it, the enormity of it really catches up with you.

Two: The other work was developing the storyline for Book 2. I have been working on the pitch for Book 2, and, in a distant way, Book 3, so that if there is uptake with a publisher, I can demonstrate that the series has legs for at least 3 books, if not more.  I knew that one of the characters in Book 2, a secondary character who had been established in Book 1 but did not have a plot line of his own, was going to step up and have a B plot in Book 2. And in his plot, there was going to be a significant trip to Paris. So Kirk and I had a list of things that we were trying to see while we were in Paris so that I could describe them accurately.

 Of course Paris offers ideas at every turn. I’ll just offer one tidbit here—an experience which I hope will make it into Book 2: On Rue Domat, there is an extraordinary ice cream shop called Le Glacier De Notre Dame de Paris. Kirk is a connoisseur of ice cream, which meant we had to go. We were not disappointed.

Just being in Paris brought up so many wonderful other ideas, including my children’s book picture book series, A Raccoon in Paris. That series is one of those dreamy “One Day I’ll Make This Happen” projects, and every once in a while, it rises to the surface to wave bonjour and remind me it’s there.  

Years ago, I wrote the picture book about a shy, sweet, little Canadian raccoon who lives in a Toronto alley behind a post office, and who inadvertently mails himself first class to Paris. There, he has many adventures with a group of animals who live in the courtyard of an old Paris apartment building. The book was inspired by my experience as a Canadian kid visiting my Parisian family—feeling a bit weird, a bit, um, Canadian?, a bit not quite sophisticated enough to keep up with their fanciness. I worried my French wasn’t good enough (I went to a French immersion school in Toronto, so I’ll tell you, it was a whole lot better than the very rusty French I speak now), and I worried I wouldn’t fit in. But my French family always welcomed me with open arms, and so the book was really about being accepted, and accepting others, and enjoying our differences (while having adventures, of course).

After writing the first picture book, I was inspired to write a few more books in what I hoped would become a series. Of course I’ve written for children’s television for years, both in live action and animation, and so writing in series comes naturally. I also adapted A Raccoon in Paris to an animated TV series pitch based on the picture books. I had a publisher interested, and he was very busy, so I continued to write while I waited for the hoped-for deal to take shape. Eventually, I ended up with 10 picture books in all.

Of course you probably know what happened next—that deal fell apart, and I was left with 10 books, wondering what to do with them. My book agent tried to sell them, and although I got positive feedback about the writing, I was told that they were too long (that was several years ago, and now the trend in picture books is even shorter than it was then—no more than 500-1000 words max—and all of my books were longer than that). I was also told that they weren’t Canadian enough (taking place in Paris) and didn’t have a strong enough educational message.

Given all that, the book series sat there. Now, with the huge growth of self-publishing, and writers taking their intellectual property into their own hands, the book series is back on my mind as a possible project if I have the bandwidth and time to work on it. I can see a way to get it out into the marketplace, but I haven’t been able to cut down the word length in any substantive way to have it conform to current trends in picture books.

Being in Paris revived my dreams of writing this series. Here is the Jardin du Luxembourg for one of those inspiring places (it features prominently in one A Raccoon in Paris book).

If I were ever to write a writing craft book, it would be about catching the idea. Ideas come, not in a way that you have planned, necessarily, but they are out there, floating in the ether, and when one lands in your brain, your only responsibility is to catch it. There are lots of ways to prime your brain to be ready to receive an idea—regularly showing up at the page, for example—but you never know when one of these ideas will land right on your nose. Elizabeth Gilbert writes about this in her very good book about creativity, Big Magic.

So while I did a lot of things in Paris to research Book 2 of Lost in France, it wasn’t until after Kirk and I returned to London that I attended a wonderful free webinar offered by Diaspora Dialogues about writing picture books…and had a brainwave about A Raccoon in Paris.

The workshop leader, author Derek Mascarenhas, gave an overview of publishing picture books, and offered a simple structural formula for writing them. After taking participants through it, he gave us the time to apply this simple structure to an idea—and having A Raccoon in Paris so recently on my mind, I pulled it up and did a quick creative freefall about how to rewrite book one using Derek’s formula. And had a breakthrough in not only content but word length. So I’m feeling excited about this book again.

Sidebar: I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all the free writing webinars and online workshops that started being offered during Covid and have continued being offered since. So many excellent writing organizations like Diaspora Dialogues, The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), The Playwrights Guild of Canada, and The Authors Guild have stepped up in a major way to offer writers free professional development. I feel lucky to be able to learn from all these opportunities.

There are a lot of ideas out there, all vying for attention. Sometimes we can’t respond to them all—not this very second, at any rate. We just play in the sandbox with them for a bit, and then have to wait for another moment when we can give them our attention again.

I worked with a writer-director who, near her desk, had three cue cards that captured all her writing projects. The first card was titled “alive” and listed the projects she was working on. The second cue card was titled “dead” and listed the projects she thought had no more gas in the tank. And the third cue card was titled “napping.”  These were projects that she was still interested in but didn’t have the bandwidth for at the moment. I love this idea. It’s also way for us to give ourselves a bit of grace. We can’t do it all at once, no matter how much we want to. 

I’m happy to have a mix of alive and napping projects. That keeps it exciting.

Fun, random things

The British rail system offers all sorts of great character names for future writing projects. Today’s best name found on the East Croydon platform notice board: Wivelsfield.

Although I am not a lover of sandwiches, the M&S cheese and minced red onion is not bad.

Kirk’s Patchwork Pride Project which he designed and which was hand-knit by a whole bunch of people from across Canada and as far away as California, and which was installed at Morningside High Park Presbyterian Church for a month during Pride, is now moving to Bill's Place, 48 Centre St., Chatham, during Chatham-Kent’s Pride Fest this August 17. We’re very excited to see the project travel. Happy Pride! Check out CK Gay Pride Association for more info.

[photo by Georgia Kirkos, jorjas photography]