Tintern Abbey is a major tourist attraction in southeast Wales. Will and I saw directional signs for it on the highway while driving to Wales from Britain. Tour buses visit. The abbey is a ruin, so I didn’t how much there’d be to see when we went. But, I wanted to go. At university, I’d studied Wordsworth’s famous poem “Tintern Abbey.” What I’d remembered about it, was that he’d visited the abbey with his younger sister and viewed it fresh through her new eyes.

In preparation for the trip, I re-read the poem. It helped that the copy I had was in a book I’d bought years ago second-hand. The original owner had obviously used it as a student. Her scribbled note in the margins deciphered some of the poem’s meaning. Among other things, it’s a religious poem. Wordsworth talks of seeing god in nature and how this sustains him through life’s difficult, depressing and dreary times.

We went to Tintern Abby on a morning that was crystal clear blue. Few other tourists were there. The adjacent town, while focussed on tourism, was attractive, rather than commercial.  Quite a lot of the the abbey’s stonework remains and the site offers details on abbey life.

I’d love to spend a couple of days in Tintern, so I could hike up to a viewpoint overlooking the abbey and see it lit up at night.

Did seeing Tintern Abbey help me better understand Wordsworth’s poem? One thing strikes me now. The poem doesn’t mention the abbey at all, except in the title, the full wording of which is: Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abby, On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1978.

A few miles above … was the poet even viewing the abbey when he composed the poem? His images all relate to nature. I wonder if he used the abbey’s name in the poem’s title to draw a parallel: just as conventionally religious people feel God through religious buidlings, nature was Wordsworth’s church.

In Wales, we stayed near Hay-on-Wye Hay-on-Wye (pop. approx. 1,500). Sometimes called “town of books”, Hay-on-Wye has over 30 second-hand bookstores and hosts an annual international literary festival.

We were in southern Wales to hike and only made it into Hay twice, both times toward the end of the day after most of the bookstores had closed. Too bad. I could have spent hours browsing the varied shops, some general, others specializing in genres like detective fiction, natural history, maps and out-of-print childrens’ literature.

While many of the stores are in traditional buildings along the town’s main streets, the two I browsed were open-air style. Books filled shelves, protected from rain by an overhang. No one manned these stores. You simply took the book you wanted and dropped the appropriate coins into a box. The books were randomly ordered. You had to comb through old textbooks and others of minor appeal to find a classic novel or recent bestseller. This gave the store a rummage sale flavour and the prices were rummage sale, as well – about 75 cents to $2.00 per book. It wouldn’t surprise me if second-hand dealers from the rest of Britain and Ireland make regular trips to Hay-on-Wye for good deals they can sell at a markup.

My quick search of the stores’ shelves unearthed John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. I bought it to read for the rest of the trip and thoroughly enjoyed it.

On second thought, it’s probably good that I didn’t have too much shopping time in Hay-on-Wye. How would I have fit all the books I’d have wanted to buy into my suitcases?

My sister was named for the title character in R. D. Blackmore’s classic novel, Lorna Doone. For that reason, when Will and I were in Exmoor National Park this fall, I was eager to drive through Doone Country, which inspired the story.

That is, I was eager for Will to drive. This was our second day of car travel in England and I was finding it scary enough to be a passenger. Even Will, normally a confident driver, was stressed by having to drive on the left-hand side of those narrow country roads hemmed in by hedges with no shoulders.

Lorna Doone tells the tale of a family of robbers and cuthroats named Doone, who pillage and attack the peaceful villagers and farmers living near Doone Valley. The murderous leader of Doones kills the father of the novel’s narrator and hero, John. One day, John wanders into Doone Valley and meets Lorna, the niece of the robber leader. Despite her upbringing, Lorna is gentle and good and, of course, beautiful. John and Lorna fall in love, but must meet in secret. I don’t know what happens next. I tried to read the book when I was a child, but, despite the story’s dramatic appeal, couldn’t get through the dense, old-fashioned prose.

The turnoff into Doone Valley from the main road was poorly marked. We overshot it, but doubled back and found ourselves winding down the narrowest and steepest road in England that we had encountered so far. Sections with overhanging trees added “Doone-ish” atmosphere.

The whole time down, we prayed we wouldn’t encounter an approaching car. Whenever we did, one of us had to back up to the nearest road widening and squeeze tightly to the hedge to let the other vehicle could pass. We feared the hedge or passing vehicle would rip off one of our side mirrors.

In short, our feelings echoed the terror of the locals in Lorna Doone when they ventured  through the wicked Doone Valley. It was like a theme park ride.

With great caution, we edged our car across Robber’s Bridge without scraping the sides on the stone walls, continued on the road and crossed the second, equally narrow bridge to Malmstead, which consisted of a gift shop, cafe and campground. From Malmsmead, hiking trails set off along the river and up the hills dotted with sheep.

We learned there was an easier, but very steep road, out from the other direction. We drove it up to the plateau and were out of Doone Valley.

The visit has inspired me to give the novel another chance. We survived Doone Valley. After that drive, Lorna Doone’s archaic prose should be a breeze.

Will and I arrived at  Coleridge Cottage jet-lagged and exhausted from our sleepless night on the plane from Calgary to Gatwick, England. To rest up from the trip, we spent the first two nights in the Somerset countryside en route to Wales.  A visit to a nearby home once occupied by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge seemed a simple activity for our first day.

Like most of our generation, Will and I had both studied Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in school.  I’d also taken a course in Romantic Poetry at university and  was so smitten by Colerdige’s poem Kubla Khan that I still recall many lines by heart.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sacred sea.

Okay, according to Wikipedia I got the last line wrong. It’s sunless sea. Was that a Freudian slip?

My university professor portrayed Colerdige as eccentric, largely due to an opium addiction. He told us Coleridge once published a poem previously published by a fellow poet and claimed it as his own work.  This wasn’t an attempt at plagarism; Coleridge was too out-of-it to know what he was doing.

In 1797, when Coleridge went into debt, a patron/friend offered him the small cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset.

Coleridge moved into the then five-room house with his wife and son.  To save money, they grew their own vegetables and fruits in the generous back yard, which you can still wander through. My guess is that Sara Coleridge did all the farm work, while her husband went for long walks in the hills, wrote poems and entertained friends, including fellow poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.

Tragedy struck when a second son died as a result of a rubella vaccine. Coleridge left Sara to deal with her grief alone while he travelled to Europe. The family moved out of the cottage after three years, taking their furnishings with them. The British Naitonal Trust has refurnished the cottage with period pieces like ones the Coleridges might have had at the time. As you go through the house, volunteers answer questions and fill you in on the details of Coleridge’s life. Upstairs, there’s a reading room with a collection of his works you can read or listen to on audio sets and a hands-on room where you find out what it’s like to write with quill pen (not easy).  After my tour, I enjoyed my first pot of tea in Britain at the museum cafe.  I might have had a beer at the Ancient Mariner pub across the street, if I wasn’t worried the drink would put me to sleep.

Coleridge’s short stay at the cottage was a productive time. During these three years, he created some of his most famous works, including Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The only line I remember from the latter poem is one usurped by Nestle for a 1960’s T.V. commercial.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop of Quik.

Calgary has enjoyed one of its best summers in memory. Many July and August days were sunny, warm and, sometimes, hot. This made me long to be outside as much as I could. Summer here is too short to scrimp on fresh air, walking, biking, hiking, local festivals and reading in my back yard.

The problem is that this cuts into my writing time. When my children were young, this wasn’t so bad. We took our major holidays in the summer and I had most of the rest of the year to write while they were in school. Now that they’re grown up and Will and I no longer have to travel in the high season, we tend to go away during the shoulder seasons and sometimes in the winter to escape the cold. This mean that if I don’t write during the summer, I won’t accomplish much over the course of the year.

So, how have I managed to optimize my writing and outdoor time this summer? I haven’t managed very well, but, in the end,  I feel satisfied with both.

One trick was to do some writing outside. I didn’t find this ideal due to glare on the computer screen and, perhaps, not being in my usual working environment. I liked outdoor writing better for computer work that requires less focus than my novel-in-progress, such as checking e-mails and facebook, Internet research and writing blog posts like this one.

A few days, when I woke up early, instead of lying around in bed, I went to my computer to write before the day warmed up. Even on some days that I slept in, I applied the work first, play later approach. As a result, I spent some lovely mid-mornings outside, relaxing over coffee, breakfast and the newspaper. Morning is such a fresh time of day, especially in Calgary, and clouds and mosquitoes are more likely to appear as the day progresses.

As a result of forcing myself to write, I completed my target of finishing the third draft of my novel-in-progress by September. Yay. Due to a number of changes I made, I still need to do another run-through this fall before the manuscript is ready to hit the world.  I’m hoping that revision will be an easier project, with fewer distractions, like inviting weather.

This June, after our Toronto visit, Will and I flew to Moncton for two weeks of vacation that involved sightseeing, hiking, kayaking and visiting relatives in New Brunswick and Maine. One relative was my aunt Edith, who turns 96 this month.

Aunt Edith was born in England. Her family immigrated to St. Andrews, NB, when she was ten.  She grew up and met my father’s brother, Charles (Chick). They married and settled in Fairhaven, his home fishing village on Deer Island, NB.

During our conversations with Aunt Edith,  we got to talking about Will’s and my planned trip this fall to Britain. Edith mentioned that she came from a village near Haworth, home of the literary Bronte sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Some 100 years ago or more,  Edith’s aunt came into possession of an umbrella owned by Charlotte Bronte. She passed the umbrella down to Edith.

The Bronte Society operates a museum in Haworth that hosts an annual festival of women’s writing and displays costumes and other memorabilia that belonged to the famous sisters. Aunt Edith wants the museum to have Charlotte’s umbrella and has been in contact with the muesuem curator.  They know the umbrella is authentic because the museum has the knob missing from the top of the umbrella in Aunt Edith’s possession.

The museum curator was so eager to get the umbrella that he planned to go to London to pick it up from a friend of Aunt Edith’s who was travelling there. Unfortunately, someone mentioned this British customs, which refused to let the umbrella into the country because its handle was made from material that is now banned – ivory.

Aunt Edith’s grand-daughter-in-law is working on getting around the importation ban. If, one day in the future, you visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum and see, among the artifacts, Charlotte Bronte’s umbrella with an ivory handle and repaired knob, think of how that umbrella journeyed to Canada and back via Aunt Edith.

Sunday, June 3rd, the final morning of Toronto’s Bloody Words conference, offered a choice of  workshops and a play, each running for three hours. I was tempted by the workshop on Editing Your Manuscript, but I have a perpetual need to learn about social media and opted for that one. That I have much to learn was brought home for me when the session leaders listed the five social media systems they planned to discuss. I hadn’t heard of two of them.

The leaders were Donna and Alex Carrick, authors who own a publishing firm and are heavily into social media. Check out their company’s webpage. Their philosopy is to take advantage of all the free social media out there. For writers, they consider the most valuable of these to be Twitter.

I’m on Twitter, but don’t tweet a lot. During this hands-on workshop with our laptops, I sent out some requests to increase my number of Twitter followers and followees, changed my Twitter name from @Calbugs to @Susan Calder to present a more professional image and changed my wallpaper (Twitter page background) to one I found more attractive. Some day I might create a wallpaper from tile images of my book cover(s). This looks appealing on Donna’s Twitter page.

I also learned that Twitter won’t allow you to follow more than 2,000 people unless that many people are following you. Twitter prefers a balance of follower to followee. If you’re approaching the 2,000 following threshhold, go to www.justunfollow.com for a list of your followees who aren’t following you and stop following them. You can now follow people who will return the favour.

To be viewed as an active Twitterer, you need about 1,000 followers. To break through and get people coming to your blog site and reading it requires about 10,000 followers. With my 186 followers, I’m a long way from either of these threshholds.

Facebook, in Donna’s and Alex’s views, is the next most effective social media. It’s the one I’m most involved in, although I wouldn’t call myself highly involved. I check into facebook about once a day – okay, often more than that – to find out what my friends are up to, comment, ‘like’ others’ comments and post pictures.

Next in social media effectiveness is Linked-in. I’m a member, but do even less with it than with Twitter. It tends to be more useful for business networking rather than for writing. Fourth and Fifth are the two systems that were new to me: Google+ and Pinterest. Google+ is like facebook, except that you deal in circles of friends. Pinterest is a virtual cork board, where you ‘pin’ your interests in the form of visuals. This appeals to me, in an artsy way.  Alex and Donna suggested we pin thumbnails of our book covers. My son’s girlfriend said if I pinned mine, she would forward the image to her Pinterest friends.

As always, after a talk on social media, I left feeling that I’ll never catch up and that you could easily spend 24 hours a day surfing the various social media. While I was on this holiday to Bloody Words and beyond, I checked my e-mail and facebook, but not nearly as much as usual. My messages diminished because I wasn’t sending any. I enjoyed this break from social media as much as I enjoyed the rest of my holiday from my routine. It makes me wonder if a total withdrawl from social media would be freeing.  How wonderful to enjoy the silence rather than the noise of continuous communication.

I’m probably too hooked on social media to do this, but it is tempting.

Saturday afternoon at the Bloody Words conference began with a dilemna. Should I attend the panel discussion on Rapid Reads Books or attend Bloody Idol, where first pages of novels-in-progress submitted anonymously by conference attendees would be judged by a panel consisting of an agent, editor and reviewer in an American Idol format? As soon as one panelist gets bored, the page is out.

Rapid Reads turned out to be a good choice, especially since it’s something I would like to write. These are books with adult content written for low literacy readers. Some of them may be people for whom English is not a native tongue. This new genre has exploded to the point that it’s now hard to break in. Clearly, the publishers discovered an untapped niche.

I learned that the books are typically 12,000 to 20,000 words. Orca, a Rapid Reads publisher, usually prints  5,000 copies of each book. (A 1,000 print run is considered good for literary novels published by a Canadian small presses).  Orca is currently marketing these books to China, where people are eager to learn English.

Rapid Reads books are written at a grade 3-5 level, with compact character rosters (2-3 main characters). Stories must be linear; no subplots or flashbacks. Editors may ask you to change four syllable words. To appeal to the demographic, it wouldn’t hurt to make your protagonist a male, aged 30 or less.

Later in the afternoon, I ran into someone who had attended Bloody Idol. It would have been a good choice, too. She noted a consistent pattern in the submitted first pages: people tend to start with action or something else of high interest, then quickly slip into reflection, flashback or description. The judges wanted them to keep their stories rolling, although they questioned if this was coddling our need for instant grantification.

I confess that, had the weather been better in Toronto that day, I would probably have skipped one or more of the next sessions and gone for a walk through the downtown area. I could feel myself suffering from session fatigue. That’s too bad , because the next three sessions I attended contained a wealth of informative material that I didn’t fully appreciate. If you’re ever asked to speak at a conference or sit on a panel and have a choice of time slots, choose one early in the day. If you’re attending a conference, treat yourself to the occasional break. Still, I’m glad I went to the next three sessions.

The Historical Mindset featured a panel of four historical fiction writers. The moderator asked: how do you create sympathy for characters who might be reprehensible by today’s standards? ie . homophobic. A panelist answered: not everyone in a past era is the same. Avoid generalizing. Have you ever faked an historical detail? One panelist said she hadn’t faked any that would not be possible. Another said, yes, he’d had a character fall into a valuable oil well before oil had that value.

Next up was Criminal Profiling, with an academic  forensic psychiatrist who assists profilers in the Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and Calgary Police. Just wrapping my head around his job description was a challenge for the middle of an information-overloaded afternoon. The psychiatrist debunked a few myths we’ve learned from TV and reading.

1. In reality, criminals’ modus operandi (method of operation aka M.O) tends not to be consistent. Bad guys learn from experience. If something didn’t work before and landed them in jail, they’ll change their behaviour. They also learn from their jail-mates, TV and the Internet. However, signature and ritual don’t change as much as M.O.

2. Interview style isn’t usually as hard as it’s depicted on TV. Typically, you start with a soft interview, to get the subject to like and respect you, then go to the hard interview, if needed. Thus, interviews tend to be long and tailored to the subject to get the most information out of him. This makes intuitive sense, but probably doesn’t suit a 40 minute TV show.

3. Not all serial killers are psychopaths (the psyciatrist said they don’t use the term sociopath).  Psychopaths often want to take a lie detector test because they think they can con anyone. They usually fail the test when their lies show different readings than their truthful statements.

My last session of the day was a presentation on Terrorism. What is the terrorist’s real motivation? To redefine himself; to become who he wants to be and to see himself as that person.  Why does she choose a particular target? Because it’s symbolic of other targets. What is the purpose of a terrorist act? To create fright. You bomb a bridge to make people afraid of other bombings. This all seems too true, given our society’s recent terrorism experience.

I went back to my apartment to change for the evening banquet, where I wound up sitting with some of the people I’d had lunch with and others I got to meet over our the meal.  The event included speeches by the Guests of Honour that were low-key and frequently hilarious. There were awards for the Bony Pete Best Short Story, the Bony Blithe Best Light Mystery (won by my fellow “Finally a Bride” panelist, Gloria Ferris) and an award by an international group whose name escapes me for Best Crime Novel. I realized that Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table was up for that latter award when I saw him sitting a couple of tables away from me.

Then, it was home to the apartment for a night’s rest before the final morning at Bloody Words.

Saturday was the busiest day at the Bloody Words Conference that took place in Toronto from June 1-3, 2012. Sessions ran every hour from 9:00 AM to noon and, after a break for lunch, 1:30 – 5:30 PM. The evening featured a banquet with speeches and awards.

Each hour offered three choices. My first selection that morning was a panel of agents, two from Canada and two from the United States. The format was largely question and answer. One audience member asked if US agents were prejudiced against novels set in Canada. All four answered no; a good story is a good story. They also agreed that one of the first things an agent does when she receives an appealing query is to Google the writer to check out her web presence.

Next, I opted for the session with Gayle Lynds, this year’s Bloody Words International Guest of Honour. At the conference in Victoria last year I’d found it interesting and informative to listen to an author at the peak of his or her game. Lynds was no exception.

Lynds writes thrillers, which were the conference focus this year. Do you know the difference between a mystery and a thriller? Mysteries are about whodunnit, which is typically revealed as late as possible in the book. In a thriller, you usually know the bad guy right off.  Reader engagement comes from the suspense of wondering if the bad or good guy will win.

I haven’t written a thriller, but Lynd’s topic “Nine Secrets to Writing a Bestselling Thriller” are worth considering for all kinds of writing. The secrets are:

1. Characters. Larger-than-life characters that grow larger in the story. Or ordinary characters thrust into extraordinary situations who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. From the beginning, the hero is in jeopardy. You also need worthy villains who have at least one redeeming quality to make them real.

2. Know Your Dramatic Question. This gives you the spine of your book. What does the hero want? What does the vllain want? Connect those questions with OR. An example: will a mad scientist unleash a virus that destroys the human race or will an introverted bookkeeper save the world?

3. High Stakes.  With the heroine having a personal involvement.

4. Rivetting Concept. An idea so catchy that the book sells itself and makes the story exciting. Train your brain to think high concept.

5. Multiple Viewpoint. Learn the point of view rules so you can break them. With multiple viewpoints, when you come to a dialogue conflict between two characters it’s exciting for the reader, who unconsiously roots for both to get his way, even the villain.

6. Exotic Setting. But this can also be something familiar we learn more deeply about. (I wonder: does this rule and rule #1 cover just about everyone and everything?)

7. Mood and Tone. Get the story rolling before introducing flashbacks or a lot of description. Portray exciting scenes and description through the eyes of your point of view character.

8. Suspense. Compress time. Try to cut down the number of days in your story. Start the book with an action, not with weather or a character awakening from sleep.

9. Finale. A big book needs a satisfying ending. If there is violence at the start, there should be violence at the end. Tie up all key story threads. If you can’t tie up a subplot by the end, you might not need it.

Lynds added that the average writer has four unfinished novels in the drawer before his first novel is published and spends ten years writing before getting published. Is that encouraging or not? It depends where you are on the ten year and novels-in-the-drawer slope.

I continued my plan of hearing authors at their peak by following Lynds’ session with the Conversation with Linwood Barclay, the Bloody Words Canadian Guest of Honour.  While Lynds writes macro thrillers – ones with large characters and international settings – Barclay is a master of the micro or domestic thriller, that is, thrillers about ordinary people in geographically confined locales dealing with an extraordinary situations. Author Stephen King has become a big Barclay fan. King called Barclay’s most recent novel “Never Look Away” one of the best books he’s read this year.

Linwood Barclay began his writing career as a humour columnist for the Toronto Star. Not surprisingly, he’s a funny and entertaining speaker. His first four novels were a comic series. When they weren’t mega-hits, on his agent’s advice, Barclay switched to darker material. He also sets his novels in the USA partly for marketing reasons, but he was born in the US, regularly visits his US relatives and his first publishing interest came from US publishers. It made me think I should have been more strategic in my writing choices.

The interviewer asked Barclay what dark secrets in his life inform his material. Barclay answered that when he was 16 his father died. He may be working out this experience in his writing, since his stories tend to be about losing people.  Another question: Why did Barclay go from writing a series to writing stand alone books? With stand alones, you can raise the stakes for your protagonists and do worse things to them. In a series, your character can’t repeatedly have the worst day of his life (What about Jack Bauer from 24?). In a series, with each book, half the work is already done – ie. the main characters and other details are created – but you are limited in what you can do.

After Barclays’s session, I ran into two women who had attended my Thursday talk at the Pape-Danforth library. They invited me to lunch with five other writers. Conferences are about making new acquaintances as well as sessions.

When lunch was done, we all hurried back to the Hilton for an equally informative afternoon. Stay tuned.