Post Leacock: A whole new world

My Unorthodox Journey to the Published Land: 7

After miraculously winning the Leacock Medal and signing with McClelland & Stewart back in 2008, my life as a writer completely changed. For instance, shortly after the Leacock Gala in June 2008, the whole family was whisked to the Rogers Centre to enjoy the Blue Jays game from the TD Comfort Zone. My enterprising son snapped a photo of the Jumbotron at just the right moment to capture my misspelled name for posterity (Ha!). (I believe the other name next to mine was the student winner of the Leacock essay competition.) It was about 35C that day and those leather chairs were comfortable reflector ovens. We happily roasted through all nine innings.

My wife, Nancy Naylor, our sons, Ben and Calder, and I at the Jays game.

And speaking invitations started coming in. My first came shortly after my unexpected Leacock win was announced. I spoke and read at a benefit for an education not-for-profit held at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts down in Toronto’s Distillery District. I was nervous but I hope that was only obvious to those in the first several rows.

My first public reading at a Toronto fundraiser. Note that the M&S version of the novel was still a few months away so I’m reading from the self-published edition.

Over the coming few months I had talks, readings, and panels at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront (now known as the Toronto International Festival of Authors), the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Word on the Street, the Summer Leacock Festival, the Headwaters Arts Festival, the Ottawa Public Library, McMaster University, and a host of other appearances. In the archives of my blog where I record a year-by-year listing of appearances, I apparently had 16 speaking gigs in the wake of the Leacock Medal in the latter half of 2008.

Just a few of my speaking gigs in my new post-Leacock life.

I even had a day of media interviews in Montreal, another new experience for me. Here’s one of those early Montreal interviews.

And here’s another piece from the summer of 2008 about my unlikely story.

I even experimented with creating a sort of video (actually it’s just an animated PowerPoint presentation with music) to capture my unlikely journey. I didn’t know what I was doing but thought a summary might be useful, and help promote the, then imminent, release of the sequel, The High Road. But I wasn’t that happy with it—it’s a tad plodding, I think—and I don’t recall doing much with it beyond uploading it to my YouTube channel where it remains with not very many views. So I might as well inflict it on you! (The music is from the podcast version of The Best Laid Plans.)

In the summer and fall of 2008, I was just finding my feet in a very new world. Just as Angus McLintock is a fish out of water in my first novel, so was I a fish out of water in the writerly world. But I was loving every minute of it, and still do all these years later. Since then, I’ve said “yes” to almost every speaking invitation that has come my way and have done more than 100 gigs a year for much of the last decade or more. (I think 142 —or nearly three gigs per week—was my high watermark in 2014.) That’s just part of the life of a writer. You’ll sell more novels if you get out there and promote it. So I have. In fact, I was shocked to learn from a reader who painstakingly counted all of my appearances on my website, that since 2008, I’ve now given more than 1,000 book talks. If you want to sign a publishing deal for your next book, you have to sell enough copies of the current book. It’s an important, even critical, part of the writer’s role.

A dozen of the more than 1,000 book talks/appearances I’ve made since 2008

Yes, it’s true. The Leacock Medal gave me a whole new life and there is no more grateful writer in the country than I. More to come on the journey…