Next to home,
Anglin Lake in Northern Saskatchewan is my favourite spot on earth. Good friends have a cottage here that
they let us use whenever we’re of a mind to –which is often. This weekend we came up here so I could
do a reading at Land of the Loon Resort, a spectacularly beautiful lodge. In
return for the reading, Ted and I have three nights in a cabin overlooking the
lake and whatever meals we choose to eat at the Snail’s Pace restaurant.
Yesterday morning when I awoke, there was an almost full moon – a slight blurring on one side, suggested the moon had a way to go, but it was bright enough to illuminate life on the lake. The ice was dotted with the shacks of ice fishers but there’d been a storm, so the snow on the lake was virginal–without tracks.
Part of the reason Ted and I had chosen this weekend to come to Anglin was that the two large projects upon which I’d been working were close to completion. I was ready to start something new. When I spotted that bright and benevolent moon shining on the broad and empty expanse of the lake’s surface, I knew I’d just been bitten on the ankle by a metaphor. It was time to get cracking on Book #13.
I used to be paralyzed when I started a new book. Like Grand in Camus’s “The Plague”, I believed the first sentence had to be perfect. Unlike the luckless Grant, who spent his entire life rewriting that first sentence, I quickly learned that first sentences – even first paragraphs , first pages and first chapters are often jettisoned along the way. So I’m relaxed as I begin the novel that crept into the edges of my consciousness, just as I was finishing “The Nesting Dolls”.
About that creeping into my consciousness. Margaret Laurence said that while she was working on the Manawaka series, as she finished one book, the shadow of the next would appear unbidden in her consciousness. When she was writing “The Diviners” no shadow appeared, and she knew she would never write another major work of fiction. That knowledge was devastating for her, and I can understand why.
It seems I’ve dodged the bullet this time. The outlines of “The Roof Garden” – a working title only—have begun filling in within the last two weeks. So far I’ve needed to research two wildly disparate things: explosives and roof gardens. I’m learning. I’m writing. My husband is within easy reach. The fire is roaring. I’m grateful. So far, so good.