Proofs and Awards

During the past week I spent some time looking at early layout proofs for COLD TO THE TOUCH. I think the thing is going to come out quite well, and I'm eager for the world to take a look at it. I'm quite hopeful it receives a good response from those that read it. Unfortunately, we had to lose the wonderful foreword written for it by [name redacted]. It's too long a story to get into, but at the end of the day the publisher and I agreed that forewords really don't mean all that much and certainly aren't much of a tool to increase sales (unless one lucks into a Stephen King foreword, I imagine). Thus, it was felt losing the piece would be best as none of the other books in the line will have one. I toyed with the idea of writing one myself, but I'm not all that good at doing so. Still, now that I'm typing this, I wonder...

Not much else to report from the trenches. The biggest news was Friday's announcement of the BFA long list. I have to admit, after the extremely positive reviews I received, most from the British presses, I'm a bit disappointed no one thought enough of the book to recommend it be nominated. I imagine the reason is no one thought strongly enough about it to do so, but instead, I'm going to attribute it to the fact that as a Canadian my work simply wasn't at the forefront of anyone's mind. Not that I would have even been nominated, of course — with only 100 copies of the book existing, not enough people would have read it to vote for it — but still it would have been nice to see the work pay off. Even if, you know, awards are essentially meaningless.

Still perhaps COLD TO THE TOUCH will garner some nominations one day. I suppose we'll just have to see.