QUILLBLOG

The duties of an editor

The Calgary Herald looks at Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction program, which this year includes Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise. (Grant is an erstwhile Calgarian, having earned a creative writing degree from the university there.) And the piece suggests that one of the signs of a really dedicated editor is remembering a birthday. Not the author’s birthday, but her character’s.

Diane Martin was among those who helped groom Grant’s debut novel Come, Thou Tortoise. Still, the University of Calgary graduate was surprised when Martin phoned her with birthday greetings on Feb. 29. It was not Grant’s birthday, mind you, but the fictional birthday of Come, Thou Tortoise’s endearingly oddball protagonist, Audrey.

“She wanted to say happy birthday to Audrey,” says Grant, in an interview from her home in St. John’s, N. L. “She knew my character’s birthday! That, in a nutshell, was how I was treated by the people I worked with.”

Not quite up there with a three-hour phone call every day for six months, but still impressive in some way, Quillblog supposes.