Most writers will tell you that finding a compatible editor is crucial and a major key to success. In debates about electronic publishing, someone inevitably claims that authors will go directly to the electronic retailer in the future, bypassing the whole soon-to-be-obsolete editorial process. (Shudder). Editor Carole Baron responds to this oft-repeated supposition in The Huffington Post:

I recently had a conversation with someone I think should know better; a respected published writer. We are all in a heated conversation about digital and electronic books and the subject of the writer going electronic directly with his or her book came up, bypassing the editorial process in a traditional publishing setting. The writer said: “Why not? There is no editing anymore.” Not only is that not true, but it certainly doesn’t understand the complex role of the editor in a publishing house.

True, with the economies of today, there is so much for the editor to do and the workload is so great, that in some cases, writers might get short changed. But in general, the editor today is working very hard, late at night and on the weekends, trying to get the best possible book from the writer.

Baron goes on to list 10 things an editor does for a writer, a helpful reminder to those who might dismiss the process in the future.

On Feb. 4, Ben McNally hosted author, adventurer, and semi-pro kayaker Jon Turk at the Dora Keogh in Toronto’s Danforth neighbourhood as part of his series The Fine Print. Turk was there to talk about his new book, The Raven’s Gift (St. Martin’s Press/H.B. Fenn and Company).

Turk regales the audience with tales of foiling a rifle-toting local with only a snowmobile, a cigarette, and a steely gaze. (All photos courtesy of The Fine Print/Ben McNally Books)

H.B. Fenn’s Tom Best, The Fine Print’s Holly Kent, Rupert McNally of Ben McNally Books, and Turk do an impromptu impression of Jean Chrétien’s famous “kitchen cabinet.” (I think Rupert’s playing Roy Romanow…)

Terry Pratchett, U.K. author of the wildly popular Discworld series, says that special “tribunals” should be set up to allow people suffering serious medical conditions to seek help in terminating their own lives. Assisted suicide is currently illegal in the U.K., but Pratchett, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, has offered himself as a “test case” for the kind of tribunal he is proposing, which Sky News says “would include a legal expert in family affairs and a doctor who had dealt with serious, long-term illness.”

Pratchett is to deliver the Richard Dimbleby Lecture tonight, in which he will argue that being granted permission to end his life would make each day more precious. The Telegraph quotes Pratchett:

If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds.

I certainly do not expect or assume that every GP or hospital practitioner would be prepared to assist death by arrangement, even in the face of overwhelming medical evidence. That is their choice. Choice is very important in this matter.

But there will be some probably older, probably wiser, who will understand.

Pratchett may be right about that. According to the same Telegraph article, 75% of those surveyed in a recent poll approved of making assisted suicide legal.

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio’s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

• James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, fought to keep a gay subplot in the novel.

• Cormac McCarthy talks about the film version of The Road in the Wall Street Journal and why you won’t find a signed copy of the book

• Remember when Scholastic tried to censor a tween book because one character had two moms? Mobylives reports that parent fanatics are at it again, this time trying to ban the entire Scholastic catalogue

• Dalton Higgins is this month’s writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto.

• The Telegraph posted their definitive Books of the Noughties. Nothing very surprising – White Teeth, Atonement, Brick Lane -  Dave Eggers’s memoir comes in fourth, right behind good ol’ Dan Brown, Obama’s memoir, and bien sur, Harry Potter at number one. Sigh.

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Google announces that its online e-book service, known as Google Editions, will launch sometime in the first half of 2010. According to a report on CNET, Google will take a 37% cut on titles sold through its own website; for books sold through a third party – such as Amazon – the publisher would get a mere 45%
• Delivering the keynote at Frankfurt’s TOC conference, Cory Doctorow says that the publishing industry is bent on destroying itself through a restrictive approach to copyright
• The jurors for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize are: Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips

Earlier this week, The Sunday Times ran a lengthy interview with novelist Sebastian Faulks in which he had this to say about the Koran:

“It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.

“There is also the barrenness of the message. I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy. If you look again at those books of the law, Leviticus or Deuteronomy, there’s a lot about who you are allowed to sleep with, and if a man had lost his testicles he wouldn’t enter into the presence of God, that is just terrible. But the great thing about the Old Testament is that it does have these incredible stories. Of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer.

“With the Koran there are no stories. And it has no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life. It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough — you’ll burn for ever.’ That’s basically the message of the book.”

For some odd reason, people felt this might be a tad controversial, so Faulks has now written a slightly more conciliatory essay in The Telegraph:

While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.

It was never my intention to offend my Muslim friends or readers, and if you read my novel I think you will see how I have shown the positive effects of the Koran on a kind and typical Muslim family.

Awww…

Meanwhile, Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, writes that Faulks had it wrong to begin with:

The Qur’an is neither a bedside read nor a Booker entry – I won’t be packing it in my hand luggage before I go to Tunisia this weekend. It is, for Muslims, a blueprint for everyday life, with guidance on subjects such as divorce, the day of judgment and everything in between. So if it reads like a rulebook, that’s because it is.

The Qur’an was not written in English, nor is it normally read in English, so of course the scriptures lose something in translation. Should Faulks want to fully appreciate and experience the Qur’an, he should brush up on his classical Arabic. Most, but not all, of the Qur’an’s stories are based on tales from the Old Testament, so if he thinks the Qur’an is a bit rubbish at capturing the imagination, then it follows the Bible is a bit of a let-down too.

Sponsored Blog Post: Canadian connections found in The Time Traveler’s Wife include actors Rachel McAdams as Claire Tabshire and actress Fiona Reid as Lucille Abshire; film locations in Toronto, Hamilton and Scugog Township; and one of the soundtrack songs is ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, recorded by Canadian band Broken Social Scene.

Currently The Time Traveler’s Wife is number one in Amazon.ca’s ranking of literature and fiction, number two in Amazon.ca’s ranking of science fiction and fantasy and is the number nine bestseller overall on Amazon.ca as well as one the Globe and Mail’s top 10 trade paperback bestsellers in Canada.

From The Guardian:

Residents of Forks, Washington State, are still stunned by what a piece of assiduous Googling from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has unleashed on their town. Looking for the US’s rainiest location in which to set her vampire series, she lighted upon the small town, population 3,221.

Fans of the books and film, based around Bella Swan and her dreamy vampire love interest Edward Cullen, began pouring into Forks. Today hundreds visit the town daily; its visitor count for June was more than 8,000 – around the number who used to come in a year. Restaurants have Twilight-themed menus with dishes such as Bellasagne, shops sell Twilight items, and tours cover the books’ locations.

Sorta like when all those fans of A Complicated Kindness swarmed Steinbach, Manitoba.

Canada’s beleaguered literary magazines, which could see significant funding cuts as early as April 2010, could be faced with further cuts as a result of an ongoing strategic review of the Canada Council for the Arts. In a recent post, magazines expert and blogger D.B. Scott speculated that the council may be asked to reallocate up to 5% of its budget – about $9 million – and suggests that one of the likely victims could be low-circulation literary and cultural magazines.

The government-mandated review requires the council to identify the least efficient or redundant aspects of its spending, which will then be reallocated either within the department or to another government agency.

It’s still too early to be certain where those cuts will be made, but Scott suggests that the current administration has already expressed its low opinion of small art and literary magazines. When the Department of Canadian Heritage underwent a similar review earlier this year, it resulted in the new Canadian Periodical Fund, which shuts out any publication with an annual circulation of less than 5,000 – a figure that effectively excludes just about every literary magazine in the country. (See Q&Q’s past coverage.)

For his part, Magazines Canada CEO Mark Jamison remains optimistic that the magazine sector will be untouched by any future Canada Council cuts. “My assumption is that the funding for art and literary magazines should be relatively secure,” Jamison told Quillblog. Jamison pointed out that the council partakes in “very careful and robust” reviews of its spending each year, and that its program for litmags is anything but redundant. “It is not a program that is anything close to undersubscribed, and the demand is far greater than [the council] can fulfill.”

As for the new Canadian Periodical Fund, Jamison told Quillblog that Magazines Canada is still lobbying the government to make exceptions for publications that have low circulation but that are culturally significant. “I remain optimistic that a flexibility will be applied to the issues.”