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Father’s Day Special!
Don’t just give something to your dad, kill three birds with one stone and give something to me and mine!
Like Sir Walter Scott, Louis L’Amour and … Penthouse Forum?!? Clearly, opinions vary!
Setting the Black Grass promo train in motion (again)
Of course it’s tempting to blame the worldwide pandemic for the lack of a real push on promoting Black Grass; cancelled book fairs and television appearances are a real thing.
I can also point to my darling daughter, pictured with me above. Though there are currently two of us at home to take care of her, she still demands a fair amount of attention (which I gladly provide, make no mistake about that!).
“In the spirit of Walter Scott, Black Grass offers humour, horror, passion, satire, and insight.”
And there is my related work as a “daddy blogger” over at PapaZesser.ca, not to mention the time I have spent figuring out how to maintain and remodel this (apparently) rather kludged WordPress site.
Even so, despite the exceptional circumstances of our times and my own complicated situations, I have not done enough in terms of doing what a publisher is supposed to do: sell books!
“The way Susan felt just before she had the first intercourse, is the way you feel about it when you want it. I wondered, how does Carl know how a woman would feel in that moment? He must have been a woman in a prior life.”
After all, the stories in The Old Man’s Last Sauna range from good to bloody exceptional, and Black Grass is a genre novel that transcends genre, a story that will surprise and delight and excite discerning readers. So I want people to buy them!
But there is, as I have been learning (too slowly), more to publishing than editing copy, laying out the interior and (second time smart!) hiring a real artist, Magdalene Carson, to create a cover. No, a publisher has to promote the books they publish — they need to sell the books they publish.
“The poker game was a tour de force, and I say this as an experienced player.”
So, without further ado, if you have been wondering whether Black Grass is worth your time (and money), I have written about how and why Black Grass inspired me to start this company and, perhaps better still, we have finally posted the opinions of 15 advance (or beta) readers of Black Grass here.
Does Black Grass appeal to English Professors and receptionists? Does it resemble the works of Sir Walter Scoot or Louis L’Amour? And is Carl Dow a sexist, or was he a woman in a previous life?
“A delicate balance of sex, violence and history that should take the book far.”
Why not find out for yourself?
Click here to find out what 15 readers of a draft version of the novel thought!
Black Grass – a novel like none you’ve read before! Black Grass on the pod(cast)
Carl interviewed by Peter Anthony Holder
We at the BumblePuppy Press were delighted when Carl‘s friend and colleague, Randy Ray, told us he wanted to put his skills at as a publicist to work for us.
Last week, Randy got down to it while on vacation in Florida (what a world!) and we are seeing the fruits of his labours already! Carl was interviewed on Peter Anthony Holder’s Montreal-based podcast, The Stuph File Program.
You can read Carl’s thoughts about the interview here, or you can just listen to interview by clicking below.
The full program can be found at The Stuph File. Look for program #0551.
And of course, Black Grass is available in print and e-book editions from your favourite online retailer. And autographed copies can be ordered directly from us.
Why radio is harder than television
Thoughts on my first interview about Black Grass
Once, when having a few beers with the department head of a Journalism school, he said to me: “I’ve experienced you more than once being interviewed on radio and television in both English and French. On television you’re always relaxed, but on radio you seem nervous, at least for the first few minutes. You’d think the opposite would be true. Why is that?”
I thought for a moment then I said, “We all use body language when we speak. I’m sure that If I sat on my hands I’d be tongue tied. Therefore, on television, I’m most always sure that the camera is at least on my upper body and therefore is transmitting my body language along with my words. On radio that luxury is absent, Therefore it takes me a few minutes to channel all of my body language into my voice.”
Recently I was interviewed Peter Anthony Holder for his Podcast. The Stuph File. I spoke about my newly published novel Black Grass.
I haven’t been interviewed on radio for more than 50 years. I leave it to you to judge if I made the grade. You can listen to the interview below.
(And of course, don’t forget to buy the book! It is available in both paper and e-book editions through most online vendors, and autographed copies can be ordered directly from my publisher here!)
Black Grass is now available
Now available in paper and ebook editions!
In 1866, about 200 kilometres south of what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, Susannah Ross was running for her life, and running out of time.
Black Grass is the extraordinary first novel by Carl Dow (author of The Old Man’s Last Sauna). Leavened with a wry sense of humour, Black Grass is a riveting adventure, a grand romance in the classic style (with a twist!), and a gripping war story set on the borders of what would become the Canadian prairies and the American plains.
Black Grass is coming
Things move slow when one has to juggle a day-job and a relationship with the responsibility of running a small press.
But things do move, and it is with great pleasure that I can now say (for real!), that our next book — Carl Dow’s Black Grass, a novel that smoothly combines adventure, historical, romance and western genres — is in production and will (yes, for real!) be published next year.
Another reason to vote NDP!
Joel Harden, NDP Ottawa Centre candidate, rescues
senior trapped in Beaver Barracks bathtub for 22 hours
Carl Dow, photographed at Ottawa’s Indy Author Book Fair, December 9, 2017. On Monday 19 March, 2018, Carl Dow of Ottawa’s Centretown apartment complex known as Beaver Barracks, and author of The Old Man’s Last Sauna and the forthcoming novel, Black Grass and Wildflowers: The Women Who Made McCord Chronicle, on which he is currently hard at work, was taking a shower at about 2 PM. He tripped, fell back into the half-filled tub, and couldn’t get out.
Mr. Dow, who will celebrate his 85th birthday July 15, has had five operations on his right hip. His left hip got jealous so they cut a deal, wherein the latter would have the pleasure of an operation – but only one. So far the bargain has been kept.
Here following is the story of the bathroom adventure in Mr. Dow’s own words.
I had an appointment with my family doctor, Mary Comerton, after having had bronchitis in December and then over the New Year was hospitalized for four days with pneumonia. I was thoroughly x-rayed and passed with flying colours. (For example, all my internal organs have been cleared. When I had my bone density checked it was declared as good as a male in his 20s.) But it had been more than three months since I was discharged and I wanted a sit-down with Mary to be officially brought up-to-date.
So I shaved and got under the shower. I turned and tripped and fell. (My right leg, as a result of all the operations, is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my left, and to make matters worse, as they say, the bungling surgeon put my right leg back together at a slight angle to the right. So I have to be careful. Because of the bungled operations my lower body strength is less than it should be (my upper body strength is much better than average).
Anyway, when I tripped I reached for the suction-cup grab bar, which I had tested before I turned on the water. It had been firm but when I needed it it came away from the wall like a piece of wet paper. So down I went. And there I lay for the next 22 hours.
I have always been super pleased at the sound proofing here. Twice, in the spirit of good neighbourliness, I’ve checked with new neighbours with volume louder than usual and we don’t hear a thing.
In the bathtub I couldn’t get my legs under me and there was no bar to grab. So using the heel of my left leg I hit the plug and got rid of the water. Then I lay back and waited for sounds in the hall.
“209 needs help!” I yelled and so I did through the rest of the day and all through the night whenever I heard sounds. But people make their own noise. So I went unheard. I thought that with morning and people stirring for work that my luck would change. No dice.
In the morning, (I knew it was morning because daylight had reached in) I heard the cleaner come with his floor machine. I yelled even while knowing that he couldn’t hear the faint call for help over the sound of his machine.
Meanwhile, I had written plot outlines for two movies and scenes for them. I was happy with the results after watching them being played out. About four in the morning (I’m guessing because I had no timepiece available), I was able to use the one crutch I had with me to secure a bath towel. I was starting to get a chill.
Throughout the morning I did my yelling. Finally, about eleven. I heard someone knocking on the only other door in the hallway.
My insatiable curiosity was in charge.
“Who’s there?”
“Joel Harden.”
The name was unfamiliar to me. “What are you doing?”
“Canvassing for the elections.”
“Which party?”
“NDP.”
“Well I’m stuck in my bathtub. Been here since two yesterday afternoon. Get me out of here and you’ve got my vote! I’ve been a New Democrat for more than 50 years.”
A few minutes later my Hero came back to report that para medics were on their way.
My daughter-in-law bought me what I call a “walk around phone”. My son Geoffrey, and Frances, light of my life, now require me to email them when I go to bed and when I wake up. I feel like a criminal out on parole. But that beats the alternative.
Publisher’s notebook 002
Write what you know? Bollocks!
By Geoffrey Dow
Some 35 years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote that “writers take tours in other people’s lives.” He meant that it is a mistake for a reader to presume any story is autobiographical, or that a writer’s “real” self or opinions can be gleaned from a work of fiction.
In recent decades it has become a conviction in some “serious” literary and critical circles that the adage, write what you know be treated as a Commandment rather than just quite sensible advice that a writer pay close attention to the world and people around them. This advice turned ideology has led to a great outpouring of well-written but mostly pretty tedious stories about writers and their suffering.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach to fiction or drama, but there is everything wrong with the insistence that all fiction and drama should take that confessional road to story-telling.
Truth is, most writers prefer to look out, rather than in, and so do most readers. And, looking out, writers must be forever “taking tours in other people’s lives”. To put it in more contemporary terms, they imagine the other.
Or you could just say, they make stuff up. Readers are blessed by the works of Jane Austen and Alistair MacLeod, but we need our Tolstoys and Tolkiens too.
Carl Dow is a writer of the second school, smelting character and story from the mines of his own lived life, but just as much from the lives and experiences of others. In his new post, Thinking Like a Woman, Carl explains one way that the act of creative empathy can come about.
The Old Man’s Last Sauna
E-book edition only $1.99 for a limited time only!
Thinking Like A Woman
Imagining the other
Jeanetics: A New Theory of Evolution
Carl’s famous blue jeans Holes In My Pants
The Hole Truth About Blue Jeans and the Secret to Becoming a Fashion Plate on a Cautious Budget!
