The Morinville Public Library is set to get an early start to Alberta Culture Days at the end of this month with a fair bit of star power. Before the weekend extravaganza gets going, popular author Kelley Armstrong is lined up for a Thursday night event to enlighten and entertain the literary masses with a two-hour talk about her books, being an author, and ‘the biz’.
Speaking with the Gazette from her home in southwestern Ontario, the very prolific author said that she is very much looking forward to her time in Morinville, considering her recent appearances in Edmonton and Calgary where she met with hundreds of her adoring fans. This time around, she’s making a tour of Alberta libraries in smaller centres, like Plamondon, Lac La Biche, and Bonnyville
“I do love doing library visits when I can,” she stated. “Alberta fans are really great! They show up! They come out!”
She added that she often makes contact with other writers and has noticed a growing trend of new authors still in their teens.
“It’s great to be able to get out and talk to them about writing because you don’t get a lot of opportunities, I find, in Canada to speak to commercial writers.”
Armstrong clearly knows a thing or two about the commerciality of her work. She has an impressive library of 25 titles that have been published since her first, Bitten, came out in 2001. She admitted that she normally has two new titles hit the market every year.
She’s had three come out in the last four months alone, the latest being August’s release of Omens, described as adult contemporary gothic. There are books in several different genre categories, each with a set of multiple adjectives: middle-grade fantasy adventure, teen urban fantasy, adult paranormal suspense, and so on.
There’s no reason to make any bones about that though, especially when she can claim to be a New York Times bestselling author for three of her series, including Women of the Otherworld, Darkest Powers, and the Nadia Stafford crime books.
“I’m not normally this busy,” she confided. “We work so far in advance. It’s not that you’re writing all the time. The books that I’ve got on the schedule this year were written two to three years ago.”
Production schedules demand such forethought. She’s already well into editing the sequel to Omens while she pens some short stories for anthologies. Armstrong called this time of year her “short story writing season.”
Despite the busy-ness of her business, she wouldn’t have it any other way. She explained that it’s what she always wanted to do with her life, and considers herself very fortunate to be earning a living from being a full-time writer, something she’s been able to claim since her second book.
“I’ve been very, very lucky.”
While she wasn’t sure about the content of her appearance, whether she would do readings, a Q & A session, a bit of a workshop or some combination of all of the above, she did offer a bit of advice to up and coming authors. It’s more boring than mind-blowing, she prefaced.
“I’m always thinking that it’d be great if there was some special tip that I could give them and it would make all the difference, but there’s nothing like that. There just isn’t.”
“It comes down to doing the work. It is always ‘Write, write and write some more’. Don’t sit around thinking about writing or planning to write or waiting until you feel like you’re good enough to write, you won’t get good until you have gone through and actually done the work as much as you possibly can, writing every day if possible.”
Armstrong’s appearance runs from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 26. Attendance is free. The library is located at 10119 100 Avenue in Morinville.
For more information on the event, call the library at 780-939-3292 or visit www.morinvillelibrary.ca.
To learn more about Armstrong and her work, visit her website at www.kelleyarmstrong.com.
